The fear of job-stealing robots has been recently stoked in the media and pundits frequently refer to automation as a key driver of long-term middle-class wage stagnation. But are robots actually transforming the labor market at an unprecedented pace? Nope—in fact, the opposite is true. First, it’s important to note that technology and automation have consistently transformed the way work gets done. So, technology itself is not a problem.
Robots and automation allow us to increase efficiency by making more things for less money. When goods and services are cheaper, consumers can afford to buy more robot-made stuff, or have money left over to spend on other things. When consumers spend their leftover cash on additional goods and services, it creates jobs. These new jobs help compensate for the jobs lost to automation.
But are robots now eroding jobs and replacing human labor at a faster pace that the economy can’t absorb? Again, no. [...]
We need to give the robot scare a rest. Robots are not leading to mass joblessness and are not the cause of wage stagnation or growing wage inequality. Recently, theNew York Timesreferred to the robot scareas a “distraction from real problems and real solutions.” Instead, we should focus on policy choices that lead to things that truly threaten workers and their families like eroding labor standards, declining unionization, elevated unemployment, unbalanced globalization, and declining top tax rates.
“I think people are entitled to march without a permit. When you have a few hundred thousand people on the street you have permission.” —Tom Hayden, The Long Sixties: From 1960 to Barack Obama, 2009
At Daily Kos on this date in 2004—The legacy of McCain-Feingold:
Campaign Finance Reform. It was the ultimate political paradox. While Republicans held a 3x fundraising lead from hard-dollar donations, Democrats had parity in unregulated soft-dollar donations.
Yet Democrats voted for it, trapped between their support for good government and their addiction to soft dollars. Meanwhile, the GOP, who apparently had the most to gain, fought it tooth and nail.
Now, the big Ds (DNC, DCCC, and DSCC) face huge money disparities vis a vis their cash-flush GOP counterparts. Bush will have two to three times as much money as our Democratic nominee. So by winning, and by pushing good government, Democrats lost, right?
Ontoday’sKagro in the Morningshow: Trump cheats at golf, and wants to Gaslight you about it, too. Felix Sater finally has more eyes on him. Is the “alt-right” just a sex cult? No, it’s much more. And worse. Labor Sec. pick Acosta connected to US Attorneys scandal & the wrist-slap for Jeffrey Epstein.
Daily Kos community designed hats. Let's also design a winning strategy for 2018.
Daily Kos community designed hats. Let's also design a winning strategy for 2018.
Let’s say that we have an energized and not yet fully organized moderate center to left group of people who are uncomfortable with Donald Trump’s presidential performance so far. Let’s further say that maybe some voted for him, and some didn’t vote at all, but are now upset with where things may be heading.
We know that we not only want to send a message now to influence policy, we also want to win back seats, influence, power and maybe a congressional chamber in 2018.
What would you do to suggest organizing principles that would help us do that? I’ll have some of my suggestions below, but this is an exercise for you. Remember, the goal isn’t to prove you were right about 2016, it’s to win in 2018.
Former congressional staffers launched a guide to this of sorts, the Indivisible movement. This excerpt highlights what could be learned from a successful movement on the right, the tea party. Before you scoff and dismiss, take a look.
An Iowa Republican thinks there are far too many liberals influencing young minds
An Iowa Republican thinks there are far too many liberals influencing young minds
Iowa State Sen. Mark Chelgren (Republican, of course) has introduced a bill requiring “partisan balance” among the faculty of public universities. In what may be the worst state bill (not specifically aimed at women) so far this year, the bill would require faculty to state their party affiliation before being hired. Of course the end game is to have fewer Democrats influencing those young minds. From the Iowa Starting Line Blog:
The legislation proposes that a “person shall not be hired as a professor or instructor member of the faculty at such an institution if the person’s political party affiliation on the date of hire would cause the percentage of faculty belonging to one political party to exceed by ten percent the percentage of faculty belonging to the other political party.”
The Secretary of State’s office would be directed to provide voter registration lists to the colleges so that new job applicants’ party affiliation could be checked before the hiring process gets underway. Graciously, Chelgren allows for people registered as No Party to slip through the process without facing the litmus test.
