photo: markk
Friday, January 22, 2021
Biden Seeks Rapid Help for Millions as Big Stimulus at Risk
President Joe Biden will mark his third day in office with executive actions to boost food assistance for impoverished Americans and use federal contracts as a step toward his proposed nationwide minimum-wage hike, seeking immediate help for an economy struggling to cope with Covid-19.
The executive actions Biden is set to sign Friday at the White House also include a restoration of rights for federal workers that were stripped by his predecessor Donald Trump.
While consequential for those affected, the measures offer a shadow of the relief included in Biden’s $1.9 trillion Covid-19 aid plan. That package faces challenges in Congress after moderate Republicans this week said they saw no need to rush on another big spending bill after last month’s $900 billion effort. Senator Susan Collins of Maine on Thursday became the latest to express opposition to the idea of a big new package, while Senator Roy Blunt, a member of GOP leadership, called it a “non-starter.”
“These actions are not a substitute for comprehensive legislative relief of the form that is in the American rescue plan,” said Brian Deese, director of the White House National Economic Council. “But they will provide a critical lifeline to millions of American families and that is why the president is going to act quickly on these steps.”
Deese is planning to discuss Biden’s proposed $1.9 trillion package with a bipartisan group of 16 senators on Sunday, independent Senator Angus King of Maine and GOP Senator Mitt Romney -- both of whom are members -- told reporters Friday.
Democrats, meanwhile, are discussing making an end-run around Republicans. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told donors on a Zoom call Thursday night she had wanted to pass Biden’s Covid-19 relief legislation via the budget reconciliation process in two weeks, according to a person familiar with the comments. That process could eliminate the need for Republican support in the Senate by lowering the threshold for passage to a simple majority.
While congressional Democrats consider their strategy, Biden on Friday will expand eligibility for enhanced food stamp programs, assist veterans who are behind on their bills and create new tools to help Americans who have not received their stimulus checks get paid.
The president will also look to clarify that unemployment insurance should cover workers refusing positions with unsafe working conditions. And he will direct agencies to examine how they can ensure federal workers and contractors are paid a $15 minimum wage. (...)
Unemployment Pain
The better part of a year after the pandemic hit the U.S., weekly filings for unemployment claims in regular state programs are still running at 900,000, more than quadruple the pre-virus level. About 5.05 million people were receiving claiming the benefits as of Jan. 9, according to the Labor Department, with an additional 5.7 million weeks claimed under the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program for the self-employed and gig workers.
Some unemployment benefits -- including the assistance for gig workers -- are set to expire on March 14, underscoring the administration’s desire for congressional action on the stimulus package.
The president is asking the Labor Department to issue guidance clarifying that workers can refuse employment that jeopardizes their health and still receive unemployment benefits. That could help service-industry and factory workers worried about the spread of the coronavirus at their job to stay home from work.
Biden will also ask the Department of Agriculture to issue new guidance that would allow as many as 12 million additional Americans to have access to food-stamp benefits that were enhanced during the pandemic. The president will also ask the department to make it easier for families to access a program providing benefits to children who would normally qualify for free school lunches, and increase the benefit by 15%.
And Biden will request that the Treasury Department create new online tools to help the estimated 8 million Americans who have not yet received the coronavirus stimulus checks to which they’re entitled.
by Justin Sink, Katia Dmitrieva, and Erik Wasson, Bloomberg | Read more:
The executive actions Biden is set to sign Friday at the White House also include a restoration of rights for federal workers that were stripped by his predecessor Donald Trump.
“These actions are not a substitute for comprehensive legislative relief of the form that is in the American rescue plan,” said Brian Deese, director of the White House National Economic Council. “But they will provide a critical lifeline to millions of American families and that is why the president is going to act quickly on these steps.”
Deese is planning to discuss Biden’s proposed $1.9 trillion package with a bipartisan group of 16 senators on Sunday, independent Senator Angus King of Maine and GOP Senator Mitt Romney -- both of whom are members -- told reporters Friday.
Democrats, meanwhile, are discussing making an end-run around Republicans. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told donors on a Zoom call Thursday night she had wanted to pass Biden’s Covid-19 relief legislation via the budget reconciliation process in two weeks, according to a person familiar with the comments. That process could eliminate the need for Republican support in the Senate by lowering the threshold for passage to a simple majority.
While congressional Democrats consider their strategy, Biden on Friday will expand eligibility for enhanced food stamp programs, assist veterans who are behind on their bills and create new tools to help Americans who have not received their stimulus checks get paid.
The president will also look to clarify that unemployment insurance should cover workers refusing positions with unsafe working conditions. And he will direct agencies to examine how they can ensure federal workers and contractors are paid a $15 minimum wage. (...)
Unemployment Pain
The better part of a year after the pandemic hit the U.S., weekly filings for unemployment claims in regular state programs are still running at 900,000, more than quadruple the pre-virus level. About 5.05 million people were receiving claiming the benefits as of Jan. 9, according to the Labor Department, with an additional 5.7 million weeks claimed under the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program for the self-employed and gig workers.
Some unemployment benefits -- including the assistance for gig workers -- are set to expire on March 14, underscoring the administration’s desire for congressional action on the stimulus package.
The president is asking the Labor Department to issue guidance clarifying that workers can refuse employment that jeopardizes their health and still receive unemployment benefits. That could help service-industry and factory workers worried about the spread of the coronavirus at their job to stay home from work.
Biden will also ask the Department of Agriculture to issue new guidance that would allow as many as 12 million additional Americans to have access to food-stamp benefits that were enhanced during the pandemic. The president will also ask the department to make it easier for families to access a program providing benefits to children who would normally qualify for free school lunches, and increase the benefit by 15%.
And Biden will request that the Treasury Department create new online tools to help the estimated 8 million Americans who have not yet received the coronavirus stimulus checks to which they’re entitled.
by Justin Sink, Katia Dmitrieva, and Erik Wasson, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Al Drago, Bloomberg
[ed. See also: The End of the 40-Year War on Government (TNR); and Biden's Signin': Here's What the Executive Ordered the Last Two Days (The Stranger)]
Thursday, January 21, 2021
Cold Bernie
Wednesday, January 20, 2021
A Message From Bernie Sanders to Joe Biden: Put an End to Business as Usual. Here's Where to Start.
A record-breaking 4,000 Americans are now dying each day from Covid-19, while the federal government fumbles vaccine production and distribution, testing and tracing. In the midst of the worst pandemic in 100 years, more than 90 million Americans are uninsured or underinsured and can’t afford to go to a doctor when they get sick. The isolation and anxiety caused by the pandemic has resulted in a huge increase in mental illness.
Over half of American workers are living paycheck to paycheck, including millions of essential workers who put their lives on the line every day. More than 24 million Americans are unemployed, underemployed or have given up looking for work, while hunger in this country is at the highest level in decades.
Because of lack of income, up to 40 million Americans face the threat of eviction, and many owe thousands in back rent. This is on top of the 500,000 who are already homeless.
Meanwhile, the wealthiest people in this country are becoming much richer, and income and wealth inequality are soaring. Incredibly, during the pandemic, 650 billionaires in America have increased their wealth by more than $1tn.
As a result of the pandemic education in this country, from childcare to graduate school, is in chaos. The majority of young people in this country have seen their education disrupted and it is likely that hundreds of colleges will soon cease to exist.
Climate change is ravaging the planet with an unprecedented number of forest fires and extreme weather disturbances. Scientists tell us that we have only a very few years before irreparable damage takes place to our country and the world.
And, in the midst of all this, the foundations of American democracy are under an unprecedented attack. We have a president who is working feverishly to undermine American democracy and incite violence against the very government and constitution he swore to defend. Against all of the evidence, tens of millions of Americans actually believe Trump’s Big Lie that he won this election by a landslide and that victory was stolen from him and his supporters. Armed rightwing militias in support of Trump are being mobilized throughout the country.
In this moment of unprecedented crises, Congress and the Biden administration must respond through unprecedented action. No more business as usual. No more same old, same old.
Democrats, who will now control the White House, the Senate and the House, must summon the courage to demonstrate to the American people that government can effectively and rapidly respond to their pain and anxiety. As the incoming chairman of the Senate budget committee that is exactly what I intend to do.
