Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Americans perceive likelihood of nuclear weapons risk as 50/50 toss-up

It has been 30 years since the end of the Cold War, yet on average, Americans still perceive that the odds of a nuclear weapon detonating on U.S. soil is as likely as a coin toss, according to new research.

A heart-healthy protein from bran of cereal crop

Foxtail millet is an annual grass grown widely as a cereal crop in parts of India, China and Southeast Asia. Milling the grain removes the hard outer layer, or bran, from the rest of the seed. Now, researchers have identified a protein in this bran that can help stave off atherosclerosis in mice genetically prone to the disease.

#TerryJones #obituary | #Culture | The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2020/jan/22/terry-jones-obituary

#MPFC

Climate change could unlock new microbes and increase heat-related deaths

Scientists warn that global climate change is likely to unlock dangerous new microbes, as well as threaten humans' ability to regulate body temperature.

Yes, Joe Biden Has Long Pushed Cuts to Social Security. End of Story.

The 2020 Democratic primary took a new turn this week as Joe Biden came under fire from the Bernie Sanders campaign over his record on proposing cuts to Social Security. The two campaigns now have each released competing ads over the issue, with the Biden camp accusing Sanders of an unfair attack, and Sanders responding with a 30-second spot that quotes Biden saying, “When I argued if we should freeze federal spending, I meant Social Security as well.”

Right on cue, the mainstream media has waded into the issue, with the tenuously liberal Paul Krugman continuing his anti-Sanders jeremiads from the New York Times editorial page.

The latest Sanders atrocity alleged by Professor Krugman is that Sanders spread falsehoods about Joe Biden’s record in support of cuts to Social Security benefits.

It does not pay to get too worked up about political backbiting in a primary. In November, we will need everybody to defeat Donald Trump, so remarks that could have the effect of driving others to deny the eventual Democratic nominee their vote should be avoided.

Sanders himself has cautioned his supporters, “We don’t need to demonize those who may disagree with us.” A simple test for a genuine Sanders campaign supporter is whether they are marching in this direction.

Still, the Krugman charge (and Biden’s defense) is patently false.  

The first shot in this brouhaha was an email released by the Sanders campaign that included clips of Biden on the floor of the U.S. Senate in 1995 touting his political courage by embracing cuts in Social Security benefits, ostensibly to save the program. Sanders argues that such cuts would be bad policy, and that Biden’s past advocacy would make him vulnerable to Trump in a presidential election. Sanders, for his part, has long advocated expanding Social Security and introduced a bill in Congress to do so last year.  

Biden’s remarks placed him in good company. The Democratic Party establishment, including Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, as well as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, have traditionally embraced the mainstream view of Social Security: namely that because it is out of balance, if viewed in isolation over the next 75 years, some combination of payroll tax increases and benefit cuts will be required to “protect” or “modernize” the program. A related objective is to reduce the federal budget deficit over the long term. The connection is that if Social Security revenues are not sufficient to finance benefits, the money must come from somewhere else.

This argument has been hashed out many times. There is a good political reason to view Social Security’s finances in isolation: it provides support if you accept that intakes from the widely accepted payroll tax must match outputs for program benefits. Such a view requires a belief that the revenues, largely from payroll taxes, must measure up to benefit obligations in real-time (annually, in other words). Such a restriction on Social Security’s finances is not applied similarly to other government spending. We don’t demand that the Department of Defense, for instance, be self-financing.

The advocacy of trimming benefits for the sake of protecting Social Security, or to reduce the budget deficit, is a respectable position, though I and many other progressive economists happen to believe it is completely wrong. Economists Dean Baker and Mark Weisbrot offer an extensive version of this case in their classic book Social Security: The Phony Crisis in which they argue, “there is no economic, demographic, or actuarial basis for the widespread belief that the program needs to be fixed.”

What "fixing the program" generally means is raising revenues (by reducing benefit costs) that won't be needed for more than 15 years. Instead, they would be deposited into the Social Security Trust Fund, which in 2018 had reserves equivalent to 289% of annual program costs. By mid-range estimates, the fund is not projected to run out of money until 2036. By more optimistic assumptions, it would never run out. Even if it did, the federal government would still have payroll tax revenue and could easily supplement it to meet benefit obligations.

Enemies of the program like to say the Trust Fund is "going broke"—or isn't real. In fact, the Trust Fund is quite real. It holds U.S. government securities, the safest financial asset in the world, backed up by the power to tax the richest country in the world.

The real agenda here is to use deficit panic to arrest any growth in the public sector. And it's worked pretty well. For Fiscal Year 2019, federal outlays were 21.3% of GDP. Under Republican President Ronald Reagan, they were as high as 22.9%.

