Saudi Arabia is a Good Ally? Get Real →

Proponents of a stronger partnership often obscure these issues by arguing that Iran remains the major threat to American interests in the region, necessitating continued U.S. support for Saudi Arabia. And it’s certainly true that Iran is a state sponsor of terror, and often a destabilizing force in the region. Yet this focus on Iran results in a form of “whataboutism,” a way to excuse the fact that Saudi Arabia is also, at times, destabilizing. In effect, we are told that Saudi Arabia may be bad, but Iran is worse!
This argument cannot actually excuse Saudi actions. In just the last few years, extensive Saudi involvement in Syria has worsened that conflict, as they provided arms and financing to a variety of rebel groups. A Saudi-led campaign has transformed the war in Yemen from a civil conflict into a major humanitarian crisis, one which has strengthened Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

The NYPD is Running Stings Against Immigrant-Owned Shops, Then Pushing For Warrantless Searches →

Cho was facing a nuisance abatement action, civil lawsuits intended to uproot persistent illegal activities by targeting the locations they stem from. Nuisance abatement became city law in the 1970s as a tool to clean up the sex industry in Times Square.
But today it’s being used quite differently — often ensnaring legal mom-and-pop shops that are almost exclusively located in minority neighborhoods, a Daily News and ProPublica investigation found.
Owners interviewed for this story, all first- and second-generation immigrants, say they felt entrapped and then strong-armed into signing settlements with steep fines and onerous conditions. The stipulations often allow for sweeping surveillance, such as warrantless searches and unbridled police access to video cameras. They also permit the NYPD to automatically fine and padlock a store should another allegation arise — all without giving merchants the opportunity to defend themselves in court.

The Rich Live Longer Everywhere. For the Poor, Geography Matters. →

For poor Americans, the place they call home can be a matter of life or death.
The poor in some cities — big ones like New York and Los Angeles, and also quite a few smaller ones like Birmingham, Ala. — live nearly as long as their middle-class neighbors or have seen rising life expectancy in the 21st century. But in some other parts of the country, adults with the lowest incomes die on average as young as people in much poorer nations like Rwanda, and their life spans are getting shorter.
In those differences, documented in sweeping new research, lies an optimistic message: The right mix of steps to improve habits and public health could help people live longer, regardless of how much money they make.

The Verizon Strike Signals a Larger Economic Battle →

The Verizon case incorporates big themes in the economy—outsourcing, monopolies, automation, and inequality, to name a few. It reflects the gradual thinning out of good-paying, middle-class U.S. jobs. And in this election year, it forces politicians to choose—not just between labor and management, but between a future of shared prosperity for workers and one in which a lot of low-paid service employees cater to the bidding of the ultra-rich.
...
In contract negotiations, Verizon asked to consolidate more call centers and route more calls overseas to facilitate outsourcing. The company also wants to redeploy existing technicians away from their homes for months at a time to service its network, which CWA sees as a deliberate effort to force workers to quit.
Verizon deems this all necessary because its landline business is hemorrhaging customers, as people cut the cords on their home phones. Verizon lost 1.4 million landline subscribers just last year. But the super-fast FiOS broadband network, also considered part of the wireline business, is booming, with sales up 9 percent last year. While total gross revenue was down 1.8 percent in 2015, the overall business made $8.9 billion. Only $300 million in savings came from reducing employee costs, according to Verizon’s own figures. In other words, the wireline business remains very profitable.
And Verizon’s wireless business, staffed mostly with non-union employees, is doing spectacularly, with obscenely high profit margins—nearly 40 cents on every dollar of revenue. The company could use that money to invest in high-demand services like FiOS, but except for one announcement this week of an expansion into Boston, FiOS build-out has stalled.
In sum, Verizon seems to be over-emphasizing the part of its business with non-union workers and under-emphasizing the part with a unionized labor force...
The shift to a foreign workforce has degraded the quality of the Verizon product—ask anyone who’s ever been on the phone for customer service with them. Verizon continues to outsource because, as one of just a handful of major telecoms, they don’t really have to worry about market share. In my area, Verizon was the only available seller of DSL broadband, competing only with more expensive cable service from Time Warner, until it divested from California wireline service this year, selling it to Frontier Communications. There’s simply no value in keeping quality high because customers are cornered, with nowhere else to go.

