[Aberlour10]

Winstonm, on 2019-July-25, 17:07, said:

The 50th anniversary of Woodstock has been moved to Maryland - to be closer to Kenberg?

uffff. I had quietly suspected they move it to Disneyland

[y66]

Good read: The Crane Wife

[Winstonm]

From Paul Krugman:

Quote

When social collapse seemed to be basically a problem for inner-city blacks, it was possible to argue that its roots lay in some unique cultural dysfunction, and quite a few commentators hinted — or in some cases declared openly — that there was something about being nonwhite that predisposed people toward antisocial behavior.

What Wilson argued, however, was that social dysfunction was an effect, not a cause. His work, culminating in the justly celebrated book “When Work Disappears,” made the case that declining job opportunities for urban workers, rather than some underlying cultural or racial disposition, explained the decline in prime-age employment, the decline of the traditional family, and more.

How might one test Wilson’s hypothesis? Well, you could destroy job opportunities for a number of white people, and see if they experienced a decline in propensity to work, stopped forming stable families, and so on. And sure enough, that’s exactly what has happened to parts of nonmetropolitan America effectively stranded by a changing economy.

I’m not saying that there’s something wrong or inferior about the inhabitants of, say, eastern Kentucky (and no American politician would dare suggest such a thing). On the contrary: What the changing face of American social problems shows is that people are pretty much the same, whatever the color of their skin. Give them reasonable opportunities for economic and personal advancement, and they will thrive; deprive them of those opportunities, and they won’t.

my emphasis

[Winstonm]

From Yahoo:

Quote

Dozens of wealthy families in Illinois have reportedly been using a controversial tactic to help their children pay for college: They give up legal guardianship so the teenagers can claim dramatically lower incomes and earn need-based financial aid, according to reports from two news organizations published Monday.

ProPublica and The Wall Street Journal each detailed the efforts in separate articles after uncovering dozens of applications filed by Chicago-area parents to financially divorce themselves from their kids over the past year and a half.

As part of the strategy, wealthy parents allegedly file paperwork to transfer legal custody of their kids to other relatives, friends or even co-workers. When the transfers are complete — often during their junior or senior years of high school — students are then able to declare themselves financially independent on college applications. In one instance detailed by the Journal, a student whose parents owned a $1.2 million home only had to declare $4,200 in income from a summer job.

That student was able to obtain about $47,000 in scholarships and federal Pell grants to attend a private university that costs $65,000 per year.

The practice is legal, but the Journal notes that the Education Department is looking into the matter. The agency did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.

“It’s a scam,” Andy Borst, the director of undergraduate admissions at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told ProPublica. “Wealthy families are manipulating the financial aid process to be eligible for financial aid they would not be otherwise eligible for. They are taking away opportunities from families that really need it.” Borst also spoke with ProPublica.

ProPublica noted that laws in Illinois governing the transfer of legal guardianship are broadly written and that as long as the parents, children and the court agree, a judge can approve the transfer even if parents are able to financially support their kids.

Almost all of the cases cited by ProPublica and the Journal echo language that says the new guardians “can provide educational and financial support and opportunities to the minor that her parents could not otherwise provide.”

[kenberg]

Winstonm, on 2019-July-25, 17:07, said:

The 50th anniversary of Woodstock has been moved to Maryland - to be closer to Kenberg?

No doubt!

It will be at Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia.

In the early 70s I lived in a townhouse that was walking distance from it. I have seen Willie Nelson there, and Lynard Skynyrd, and others. I plan to skip Woodstock 50. I was not at the original but anyway it seems to me that the original was something that you were there for or you weren't, and any attempted re-do should be scrapped. Lightning strikes once and, Stevie Nicks to the contrary, not twice.

[Winstonm]

Deniers of Ron Reagan's coded racism beware of your claims:

Quote

Ronald Reagan Makes Racist Comment To Richard Nixon In Newly Released Audio
HuffPost Lee Moran, HuffPost 5 hours ago

Ronald Reagan called representatives of an African country’s government “monkeys” in a 1971 telephone call with then-President Richard Nixon, according to a newly released recording of the private conversation.

The National Archives released audio of the call between Nixon and Reagan, who was then the GOP governor of California, earlier this month. Nixon, dogged by the Watergate scandal, resigned the presidency in disgrace in 1974. Reagan went on to serve two terms as president in the 1980s.

“To see those, those monkeys from those African countries. Damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes,” Reagan told Nixon, reportedly in reference to members of the Tanzanian delegation dancing in the United Nations’ General Assembly following its vote to recognize the People’s Republic of China.