What does all of this mean for the average American?
It means that we aggressively crush the pandemic and enable the American people to return to their jobs and schools. This will require a federally led emergency program to produce the quantity of vaccines that we need and get them into people’s arms as quickly as possible.
It means that during the severe economic downturn we’re experiencing, we must make sure that all Americans have the financial resources they need to live with dignity. We must increase the $600 in direct payments for every working-class adult and child that was recently passed to $2,000, raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, expand unemployment benefits and prevent eviction, homelessness and hunger.
It means that, during this raging pandemic, we must guarantee healthcare to all. We must also end the international embarrassment of the United States being the only major country on Earth not to provide paid family and medical leave to workers.
It means making pre-kindergarten and childcare universal and available to every family in America.
Despite what you may have heard, there is no reason why we cannot do all of these things. Through budget reconciliation, a process that only requires a majority vote in the Senate, we can act quickly and pass this emergency legislation.
But that is not enough. This year we must also pass a second reconciliation bill that deals with the major structural changes that our country desperately needs. Ultimately, we must confront the grotesque level of income and wealth inequality and create a country that works for all and not just the few. Americans should no longer be denied basic economic rights that are guaranteed to people in virtually every other major country.
This means using a second reconciliation bill to create millions of good-paying jobs rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure and constructing affordable housing, modernizing our schools, combatting climate change and making massive investments in energy efficiency and renewable energy.
It means making public colleges, universities, trade schools and Historically Black Colleges and Universities tuition-free and forcefully addressing the outrageous level of student debt for working families.
And it means making the wealthiest Americans and most profitable corporations pay their fair share of taxes. We cannot continue to allow profitable corporations like Amazon to make billions of dollars in taxes and pay nothing in net federal income taxes. And billionaires cannot be allowed to pay a lower tax rate than working-class Americans. We need real tax reform.
Over half of American workers are living paycheck to paycheck, including millions of essential workers who put their lives on the line every day. More than 24 million Americans are unemployed, underemployed or have given up looking for work, while hunger in this country is at the highest level in decades.
Because of lack of income, up to 40 million Americans face the threat of eviction, and many owe thousands in back rent. This is on top of the 500,000 who are already homeless.
As a result of the pandemic education in this country, from childcare to graduate school, is in chaos. The majority of young people in this country have seen their education disrupted and it is likely that hundreds of colleges will soon cease to exist.
Climate change is ravaging the planet with an unprecedented number of forest fires and extreme weather disturbances. Scientists tell us that we have only a very few years before irreparable damage takes place to our country and the world.
And, in the midst of all this, the foundations of American democracy are under an unprecedented attack. We have a president who is working feverishly to undermine American democracy and incite violence against the very government and constitution he swore to defend. Against all of the evidence, tens of millions of Americans actually believe Trump’s Big Lie that he won this election by a landslide and that victory was stolen from him and his supporters. Armed rightwing militias in support of Trump are being mobilized throughout the country.
In this moment of unprecedented crises, Congress and the Biden administration must respond through unprecedented action. No more business as usual. No more same old, same old.
Democrats, who will now control the White House, the Senate and the House, must summon the courage to demonstrate to the American people that government can effectively and rapidly respond to their pain and anxiety. As the incoming chairman of the Senate budget committee that is exactly what I intend to do.
What does all of this mean for the average American?
It means that we aggressively crush the pandemic and enable the American people to return to their jobs and schools. This will require a federally led emergency program to produce the quantity of vaccines that we need and get them into people’s arms as quickly as possible.
It means that during the severe economic downturn we’re experiencing, we must make sure that all Americans have the financial resources they need to live with dignity. We must increase the $600 in direct payments for every working-class adult and child that was recently passed to $2,000, raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, expand unemployment benefits and prevent eviction, homelessness and hunger.
It means that, during this raging pandemic, we must guarantee healthcare to all. We must also end the international embarrassment of the United States being the only major country on Earth not to provide paid family and medical leave to workers.
It means making pre-kindergarten and childcare universal and available to every family in America.
Despite what you may have heard, there is no reason why we cannot do all of these things. Through budget reconciliation, a process that only requires a majority vote in the Senate, we can act quickly and pass this emergency legislation.
But that is not enough. This year we must also pass a second reconciliation bill that deals with the major structural changes that our country desperately needs. Ultimately, we must confront the grotesque level of income and wealth inequality and create a country that works for all and not just the few. Americans should no longer be denied basic economic rights that are guaranteed to people in virtually every other major country.
This means using a second reconciliation bill to create millions of good-paying jobs rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure and constructing affordable housing, modernizing our schools, combatting climate change and making massive investments in energy efficiency and renewable energy.
It means making public colleges, universities, trade schools and Historically Black Colleges and Universities tuition-free and forcefully addressing the outrageous level of student debt for working families.
And it means making the wealthiest Americans and most profitable corporations pay their fair share of taxes. We cannot continue to allow profitable corporations like Amazon to make billions of dollars in taxes and pay nothing in net federal income taxes. And billionaires cannot be allowed to pay a lower tax rate than working-class Americans. We need real tax reform.
by Bernie Sanders, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Rex/Shutterstock
Tuesday, January 19, 2021
President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Farewell Address (1961)
Three days from now, after half a century in the service of our country, I shall lay down the responsibilities of office as, in traditional and solemn ceremony, the authority of the Presidency is vested in my successor.
This evening I come to you with a message of leave-taking and farewell, and to share a few final thoughts with you, my countrymen.
Our people expect their President and the Congress to find essential agreement on issues of great moment, the wise resolution of which will better shape the future of the Nation.
My own relations with the Congress, which began on a remote and tenuous basis when, long ago, a member of the Senate appointed me to West Point, have since ranged to the intimate during the war and immediate post-war period, and, finally, to the mutually interdependent during these past eight years.
In this final relationship, the Congress and the Administration have, on most vital issues, cooperated well, to serve the national good rather than mere partisanship, and so have assured that the business of the Nation should go forward. So, my official relationship with the Congress ends in a feeling, on my part, of gratitude that we have been able to do so much together.
II
We now stand ten years past the midpoint of a century that has witnessed four major wars among great nations. Three of these involved our own country. Despite these holocausts America is today the strongest, the most influential and most productive nation in the world. Understandably proud of this pre-eminence, we yet realize that America's leadership and prestige depend, not merely upon our unmatched material progress, riches and military strength, but on how we use our power in the interests of world peace and human betterment.
III
Throughout America's adventure in free government, our basic purposes have been to keep the peace; to foster progress in human achievement, and to enhance liberty, dignity and integrity among people and among nations. To strive for less would be unworthy of a free and religious people. Any failure traceable to arrogance, or our lack of comprehension or readiness to sacrifice would inflict upon us grievous hurt both at home and abroad.
Progress toward these noble goals is persistently threatened by the conflict now engulfing the world. It commands our whole attention, absorbs our very beings. We face a hostile ideology-global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method. Unhappily the danger it poses promises to be of indefinite duration. To meet it successfully, there is called for, not so much the emotional and transitory sacrifices of crisis, but rather those which enable us to carry forward steadily, surely, and without complaint the burdens of a prolonged and complex struggle-with liberty at stake. Only thus shall we remain, despite every provocation, on our charted course toward permanent peace and human betterment.
Crises there will continue to be. In meeting them, whether foreign or domestic, great or small,there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties. A huge increase in newer elements of our defense; development of unrealistic programs to cure every ill in agriculture; a dramatic expansion in basic and applied research-these and many other possibilities, each possibly promising in itself, may be suggested as the only way to the road we which to travel.
But each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs-balance between the private and the public economy, balance between cost and hoped for advantage-balance between the clearly necessary and the comfortably desirable; balance between our essential requirements as a nation and the duties imposed by the nation upon the individual; balance between action of the moment and the national welfare of the future. Good judgment seeks balance and progress; lack of it eventually finds imbalance and frustration.
The record of many decades stands as proof that our people and their government have, in the main, understood these truths and have responded to them well, in the face of stress and threat. But threats, new in kind or degree, constantly arise. I mention two only.
IV
A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.
Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peace time, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.
Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United State corporations.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence-economic, political, even spiritual-is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been over shadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system-ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.