Uber and Lyft don't cover their cost of capital and rely on desperate workers →

Uber and Lyft are only economically viable because they offload their cost of capital -- the investment and depreciation on cars and the cost of keeping a driver fed and healthy -- onto the drivers, who are only willing to accept such a bad deal because the labor market sucks.
Businesses that can't cover their costs of capital are not sustainable without some source of subsidy (like the food-stamps for McDonald's and Walmart workers that we all pay for). If the labor market improves and workers decline to continue to subsidize rideshare companies they'll need to find some way to get the government or the capital markets to subsidize them or they'll collapse.

Robber Baron Recessions →

The argument begins with a seeming paradox about overall corporate behavior. You see, profits are at near-record highs, thanks to a substantial decline in the percentage of G.D.P. going to workers. You might think that these high profits imply high rates of return to investment. But corporations themselves clearly don’t see it that way: their investment in plant, equipment, and technology (as opposed to mergers and acquisitions) hasn’t taken off, even though they can raise money, whether by issuing bonds or by selling stocks, more cheaply than ever before.
How can this paradox be resolved? Well, suppose that those high corporate profits don’t represent returns on investment, but instead mainly reflect growing monopoly power. In that case many corporations would be in the position I just described: able to milk their businesses for cash, but with little reason to spend money on expanding capacity or improving service. The result would be what we see: an economy with high profits but low investment, even in the face of very low interest rates and high stock prices.
And such an economy wouldn’t just be one in which workers don’t share the benefits of rising productivity; it would also tend to have trouble achieving or sustaining full employment. Why? Because when investment is weak despite low interest rates, the Federal Reserve will too often find its efforts to fight recessions coming up short. So lack of competition can contribute to“secular stagnation” — that awkwardly-named but serious condition in which an economy tends to be depressed much or even most of the time, feeling prosperous only when spending is boosted by unsustainable asset or credit bubbles. If that sounds to you like the story of the U.S. economy since the 1990s, join the club.

Capitalism is coercive and creates patterns of deprivation, as explained by libertarian blockquotes →

Capitalism isn't the end of humanity, and I'm hopeful we'll discover a next, better set of institutions.

Whenever you accuse capitalism of being coercive and causing patterns of deprivation, certain people lose their shit. This is especially true of the libertarian crowd, which is extremely invested in insisting that capitalism is actually super-duper freedom with no coercion at all.
People who don’t like this message (in my experience) like to dismiss it as some kind of fringe Marxist thing, but you can actually piece it together entirely from libertarian and libertarian-favored thinkers. Watch me do this below.

Black Lives Matter and America’s long history of resisting civil rights protesters →

The majority of Americans haven't embraced the activists’ message or strategies, either; fewer than a third of Americans said Black Lives Matter focuses on real issues of racial discrimination while 55 percent said the movement distracts from those issues, according to a September PBS News Hour/Marist poll. Another poll conducted that month by NBC News and Wall Street Journal found that 32 percent of Americans had mostly positive views of the movement; 29 percent had mostly negative views and 39 percent were neutral.
Such tepid acceptance of black activism isn't surprising. This country has a history of disapproving of civil rights protests and demonstrations. And perhaps nothing better demonstrates that dynamic than the movement of the 1960s.
Today, sit-ins, freedom rides and marches for voting rights are viewed with historical reverence. Schoolchildren across the country memorize Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Conservatives invoke the moral authority of the civil rights movement as a model for their own activism. Civil rights workers are viewed as national heroes.
But in their day, activists were met with widespread disapproval. A review of polling data from the 1960s paints a picture of an America in which the majority of people felt such protest actions would hurt, not help, African Americans’ fight for equality...