[y66]

Bill and Melinda Gates will add 50% to amounts donated to local school projects at https://www.donorschoose.org/. Today only I believe.

[Winstonm]

Quote

NEWS IN BRIEF
Damning Investigation Finds Jeffrey Epstein Left Unsupervised For Decades Prior To Suicide

https://www.theonion...supe-1837208732

[johnu]

Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang has mentioned automation and the resulting loss of jobs several times in his campaign.

If you were fired, would you rather be replaced by a human or a robot? These workers have a surprising answer

Quote

A study released this week of 2,000 people by researchers at the Technical University of Munich and Erasmus University in Rotterdam is putting a twist on people’s fears of automation that are creeping into the workplace. When participants were asked if they wanted a human or a robot to take their job, 60% of participants said they’d actually prefer to be replaced by a robot instead of a human being. In fact, they felt the same way about being replaced by artificial intelligence.

And yet another part of the study gauged reactions to a theoretical firm that costs either with replacement employees or robots: 67% opted for new employees. They want people to have jobs, just not if one of them is filling their role if they get fired.

The researchers have a simple explanation: Ego.

[johnu]

--- Moved to Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped? thread ---

[Winstonm]

johnu, on 2019-August-13, 22:13, said:

Trump Defends Retweet Of Baseless Conspiracy Theory Implicating Clintons In Epstein’s Death


So the Unindicted Co-Conspirator in Chief is trying to deflect attention from himself. Dennison is on record as admiring the success of Epstein with "very" young women and was known to have "partied" with Epstein on more than one occasion. What does he have to worry about?

If there is any conspiracy to investigate, Individual-1 is in charge of the entire government, his government paid personal attorney Barr is in charge of the prison where Epstein was being held and who was recused from the Epstein case because he worked at a law firm that previously defended Epstein, unrecused himself to take over the investigation into the death of Epstein. I'm sure he will do an even better job at finding the "facts" than he did in the Mueller report There have been too many scandals and unethical activities in the White House to keep track of since 2018, but this has a stink to it that probably will never go away.

Quote

Trump said he thought it was “fine” to retweet the conspiracy because it came from “a very highly respected conservative pundit.

”

Alex Jones?

[y66]

Neil Irwin at the NYT Upshot explains the deal with the inverted yield curve by way of a sports betting analogy and some cool graphics. Elementary no doubt for readers of this forum.

[Winstonm]

https://www.axios.co...9c009bcef4.html

Quote

The Business Roundtable today made a small, symbolic but significant move: 181 of the nation’s top CEOs agreed that driving shareholder value is no longer their sole business objective.

Why this matters: They expanded their mission beyond mere wealth creation to include everything from taking care of employees to helping their communities.

A group decided this? I am shocked, shocked to find these businessmen sitting in a commies circle, making decisions for the proletariat.

[y66]

Winstonm, on 2019-August-19, 06:52, said:

https://www.axios.co...9c009bcef4.html

A group decided this? I am shocked, shocked to find these businessmen sitting in a commies circle, making decisions for the proletariat.

The Business Roundtable statement was interesting because, as David Gelles and David Yaffe-Bellany noted at NYT, it explicitly rebuked the notion put forward by Milton Friedman 50 years ago and embraced by corporate America that “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits” and it explicitly recognized that corporations also have a responsibility to invest in their employees, protect the environment and deal fairly and ethically with their suppliers, yada, yada. No doubt even the ghost of Milton Friedman is rolling his eyes.

[kenberg]

As I get it Friedman said “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits” and the round table has said no that's not so.


Neither appears to address the question of whether is is even remotely realistic to think that corporations, perhaps with the occasional exception, will do anything other than try to increase its profits.

Possibly socially responsive behavior can become a way to increase profits, and so then they will do so, saying "well, if we have to we have to" . Or at least try to make it look that way. I would not hold my breath waiting for them do do the right thing because it's the right thing.

We could make a bundle by flooding the market with opioids but that would be socially wrong so we won't do it. Cue in the laugh track.

[johnu]

This is just crazy

Faithless elector: A court ruling just changed how we pick our president

Quote

A federal appeals court ruled late Tuesday that presidential electors who cast the actual ballots for president and vice president are free to vote as they wish and cannot be required to follow the results of the popular vote in their states.

The decision could give a single elector the power to decide the outcome of a presidential election — if the popular vote results in an apparent Electoral College tie.

The last part of the quote is incorrect. If the popular vote would have had a 270-268 result, but the single elector changes the vote to 269-269, the House would decided who wins with each state having 1 vote, taking the decision away from the popular (electoral) vote.