V
Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society's future, we-you and I, and our government-must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.
VI
Down the long lane of the history yet to be written America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.
Such a confederation must be one of equals. The weakest must come to the conference table with the same confidence as do we, protected as we are by our moral, economic, and military strength. That table, though scarred by many past frustrations, cannot be abandoned for the certain agony of the battlefield.
Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative. Together we must learn how to compose difference, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose. Because this need is so sharp and apparent I confess that I lay down my official responsibilities in this field with a definite sense of disappointment. As one who has witnessed the horror and the lingering sadness of war-as one who knows that another war could utterly destroy this civilization which has been so slowly and painfully built over thousands of years-I wish I could say tonight that a lasting peace is in sight.
Happily, I can say that war has been avoided. Steady progress toward our ultimate goal has been made. But, so much remains to be done. As a private citizen, I shall never cease to do what little I can to help the world advance along that road.
VII
So-in this my last good night to you as your President-I thank you for the many opportunities you have given me for public service in war and peace. I trust that in that service you find somethings worthy; as for the rest of it, I know you will find ways to improve performance in the future.
You and I-my fellow citizens-need to be strong in our faith that all nations, under God, will reach the goal of peace with justice. May we be ever unswerving in devotion to principle, confident but humble with power, diligent in pursuit of the Nation's great goals.
To all the peoples of the world, I once more give expression to America's prayerful and continuing inspiration:
We pray that peoples of all faiths, all races, all nations, may have their great human needs satisfied; that those now denied opportunity shall come to enjoy it to the full; that all who yearn for freedom may experience its spiritual blessings; that those who have freedom will understand, also, its heavy responsibilities; that all who are insensitive to the needs of others will learn charity; that the scourges of poverty, disease and ignorance will be made to disappear from the earth, and that, in the goodness of time, all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love.
by Dwight D. Eisenhower, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum | Read more:
Image: Baka Sobaka / Shutterstock via
[ed. Today, Eisenhower would likely be considered a moderate liberal. FYI: Military budget in 1961: $334 billion; today, 2019: $786 billion. Taxes, 1961 (filing single) and making over $200,000/91%; today, 2019: 35%. (Sources: here and here). Keep in mind, this is when the greatest expansion of the American middle class occurred (peaking roughly in the 50s and 60s), and can be attributed to, among other things, FDR's New Deal, post-WWII jobs stimulus, fair taxation, Social Security, expansion of union rights, G.I. Bill, widespread affordable housing, and other progressive programs (here and here). After Kennedy was assassinated, Johnson pursued and enacted his Great Society programs: Medicare, Medicaid, Older Americans Act, War on Poverty, Civil Rights Act, etc. (all of which would be considered "socialism" today). So what happened? It's generally thought that widespread middle-class prosperity began to erode in the 70s with crippling inflation, then went into a death-spiral after Reaganomics and later neoliberalism redistributed wealth further up the economic ladder leading to the vast inequalities in income and wealth we see today. See also: Middle-class squeeze (Wikipedia).]
Monday, January 18, 2021
Tax and Spend Republicans
[ed. As Joe Biden assumes the Office of the Presidency in a couple days he's already revealed plans for a $1.9 trillion economic recovery plan (the details of which can be viewed here). Included in that budget are provisions for an immediate $1400 stimulus check to help ease the burden of the pandemic's disastrous effect on the economy. Some are asking why $1400 instead of the $2000 that was promised? Well, for one thing, Democrats weren't clear to begin with and are simply adding $1400 to the $600 that Congress approved in the Covid-relief bill last month. This I think is a mistake. If you promise a $2000 check, you should deliver a $2000 check (not some "oh, well you know this is what we really meant... blah, blah, blah). But secondarily it also shows how conditioned Democrats are to being cowed by that tired, old Republican bogeyman of being "tax and spend" liberals. So, to help nip that nonsense in the bud, please refer to the following, provided by Politifact. It's pretty obvious. Republicans are the tax and spend party (cutting taxes for corporations and the rich, spending like crazy); Democrats clean up their messes.]
***
A viral post portrays Democrats, not Republicans, as the party of fiscal responsibility, with numbers about the deficit under recent presidents to make the case.Alex Cole, a political news editor at the website Newsitics, published the tweet July 23. Within a few hours, several Facebook users posted screenshots of the tweet, which claims that Republican presidents have been more responsible for contributing to the deficit over the past four decades.
Those posts racked up several hundred likes and shares. We also found a screenshot on Reddit, where it has been upvoted more than 53,000 times.
"Morons: ‘Democrats cause deficits,’" the original tweet reads. (...)
At PolitiFact, we’ve reported extensively on how Republicans and Democrats often try to pin the federal deficit on each other — muddying the facts in the process. So we wanted to see if this Facebook post is true.
We reached out to Newsitics, the media outlet that Cole founded and works for, to see what evidence he used to compose the tweet and didn’t hear back. Our review shows the numbers basically check out, but they don’t tell the full story.
We reached out to Newsitics, the media outlet that Cole founded and works for, to see what evidence he used to compose the tweet and didn’t hear back. Our review shows the numbers basically check out, but they don’t tell the full story.
What even is the deficit?
Some people confuse the federal deficit with the debt — but they’re two separate concepts.
The Department of the Treasury explains it like this: The deficit is the difference between the money that the government makes and the money it spends. If the government spends more than it collects in revenues, then it’s running a deficit.
The federal debt is the running total of the accumulated deficits.
Following the money
Now let’s take a closer look at each president’s impact on the federal deficit.
To check the numbers in Cole’s tweet, we went to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, which has an interactive database for these kinds of figures. Here’s what we found for each claim:
"(President Ronald) Reagan took the deficit from 70 billion to 175 billion." This is more or less accurate. The federal deficit went from about $78.9 billion at the beginning of Reagan’s presidency to $152.6 billion at the end of it. At points between 1983 and 1986, the deficit was actually more than $175 billion.
"(George H.W.) Bush 41 took it to 300 billion." Close, but not exactly. The number was around $255 billion at the end of Bush’s term. The deficit spiked at around $290.3 billion the year before he left office.
"(Bill) Clinton got it to zero." This is true. During his presidency, Clinton managed to zero out the deficit and end his term with a $128.2 billion surplus.
"(George W.) Bush 43 took it from 0 to 1.2 trillion." This is in the ballpark. Ignoring the fact that he actually started his presidency with a surplus, Bush left office in 2009 with a federal deficit of roughly $1.41 trillion.
"(Barack) Obama halved it to 600 billion." This is essentially accurate. Obama left the presidency with a deficit of approximately $584.6 billion, which is more than halving $1.41 trillion. The deficit was even lower in 2015 at around $441.9 billion.
We had to look for more recent data to back up Cole’s allegation that "Trump’s got it back to a trillion."
A Treasury Department statement from June put the federal deficit at about $747.1 billion so far this fiscal year. But the agency also reported that Washington is on track to post a $1.1 trillion deficit by the end of September, which backs up Cole’s claim.
A Treasury Department statement from June put the federal deficit at about $747.1 billion so far this fiscal year. But the agency also reported that Washington is on track to post a $1.1 trillion deficit by the end of September, which backs up Cole’s claim.
Sunday, January 17, 2021
Among the Insurrectionists
By the end of President Donald Trump’s crusade against American democracy—after a relentless deployment of propaganda, demagoguery, intimidation, and fearmongering aimed at persuading as many Americans as possible to repudiate their country’s foundational principles—a single word sufficed to nudge his most fanatical supporters into open insurrection. Thousands of them had assembled on the Mall, in Washington, D.C., on the morning of January 6th, to hear Trump address them from a stage outside the White House. From where I stood, at the foot of the Washington Monument, you had to strain to see his image on a jumbotron that had been set up on Constitution Avenue. His voice, however, projected clearly through powerful speakers as he rehashed the debunked allegations of massive fraud which he’d been propagating for months. Then he summarized the supposed crimes, simply, as “bullshit.”