The obvious impact and purpose of this bill would be to ban Democrats from getting hired anymore at Iowa colleges. If you took a survey right now, it’s highly likely that Iowa professors are registered as Democrats at a much higher rate than Republican. So any new hires would be strictly limited to Republican or No Party voters.
No, this is not a joke.
You can read the full language here, but a screenshot of the un-American, un-Constitutional bill is below. Maybe if conservatives want to see more of themselves at public universities, they could dedicate themselves to teaching, accept low pay, work long hours, tolerate public flogging, and earn their positions the old-fashioned way.
Seattle is planning to fire off "a series of Freedom of Information requests" to multiple federal agencies, Murray said in his State of the City address. The city will give the White House and Department of Homeland Security the deadline of 20 business days to respond. [...]
"The city must be able to provide accurate information to immigrants and refugees and their families living in Seattle," Murray will say. "We will seek to determine the administration's definition of 'sanctuary cities' and the enforcement actions the federal government may take against us.
"We will also seek detailed information about the administration's changes to travel policy as well as changes to immigration status, including the DACA program."
Detailed information may be hard to come by, considering the dishonesty and incompetence coming out of Trump and everyone around him. But if Murray doesn’t get answers, or isn’t satisfied with what he hears, “We believe the rule of law is on our side, and we will take legal action if the federal government does not answer our requests in a timely manner.”
Now that Donald Trump occupies the White House, Democrats face the choice of whether to try to compromise with his reactionary agenda, or whether to emulate Republicans under Barack Obama and oppose the new administration in lockstep. To the dismay of many progressives, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer sometimes sounds more inclined toward working with Trump on certain policies. However, there’s one crucial reason why House Democrats in particular have very little to lose by opposing Trump: He lost the overwhelming majority of their districts by a decisive margin.
This statistic is critical in our highly polarized era, when ticket-splitting rates are at historic lows. Democrats who hold seats where most voters vigorously opposed Trump have little to fear in future general elections if they are seen opposing him, especially when his national approval rating often polls in the low 40s. In fact, Democrats from these dark-blue districts who do cross the aisle to work with Trump could even be at risk of losing a primary challenge because of it.
Daily Kos Electionshas calculated the 2016 presidential election outcomein all 435 congressional districts, which we’ve illustrated in the map at the top of this post that renders each district the same size. It reveals which party won each seat at both the presidential and congressional level (see here fora larger imageora traditional map).Thanks in large part to gerrymandering, House Democrats won just 194 seats in 2016, but 182 of those members hold seats that Hillary Clinton carried.
The graph below, called a histogram, groups every Democratic-won House seat by its 2016 presidential election margin. Clinton prevailed in half of the Democratic seats by a landslide 31-point margin or greater—all of those dark blue districts to the left of the “Median District” line. She carried 167 of those seats by at least 10 points, equivalent to a full 86 percent of all Democratic seats. With polls finding Trump deeply unpopular nationally, there is a strong likelihood that voters disapprove of him by even more in the vast majority of Democratic districts.
ADF's David Cortman speaks to reporters outside the US Supreme Court on March 25, 2014, after oral arguments challenging the Affordable Care Act's mandate for birth control coverage.
ADF's David Cortman speaks to reporters outside the US Supreme Court on March 25, 2014, after oral arguments challenging the Affordable Care Act's mandate for birth control coverage.
When the GOP-led House Judiciary Committee held a hearing last week on the "The State of Religious Liberty in America," they brought in a representative of the notoriously anti-LGBTQ legal group Alliance Defending Freedom to testify. The group, armed with some $45 million to fund litigation, has helped inspire a wave of transphobic bathroom bills that have been introduced across the country in recent years. In fact, the group not only testified on behalf of a South Dakota bathroom bill targeting transgender students (and later vetoed by the GOP governor), it offered to provide pro bono legal service to defend the measure if it was enacted.