In fact, in 2016, 10 electors did not vote for the publicly elected candidate, although 3 states removed the electors and replaced them.

What right does a single person have to disregard the voters of an entire state (or congressional district, whether the state voted Republican or Democratic? Just one more reason to get rid of the electoral college.

This will obviously be appealed to the Supreme Court.

I wonder what legal penalties can be applied by states if the Supreme Court allows electors to vote as the choose. I would not be opposed to a $100 million dollar fine and life in prison if an elector did not vote according to the popular vote.

[Winstonm]

johnu, on 2019-August-21, 22:03, said:

This is just crazy

Faithless elector: A court ruling just changed how we pick our president


The last part of the quote is incorrect. If the popular vote would have had a 270-268 result, but the single elector changes the vote to 269-269, the House would decided who wins with each state having 1 vote, taking the decision away from the popular (electoral) vote.

In fact, in 2016, 10 electors did not vote for the publicly elected candidate, although 3 states removed the electors and replaced them.

What right does a single person have to disregard the voters of an entire state (or congressional district, whether the state voted Republican or Democratic? Just one more reason to get rid of the electoral college.

This will obviously be appealed to the Supreme Court.

I wonder what legal penalties can be applied by states if the Supreme Court allows electors to vote as the choose. I would not be opposed to a $100 million dollar fine and life in prison if an elector did not vote according to the popular vote.

It wasn't so long ago that back room party bosses decided who would run. Party bossed stopped many demagogues like Henry Ford from winning a spot on the ticket. The electoral college was supposed to prevent a ridiculous popular choice from becoming president by being independent of the voters' wishes - and how did that work out.

Too much democracy is almost as dangerous as too little.

[y66]

From Business Insiders' ongoing series on Better Capitalism (March 2018):

Quote

At the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland in January, Business Insider CEO Henry Blodget made the case why it's time for a "better capitalism."

The current state of inequality in the United States, he explained, is largely linked to a reaction to 1970s stagnation that has gone on for too long, where chasing quarterly profits has resulted in a toxic short-termism.

When Blodget opened the discussion to the panel he had assembled, Columbia University's Joseph Stiglitz remarked, "I want to emphasize that it was, in this period, not only activist shareholders but Milton Friedman," the late economist and fellow Nobel laureate, who was to blame for this prevailing ideology. "And he was wrong."

In his highly influential 1962 collection of essays, " Capitalism and Freedom," Friedman proclaimed that in a free economy, "there is one and only one social responsibility of business — to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition, without deception or fraud."

We followed up with Stiglitz after the Davos panel, and he told us that Friedman's assertion "was not based on any economic theory." He then gave some background on the origins of this debate.

Friedman made his assertion as a natural extension of a defining passage in Adam Smith's definitive " The Wealth of Nations" from 1776, that of the "invisible hand." Smith wrote that an individual laboring in his own interest is "led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest, he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good."

Stiglitz pointed out that indeed the invisible hand's existence was "proven" in 1954 by the economists Kenneth J. Arrow and Gerard Debreu. Arrow and Debreu were able to show the existence of an equilibrium between supply and demand in a free, competitive economy — but they also made clear that this could only exist if a given set of assumptions about the economy and consumer behavior were true.

And the latter part is essential, said Stiglitz.

"Then some of us, beginning in the late '60s, asked the question, 'Well what happens if those conditions aren't satisfied?'" he told Business Insider.

Stiglitz said that he and the economist Sandy Grossman investigated this question throughout the '70s. In 1980, they published a paper that declared that while market equilibrium can exist in theory, it was "impossible" for it to exist in a competitive economy in reality. Following this line of thinking, then, Friedman's argument falls apart. And therefore, existing solely to please shareholders will not — as Friedman argued — benefit other stakeholders, such as employees, consumers, and society as a whole.

Stiglitz respected Friedman (who died in 2006) for his work on consumption that won him a Nobel prize, he wrote in his 2012 book " The Price of Inequality," but the two had several arguments about this idea of the free market. "I remember long discussions with him on the consequences of imperfect information or incomplete risk markets; my own work and that of numerous colleagues had shown that in these conditions, markets typically didn't work well. Friedman simply couldn't or wouldn't grasp these results."

Friedman's ideas, however, would take hold in the US for the next few decades.

When Stiglitz cites what he considers to be the problem of Friedman, he explained, he's using him as the figurehead for a movement that took advantage of the societal trends Blodget mentioned. This movement was led by the Chicago school of economics, the free market ideology developed at the University of Chicago in the mid-20th century.