“Bullshit! Bullshit!” the crowd chanted. It was a peculiar mixture of emotion that had become familiar at pro-Trump rallies since he lost the election: half mutinous rage, half gleeful excitement at being licensed to act on it. The profanity signalled a final jettisoning of whatever residual deference to political norms had survived the past four years. In front of me, a middle-aged man wearing a Trump flag as a cape told a young man standing beside him, “There’s gonna be a war.” His tone was resigned, as if he were at last embracing a truth that he had long resisted. “I’m ready to fight,” he said. The young man nodded. He had a thin mustache and hugged a life-size mannequin with duct tape over its eyes, “traitor” scrawled on its chest, and a noose around its neck.
“We want to be so nice,” Trump said. “We want to be so respectful of everybody, including bad people. We’re going to have to fight much harder. And Mike Pence is going to have to come through for us.”
About a mile and a half away, at the east end of the Mall, Vice-President Pence and both houses of Congress had convened to certify the Electoral College votes that had made Joe Biden and Kamala Harris the next President and Vice-President of the United States. In December, a hundred and forty Republican representatives—two-thirds of the caucus—had said that they would formally object to the certification of several swing states. Fourteen Republican senators, led by Josh Hawley, of Missouri, and Ted Cruz, of Texas, had joined the effort. The lawmakers lacked the authority to overturn the election, but Trump and his allies had concocted a fantastical alternative: Pence, as the presiding officer of the Senate, could single-handedly nullify votes from states that Biden had won. Pence, though, had advised Congress that the Constitution constrained him from taking such action.
“After this, we’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you,” Trump told the crowd. The people around me exchanged looks of astonishment and delight. “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women. We’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them—because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength.”
“No weakness!” a woman cried.
Before Trump had even finished his speech, approximately eight thousand people started moving up the Mall. “We’re storming the Capitol!” some yelled.
There was an eerie sense of inexorability, the throngs of Trump supporters advancing up the long lawn as if pulled by a current. Everyone seemed to understand what was about to happen. The past nine weeks had been steadily building toward this moment. On November 7th, mere hours after Biden’s win was projected, I attended a protest at the Pennsylvania state capitol, in Harrisburg. Hundreds of Trump supporters, including heavily armed militia members, vowed to revolt. When I asked a man with an assault rifle—a “combat-skills instructor” for a militia called the Pennsylvania Three Percent—how likely he considered the prospect of civil conflict, he told me, “It’s coming.” Since then, Trump and his allies had done everything they could to spread and intensify this bitter aggrievement. On December 5th, Trump acknowledged, “I’ve probably worked harder in the last three weeks than I ever have in my life.” (He was not talking about managing the pandemic, which since the election has claimed a hundred and fifty thousand American lives.) Militant pro-Trump outfits like the Proud Boys—a national organization dedicated to “reinstating a spirit of Western chauvinism” in America—had been openly gearing up for major violence. In early January, on Parler, an unfiltered social-media site favored by conservatives, Joe Biggs, a top Proud Boys leader, had written, “Every law makers who breaks their own stupid Fucking laws should be dragged out of office and hung.”
On the Mall, a makeshift wooden gallows, with stairs and a rope, had been constructed near a statue of Ulysses S. Grant. Some of the marchers nearby carried Confederate flags. Up ahead, the dull thud of stun grenades could be heard, accompanied by bright flashes. “They need help!” a man shouted. “It’s us versus the cops!” Someone let out a rebel yell. Scattered groups wavered, debating whether to join the confrontation. “We lost the Senate—we need to make a stand now,” a bookish-looking woman in a down coat and glasses appealed to the person next to her. The previous day, a runoff in Georgia had flipped two Republican Senate seats to the Democrats, giving them majority control.
Hundreds of Trump supporters had forced their way past barricades to the Capitol steps. In anticipation of Biden’s Inauguration, bleachers had been erected there, and the sides of the scaffolding were wrapped in ripstop tarpaulin. Officers in riot gear blocked an open flap in the fabric; the mob pressed against them, screaming insults.
“You are traitors to the country!” a man barked at the police through a megaphone plastered with stickers from “InfoWars,” the incendiary Web program hosted by the right-wing conspiracist Alex Jones. Behind the man stood Biggs, the Proud Boys leader. He wore a radio clipped onto the breast pocket of his plaid flannel shirt. Not far away, I spotted a “straight pride” flag.
There wasn’t nearly enough law enforcement to fend off the mob, which pelted the officers with cans and bottles. One man angrily invoked the pandemic lockdown: “Why can’t I work? Where’s my ‘pursuit of happiness’?” Many people were equipped with flak jackets, helmets, gas masks, and tactical apparel. Guns were prohibited for the protest, but a man in a cowboy hat, posing for a photograph, lifted his jacket to reveal a revolver tucked into his waistband. Other Trump supporters had Tasers, baseball bats, and truncheons. I saw one man holding a coiled noose.
“Hang Mike Pence!” people yelled.
Soon the mob swarmed past the officers, into the understructure of the bleachers, and scrambled through its metal braces, up the building’s granite steps. Toward the top was a temporary security wall with three doors, one of which was instantly breached. Dozens of police stood behind the wall, using shields, nightsticks, and pepper spray to stop people from crossing the threshold. Other officers took up positions on planks above, firing a steady barrage of nonlethal munitions into the solid mass of bodies. As rounds tinked off metal, and caustic chemicals filled the space as if it were a fumigation tent, some of the insurrectionists panicked: “We need to retreat and assault another point!” But most remained resolute. “Hold the line!” they exhorted. “Storm!” Martial bagpipes blared through portable speakers.
“Shoot the politicians!” somebody yelled.
“Fight for Trump!”
A jet of pepper spray incapacitated me for about twenty minutes. When I regained my vision, the mob was streaming freely through all three doors. I followed an overweight man in a Roman-era costume—sandals, cape, armguards, dagger—away from the bleachers and onto an open terrace on the Capitol’s main level. People clambered through a shattered window. Video later showed that a Proud Boy had smashed it with a riot shield. A dozen police stood in a hallway softly lit by ornate chandeliers, mutely watching the rioters—many of them wearing Trump gear or carrying Trump flags—flood into the building. Their cries resonated through colonnaded rooms: “Where’s the traitors?” “Bring them out!” “Get these fucking cocksucking Commies out!”
The attack on the Capitol was a predictable apotheosis of a months-long ferment. Throughout the pandemic, right-wing protesters had been gathering at statehouses, demanding entry. In April, an armed mob had filled the Michigan state capitol, chanting “Treason!” and “Let us in!” In December, conservatives had broken the glass doors of the Oregon state capitol, overrunning officers and spraying them with chemical agents. The occupation of restricted government sanctums was an affirmation of dominance so emotionally satisfying that it was an end in itself—proof to elected officials, to Biden voters, and also to the occupiers themselves that they were still in charge. After one of the Trump supporters breached the U.S. Capitol, he insisted through a megaphone, “We will not be denied.” There was an unmistakable subtext as the mob, almost entirely white, shouted, “Whose house? Our house!” One man carried a Confederate flag through the building. A Black member of the Capitol Police later told BuzzFeed News that, during the assault, he was called a racial slur fifteen times.
I followed a group that broke off to advance on five policemen guarding a side corridor. “Stand down,” a man in a maga hat commanded. “You’re outnumbered. There’s a fucking million of us out there, and we are listening to Trump—your boss.”
“We can take you out,” a man beside him warned.
The officers backpedalled the length of the corridor, until we arrived at a marble staircase. Then they moved aside. “We love you guys—take it easy!” a rioter yelled as he bounded up the steps, which led to the Capitol’s central rotunda.
Beneath the soaring dome, surrounded by statues of former Presidents and by large oil paintings depicting such historical scenes as the embarkation of the Pilgrims and the presentation of the Declaration of Independence, a number of young men chanted, “America first!” The phrase was popularized in 1940 by Nazi sympathizers lobbying to keep the U.S. out of the Second World War; in 2016, Trump resurrected it to describe his isolationist foreign and immigration policies. Some of the chanters, however, waved or wore royal-blue flags inscribed with “AF,” in white letters. This is the logo for the program “America First,” which is hosted by Nicholas Fuentes, a twenty-two-year-old Holocaust denier, who promotes a brand of white Christian nationalism that views politics as a means of preserving demographic supremacy. Though America Firsters revile most mainstream Republicans for lacking sufficient commitment to this priority—especially neoconservatives, whom they accuse of being subservient to Satan and Jews—the group’s loyalty to Trump is, according to Fuentes, “unconditional.”
