10 FEBRUARY 2020
With just Reasonable support Reader Supported News is a powerful and effective vehicle for change. Without it RSN does not exist.
We are not getting adequate support.
We have to confront that.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
Founder, Reader Supported News
If you would prefer to send a check:
Reader Supported News
PO Box 2043
Citrus Hts
CA 95611
Reader Supported News
PO Box 2043
Citrus Hts
CA 95611
10 February 2020
Robert Reich | The Real State of the Union
Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Website
Reich writes: "I wasn't going to comment on Trump's lie-filled State of the Union message but the whoppers were so big - especially on the economy - that I feel compelled."
Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Website
Reich writes: "I wasn't going to comment on Trump's lie-filled State of the Union message but the whoppers were so big - especially on the economy - that I feel compelled."
Here, for the record, is the real state of the union:
1. JOBS: Average monthly job creation dropped from 223,000 in 2018 to 176,000 in 2019. The employment rate for working-age adults has increased less than during the Obama recovery, and is still significantly below that of other developed countries. The pace of job creation is also markedly slower than it was under Obama.
2. WAGES: Wage growth has slowed, except in states with minimum-wage increases. The typical American household remains poorer today than it was before the financial crisis began in 2007. The median wage of a full-time male worker (and those with full-time jobs are the lucky ones) is still more than 3% below what it was 40 years ago.
3. TAXES: The Trump-Republican tax cut has been a huge failure. We were promised an increase in business investment, but business investment has contracted for the third straight quarter—the first time this has happened since the Great Recession in 2009. Instead, the tax cut triggered an all-time record binge of share buybacks – some $800 billion in 2018.
If fully implemented, the 2017 tax cut will result in tax increases for most households in the bottom 80 percent.
And it has resulted in record peacetime deficits (almost $1 trillion in fiscal 2019) in a country supposedly near full employment. Even with weak investment, the US had to borrow massively abroad: the most recent data show foreign borrowing at nearly $500 billion a year, with an increase of more than 10% in America’s net indebtedness position in one year alone.
Nothing has trickled down to average workers. To the contrary, If fully implemented the 2017 tax cut will result in tax increases for most households in the bottom 80 percent.
4. TRADE: The 2018 goods deficit was the largest on record. Even the deficit in trade with China was up almost a quarter from 2016.
5 GROWTH: Last quarter’s growth was just 2.1%, far less than the 4%, 5%, or even 6% Trump promised to deliver, and even less than the 2.4% average of Obama’s second term. That is a remarkably poor performance considering the stimulus provided by the $1 trillion deficit and ultra-low interest rates.
6. WORKERS’ RIGHTS: Trump administration has systematically weakened workers’ rights. More than eight million workers will be left behind by the Trump overtime rule. Workers would receive $1.4 billion less than under the 2016 rule. New Trump administration joint-employer rule has $1 billion price tag for workers.
7. HEALTH: Millions of Americans have lost their health coverage, and the uninsured rate has risen, in just two years, from 10.9% to 13.7%. US life expectancy, already relatively low, fell in each of the first two years of Trump’s presidency, and in 2017, midlife mortality reached its highest rate since World War II.
8. CLIMATE: losses related to climate change have already reached new highs in the US, which has suffered more property damage than any other country – reaching some 1.5% of GDP in 2017.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. (photo: Susan Walsh/AP)
Schumer Asks Inspectors General to Investigate Whistleblower Retaliation After Vindman Firing
Marianne LeVine, Politico
LeVine writes: "Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is asking that every agency inspector general investigate retaliation against whistleblowers who report presidential misconduct, after the firing of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman from the National Security Council."
READ MORE
Marianne LeVine, Politico
LeVine writes: "Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is asking that every agency inspector general investigate retaliation against whistleblowers who report presidential misconduct, after the firing of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman from the National Security Council."
READ MORE
Washington D.C. (photo:News2Share Facebook page)
A White Nationalist Group Marches Through Washington and, Surprising to Nobody Black, Everyone Seems Perfectly Fine With It
Zack Linly, The Root
Linly writes: "There's got to be a reason that, even in 2020, American officials can be so cavalier in their acceptance of white nationalist demonstration and why white supremacist groups use so much of the same symbolism as the average self-described patriot."