The game here is that Democrats do the hard work of cutting spending, outraging their constituents and losing elections, and then Republicans come in and set about blowing up the deficit all over again, with tax cuts for their rich donors. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama both fell into this trap—and Joe Biden was a steadfast ally. Krugman has written about all this eloquently, so he had to really stretch to gin up his attack on Sanders.

At the end of the Sanders campaign email, there is a brief reference to a speech Biden made at the Brookings Institution in 2018. Krugman seizes on this reference to claim that it does not substantiate Sanders’ criticisms, concluding that Sanders “flat-out lied.” In fact, while Biden’s language is less than forthright, he does push a position, popular among centrist Democrats, that has long been used to justify cuts to Social Security.

In his Brookings speech, Biden claimed that “Social Security and Medicare can stay—it still needs adjustments—but it can stay.” This is perfectly in line with the establishment deficit nagging discussed above, these days often criticized by Krugman himself. Even if you doubt that inference, the video clips, described by Biden as “doctored” (itself an...untruth, according to the New York Times), are unambiguous.

Here is Biden speaking to Meet the Press’s Tim Russert in 2007:

Tim Russert: Senator, we have a deficit. We have Social Security and Medicare looming. The number of people on Social Security and Medicare is now 40 million people. It’s going to be 80 million in 15 years. Would you consider looking at those programs, age of eligibility...

Biden: Absolutely.

And Biden’s advocacy of Social Security cuts hasn’t just been theoretical. As David Dayen lays out, it’s had real consequences by popularizing the regressive “chained CPI” approach to calculating benefits.

To support his argument, Krugman links to a piece from PolitiFact, which has its own history of mangled economic analysis, according to no less than Paul Krugman!

PolitiFact’s argument is that Biden was aiming to “protect the program,” which, as noted above, is the time-honored excuse for austerity of all types. So, Krugman is wrong to affirm that Sanders lied about Biden’s support for benefit cuts, and dishonest to imply that the Brookings speech is a decisive refutation of that charge.

In summary, there should be no doubt that Joe Biden has long advocated cuts to Social Security. So have many other Democratic Party leaders, but, as they say, the times they are a-changin’. Biden is now supporting benefit increases. Again, in a spirit of comity, we should welcome all converts.

Krugman misled his readers by calling Sanders a liar on this issue. Going forward, the application of the liberal commentator’s formidable powers of economic analysis upon Sanders’ proposals should be received with circumspection.

Thankfully, Social Security appears to currently be out of the danger zone—but it will always be vulnerable to delusions about the long-run dangers of budget deficits, and as long as politicians are willing to describe benefit cuts as measures to save the program. We shouldn’t buy it.

How a 15-Hour Workweek Could Change Our Lives for the Better

15-hour work • week

noun

1. Exactly what it sounds like—less work for the same money

I work nearly three times that much now. Is this normal?

Sadly, yes. The Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development shows that American workers put in an average of 1,786 hours annually, 200 more hours than their British and French peers. Yet study after study reveals that working more hours doesn’t increase productivity—just stress, health issues and carbon emissions.

How much less should I be working?

An often-cited 2016 study found that workers performed best when they were clocking in just three days a week, five hours a day. Advocates of a 15-hour workweek, such as Dutch author Rutger Bregman, argue that much of the work we do now is pointless at best and harmful at worst, so we should do much less of it. Major trade unions in Germany, the Netherlands, Ireland and the U.K. have all backed a four-day workweek, and the British Labour Party’s shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, has promised to reduce the average workweek to 32 hours within the next decade, proclaiming, “We should work to live, not live to work.” Microsoft Japan experimented with a shorter workweek and trumpeted that it actually boosted productivity and cut down on time-wasting.

What about in the United States?

Thanks perhaps to a national case of workaholism, until recently it was self-proclaimed do-gooder CEOs talking about why we should work less (to increase their profits, naturally). But there are signs the American labor movement could once again take up the fight for fewer hours. Notably, Bernie Sanders said he would consider a 32-hour workweek (for the same pay) at the United Food and Commercial Workers 2019 fall forum in Iowa.

Sounds great to me. Is there a catch?

Some progressive economists worry that enforcing a shorter workweek could lead to an economic contraction and pay cuts. One proposal for a “leisure agenda” from the People’s Policy Project recommends a mix of measures instead, including more federal holidays, more guaranteed vacation time, and more paid parental and sick leave. However we get there, the end goal is clear: We need to get a life.