The America Firsters and other invaders fanned out in search of lawmakers, breaking into offices and revelling in their own astounding impunity. “Nancy, I’m ho-ome! ” a man taunted, mimicking Jack Nicholson’s character in “The Shining.” Someone else yelled, “1776—it’s now or never.” Around this time, Trump tweeted, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country. . . . USA demands the truth!” Twenty minutes later, Ashli Babbitt, a thirty-five-year-old woman from California, was fatally shot while climbing through a barricaded door that led to the Speaker’s lobby in the House chamber, where representatives were sheltering. The congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York, later said that she’d had a “close encounter” with rioters during which she thought she “was going to die.” Earlier that morning, another representative, Lauren Boebert—a newly elected Republican, from Colorado, who has praised QAnon and promised to wear her Glock in the Capitol—had tweeted, “Today is 1776.”
When Babbitt was shot, I was on the opposite side of the Capitol, where people were growing frustrated by the empty halls and offices.
“Where the fuck are they?”
“Where the fuck is Nancy?”
No one seemed quite sure how to proceed. “While we’re here, we might as well set up a government,” somebody suggested.
Then a man with a large “AF ” flag—college-age, cheeks spotted with acne—pushed through a series of tall double doors, the last of which gave onto the Senate chamber.
“Praise God!”
“Bullshit! Bullshit!” the crowd chanted. It was a peculiar mixture of emotion that had become familiar at pro-Trump rallies since he lost the election: half mutinous rage, half gleeful excitement at being licensed to act on it. The profanity signalled a final jettisoning of whatever residual deference to political norms had survived the past four years. In front of me, a middle-aged man wearing a Trump flag as a cape told a young man standing beside him, “There’s gonna be a war.” His tone was resigned, as if he were at last embracing a truth that he had long resisted. “I’m ready to fight,” he said. The young man nodded. He had a thin mustache and hugged a life-size mannequin with duct tape over its eyes, “traitor” scrawled on its chest, and a noose around its neck.
“We want to be so nice,” Trump said. “We want to be so respectful of everybody, including bad people. We’re going to have to fight much harder. And Mike Pence is going to have to come through for us.”
About a mile and a half away, at the east end of the Mall, Vice-President Pence and both houses of Congress had convened to certify the Electoral College votes that had made Joe Biden and Kamala Harris the next President and Vice-President of the United States. In December, a hundred and forty Republican representatives—two-thirds of the caucus—had said that they would formally object to the certification of several swing states. Fourteen Republican senators, led by Josh Hawley, of Missouri, and Ted Cruz, of Texas, had joined the effort. The lawmakers lacked the authority to overturn the election, but Trump and his allies had concocted a fantastical alternative: Pence, as the presiding officer of the Senate, could single-handedly nullify votes from states that Biden had won. Pence, though, had advised Congress that the Constitution constrained him from taking such action.
“After this, we’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you,” Trump told the crowd. The people around me exchanged looks of astonishment and delight. “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women. We’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them—because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength.”
“No weakness!” a woman cried.
Before Trump had even finished his speech, approximately eight thousand people started moving up the Mall. “We’re storming the Capitol!” some yelled.
On the Mall, a makeshift wooden gallows, with stairs and a rope, had been constructed near a statue of Ulysses S. Grant. Some of the marchers nearby carried Confederate flags. Up ahead, the dull thud of stun grenades could be heard, accompanied by bright flashes. “They need help!” a man shouted. “It’s us versus the cops!” Someone let out a rebel yell. Scattered groups wavered, debating whether to join the confrontation. “We lost the Senate—we need to make a stand now,” a bookish-looking woman in a down coat and glasses appealed to the person next to her. The previous day, a runoff in Georgia had flipped two Republican Senate seats to the Democrats, giving them majority control.
Hundreds of Trump supporters had forced their way past barricades to the Capitol steps. In anticipation of Biden’s Inauguration, bleachers had been erected there, and the sides of the scaffolding were wrapped in ripstop tarpaulin. Officers in riot gear blocked an open flap in the fabric; the mob pressed against them, screaming insults.
“You are traitors to the country!” a man barked at the police through a megaphone plastered with stickers from “InfoWars,” the incendiary Web program hosted by the right-wing conspiracist Alex Jones. Behind the man stood Biggs, the Proud Boys leader. He wore a radio clipped onto the breast pocket of his plaid flannel shirt. Not far away, I spotted a “straight pride” flag.
There wasn’t nearly enough law enforcement to fend off the mob, which pelted the officers with cans and bottles. One man angrily invoked the pandemic lockdown: “Why can’t I work? Where’s my ‘pursuit of happiness’?” Many people were equipped with flak jackets, helmets, gas masks, and tactical apparel. Guns were prohibited for the protest, but a man in a cowboy hat, posing for a photograph, lifted his jacket to reveal a revolver tucked into his waistband. Other Trump supporters had Tasers, baseball bats, and truncheons. I saw one man holding a coiled noose.
“Hang Mike Pence!” people yelled.
Soon the mob swarmed past the officers, into the understructure of the bleachers, and scrambled through its metal braces, up the building’s granite steps. Toward the top was a temporary security wall with three doors, one of which was instantly breached. Dozens of police stood behind the wall, using shields, nightsticks, and pepper spray to stop people from crossing the threshold. Other officers took up positions on planks above, firing a steady barrage of nonlethal munitions into the solid mass of bodies. As rounds tinked off metal, and caustic chemicals filled the space as if it were a fumigation tent, some of the insurrectionists panicked: “We need to retreat and assault another point!” But most remained resolute. “Hold the line!” they exhorted. “Storm!” Martial bagpipes blared through portable speakers.
“Shoot the politicians!” somebody yelled.
“Fight for Trump!”
A jet of pepper spray incapacitated me for about twenty minutes. When I regained my vision, the mob was streaming freely through all three doors. I followed an overweight man in a Roman-era costume—sandals, cape, armguards, dagger—away from the bleachers and onto an open terrace on the Capitol’s main level. People clambered through a shattered window. Video later showed that a Proud Boy had smashed it with a riot shield. A dozen police stood in a hallway softly lit by ornate chandeliers, mutely watching the rioters—many of them wearing Trump gear or carrying Trump flags—flood into the building. Their cries resonated through colonnaded rooms: “Where’s the traitors?” “Bring them out!” “Get these fucking cocksucking Commies out!”
The attack on the Capitol was a predictable apotheosis of a months-long ferment. Throughout the pandemic, right-wing protesters had been gathering at statehouses, demanding entry. In April, an armed mob had filled the Michigan state capitol, chanting “Treason!” and “Let us in!” In December, conservatives had broken the glass doors of the Oregon state capitol, overrunning officers and spraying them with chemical agents. The occupation of restricted government sanctums was an affirmation of dominance so emotionally satisfying that it was an end in itself—proof to elected officials, to Biden voters, and also to the occupiers themselves that they were still in charge. After one of the Trump supporters breached the U.S. Capitol, he insisted through a megaphone, “We will not be denied.” There was an unmistakable subtext as the mob, almost entirely white, shouted, “Whose house? Our house!” One man carried a Confederate flag through the building. A Black member of the Capitol Police later told BuzzFeed News that, during the assault, he was called a racial slur fifteen times.
I followed a group that broke off to advance on five policemen guarding a side corridor. “Stand down,” a man in a maga hat commanded. “You’re outnumbered. There’s a fucking million of us out there, and we are listening to Trump—your boss.”
“We can take you out,” a man beside him warned.
The officers backpedalled the length of the corridor, until we arrived at a marble staircase. Then they moved aside. “We love you guys—take it easy!” a rioter yelled as he bounded up the steps, which led to the Capitol’s central rotunda.
