"Great News: Wall Street Democrats Might Leave the Party" →

David Dayen, writing in The American Prospect:

This is fantastic news. Anything that accelerates the split in the decades-long marriage between the alleged party of the people and Big Money should be celebrated. The transformation in policy that would ensue if Wall Street Democrats walk away from the party, freeing it from self-censorship and bad ideas, far outstrips whatever money they might raise for Democratic candidates.

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The most telling quote came from a hedge fund executive, who fretted that if Warren helped people discover that the Trump tax cuts only helped fatten corporate wallets, “Wall Street would not like the public thinking about that.” So their beef with “far left” Democrats is that they would tell too much truth about our broken tax code and the soaring inequality it fosters.

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That’s exactly the right attitude, which Sanders has backed up with his constant invocations of the old FDR line about the economic royalists, “I welcome their hatred.” And proudly rejecting the support of Wall Street isn’t just a populist pose; it’s a viable economic policy. Just about everything that has ailed the Democratic Party since the 1970s from a policy standpoint can be traced back to an ugly partnership with Wall Street money.

Post-Watergate reformers did not place themselves in opposition to financial power; their first inclination was to throw out the populist head of the House Banking Committee, Wright Patman, who had been fighting consolidation for decades. Patman’s pro-bank foes on the committee ensured his fate by allying with the Watergate babies. Later, as Brooks Jackson details in the seminal book Honest Graft, Democrats, led by chief fundraiser for the House campaign arm Tony Coelho, cozied up to Big Money to hang onto power during the Reagan revolution.

This wound up betraying just about every New Deal principle there was, and muddying the distinctions between the party and the Republicans. Seduced by an ardor for markets, New Democrats and the DLC pursued financial deregulation and spurred financialization in a host of policy arenas, from education to housing to retail. Large companies like Apple and Koch Industries are as much derivatives traders and hedgers as they are product makers and sellers.

GM just showed why we have to overhaul our health insurance system →

Paul Waldman in the Washington Post:

As the United Auto Workers strike against General Motors threatens to drag on, the company decided to play hardball: It announced that it is cutting off health benefits for striking workers. Though they will be able to pick up coverage through COBRA with the help of the union — coverage that won’t be as comprehensive — the move sends a clear message that this will be a merciless fight.

Which reminds us of something very important about health-care reform, no matter what form it takes under the next Democratic president: We have to move away from the ridiculous system where the insurance you have, and whether you have insurance at all, is dependent on the benevolence of your boss.

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Most people have probably never questioned it: You get a job, and if you’re lucky, it comes with health insurance. You boss decides what kind of plan you’re on, and every year he decides if he wants to switch you to a different one (which is why “If you like your plan, you can keep it” is a fiction, no matter who’s saying it). That’s just how things work.

But more than 150 million Americans get health coverage through their jobs not because anyone thought it would be the best way to construct an insurance system. It was an accident of history…

"Striking GM Workers Deserve Our Support" →

Jane McAlevey in The Nation:

Bailed out by the taxpayer to the tune of $11 billion, General Motors has been making record profits—and closing plants. According to striking GM employee Sean Crawford, who works at Flint Truck Assembly building the Silverado and the GMC Sierra, “GM doesn’t care about America, they don’t care what happens to our communities. Whole cities are being decimated by disinvestment. They can wave the flag all they want in their TV advertisements, but they’ve destroyed whole communities of people just trying to raise their families.” For Crawford, the most important two issues in this strike are putting an end to the creation of “temporary” workers—many of whom have been working side by side with him for up to six years—and bringing all workers up to the same tier.

That second point is key: According to Sam Gindin, who by the time he retired had spent decades as chief labor economist for the Canadian Autoworkers, “Part of what made the United Auto Workers so important for so long was the solidaristic union principle of equal pay for equal work. The level of equality in the auto industry was remarkable for decades because previous union leadership fought to keep the difference between skilled trades, assembly line, and even janitors minimal. Having extended this to women decades back, it has more recently been given up for new workers doing the same job as workers hired earlier.”

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More strikes are urgently needed to reverse the dangerous increase in American inequality. But the exciting strikes that have been electrifying the nation for the past two years have been led by a surge in bottom-up movements of the rank and file, mainly of women in the education sector. Workers at GM are reading tea leaves and official press releases, just like the media, and that’s no way to win a massive strike.

Yet, despite the many obstacles and tarnished national UAW leadership, everyone needs the workers in this strike to win. At General Motors, the autoworkers deserve real job security, a great contract that honors their tireless hard work, and new union leadership. To get it, they need to drive this strike themselves.

Everyone agrees: rich countries have to help poor countries with climate change →

There’s an interesting point that’s implied here: our middle-man elite (i.e., most “politicians”), whom we deride as obsessed with polls, only seem to pay attention to the polls that are politically safe (i.e., the ones that won’t scare their donors).

From Carl Beier’s blog:

These numbers indicate the difference between "agree" and "disagree" answers. Predictably, Democrats - and groups that have strong representation in the Democratic coalition, including Black and Hispanic respondents, women, and Millennials - provided the strongest agreement. But surprisingly, even groups at the other end of the spectrum - including Republicans - registered more approval than disapproval.