This is part of “The Big Idea,” a monthly series offering brief introductions to progressive theories, policies, tools and strategies that can help us envision a world beyond capitalism. For recent In These Times coverage of reducing hours and raising pay in action, see, "How Working Less Can Help Prevent Climate Catastrophe and Promote Women's Equality," "California Workers Win Equal Overtime: 'This Bill Corrects 78 Years of Discrimination'" and "Long Hours, No Rest: Overworked Americans Still Dream of Vacation."

#World’s #consumption of #materials hits record 100bn tonnes a year | #Environment | The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/22/worlds-consumption-of-materials-hits-record-100bn-tonnes-a-year

Here’s Why Democrats Did Their Lame Pro Forma Impeachment of Trump

Impeachment requires bipartisan consensus built up over a painstaking process to be effective. Why did Democrats rush through a pro forma piece of crap at the beginning of an election year?

Missing piece to urban air quality puzzle

Air quality models have long failed to accurately predict atmospheric levels of secondary organic aerosol, which comprises a substantial fraction of the fine particulate matter in cities. But researchers have found a missing source of emissions that may explain roughly half of that SOA, closing much of the model-measurement gap.

#MontyPython star #TerryJones dies aged 77 - BBC News

He liked traffic lights.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-51209197

#MPFC

Copyright is a monopoly right, and monopolies have a tendency to accumulate in the vaults of big companies, who use them to dominate creative industries. #CopyrightWeek https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/01/serving-big-company-interests-copyright-crisis

Arctic sea ice can't 'bounce back'
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/01/200121112913.htm #climatechange #climatecrisis

Greta Thunberg's Message to Capitalists: 'Act as if You Loved Your Children'
https://earther.gizmodo.com/greta-thunbergs-message-to-capitalists-act-as-if-you-l-1841130508 #climatechange #climatecrisis

What the U.S. Left Can Learn From the Labour Party’s Epic Loss

The similarities are impossible to ignore. Both are aging Boomers with long resumes in the struggle for social justice. Both have campaigned on platforms of left populism that take aim at the rich and powerful. And both have helped spark social movements led by activists 50 years their junior. Yes, Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders share much in common.

So, as we survey the rubble of the Labour Party’s epic defeat, which saw the largest Conservative landslide since Margaret Thatcher, it’s not unfair to ask: What went wrong? What can the the U.S. Left—and the Sanders campaign more specifically—learn from Corbyn’s loss? And, as the hot takes flood in from American pundits with little understanding of the British political system, it is equally important to ask: What should we not learn from this defeat, as well?

There are three key areas where learning will be essential, and contested:

Staving off character assassination

I knew from my time canvassing for Labour in the UK as well as from reading the polls: Jeremy Corbyn was the most unpopular opposition leader in British history.

Pundits will point to individual traits to explain his unpopularity, ranging from his personality (a hippie! with no charisma!) to his policies (he’s a Commie!) to his political allies (he cavorts with terrorists!) to his base of supporters (they’re anti-Semites, the lot of them).

But speak with many of the Labour supporters who hit the doors in this election, and they will tell you that hatred of Corbyn was far more amorphous, more ineffable, more atmospheric than this. If you were to ask a given voter why they hated Jeremy Corbyn—and I had the opportunity to ask many such voters—they were liable to say: “I just do.”

The electoral costs of such unpopularity were extreme. According to one post-election poll, 43% of respondents voted against Labour because of the party’s leadership, compared to just 17% for its stance on Brexit and 12% for its economic policies. 

What could have produced such an atmosphere of contempt? The short answer: a sustained campaign of character assassination in near every UK tabloid, mainstream newspaper and otherwise respectable publication against Jeremy Corbyn.

The case of anti-Semitism is an instructive one. Most British voters now believe that Corbyn is an anti-Semite, but few can point to an example of his anti-Semitism. Why, then, do they believe it? Because the claim was asserted, over and over, in the papers. If Corbyn weren’t anti-Semitic, voters were right to ask, why would so many stories get written about it so many months in a row? The prophecy was self-fulfilling.

Supporters of Bernie Sanders complain about his absence from mainstream reporting. CNN and MSNBC are liable to throw Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg and even Elizabeth Warren onto their chyron, but ignore Sanders, despite his consistent polling near the top of the Democratic field.

But Sanders supporters appear unprepared for the next phase of this process, when he moves back into frame but straight into the crosshairs. It’s been said before but bears repeating: We have seen only a fraction of the stories that the press will use to bring down Bernie Sanders.

