[Peace] Notes

[J.B. Nicholson]

So many things Pres. Trump somehow didn't find time to fit into the State of the 
Union speech. So many things to discuss and get into for News from Neptune and AWARE 
on the Air.

Break a leg, guys.

-J




https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/02/donald-trump-will-run-to-the-left

This article doesn't mention healthcare but healthcare presents an interesting 
guarantee for Trump to get a 2nd term: if he publicly pledges to sign into law either 
Sanders' or Jayapal's Medicare for All bills as currently-written and published (no 
changes) if Congress passes either bill. The Democrats will get another golden 
opportunity to pass a Medicare for All bill and show us whether they're sincere in 
their repeatedly stated interest in pursuing Medicare for All. The last time the 
Democrats had a golden opportunity to show us what they thought of Medicare for All 
was during the Obama administration when the Democrats held a majority in both houses 
of Congress and passed Obamacare (an HMO-written, HMO-backed plan to continue the 
status quo with some relatively minor changes) instead of HR676, John Conyers' 
Medicare for All bill which was highly reviewed and approved of by those who follow 
such bills.

Getting to the article which focuses on how the Democrats could defeat Trump in the 
upcoming election:

> To run against Trump, you need to be fully prepared for the fact that he can take
> any position on any issue at any time. He’s been for abortion and against it,
> pro-war and anti-war, tough on crime and the friend of the unjustly imprisoned. To
> beat this, you need to have a clear, powerful, and effective message of your own,
> and you can’t run someone who is themselves open to charges of lies and
> hypocrisy.
> 
> What too few people still understand about Donald Trump is that Trump is
> formidable. He crushed every Republican in the 2016 primary, and took out the
> extremely powerful Hillary Clinton. The Apprentice was the #1 show for so long
> because Trump has a talent for entertaining people and drawing attention to
> himself. Democrats are constantly falling into the “Trump trap” by obsessing over
> him and criticizing his character flaws, not realizing that every moment they are
> doing so they are squandering opportunities to present their own alternative.
> (This is why I’ve been so annoyed by the whole impeachment proceeding, which seems
> to me like it probably just bores and confuses most people.)
> 
> But Trump can be defeated. He has weaknesses. For one thing, everything about
> Trump is fake.

jbn: But it is difficult to find a weakness in Trump in which the Democrats aren't 
also complicit.





Economy: Student loan debt that stays with you for the rest of your life.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/02/student-debt-forgiveness-lets-do-some-math

This article asks "What would it cost to wipe out everybody’s student loans?"

> [If] everyone who owed a student loan was able to pay back their debt, the federal
> government would lose more than $1.5 trillion in future revenue by forgiving it
> all. But if a substantial number of people are likely to struggle for 25 years or
> die in debt, never paying off more than a fraction of the loan, then forgiving all
> debt will cost much less than $1.5 trillion.[3] So which is it? How much does it
> actually cost to forgive student debt?
> 
> No one knows. As Jordan Weissmann noted last year in Slate, even the wonkiest
> wonks don’t have a way to figure this out. The Department of Education doesn’t
> publish the data you’d need to get a reasonably accurate picture of student loan
> repayment and estimate the cost of forgiveness. What we’d need to know is how many
> people are likely to get forgiveness already. That means we need to know how many
> people are stuck in income-based repayment and likely to remain there, and how
> many people are likely to die before they pay their full balance (or, often, any
> of their balance). The Department of Education doesn’t publish any of this
> information.




Danny Haiphong on "Why Attacking the Green Party to Assist the War Party Helps Donald 
Trump, Not Bernie Sanders"

https://www.blackagendareport.com/why-attacking-green-party-assist-war-party-helps-donald-trump-not-bernie-sanders 
--