This consensus should come as welcome news to anyone concerned about climate change, since you can't fight climate change without massive transfers to poor countries. The problem has been neglected in many (though thankfully not all) of the Green New Deal proposals that we've seen so far - and one reason, I suspect, is that politicians think that voters just don't want the United States to pay for it.

"POWERED BY THE PEOPLE: A Genuine Populist Is Running for West Virginia Governor. His Donor Rolls Broke the State’s Campaign Finance Software." →

This is amazing (but shouldn’t be). This is how I naïvely assumed parties worked: organizing from the ground up, recruiting and training people to run for office, supporting candidates up and down the ballot.

Aida Chavez in the Intercept:

The roadmap is simple: Organize locally, recruit local candidates who know their neighbors’ needs, and run those candidates in local races. So far, Smith’s campaign has recruited an estimated 56 candidates and potential candidates who are mulling a run in 2020. They have their sights set on positions like city council memberships, magistrate judge seats, county commissioners, and delegates. Their candidate pipeline includes people who are ready to go —and have their campaign website set already — to others who are considering running for office for the first time and want go to a training to get a sense of what it takes.

Smith’s campaign will train candidates and their campaign staff. Perhaps most crucially, West Virginia Can’t Wait will grant these smaller campaigns access to their team and join them on the trail, opening up town halls and events to the local candidates.

"The Real Costs of the U.S. Health-Care Mess" →

Matt Bruenig, of the People’s Policy Project, explaining why so many people fall through the cracks of our current cobbled-together system, the consequences (in lives), and how moving to a singlepayer “Medicare for All” system actually costs less while covering everyone:

…Despite all of this, or perhaps because of it, America still has about 30 million uninsured people, a number that is predicted to increase to 35 million by 2029. Conservative estimates suggest that there is one unnecessary death annually for every 830 uninsured people, meaning that America’s level of uninsurance leads to more than 35,000 unnecessary deaths every year.

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Biden is probably correct to say that his plan is the most similar to Obamacare. And just like Obamacare, Biden’s plan will leave a lot of Americans uninsured. Specifically, his own materials say that 3 percent of Americans will still be uninsured after his reforms, which means that about 10 million Americans will continue to lack insurance and about 12,000 will die each year due to uninsurance.

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Under the Sanders plan, the federal government will provide comprehensive health insurance that covers nearly everything people associate with medical care, including prescription drugs, hearing, dental, and vision. Over the course of four years, every American will be transitioned to the new public health plan. Going forward, rather than getting money to providers through a mess of leaky insurance channels, all money will flow through the single Medicare channel, which will cover everyone.

So far, Sanders has not adopted a specific set of “pay-fors” for his Medicare for All program, but has instead offered up lists of funding options. Although he has remained open on the specifics of funding Medicare for All, the overall Sanders vision is pretty clear: cut overall health spending while also redistributing health spending up the ladder so that the majority of families pay less for health care than they do now.

And this plan is plausible: The right-wing Mercatus Center found in 2018 that the Sanders plan reduces overall health spending by $2 trillion in the first 10 years. The nonpartisan Rand Corporation has constructed a similar single-payer plan, with pay-fors, for New York State that would result in health-care savings for all family income-groups below 1,000 percent of the poverty line ($276,100 for a family of four).

"Are Voters Willing to Pay 18 Percent of GDP on Health Care?" →

Trick question! As Jon Walker writes in The American Prospect, that’s what we pay right now, and it’s nearly twice the amount of almost any other highly industrialized country, but for much worse outcomes (even when people do seek care, which many don’t because of high copays and deductibles which could be eliminated in a singlepayer system). So where does all that money go? Primarily as “profits” for drug companies, as well as for an army of staff at hospitals who do nothing but argue with another army of staff at insurance companies about whether or not to pay for people’s healthcare.

So the question that should be asked is whether our elected representatives have the guts to fight the drug, healthcare, and health insurance lobbyists, and push for a singlepayer system, which is the most efficient—and moral—system we’ve devised so far.

We need a national program to recognize propaganda →

Finland is working their own out, and we should pay attention.

From Eliza Mackintosh at CNN:

Standing in front of the classroom at Espoo Adult Education Centre, Jussi Toivanen worked his way through his PowerPoint presentation. A slide titled “Have you been hit by the Russian troll army?” included a checklist of methods used to deceive readers on social media: image and video manipulations, half-truths, intimidation and false profiles.

Another slide, featuring a diagram of a Twitter profile page, explained how to identify bots: look for stock photos, assess the volume of posts per day, check for inconsistent translations and a lack of personal information.

The lesson wrapped with a popular “deepfake” — highly realistic manipulated video or audio — of Barack Obama to highlight the challenges of the information war ahead.

The course is part of an anti-fake news initiative launched by Finland’s government in 2014 – two years before Russia meddled in the US elections – aimed at teaching residents, students, journalists and politicians how to counter false information designed to sow division.