Finally, the ADF received the appropriate moniker this year of being labeled a hate group courtesy of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Media Matters has since assembled the top 10 "need to know" items about ADF, “the nation’s largest anti-LGBTQ hate group.” Here's a sampling from Rachel Percelay:
1. SPLC Labeled ADF A Hate Group Because Of Its Extreme, Demonizing Lies About LGBT People. SPLC added ADF to its list of anti-LGBTQ hate groups because ADF’s leaders and affiliated lawyers have “regularly demonized LGBT people, falsely linking them to pedophilia, calling them ‘evil’ and a threat to children and society, and blaming them for the ‘persecution of devout Christians.’” As SPLC has repeatedly clarified, it does not list organizations as anti-LGBTQ hate groups on the basis of “opposition to same-sex marriage or the belief that the Bible describes homosexual activity as sinful.” [Southern Poverty Law Center, 2/15/17, 2/15/17] [...]
4. ADF Has Expanded Its Anti-Choice, Anti-LGBTQ Extemism Internationally. While ADF has largely run out of options for promoting the criminalization of homosexuality in America, the group has taken its anti-sodomy agenda overseas. ADF has actively worked to promote and defend anti-sodomy laws that criminalize gay sex in Jamaica, Belize and India. In 2010, the United Nations granted special consultant status to ADF, allowing the group to help shape international human rights policy and treaties. More recently, the group has become involved in the Organization of American States, where ADF’s mission has been battling “abortion and radical sexual agendas.” [Southern Poverty Law Center, 2/15/17; Media Matters, 11/19/14]
If there’s one thing Donald Trump takes seriously, it’s people making fun of Donald Trump. In fact, it may be the only thing he takes seriously. That’s why he’s devoted far more time to giving his opinion of Saturday Night Live than he has to … well, anything.
So it shouldn’t be surprising that the moment Donald Trump engages in any action, he immediately takes pre-emptive action against the haters, jokers, and snarkists. Among other things, Trump has accumulated a ludicrous collection of domains that are in themselves a kind of Donald Trump mind map.
For example, he bought TrumpNetwork.com in 2007 in preparation to launch a multi-level marketing company, in the style of Amway and Herbalife. … In the months before he launched Trump Network in 2009, he acquired TrumpMultiLevelMarketing.com, TrumpNetworkFraud.com, TrumpNetworkPyramidScheme.com, TrumpNetworkPonziScheme.com and 15 similar iterations.
If you think Trump’s frequent claims that Trump University has a 98 percent approval rating make 98PercentApproval.com a good site to fight that claim, Trump’s already there. If you are part of one of Trump’s 3,500 lawsuits, don’t expect to use ImBeingSuedByTheDonald.com to defend yourself.
Trump’s domain purchases also show that he had his mind set on a presidential run long before he escalated into an actual candidate.
In 2012, the Trump Organization acquired VoteAgainstTrump.com, TrumpMustGo.com, and NoMoreTrump.com.
But if Trump’s Internet land grab maps out his hopes and fears, just what kind of chemical trip was he on when he registered Entex-Motrin.com?
Vox's Sarah Kliff has an important story to tell about one small but critical component to Obamacare, and she does it in a most effective way. She explains how one family, and one little boy, have been saved by a provision that was really kind of an afterthought.
Timmy Morrison was delivered by emergency C-section, weighing in at 3 pounds, 9 ounces. Doctors put him under anesthesia within a week and into surgery within a month. Some of the contents of his stomach sometimes made their way to his lungs. Workers in the intensive care unit frequently needed to resuscitate him.
He arrived seven weeks premature — but, in a way, just at the right time.
Six months before Timmy was born, President Barack Obama signed a sweeping health care law that would come to bear his name. Six days before Timmy's birth, the Obama administration began to phase in a provision that banned insurance companies from limiting how much they would pay for any individual's medical bills over his or her lifetime. At the time the Affordable Care Act passed, 91 million Americans had employer-sponsored plans that imposed those so-called lifetime limits.
That group included Timmy's parents, whose plan previously included a $1 million lifetime limit. This Obamacare provision took effect September 23, 2010. Timmy was born September 29. On December 17, he surpassed $1 million worth of bills in the neonatal intensive care unit. He didn't leave the NICU until he was 6 months old.
Timmy's parents were already insured, like the majority of Americans with insurance, through a workplace plan. But that plan—like almost all insurance plans pre-Obamacare, had either or both annual and lifetime caps on what they would pay out. Without the law, or if Timmy had been born a week earlier, his insurance would have run out when he was three months old, his mother estimates.