Beneath the soaring dome, surrounded by statues of former Presidents and by large oil paintings depicting such historical scenes as the embarkation of the Pilgrims and the presentation of the Declaration of Independence, a number of young men chanted, “America first!” The phrase was popularized in 1940 by Nazi sympathizers lobbying to keep the U.S. out of the Second World War; in 2016, Trump resurrected it to describe his isolationist foreign and immigration policies. Some of the chanters, however, waved or wore royal-blue flags inscribed with “AF,” in white letters. This is the logo for the program “America First,” which is hosted by Nicholas Fuentes, a twenty-two-year-old Holocaust denier, who promotes a brand of white Christian nationalism that views politics as a means of preserving demographic supremacy. Though America Firsters revile most mainstream Republicans for lacking sufficient commitment to this priority—especially neoconservatives, whom they accuse of being subservient to Satan and Jews—the group’s loyalty to Trump is, according to Fuentes, “unconditional.”
The America Firsters and other invaders fanned out in search of lawmakers, breaking into offices and revelling in their own astounding impunity. “Nancy, I’m ho-ome! ” a man taunted, mimicking Jack Nicholson’s character in “The Shining.” Someone else yelled, “1776—it’s now or never.” Around this time, Trump tweeted, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country. . . . USA demands the truth!” Twenty minutes later, Ashli Babbitt, a thirty-five-year-old woman from California, was fatally shot while climbing through a barricaded door that led to the Speaker’s lobby in the House chamber, where representatives were sheltering. The congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York, later said that she’d had a “close encounter” with rioters during which she thought she “was going to die.” Earlier that morning, another representative, Lauren Boebert—a newly elected Republican, from Colorado, who has praised QAnon and promised to wear her Glock in the Capitol—had tweeted, “Today is 1776.”
When Babbitt was shot, I was on the opposite side of the Capitol, where people were growing frustrated by the empty halls and offices.
“Where the fuck are they?”
“Where the fuck is Nancy?”
No one seemed quite sure how to proceed. “While we’re here, we might as well set up a government,” somebody suggested.
Then a man with a large “AF ” flag—college-age, cheeks spotted with acne—pushed through a series of tall double doors, the last of which gave onto the Senate chamber.
“Praise God!”
Ranked-Choice Voting in Elections. Here's How It Works
New York City voted on Tuesday to change the way it determines election winners. With approval from more than 73% of voters, the Big Apple joins Maine and countries including Australia and New Zealand in adopting what’s known as ranked-choice voting.
This popular electoral system allows voters to rank candidates by preference, meaning they can submit ballots that list not only their first-choice candidate for a position, but also their second, third and so on.
Ranked-choice voting advocates, including Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang, who has championed it as a key policy initiative, say it could help prevent evermore polarized election campaigns, increase the number of women and minority candidates running for office, and reduce negative campaigning. Critics say that the new system could make elections much more complicated for voters and be abused by parties trying to game the system.
In addition to Maine, which has adopted the system statewide, several states are experimenting with ranked-choice voting. Alaska, Hawaii, Kansas, and Wyoming plan to use ranked-choice for voters in the 2020 Democratic primaries, and Nevada plans to use it for early voters in their 2020 Democratic caucuses, according to FairVote, a nonpartisan group that advocates for election reform.
“We are really settling on ranked-choice voting as the most promising reform to democratize and depolarize our politics,” says Larry Diamond, the former director of Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. “I think it’s not only here to stay but that it’s gaining support across the country.”
Here’s what to know about ranked-choice voting.
What is ranked-choice voting?
Ranked-choice voting is an electoral system that allows people to vote for multiple candidates, in order of preference. Instead of just choosing who you want to win, you fill out the ballot saying who is your first choice, second choice, or third choice (or more as needed) for each position.
The candidate with the majority (more than 50%) of first-choice votes wins outright. If no candidate gets a majority of first-choice votes, then it triggers a new counting process. The candidate who did the worst is eliminated, and that candidate’s voters’ ballots are redistributed to their second-choice pick. In other words, if you ranked a losing candidate as your first choice, and the candidate is eliminated, then your vote still counts: it just moves to your second-choice candidate. That process continues until there is a candidate who has the majority of votes.
In comparison, the U.S. federal government and most American states and cities currently use what’s known as the plurality system: the candidate with the highest number of votes wins—period. It doesn’t matter whether that candidate earned the majority of the vote.
In a ranked-choice voting system, it works differently. The winning candidate almost always ends up with a majority of votes—even if some portion of the electorate selected him or her as a second or third choice.
Ranked-choice voting works in a variety of contexts. New York City will join Maine in using instant-runoff voting.
How ranked-choice voting could affect U.S. elections
If ranked-choice voting was adopted nationwide, it would fundamentally change how U.S. elections work.
Take the last presidential election, for example. In 2016, both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton received less than 50% of the total vote in 12 states, with the remainder going to third-party candidates. Under the current system, in each of those states, the candidate with the most votes was declared victorious. If the U.S. had a ranked-choice voting system, voters would have been asked to choose a second choice, third choice or more. (If Green Party candidate Jill Stein was a voter’s first choice, for instance, she would have been given the option of choosing a different candidate—Clinton, Trump, etc.—as her second choice.)
Ranked-choice voting advocates argue that the plurality system doesn’t always reflect the true will of the people. It can lead to vote-splitting among candidates with similar positions, resulting in a candidate who is less popular overall being elected, experts say. That’s called the “Nader” effect or the “spoiler” effect. (...)
Because it helps eliminate vote-splitting, a ranked-choice voting system can have the effect of encouraging more third-party and centrist candidates, advocates say. Michael Bloomberg, a centrist, third-party candidate, considered running in the 2016 presidential election but decided not to upon concluding that he might split the Democratic vote with Clinton, increasing the chances of Trump’s victory. (Trump, of course, still won the election, though he lost the popular vote to Clinton.) Again, the 2016 election offers a good hypothetical example. If a ranked-choice voting system had been in place in Michigan, then Clinton, not Trump, may have won that state. Because neither candidate received a majority of the Michigan vote, ranked-choice voting would have come into play. And if we can assume that most Stein voters would have chosen Clinton as their second choice, the former Secretary of State would have won, according to Saari. Trump won Michigan by 10,700; Stein received more than 51,000 votes. (...)
Ranked-choice voting can lead to less negative campaigning, says Richard DeLeon, who researches ranked-choice voting at San Francisco State University. Less divisive political environments can also have the effect of helping female, minority, centrist candidates, and third-party candidates.
“A lot of research shows that when you, as a candidate, go negative, you hurt public perceptions of yourself, but you do more damage to your opponent, and in plurality elections, this tradeoff can pay off,” says Diamond, the Stanford researcher. But since candidates are forced to rely on second and third-place votes in ranked-choice elections, negative campaigning can open the way for a third candidate to gain support. “It becomes much more costly to go negative since you risk losing your ability to pick up second-preference votes, and it actually does more harm than good,” Diamond adds.
A 2018 study showed that this created a slight percentage increase in female candidates running. This may be because women can be “deterred from running for office if they have to campaign negatively to win,” explains Sarah John, an author of the study and former director of research at FairVote. “Over time we expect candidates to learn how to run an effective ranked-choice voting election campaign, which will less often include ‘going negative.”
The study also showed that women overall and minority women are more likely to win in ranked-choice voting systems. This is, in part, because of an unconscious ticket “balancing” that many voters tend to practice. “When voters are asked to vote for or rank a whole field of candidates under proportional or ranked systems, they often tend to include female or minority candidates in the mix for balance,” explains John.
According to experts, ranked-choice systems also tend to favor centrist candidates, since the system allows voters to express preference for one-sided, partisan candidates of their choice, as well as moderate candidates, who have broader appeal. Partisan candidates have a narrower appeal, so they are less likely to be the second and third-choice for voters than a centrist candidate would be. This can also motivate partisan candidates to avoid taking extremes as well as give third-party, centrist candidates more incentive to run.
This popular electoral system allows voters to rank candidates by preference, meaning they can submit ballots that list not only their first-choice candidate for a position, but also their second, third and so on.
Ranked-choice voting advocates, including Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang, who has championed it as a key policy initiative, say it could help prevent evermore polarized election campaigns, increase the number of women and minority candidates running for office, and reduce negative campaigning. Critics say that the new system could make elections much more complicated for voters and be abused by parties trying to game the system.
“We are really settling on ranked-choice voting as the most promising reform to democratize and depolarize our politics,” says Larry Diamond, the former director of Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. “I think it’s not only here to stay but that it’s gaining support across the country.”