> The authors of the letter appear to be just as disinterested in the facts of the
> 2016 election as the top brass of the War Party. That’s because politics are about
> power, not facts. If politics were about facts, the authors of the letter would
> focus more of their attention on the actual policies associated with the War Party
> than with the electoral strategy of the Green Party. Workers, especially Black
> Americans, have seen their standard of living decimated by the War Party’s policy
> agenda. Thus, time would be better spent condemning the War Party for passing
> bloated military budgets that kill millions of people abroad, submitting workers
> to brutal, job-killing austerity measures, and fortifying the domestic
> police-state through the reauthorization of the Patriot Act. In the final
> analysis, a public attack that characterizes the Green Party as a of spoiler for
> the Democrats amounts to a defense of these policies and the larger system of U.S.
> imperialism which produces them.
> 
> Chomsky et al. have clearly missed the political target. Bernie Sanders’ rise to
> the top of the War Party’s field of candidates is a signal that millions of
> people, most of them workers, are sick and tired of politics as usual in
> Washington. If David Frum’s recent article in The Atlantic is any indication, then
> it is clear that the neocons and capitalists in control of the War Party are
> prepared to do anything they can to prevent a Sanders presidency, even if that
> means providing tacit support to a second term for Donald Trump. A party
> controlled by capitalists is a party that cannot fulfill the interests of the
> working class. The Green Party exists to offer an alternative to those who not
> only want to see Medicare for All and peace become realities in our lifetime, but
> also understand that a political system designed to keep workers and poor people
> completely destitute of political power must be completely transformed into its
> opposite before a socialist policy agenda takes shape in the United States. It is
> here where the authors of the letter are in fundamental disagreement with the
> Green Party, its supporters, and anyone who stands for peace and social justice.
> They claim to want to help Sanders win but repeat the talking points of the very
> same people who stampeded his 2016 campaign and handed Trump the White House. Such
> behavior won’t gain the left any friends with the workers and the oppressed and
> should be ignored entirely.




Assange: Doctors for Assange interviews from Consortium News

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aC_e4e-R5bM -- Dr. Sue Wareham
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkLtylEgec0 -- Dr. Jill Stein
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2y38x-cHqs -- Dr. Robert Marr
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fePJLIVc1_g -- Dr. Derek Summerfield

Related:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3ZX2_FRfe0 -- Foreign Minister of Ecuador, Guillaume 
Long, on why Assange was granted asylum
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hZQDmqVhk4 -- John Pilger calls on Australia to help 
Julian Assange (July 2018)



Economy: Redacted Tonight has us covered on the "gig economy" exploitation

The economic links this week come to us courtesy of the only comedy news show worth 
watching, Redacted Tonight.

"Uber drivers often make below minimum wage, report finds"
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/01/uber-lyft-driver-wages-median-report 
-- A reminder of what we were told over a year ago:

> Uber and Lyft drivers in the US make a median profit of as little as $8.55 per
> hour before taxes, according to a new report that suggests a majority of
> ride-share workers make below minimum wage and that some actually lose money.
> 
> Researchers did an analysis of vehicle cost data and a survey of more than 1,100
> drivers for the ride-hailing companies for the paper, published by the
> Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy
> Research. The first draft of the paper, released last month, said the median
> profit was $3.37 an hour, but the author released a new analysis on Monday
> following criticism from Uber.
> 
> In the new analysis, the researcher reported the higher median profit of $8.55 an
> hour. The study, which factored in insurance, maintenance, repairs, fuel and other
> costs, also said that for 54% of drivers, the profit is less than the minimum wage
> in their states and that 8% of drivers are losing money on the job.

"DoorDash drivers make an average of $1.45 an hour, analysis finds"
https://www.salon.com/2020/01/19/doordash-drivers-make-an-average-of-145-an-hour-analysis-finds/

> The national minimum wage of $7.25 an hour has not changed in a decade, and there
> is widespread agreement that it is far below what constitutes a living wage
> anyway. As if the statistics on the federal minimum wage weren't dismal enough,
> leave it to Silicon Valley to figure out "innovative" ways to pay workers even
> less. A new, in-depth quantitative study released this week, as part of a worker
> campaign in collaboration with the worker rights non-profit Working Washington,
> found that contract delivery workers for food delivery company DoorDash earn $1.45
> per hour on average, after other expenses are accounted for.
> 
> DoorDash is an on-demand prepared food delivery service. The basic premise is that
> the compay's contract delivery drivers, or "Dashers," deliver food to customers
> who order on the mobile app. Similar to Uber drivers or TaskRabbit workers, the
> company advertises that, by becoming a Dasher, you can "be your own boss" and
> "enjoy the flexibility of choosing when, where, and how much you earn."
> 
> Working Washington crunched pay data from 229 delivery jobs from Dashers around
> the United States, and found that the workers were making an average of $1.45 an
> hour, after taking into account the costs of mileage, additional payroll taxes
> that add up for independent contractors, and the lost work time as workers wait
> for the next job. All of the data was from November and December 2019, after the
> company implemented a new pay model. The estimates made in the study don't take
> into account the cost of paying for public insurance benefits. They only factor in
> work expenses beyond mileage and payroll taxes — which means the real wages may be
> even more depressing.