READ MORE
Zack Linly, The Root
Linly writes: "There's got to be a reason that, even in 2020, American officials can be so cavalier in their acceptance of white nationalist demonstration and why white supremacist groups use so much of the same symbolism as the average self-described patriot."
READ MORE
American Assault Amphibious Vehicle (AAV) of the US Marine Corps on winter exercise Cold Response 2016. (photo: Torbjørn Kjosvold)
World War III's Newest Battlefield: US Troops Head for the Far North
Michael T. Klare, TomDispatch
Klare writes: "In early March, an estimated 7,500 American combat troops will travel to Norway to join thousands of soldiers from other NATO countries in a massive mock battle with imagined invading forces from Russia."
READ MORE
Michael T. Klare, TomDispatch
Klare writes: "In early March, an estimated 7,500 American combat troops will travel to Norway to join thousands of soldiers from other NATO countries in a massive mock battle with imagined invading forces from Russia."
READ MORE
The author as Prairie Johnson in a scene from 'The OA.' (photo: JoJo Whilden/Netflix)
Brit Marling | I Don't Want to Be the Strong Female Lead
Brit Marling, The New York Times
Marling writes: "I moved to Los Angeles to become an actress at 24. These are character descriptions of roles I have read for: 'thin, attractive, Dave's wife'; 'robot girl, a remarkable feat of engineering'; 'her breasts are large and she's wearing a red sweater.'"
READ MORE
Brit Marling, The New York Times
Marling writes: "I moved to Los Angeles to become an actress at 24. These are character descriptions of roles I have read for: 'thin, attractive, Dave's wife'; 'robot girl, a remarkable feat of engineering'; 'her breasts are large and she's wearing a red sweater.'"
READ MORE
Chen Qiushi. (photo: YouTube/Chen Qiushi)
Chinese Citizen Journalist Who Went Viral for His Reporting on Coronavirus Has Gone Missing
Kat Tenbarge, Business Insider
Tenbarge writes: "Since Thursday night, friends and family of Chinese lawyer Chen Qiushi have been unable to reach him. They say the citizen journalist was forcibly quarantined by Wuhan police after disseminating viral video reports about coronavirus."
READ MORE
Kat Tenbarge, Business Insider
Tenbarge writes: "Since Thursday night, friends and family of Chinese lawyer Chen Qiushi have been unable to reach him. They say the citizen journalist was forcibly quarantined by Wuhan police after disseminating viral video reports about coronavirus."
READ MORE
Students and others at a climate change protest in New York in May. (photo: Erik McGregor/Pacific Press/LightRocket/Getty Images)
The Environmental Burden of Generation Z
Jason Plautz, The Washington Post
Plautz writes: "As climate change continues unabated, parents, teachers and medical professionals across the country find themselves face-to-face with a quandary: How do you raise a generation to look toward the future with hope when all around them swirls a message of apparent hopelessness?"
Jason Plautz, The Washington Post
Plautz writes: "As climate change continues unabated, parents, teachers and medical professionals across the country find themselves face-to-face with a quandary: How do you raise a generation to look toward the future with hope when all around them swirls a message of apparent hopelessness?"
EXCERPT:
Of course, before you can bring up solutions, you have to be able to bring up climate change at all. Schools, however, have sometimes been slow to bring climate change into the classroom, especially in conservative areas. Lawmakers in states such as Florida and Texas have pushed bills that would strip climate change from curriculums entirely. In Pennsylvania’s Central Bucks School District in 2017, a Republican school board member used fears about rising anxiety among the young in lobbying to remove textbooks that discussed climate change.
Moreover, many teachers are unequipped to deal with it. A survey from the National Center for Science Education and Penn State’s Survey Research Center during the 2014-15 school year found that fewer than half of the teachers responding had taken a formal course on climate change. The same survey found that only two-thirds of teachers said they emphasize that human activity is the primary driver of climate change, despite the scientific consensus that humans are the cause. (Jeanne Kaidy, a high school science teacher in Rochester, N.Y., told me she gets a “distressing” amount of pushback from students and teachers disputing the science.)
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.