What do we do when we only have two branches of government?

One of the many problems that’s come to a head these last few years is the increasingly activist Judicial branch, in a system that was designed to be balanced through three active and competitive branches. Congress has ceded more and more power to the Executive branch for the better part of 50 years. And it’s barely functioned for the last 10 years, as the Republican Party no longer tries to compromise, even when the Democrats are willing to give them what they want up front. The Judiciary has always included partisan activists who’ve used flimsy readings of the law and legislators’ intent, in order to “legislate from the bench.” But now judicial activists legislate more often than Congress, and the Executive appoints those judges. So the Republican Party has been stacking the courts with every ideologue they can, following the standard authoritarian playbook, since Trump took office.

Ian Milhiser, in Vox:

…The first reason is the effective blockade Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell imposed on appellate court confirmations the moment Republicans took over the Senate. McConnell’s effort to block Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland is well-known. Less well-known are the many lower court nominees who received similar treatment. Under Trump, McConnell’s turned the Senate into a machine that churns out judicial confirmations and does little else — he’s ignored literally hundreds of bills passed by the House. Under Obama, by contrast, McConnell’s Senate was the place where judicial nominations went to die.

We’re in the midst of a rapid takeover of the highest appeals courts in the country, which have already been gutting basic rights and protections for the average American over the past several years:

Judges, by contrast, have become the most consequential policymakers in the nation. They have gutted America’s campaign finance law and dismantled much of the Voting Rights Act. They have allowed states to deny health coverage to millions of Americans. They’ve held that religion can be wielded as a sword to cut away the rights of others. They’ve drastically watered down the federal ban on sexual harassment. And that barely scratches the surface.

The judiciary is where policy is made in the United States. And that policy is likely to be made by Republican judges for the foreseeable future.

There are likely now five votes on the Supreme Court, for example, to effectively give the judiciary a veto power over all federal regulations. Similarly, the Court’s decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014) signals that religious conservatives may now ask the judiciary for an exemption from any law — and courts are likely to become quite generous in passing out such exemptions in the coming years. Republicans spent most of 2017 trying and failing to repeal Obamacare — but that failure means little to a federal appeals court that is expected to strike down the Affordable Care Act any day now.

And that’s not all. In the coming months, the courts are poised to gut abortion rights, eviscerate gun control, and neuter landmark environmental laws. Federal judges have already stripped workers of their ability to assert many of their rights against their employers, and this process is likely to accelerate in the near future. Many of our voting rights lay in tatters, thanks to conservative judicial appointments, and this process is likely to accelerate as well.

We need to break the increasing stranglehold the rich have on every lever of power in this country. This country is turning into a corrupt oligarchy. We need to educate ourselves, and get involved, and as many of us as quickly as possible. A better world is possible when we work together.

Destroying 3+ generations for the top 1%

Behold the New Gilded Age, much like the last Gilded Age, as money chases money, eventually leaving the 99% behind.

Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing, describing one effect of 40 years of wealth being sucked away from the poor and middle class:

The percentage of millennials planning to "always rent" is up about 25% from last year, to 12.3%, based on Apartment List's annual survey; the factors behind this are primarily high house prices and high levels of indebtedness, driven primarily by student debt.

…

But if millennials think they're struggling now, wait until their parents -- who lost their defined benefits pension and were moved into market-based 401(k)s that are grossly inadequate to supporting them after they stop working -- retire. 

…

That means that a whole generation's prime child-rearing and working years will be compromised by crushing eldercare and debt burdens, leaving them largely childless (with fewer young workers coming up behind them to pay into the Social Security system when they retire) and with stunted working lives.

Not everyone will end up this way: the top decile and the one percent will enjoy the "privileges" of good jobs and families. 

If there was ever a moment for intergenerational solidarity, this is it. Neither boomers nor the generations after them have a future under neoliberalism and inequality.

We're not prepared for modern disinformation campaigns →

The following is even relatively minor compared with the “deepfake” photos and videos that are coming. This is societal poison; we need laws to stop this stuff now.

Cory Doctorow in Boing Boing:

It's a preview of just how badly things could go in 2020: the Kentucky gubernatorial race was narrowly decided for the Democratic candidate Andy Beshear, but the monumentally unpopular Trumpist incumbent Matt Bevin will not concede, and instead, he is repeating the Trumpist lie that "voter fraud" caused him to lose his office.

Supercharging this lie are obvious fake Twitter accounts, like the now-suspended @Overlordkraken1 account, which posted hours after the polls closed with "just shredded a box of Republican mail-in ballots" and "Bye-Bye Bevin." Though the account only had 19 followers and though it was swiftly shuttered, a screenshot of the tweet was retweeted by a botnet army, and then far-right commentators started to cite it as evidence of electoral fraud…

"EFF and ACLU triumph as federal judge rules that warrantless, suspicionless device searches at the border are illegal" →

This is great news. Privacy laws around the internet and smartphones basically don’t exist. It’s been “legal” for law enforcement to demand we open everything on our phones, and let them download the entire contents, without warrant or suspicion, until now.

Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing:

Now, a federal court in Boston has found in favor of the travelers, affirming that CBP cannot conduct searches of border-crossers' devices without particularized suspicion of illegal contraband.

The judgment has the potential to stem the rising floodtide of warrantless border searches of devices -- up 400% in just three years.