Here’s what to know about ranked-choice voting.
What is ranked-choice voting?
Ranked-choice voting is an electoral system that allows people to vote for multiple candidates, in order of preference. Instead of just choosing who you want to win, you fill out the ballot saying who is your first choice, second choice, or third choice (or more as needed) for each position.
The candidate with the majority (more than 50%) of first-choice votes wins outright. If no candidate gets a majority of first-choice votes, then it triggers a new counting process. The candidate who did the worst is eliminated, and that candidate’s voters’ ballots are redistributed to their second-choice pick. In other words, if you ranked a losing candidate as your first choice, and the candidate is eliminated, then your vote still counts: it just moves to your second-choice candidate. That process continues until there is a candidate who has the majority of votes.
In comparison, the U.S. federal government and most American states and cities currently use what’s known as the plurality system: the candidate with the highest number of votes wins—period. It doesn’t matter whether that candidate earned the majority of the vote.
In a ranked-choice voting system, it works differently. The winning candidate almost always ends up with a majority of votes—even if some portion of the electorate selected him or her as a second or third choice.
Ranked-choice voting works in a variety of contexts. New York City will join Maine in using instant-runoff voting.
How ranked-choice voting could affect U.S. elections
If ranked-choice voting was adopted nationwide, it would fundamentally change how U.S. elections work.
Take the last presidential election, for example. In 2016, both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton received less than 50% of the total vote in 12 states, with the remainder going to third-party candidates. Under the current system, in each of those states, the candidate with the most votes was declared victorious. If the U.S. had a ranked-choice voting system, voters would have been asked to choose a second choice, third choice or more. (If Green Party candidate Jill Stein was a voter’s first choice, for instance, she would have been given the option of choosing a different candidate—Clinton, Trump, etc.—as her second choice.)
Ranked-choice voting advocates argue that the plurality system doesn’t always reflect the true will of the people. It can lead to vote-splitting among candidates with similar positions, resulting in a candidate who is less popular overall being elected, experts say. That’s called the “Nader” effect or the “spoiler” effect. (...)
Because it helps eliminate vote-splitting, a ranked-choice voting system can have the effect of encouraging more third-party and centrist candidates, advocates say. Michael Bloomberg, a centrist, third-party candidate, considered running in the 2016 presidential election but decided not to upon concluding that he might split the Democratic vote with Clinton, increasing the chances of Trump’s victory. (Trump, of course, still won the election, though he lost the popular vote to Clinton.) Again, the 2016 election offers a good hypothetical example. If a ranked-choice voting system had been in place in Michigan, then Clinton, not Trump, may have won that state. Because neither candidate received a majority of the Michigan vote, ranked-choice voting would have come into play. And if we can assume that most Stein voters would have chosen Clinton as their second choice, the former Secretary of State would have won, according to Saari. Trump won Michigan by 10,700; Stein received more than 51,000 votes. (...)
What are the benefits of ranked-choice voting?
Ranked-choice voting can lead to less negative campaigning, says Richard DeLeon, who researches ranked-choice voting at San Francisco State University. Less divisive political environments can also have the effect of helping female, minority, centrist candidates, and third-party candidates.
“A lot of research shows that when you, as a candidate, go negative, you hurt public perceptions of yourself, but you do more damage to your opponent, and in plurality elections, this tradeoff can pay off,” says Diamond, the Stanford researcher. But since candidates are forced to rely on second and third-place votes in ranked-choice elections, negative campaigning can open the way for a third candidate to gain support. “It becomes much more costly to go negative since you risk losing your ability to pick up second-preference votes, and it actually does more harm than good,” Diamond adds.
A 2018 study showed that this created a slight percentage increase in female candidates running. This may be because women can be “deterred from running for office if they have to campaign negatively to win,” explains Sarah John, an author of the study and former director of research at FairVote. “Over time we expect candidates to learn how to run an effective ranked-choice voting election campaign, which will less often include ‘going negative.”
The study also showed that women overall and minority women are more likely to win in ranked-choice voting systems. This is, in part, because of an unconscious ticket “balancing” that many voters tend to practice. “When voters are asked to vote for or rank a whole field of candidates under proportional or ranked systems, they often tend to include female or minority candidates in the mix for balance,” explains John.
According to experts, ranked-choice systems also tend to favor centrist candidates, since the system allows voters to express preference for one-sided, partisan candidates of their choice, as well as moderate candidates, who have broader appeal. Partisan candidates have a narrower appeal, so they are less likely to be the second and third-choice for voters than a centrist candidate would be. This can also motivate partisan candidates to avoid taking extremes as well as give third-party, centrist candidates more incentive to run.
by Anna Purna Kambhampaty, Time | Read more:
Image: Gabriela Bhaskar—The New York Times/Redux[ed. Positives and negatives. If the process favors more "centrists" (middle of the road, wishy washy types) then I consider that a definite downside.]
Saturday, January 16, 2021
How AWS and Other Cloud Providers Became the Internet’s Most Powerful Moderators
When Amazon Web Services decided to stop hosting the alt-right social network Parler last week following the insurrection at the Capitol, it looked like the site was doomed to go offline.
Migrating an app successfully between cloud providers, and ensuring it works on the other side as expected, is hard enough. But moving the vast amounts of data associated with a social network (likely hundreds of terabytes of information) would be agonizingly slow, taking far longer than the 24-hour warning Amazon gave Parler.
Unfortunately for Parler, virtually every other vendor was ditching them as well. With cloud providers rejecting them and no physical servers of its own, Parler has nowhere to go and now says it may never return.
The swift shutdown of Parler illustrates a wonder of the modern internet. It’s simple to get a website or service online without ever physically seeing or touching a server. Developers can choose from an array of hosts, from Amazon Web Services to Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud, click a few buttons, and be online in a few minutes. These companies manage vast data centers full of servers, renting them out by the hour, so you don’t need to think about setting up your own gear. They have centralized much of the web, which gives them unprecedented power to police it.
This is a relatively new phenomenon. Until just over a decade ago, getting anything online at scale was a complicated, expensive process. It required procuring expensive physical servers from a company like Dell or HP, putting them in a data center somewhere, and configuring them yourself to get them up and running. Smaller companies might contract with a “colocation” provider like Rackspace to rent a spot for their servers in its data center, but the arrangement was expensive and slow, taking days or weeks to get the contracts signed, servers delivered, set up, and online.
Those enormous data centers are still there; they’re just operated by the largest companies at an enormous scale. Rather than renting an entire server sitting in a rack somewhere, virtualization technology allows companies like Amazon to rent out hundreds of tiny slices of a single server’s performance to lots of people, which is what makes it such a profitable business.
Because of the complexity and expertise involved, nobody wants to buy an actual server because then you’re stuck maintaining it, replacing it every few years, and making sure it’s in a safe place — doing so would be far too expensive for most services. (...)
Larger companies and governments do still operate their own data centers for various reasons, from data privacy to local laws that disallow using cloud services, but the vast majority of the world now rents servers from one or more cloud providers.
Most of the largest services, like Apple’s iCloud, use multiple cloud platforms to avoid putting their eggs in one basket in case of outages. The average company can’t afford this because it’s hilariously expensive to pay multiple cloud platforms—and it requires ensuring that your app is built to work correctly when spread across all of them.
Snap, for example, revealed in 2017 that it had a contract with Google Cloud for $2 billion over five years for its service, in addition to a contract with Amazon Web Services for $1 billion. It’s unlikely Parler has that kind of money, let alone custom contracts with any of these companies.
When Amazon booted Parler from its cloud platform, there was little the company could have done to stay online, which shows the power of deplatforming hate. A decade ago, when the norm would have been owning actual servers and space in a data center, the company likely could have stayed online in a similar fashion to how torrent website The Pirate Bay famously dodged almost every global takedown it’s faced over the last 20 years.
But, gone are the days when it was common for smaller companies to own servers. It’s simply not realistic anymore. Getting things online fast and cheap has been an incredible change to how the internet is cobbled together, but it has also centralized the majority of the web around giant platforms like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud — which means that the internet is at the mercy of their whims as well, for better or worse.