As Stiglitz sees it, Americans, particularly on the right, embraced the Chicago school's way of thinking because it appeared to be the efficient solution to stimulating a stagnant economy.

Within this free market ideology, pursuing short-term value is simultaneously a pursuit of long-term value. If you accept this, prioritizing short-term gains comes through the optimization of management and spending, which allows the company to grow, in turn supplying higher returns, more jobs and other benefits to society, and better products.

It is a rejection of a fundamental Keynesian belief, Stiglitz noted.

British economist John Maynard Keynes published his revolutionary book "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money" in 1936, in the wake of the Great Depression. In it, he differentiated between short-term and long-term value, and expressed his frustration with the way the American stock market encouraged public companies to prioritize short-term gains, better for the majority of contemporary investors, over long-term gains, better for society as a whole. The basic premise of the argument Keynes had with his peers is the same as the one today.

"The social object of skilled investment should be to defeat the dark forces of time and ignorance which envelop our future," Keynes warned.

More Americans in positions of power began gravitating toward the Chicago school's ideas in the '70s, and Friedman became an adviser to President Ronald Reagan.

Not only did Friedman have the ear of the leader of the free world, but the Chicago school's theories around lawmaking for the intended purpose of market efficiency also came to fruition.

In his 2015 book "Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy," Stiglitz said that the normalization of shareholder primacy was solidified under the Reagan administration through changes to federal income tax law and securities law, including relaxed antitrust laws. This fostered the rise of activist investors.

"If all of this had led to more efficient and innovative corporations, that would have been one thing," Stiglitz wrote. "But in fact, the new 'activist' investors pushed for seats on boards and pressured management into policies that were viewed as more 'shareholder-friendly' — meaning friendlier to short-term investors — including increasing dividends and buyouts."

The Securities and Exchange Commission continued this trend through the early 1990s.

And while the increasingly linked nature of CEO pay and stock performance was ostensibly to keep CEOs accountable to their shareholders, Stiglitz argued, it instead materialized as "an incentive to manipulate stock prices by using company money to buy back shares in order to drive prices higher." That's how you got from the average ratio of CEO-to-median-level-employee pay from 20-to-1 in 1965 to 295-to-1 today.

For Stiglitz, the moral outrage isn't that individuals are making large amounts of money, it's that it's happening at the expense of the entire economy.

Stiglitz told us that this decades-old debate about how to balance the creation of short-term and long-term value is recently gaining new life in the US because of the venomous class tensions and ugly politics arising out of income inequality, and because people in positions of power are looking at the big picture and realizing that something has to change.

And regardless of the performance of the stock market this year, the economy overall is not doing too well, Stiglitz argued, when you look at it from the perspective of GDP growth.

"When we were growing at 4% we might have been able to grow even faster," he said. "But we took the 4% and enjoyed it. But when we're growing at 2-2.5%, and we had been growing at 3.5%, the natural question is, 'What's happened? Is there something wrong?'"

What we're seeing today is largely the result of the ideas championed by the likes of Friedman that seemed so promising to those in power in the '80s, Stiglitz argued. It's contributed greatly to this combination of inequality and low growth in America.

Stiglitz said that while CEOs aren't going to solve inequality on their own, the reason they exist in society is to grow the economy, and more are realizing they need to make changes.

It's why, for example, someone like BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, as the head of the largest asset manager in the world, has felt compelled to take a stand against short-termism. In a letter to CEOs this year, Fink announced that BlackRock will only do business with companies that have clearly defined long-term strategies that benefit in society in some way.

"Without a sense of purpose, no company, either public or private, can achieve its full potential," Fink wrote. "It will ultimately lose the license to operate from key stakeholders. It will succumb to short-term pressures to distribute earnings, and, in the process, sacrifice investments in employee development, innovation, and capital expenditures that are necessary for long-term growth. It will remain exposed to activist campaigns that articulate a clearer goal, even if that goal serves only the shortest and narrowest of objectives."

For Stiglitz, Fink's letter and similar declarations from large companies like Unilever aren't calls to feel good and congratulate each other, but are arising out of a sense of urgency. It's an urgency to shed the Friedman doctrine.

Stiglitz said the core of this debate in the US right has been going on since the 1930s, just in a vastly different world.

"As they said in the Bible, 'There is nothing new under the sun,'" Stiglitz said, laughing. "But there is a new context to it today."

[Winstonm]

y66, on 2019-August-22, 08:37, said:

From Business Insiders' ongoing series on Better Capitalism (March 2018):

As I have long said, the beginning of the rot was the election of Ronald Reagan:

Quote

In his 2015 book "Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy," Stiglitz said that the normalization of shareholder primacy was solidified under the Reagan administration through changes to federal income tax law and securities law, including relaxed antitrust laws. This fostered the rise of activist investors.