> The report states:
> 
> "Nearly a third of [DoorDash] jobs actually pay less than $0 after accounting for
> these basic expenses. Just 11% of jobs pay more than the federal minimum wage of
> $7.25/hour, after expenses, and only 2% meet the standard of $15 + expenses.
> Further, jobs with higher tips still tend to include lower pay: the set of jobs
> with tips of less than $1 pay 1.8 times as much as those jobs with tips of more
> than $8, on a gross hourly pay basis."
> 
> In November 2019, DoorDash claimed its new pay model would result in gross hourly
> earnings of more than $18.
> 
> But as the report explains, it's unclear what qualifies as "gross" earnings:
> 
> "The company has declined to disclose how much of that gross amount is tips, how
> much is pay from the company, how many miles workers drive (and thus much much
> mileage expense they incur), what periods of time they consider to be part of an
> 'active hour,' or other details and costs involved in achieving that reported
> level of gross earnings."
> 
> What it boils down to is that DoorDash has created a pay model in which workers
> appear to be making a decent wage on paper, but which, after expenses, is barely
> more than $0. Worse, only 11 percent of DoorDash jobs paid above the U.S.'s
> laughable federal minimum wage.
> 
> Yet DoorDash's manipulative exploitation of its workers is evidently great for its
> business model and its investors. According to CNBC, Doordash seized one-third of
> the digital food delivery sales in the U.S. market in 2019.

"The American March to Inequality: Why the UN Alston Report Alarms the Trump Plutocrats"
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/06/23/american-march-inequality-why-un-alston-report-alarms-trump-plutocrats 
-- from June 2018

UN Special Rapporteur Philip Alston's report "loads of light on how unequal a society 
America is, how it is marching rapidly toward even greater, Third World levels of 
inequality, and how peculiar the US is, as a land of rapacious robber barons and 40 
million completely marginalized poor."

> Already, the top 0.1% holds as much of the country’s wealth as the bottom 90%
> (i.e. almost everyone reading these words).

Alston wrote:

> *US infant mortality rates in 2013 were the highest in the developed world.
> 
> *Americans can expect to live shorter and sicker lives, compared to people living
> in any other rich democracy, and the “health gap” between the U.S. and its peer
> countries continues to grow.
> 
> *U.S. inequality levels are far higher than those in most European countries
> 
> *Neglected tropical diseases, including Zika, are increasingly common in the USA.
> It has been estimated that 12 million Americans live with a neglected parasitic
> infection. A 2017 report documents the prevalence of hookworm in Lowndes County,
> Alabama.
> 
> *The US has the highest prevalence of obesity in the developed world.
> 
> *In terms of access to water and sanitation the US ranks 36th in the world.
> 
> *America has the highest incarceration rate in the world, ahead of Turkmenistan,
> El Salvador, Cuba, Thailand and the Russian Federation. Its rate is nearly 5 times
> the OECD average.
> 
> *The youth poverty rate in the United States is the highest across the OECD with
> one quarter of youth living in poverty compared to less than 14% across the OECD.

Related:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vj3EMePsU-Y -- Rania Khalek on the Alabama sewage 
crisis referred to above which leads to hookworm.





Danny Sjursen on "America and Israel Against the World"
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/america-and-israel-against-the-world/
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/02/13/america-and-israel-against-world




Prison: Why do we lock up so many people?
Adam Gopnik on "The Caging of America"
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/01/30/the-caging-of-america