The U.S. Left needs to prepare for this, diligently and creatively. The Corbyn camp was far too quick to the bunker: “It’s a conspiracy by the billionaire media.” That may have been true. But the U.S. Left will need a much more proactive strategy for combatting such destructive stories and presenting an alternative vision of Sanders’ progressive personality.

Sunlight is indeed the best disinfectant—only a full-throated challenge to mounting controversy can kill it off. And that challenge may require progressive candidates to go on all available media outlets—including Fox News—and do it themselves.

Maintaining the coalition

The Labour Party electoral coalition is strikingly similar to that of the Democratic Party, in both its general composition and its direction of travel: working-class communities with low levels of education and, increasingly, wealthier city-dwellers with high levels of education.

It’s a coalition that fell to pieces in Thursday’s election. The Tory landslide was a working class wave: the Conservative Party broke through traditional Labour-voting working-class regions, formerly known as the ‘Red Wall,’ to win scores of new seats.

How did Boris Johnson—an Eton-educated, silver-spooned, elite-obsessed Tory—manage to make such gains against a Labour Party explicitly committed to the cause of the working class?

The short answer is Brexit. The question of European Union membership—or more accurately, of whether or not the British government would go ahead with the referendum decision to leave the EU—cut straight through the Labour coalition.

If the Labour Party had embraced Brexit and served as its parliamentary handmaiden, the Liberal Democrats were waiting in the wings to claim the urban middle classes as their own.

If the Labour Party moved to stymie Brexit, however, they would risk losing their Leave constituencies to a Conservative Party that promised to deliver Brexit faithfully. The Labour Party ultimately took the latter risk, and lost predictably as a result.

The good news for Democrats is, of course, that the United States has no Brexit. Nor is the Democratic Party threatened by an adjacent challenger like the Liberal Democrats.

But Americans do have an issue that closely resembles Brexit: the election of Donald Trump.

Many pundits will compare Boris Johnson and Trump, in style as in haircut. But the Brexit-Trump comparison is by far the more relevant. A vote for Trump, like a vote for Brexit, was meant to send a shock to the system and a middle finger to its political establishment. That is why Trump voters, like Brexit ones, rarely care for the immediate consequences of their vote choice: the vote was all that mattered.

If progressives are searching for lessons, then, impeachment may be a good place to start: a political strategy that could ultimately turn out to be both myopic and fruitless.

Like calling for a People’s Vote, impeaching President Trump could be seen as disrespectful to the rebel vote of the 2016 election, and could deepen the sense of discontent that gave rise to Trump in the first place. To keep its coalition together, Democrats will need to find a path to détente between its competing demographics. Impeachment alone is unlikely to be the answer.

Spin, not socialism

Finally, the S-word.

The commentariat is already swarming with takes about the peril of far-left policies. Socialism, the argument goes, was Corbyn’s Achilles heel. And it is likely to be much worse in the United States, where the S-word is wielded with much greater psychological power and historical weight.

The problem with this argument is that it’s wrong. Labour’s policies were their strongest pull—even, or especially, their most socialist ones: the nationalization of industry. A recent poll found 84% of respondents supported nationalizing the water industry. In another, 77% supported the same for energy and 76% for rail.

The issue was that, in the end, it didn’t really matter. The raft of policies that the Labour Party ushered into its manifesto—the stuff of a progressive wonk’s dreams, and the hard work of so many brilliant and creative young policy thinkers in the UK—simply did not bring people to the polls in their favor.

Simply put, socialism was not too strong an ideology, but too weak an electoral strategy.

No, spin still seems to dominate our politics: dirty, rotten spin. Johnson ran an outright corrupt campaign, disseminating lies, shirking accountability and banking on the likelihood that people wouldn’t care. It turns out that 43.6% of them didn’t—choosing to support the Tories anyway.

The lessons from this particular electoral injustice are vexed. But one is clear: Plans and policies do not deliver majorities—even if their details determine how you then govern. To win, then, progressive Democrats must get off of the page and into the street, with a message that is as simple as it is emotionally powerful.

Liberal pundits are going to stop at nothing to swing the Democratic Party back toward the center—and Corbyn’s loss will be powerful ammunition. Progressives cannot sweep it under the rug. The lessons are there, if we are willing to learn them. But in this moment of despair, those of us on the Left must keep repeating to ourselves, over and over: We can win, and we must.

Apple canceled the project to encrypt iCloud backups two years ago due to pressure from the FBI because it "would deny them the most effective means for gaining evidence against iPhone-using suspects" #privacy

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusive/exclusive-apple-dropped-plan-for-encrypting-backups-after-fbi-complained-sources-idUSKBN1ZK1CT