[y66]

From The Monopolization of America by David Leonhardt at NYT (November 2018):

Quote

The popular telling of the Boston Tea Party gets something wrong. The colonists were not responding to a tax increase. They were responding to the Tea Act of 1773, which granted a tea monopoly in the colonies to the well-connected East India Company. Merchants based in the Americas would be shut out of the market.

Many colonists, already upset about taxation without representation and other indignities, were enraged. In response, dozens of them stormed three ships in Boston Harbor on the night of Dec. 16, 1773, and tossed chests of East India tea — “that worst of plagues, the detested tea,” as one pamphlet put it — into the water.

A major spark for the American Revolution, then, was a protest against monopoly.

A strong strain of anti-monopoly sentiment has run through our politics ever since. America was born as “a nation of farmers and small-town entrepreneurs,” the historian Richard Hofstadter once wrote, “anti-authoritarian, egalitarian and competitive.” Hostility to corporate bigness animated Thomas Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt, as well as the labor movement, Granger movement, Progressive movement and more.

Of course, monopolies and other corporate giants have fought back against these assaults on their power, and sometimes succeeded for years or decades at a time. It happened during the age of Rockefeller and Morgan. Over the past 40 years, it has happened again.

The federal government, under presidents of both parties, has largely surrendered to monopoly power. “The ‘anti’ in ‘antitrust’ has been discarded,” as the legal scholar Tim Wu puts it in his new book, “The Curse of Bigness.” Washington allows most megamergers to proceed either straight up or with only fig-leaf changes. The government has also done nothing to prevent the emergence of dominant new technology companies that mimic the old AT&T monopoly.

This meekness has made possible the consolidation of one industry after another. For a long time, though, it’s been hard to figure out precisely how much consolidation. The available statistics just aren’t very good, which isn’t an accident. In 1981 — around the time that the Reagan administration was launching the modern pro-monopoly era — the Federal Trade Commission suspended a program that collected data on industry concentration.

Fortunately, researchers in the private sector have recently begun filling in the gaps. On Monday, the Open Markets Institute — an anti-monopoly think tank — is releasing the first part of a data set showing the market share that the largest companies have in each industry. You can see the main theme in the charts here: Big companies are much more dominant than they were even 15 years ago.



Mergers are one big reason. Another is the power of so-called network effects — in which the growth of, say, Facebook makes more people want to use it. True, a few industries have become less concentrated, but they are exceptions. If anything, the chart here understates consolidation, because it doesn’t yet cover energy, telecommunications and some other areas. It also doesn’t cover local monopolies, such as hospitals that are dominant enough to drive up prices.

The new corporate behemoths have been very good for their executives and largest shareholders — and bad for almost everyone else. Sooner or later, the companies tend to raise prices. They hold down wages, because where else are workers going to go? They use their resources to sway government policy. Many of our economic ills — like income stagnation and a decline in entrepreneurship — stem partly from corporate gigantism.

So what are we going to do about it? It’s time for another political movement, one that borrows from the Boston Tea Partiers, Jefferson, T.R. and the other defenders of the economic little guy.

The beginnings of this movement are now visible. Top Democrats believe that anti-monopolism can be a political winner for their party. It’s a way to address voters’ anxiety over high drug prices, digital privacy and more. “The control of business over certain segments of the economy,” says Senator Amy Klobuchur of Minnesota, a potential presidential candidate, “I think it will be a much bigger thing going into 2020.”

Klobuchar has offered a good bill that would raise the legal standards for merger approval. But preventing future mergers won’t be enough. Eventually, the government will probably need to break up existing giants, as it did to the old AT&T and Standard Oil. One obvious candidate is Facebook, which has gobbled up Instagram, WhatsApp and other businesses.

And corporate bigness doesn’t need to be a partisan issue. Senator Mike Lee of Utah is among the Republicans who have expressed concern about it. Conservatives, after all, are supposed to care about the ideals that monopolies undermine — like market competition, economic dynamism and individual freedom. Ultimately, monopolies aren’t only an economic problem. They are also a political one.

“We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few,” Louis Brandeis, the Supreme Court justice and anti-monopoly crusader, said a century ago, “but we can’t have both.”

Conservatives, after all, are supposed to care about the ideals that monopolies undermine — like market competition, economic dynamism and individual freedom? No doubt, the members of the Business Roundtable have something in their statement saying they care about this stuff too.