On the famous prediction of 15 hour work weeks... →

An economy is meant to serve the people, not the people an economy. As Jeff Spross, in his article “The many benefits of a 4 day work week” lays out, most of us are working harder than ever, but not reaping the benefits that should follow—more pay, or more time off. Our pay’s stagnating; our bills keep going up; those of us not at the top suffer cycles of chronic stress and burnout; and some companies are beginning to realize they need to share the profits, one way or another (and it’s cheaper just to give people more time off).

Jeff Spross, in The Week:

Back in the 1930s, the economist John Maynard Keynes famously predicted that work weeks would eventually fall to 15 hours — or roughly two-day weeks — as technology advanced and economies became more productive. The logic for this is pretty simple: If a society increases the amount of wealth an hour of labor can produce, people can take the benefits of that in one of two ways: They can work more and take home more income, or they can take the same income home and work less.

…

In fact, Cooper calculated that if we had reduced our hours worked as much as other countries that produce similar amounts of GDP per hour of labor, Americans would already have the equivalent of three Fridays off every month.

…That story about how people can take more income for the same hours, or the same income for fewer hours? It only works if the gains from productivity are shared equally. Rising inequality means they’re not. Thus, many working Americans aren't getting fewer hours or more income — they're working as hard as ever and their wages are stagnating.

A lot of people are working full 40-hour weeks — or much more, in a lot of instances — not because their company needs that labor time, but simply because they need to do so to bring home enough income to get by. Which implies their hours could be cut, but their pay maintained, without any loss to the bottom line — not to mention a decrease in stress and burnout.

And that's often what companies discover. Microsoft in Japan is not an isolated incident. A trust management firm in New Zealand recently made permanent a policy of 30-hour weeks — with pay equivalent to 37.5 hours — after it found significant increases in both worker productivity and reports of improved work-life balance. The Belgian nonprofit Femma is experimenting with a four-day work week this year, and the results will be followed by researchers at the University of Brussels. A Swedish city tried out six-hour work days recently, and found its officials nonetheless completed the same amount of work as before, if not more. Meanwhile, multiple research studies attest that working fewer hours can actually improve productivity and performance.

"Being a pastor in 2019..." →

Being a pastor in 2019 means talking with a congregant and her daughter about their anxiety over how she'll pay for insulin when she ages off of Medicaid in a few months.

— John Thornton Jr. (@johnthorntonjr) November 6, 2019

Only a small fraction need to be racist, sexist, etc., to poison society →

This is an important follow-up study to what’s been commonly-reproduced research: race and sex make a statically significant difference in who’s called back for job interviews. And now we have decent evidence that it’s a fraction of hiring managers who’re responsible for the racial disparity. But just like how most men may not be serious sexual harassers, or the overwhelming majority of people in a “bad” neighborhood may not commit crimes, it only takes a few percent of a given group behaving awfully to another in order to cause widespread mistrust and harm.

Kevin Drum, writing in Mother Jones:

A popular way of testing for racist attitudes in employment is to send multiple applications to a single job posting. The applications are generally identical except for one thing: the names of the applicants. One has a sterotypically white name (Madison Nash) and the other has a stereotypically black name (LaShonda Greene). Then you check to see how many of the white names get callbacks for interviews compared to the black names. Generally speaking, the white names get called back at a rate 2-4 percentage points higher than the black names.

…Only a small group, about one-sixth of the total, discriminates against blacks, but that sixth is massively racist: they all but flatly refuse to even interview someone who seems like they might be black.

…All by themselves, their racism is so overwhelming that it’s enough to make a noticeable difference in the overall rate.

"The Medicare for All Cost Debate Is Extremely Dishonest" →

What should we call a cost that’s automatically taken out of our paychecks? If the payment goes into public coffers, we call it a “tax”, but for some reason, if it goes to a private company in the health insurance industry, it’s a “premium.”

David Dayen, writing in The American Prospect:

…Biden and Buttigieg take advantage of the fact that we use a bizarre and often faulty system to “score” legislation in the Congressional Budget Office, which only looks at a ten-year window for budgetary impact. If the public option is good, and it eventually becomes a kind of Medicare for All, the cost spike would all happen outside the ten-year window. So Biden and Buttigieg are either lying about how effective their public options will be, or they’re lying about how much they will ultimately cost. They can’t have it both ways.

Notice that I’m using the deficit-scold framing here. In reality, Medicare for All saves money, and maybe even more than we expect. The infamous libertarian Mercatus Center study estimated that Medicare for All would save $2 trillion over ten years, due to lower provider reimbursements, administrative costs, and drug outlays. But the CBO recently looked at a relatively modest prescription drug bargaining proposal from House Democrats, which would directly negotiate prices on just 25 pharmaceuticals per year, and found it would save $345 billion in federal spending for Medicare. If that’s the payoff on just 25 drugs, increasing bargaining power across the health care space would presumably go well beyond $2 trillion.

The problem with cost debates on health care is that much of the current system is largely submerged, set up to hide the true cost to the individual. Quick—how much does your employer-provided health care actually cost in total, beyond just the number that shows up on your paycheck and in co-pays? Most of us have no idea unless we work in a corporate HR department. When you surface these submerged payments, they feel like brand-new tax burdens. But you’ve been paying them all along…