From the moment Donald Trump secured the 2016 presidential nomination, throughout his Access Hollywood sexual-assault tape scandal, and even right up until today, Republican elected officials have overwhelmingly given him their full backing. There’s one incredibly important reason for why so many House Republicans in particular continue to stand by him: He carried the vast majority of the districts they represent by a very wide margin.
This fact is a crucial piece of context for why House Republicans so steadfastly support Trump even when polls show his national approval rating in the low 40s and debacles like National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s resignation unfold almost daily. Republican members of Congress are almost all far more concerned with primary challenges than general election defeats because Trump remains almost uniformly popular both with the Republican base and with the swing voters in their districts who would put them over the top against a Democratic opponent.
Daily Kos Elections has calculated the 2016 presidential election outcome in all 435 congressional districts, which we’ve illustrated in the map at the top of this post that renders each district the same size. It reveals which party won each seat at both the presidential and congressional level (see here for a larger image or a traditional map). House Republicans won 241 seats in 2016, and Trump won 218 of those, meaning an outright majority of the House consists of Republicans in Trump districts. And in most of those 218 seats, Trump won handily, as we’ll explain further below.
The chart below, known as a histogram, graphs every Republican-won House district according to its 2016 presidential election margin. Trump carried half of the Republican-won seats by almost a 20-point margin or greater—all those to the right of the line marked “Median District”—and he bested Clinton by at least 10 points in 179 Republican-held seats, or roughly three-fourths of the GOP caucus. So even if Trump’s approval rating is in the low 40s nationally, there’s a good bet it’s higher in these types of districts.
A federal judge ruled Tuesday that Texas lawmakers could not deny Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood over doctored videos made by anti-abortion activists in 2015. KPRC-2 reports:
An injunction issued by U.S. District Sam Sparks of Austin comes after he delayed making decision in January and essentially bought Planned Parenthood an extra month in the state's Medicaid program.
Texas is now at least the sixth state where federal courts have kept Planned Parenthood eligible for Medicaid reimbursements for non-abortion services, although a bigger question remains over whether President Donald Trump will federally defund the organization.
Sparks' decision preserves what Planned Parenthood says are cancer screenings, birth control access and other health services for nearly 11,000 low-income women. Texas originally intended to boot Planned Parenthood in January but Sparks told the state to wait pending his ruling.
More than a dozen states have now resolved investigations that turned up no criminal wrongdoing by Planned Parenthood.
Mike Pence voted against Obamacare, has been one of the loudest voices calling for Planned Parenthood to be defunded, and has advocated sending HIV prevention funding to conversion therapy. But when one Indiana county had a major HIV outbreak after its Planned Parenthood office—which was the county’s only HIV testing center—closed, guess what Pence did?
Yup, he realized that HIV prevention might be worthwhile and relied on a thing he voted against—Obamacare—to fix a problem that had been made worse by a thing he championed—defunding Planned Parenthood. And Politico is giving him credit for taking action to fix the problem while barely mentioning the ways his policies contributed to it to begin with.
In 2015, as a rash of HIV infections spread through rural southern Indiana, state health officials parachuted into Scott County and enrolled scores of people into Obamacare's expanded Medicaid program so they could get medical care and substance abuse treatment. Many were addicted to opioids and had contracted HIV by sharing dirty needles. [...]
His health department relied heavily on the program to respond to the HIV crisis in southern Indiana. Officials set up a “one-stop-shop,” next to a free needle exchange, in the tiny, impoverished town of Austin, and offered hot meals, HIV screenings, vaccinations and assistance to help people enroll in insurance — many for the first time — through HIP 2.0 [Indiana’s version of Medicaid expansion].
Within a month, about 168 people were approved for the program, according to figures provided by the Indiana Family and Social Services Administration. About 2,280 people in the Scott County are currently enrolled, many of whom are now getting substance abuse treatment.
But even though he’s had direct experience with how Obamacare can not only help individuals but address a public health crisis, Pence remains committed to repealing it and kicking all those people off of their health coverage.