> For most privileged, professional people, the experience of confinement is a mere
> brush, encountered after a kid’s arrest, say. For a great many poor people in
> America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through
> an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More
> than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time
> in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history
> is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as
> slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in
> the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than
> were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional
> supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago
> under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled,
> Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.
> 
> The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as
> startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred
> and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the
> number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country
> even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on
> prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. Ours is,
> bottom to top, a “carceral state,” in the flat verdict of Conrad Black, the former
> conservative press lord and newly minted reformer, who right now finds himself
> imprisoned in Florida, thereby adding a new twist to an old joke: A conservative
> is a liberal who’s been mugged; a liberal is a conservative who’s been indicted;
> and a passionate prison reformer is a conservative who’s in one.
> 
> The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.
> Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in
> solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men
> are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write,
> and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself
> in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years,
> and you will have some sense of the experience.) Prison rape is so endemic—more
> than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out
> as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder
> for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is
> now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit
> of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about
> watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our
> descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who
> thought themselves civilized. Though we avoid looking directly at prisons, they
> seep obliquely into our fashions and manners. Wealthy white teen-agers in baggy
> jeans and laceless shoes and multiple tattoos show, unconsciously, the reality of
> incarceration that acts as a hidden foundation for the country.
> 
> How did we get here? How is it that our civilization, which rejects hanging and
> flogging and disembowelling, came to believe that caging vast numbers of people
> for decades is an acceptably humane sanction? There’s a fairly large recent
> scholarly literature on the history and sociology of crime and punishment, and it
> tends to trace the American zeal for punishment back to the nineteenth century,
> apportioning blame in two directions. There’s an essentially Northern explanation,
> focussing on the inheritance of the notorious Eastern State Penitentiary, in
> Philadelphia, and its “reformist” tradition; and a Southern explanation, which
> sees the prison system as essentially a slave plantation continued by other means.
> Robert Perkinson, the author of the Southern revisionist tract “Texas Tough: The
> Rise of America’s Prison Empire,” traces two ancestral lines, “from the North, the
> birthplace of rehabilitative penology, to the South, the fountainhead of
> subjugationist discipline.” In other words, there’s the scientific taste for
> reducing men to numbers and the slave owners’ urge to reduce blacks to brutes.
> 
> William J. Stuntz, a professor at Harvard Law School who died shortly before his
> masterwork, “The Collapse of American Criminal Justice,” was published, last fall,
> is the most forceful advocate for the view that the scandal of our prisons derives
> from the Enlightenment-era, “procedural” nature of American justice. He runs
> through the immediate causes of the incarceration epidemic: the growth of
> post-Rockefeller drug laws, which punished minor drug offenses with major prison
> time; “zero tolerance” policing, which added to the group; mandatory-sentencing
> laws, which prevented judges from exercising judgment. But his search for the
> ultimate cause leads deeper, all the way to the Bill of Rights. In a society where
> Constitution worship is still a requisite on right and left alike, Stuntz
> startlingly suggests that the Bill of Rights is a terrible document with which to
> start a justice system—much inferior to the exactly contemporary French
> Declaration of the Rights of Man, which Jefferson, he points out, may have helped
> shape while his protégé Madison was writing ours.
> 
> The trouble with the Bill of Rights, he argues, is that it emphasizes process and
> procedure rather than principles. The Declaration of the Rights of Man says, Be
> just! The Bill of Rights says, Be fair! Instead of announcing general
> principles—no one should be accused of something that wasn’t a crime when he did
> it; cruel punishments are always wrong; the goal of justice is, above all, that
> justice be done—it talks procedurally. You can’t search someone without a reason;
> you can’t accuse him without allowing him to see the evidence; and so on. This
> emphasis, Stuntz thinks, has led to the current mess, where accused criminals get
> laboriously articulated protection against procedural errors and no protection at
> all against outrageous and obvious violations of simple justice. You can get off
> if the cops looked in the wrong car with the wrong warrant when they found your
> joint, but you have no recourse if owning the joint gets you locked up for life.
> You may be spared the death penalty if you can show a problem with your appointed
> defender, but it is much harder if there is merely enormous accumulated evidence
> that you weren’t guilty in the first place and the jury got it wrong. Even clauses
> that Americans are taught to revere are, Stuntz maintains, unworthy of reverence:
> the ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” was designed to protect cruel
> punishments—flogging and branding—that were not at that time unusual.
> 
> The obsession with due process and the cult of brutal prisons, the argument goes,
> share an essential impersonality. The more professionalized and procedural a
> system is, the more insulated we become from its real effects on real people.
> That’s why America is famous both for its process-driven judicial system (“The
> bastard got off on a technicality,” the cop-show detective fumes) and for the
> harshness and inhumanity of its prisons. Though all industrialized societies
> started sending more people to prison and fewer to the gallows in the eighteenth
> century, it was in Enlightenment-inspired America that the taste for long-term,
> profoundly depersonalized punishment became most aggravated. The inhumanity of
> American prisons was as much a theme for Dickens, visiting America in 1842, as the
> cynicism of American lawyers. His shock when he saw the Eastern State
> Penitentiary, in Philadelphia—a “model” prison, at the time the most expensive
> public building ever constructed in the country, where every prisoner was kept in
> silent, separate confinement—still resonates:
> 
> "I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of
> torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts
> upon the sufferers. . . . I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries
> of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body: and because
> its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as
> scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts
> few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret
> punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay."
> 
> Not roused up to stay—that was the point. Once the procedure ends, the penalty
> begins, and, as long as the cruelty is routine, our civil responsibility toward
> the punished is over. We lock men up and forget about their existence. For
> Dickens, even the corrupt but communal debtors’ prisons of old London were better
> than this. “Don’t take it personally!”—that remains the slogan above the gate to
> the American prison Inferno. Nor is this merely a historian’s vision. Conrad
> Black, at the high end, has a scary and persuasive picture of how his counsel, the
> judge, and the prosecutors all merrily congratulated each other on their combined
> professional excellence just before sending him off to the hoosegow for several
> years. If a millionaire feels that way, imagine how the ordinary culprit must
> feel.

Related:
https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cpus16.pdf -- DOJ report which includes:

> At year-end 2016, about 1 in 38 persons in the United States were under
> correctional supervision.