Migrating an app successfully between cloud providers, and ensuring it works on the other side as expected, is hard enough. But moving the vast amounts of data associated with a social network (likely hundreds of terabytes of information) would be agonizingly slow, taking far longer than the 24-hour warning Amazon gave Parler.
Unfortunately for Parler, virtually every other vendor was ditching them as well. With cloud providers rejecting them and no physical servers of its own, Parler has nowhere to go and now says it may never return.
The swift shutdown of Parler illustrates a wonder of the modern internet. It’s simple to get a website or service online without ever physically seeing or touching a server. Developers can choose from an array of hosts, from Amazon Web Services to Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud, click a few buttons, and be online in a few minutes. These companies manage vast data centers full of servers, renting them out by the hour, so you don’t need to think about setting up your own gear. They have centralized much of the web, which gives them unprecedented power to police it.
This is a relatively new phenomenon. Until just over a decade ago, getting anything online at scale was a complicated, expensive process. It required procuring expensive physical servers from a company like Dell or HP, putting them in a data center somewhere, and configuring them yourself to get them up and running. Smaller companies might contract with a “colocation” provider like Rackspace to rent a spot for their servers in its data center, but the arrangement was expensive and slow, taking days or weeks to get the contracts signed, servers delivered, set up, and online.
Those enormous data centers are still there; they’re just operated by the largest companies at an enormous scale. Rather than renting an entire server sitting in a rack somewhere, virtualization technology allows companies like Amazon to rent out hundreds of tiny slices of a single server’s performance to lots of people, which is what makes it such a profitable business.
Because of the complexity and expertise involved, nobody wants to buy an actual server because then you’re stuck maintaining it, replacing it every few years, and making sure it’s in a safe place — doing so would be far too expensive for most services. (...)
Larger companies and governments do still operate their own data centers for various reasons, from data privacy to local laws that disallow using cloud services, but the vast majority of the world now rents servers from one or more cloud providers.
Most of the largest services, like Apple’s iCloud, use multiple cloud platforms to avoid putting their eggs in one basket in case of outages. The average company can’t afford this because it’s hilariously expensive to pay multiple cloud platforms—and it requires ensuring that your app is built to work correctly when spread across all of them.
Snap, for example, revealed in 2017 that it had a contract with Google Cloud for $2 billion over five years for its service, in addition to a contract with Amazon Web Services for $1 billion. It’s unlikely Parler has that kind of money, let alone custom contracts with any of these companies.
When Amazon booted Parler from its cloud platform, there was little the company could have done to stay online, which shows the power of deplatforming hate. A decade ago, when the norm would have been owning actual servers and space in a data center, the company likely could have stayed online in a similar fashion to how torrent website The Pirate Bay famously dodged almost every global takedown it’s faced over the last 20 years.
But, gone are the days when it was common for smaller companies to own servers. It’s simply not realistic anymore. Getting things online fast and cheap has been an incredible change to how the internet is cobbled together, but it has also centralized the majority of the web around giant platforms like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud — which means that the internet is at the mercy of their whims as well, for better or worse.
by Owen Williams, One Zero | Read more:
Image: Thiago Prudêncio/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images[Ed. See also: Beyond Platforms: Private Censorship, Parler, and the Stack (EFF); How Silicon Valley, in a Show of Monopolistic Force, Destroyed Parler (Glenn Greenwald).]
Paywalls
[ed. Everybody hates paywalls (see here, here, here, here and here), and some are more impenetrable (and irritating) than others (like the Washington Post, thanks J. Bezos). There are some workarounds and it's probably worthwhile to revisit them from time to time. Here are a couple I've found on the Chrome extensions page:]
Cookie Remover: removes cookies (and paywall) from the current page.
Outline: Read and annotate without distractions (cut and paste url for a paywall/ad-free experience).
Cookie Remover: removes cookies (and paywall) from the current page.
Outline: Read and annotate without distractions (cut and paste url for a paywall/ad-free experience).
Also, just opening a link in incognito mode (Chrome users) can sometimes work
Violence in the Capitol, Dangers in the Aftermath
In the days and weeks after the 9/11 attack, Americans were largely united in emotional horror at what had been done to their country as well as in their willingness to endorse repression and violence in response. As a result, there was little room to raise concerns about the possible excesses or dangers of the American reaction, let alone to dissent from what political leaders were proposing in the name of vengeance and security. The psychological trauma from the carnage and the wreckage at the country’s most cherished symbols swamped rational faculties and thus rendered futile any attempts to urge restraint or caution.
Nonetheless, a few tried. Scorn and sometimes worse were universally heaped upon them.
On September 14 — while bodies were still buried under burning rubble in downtown Manhattan — Congresswoman Barbara Lee cast a lone vote against the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF). “Some of us must urge the use of restraint,” she said seventy-two hours after the attack, adding: “our country is in a state of mourning” and thus “some of us must say: let’s step back for a moment, let’s pause just for a minute, and think through the implications of our actions today so that this does not spiral out of control.”
For simply urging caution and casting a single “no” vote against war, Lee’s Congressional office was deluged with threats of violence. Armed security was deployed to protect her, largely as a result of media attackssuggesting that she was anti-American and sympathetic to terrorists. Yet twenty years later — with U.S. troops still fighting in Afghanistan under that same AUMF, with Iraq destroyed, ISIS spawned, and U.S. civil liberties and privacy rights permanently crippled — her solitary admonitions look far more like courage, prescience and wisdom than sedition or a desire to downplay the threat of Al Qaeda.
Others also raised similar questions and issued similar warnings. On the left, people like Susan Sontag and Noam Chomsky, and on the right people such as Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan — in different ways and at different times — urged U.S. politicians and Americans generally to resist unleashing an orgy of domestic assaults on civil liberties, foreign invasions, and an endless war posture. They warned that such a cycle, once initiated, would be very difficult to control, even more difficult to reverse, and virtually guaranteed to provoke even greater violence. (...)
In retrospect, it is hard to deny that those who defied, or at least questioned, the potent 2001 emotional consensus by urging deliberation in lieu of reactionary rage were vindicated by subsequent events: the two-decade expansion of the war in Afghanistan to multiple countries, the enactment of the Patriot Act, the secret implementation of mass surveillance systems, the trillions of dollars of taxpayer wealth transferred to weapons manufacturers, and the paramilitarization of the domestic security state. At the very least, basic rationality requires an acknowledgement that when political passions and rage-driven emotions find their most intense expression, calls for reflection and caution can only be valuable even if ultimately rejected. (...)
There are other, more important historical lessons to draw not only from the 9/11 attack but subsequent terrorism on U.S. soil. One is the importance of resisting the coercive framework that demands everyone choose one of two extremes: that the incident is either (a) insignificant or even justifiable, or (b) is an earth-shattering, radically transformative event that demands radical, transformative state responses.
This reductive, binary framework is anti-intellectual and dangerous. One can condemn a particular act while resisting the attempt to inflate the dangers it poses. One can acknowledge the very real existence of a threat while also warning of the harms, often far greater, from proposed solutions. One can reject maximalist, inflammatory rhetoric about an attack (a War of Civilizations, an attempted coup, an insurrection, sedition) without being fairly accused of indifference toward or sympathy for the attackers.
Indeed, the primary focus of the first decade of my journalism was the U.S. War on Terror — in particular, the relentless erosions of civil liberties and the endless militarization of American society in the name of waging it. To make the case that those trends should be opposed, I frequently argued that the threat posed by Islamic radicalism to U.S. citizens was being deliberately exaggerated, inflated and melodramatized. (...)
It is stunning to watch now as every War on Terror rhetorical tactic to justify civil liberties erosions is now being invoked in the name of combatting Trumpism, including the aggressive exploitation of the emotions triggered by yesterday’s events at the Capitol to accelerate their implementation and demonize dissent over the quickly formed consensus. The same framework used to assault civil liberties in the name of foreign terrorism is now being seamlessly applied — often by those who spent the last two decades objecting to it — to the threat posed by “domestic white supremacist terrorists,” the term preferred by liberal elites, especially after yesterday, for Trump supporters generally. In so many ways, yesterday was the liberals’ 9/11, as even the most sensible commentators among them are resorting to the most unhinged rhetoric available.
Nonetheless, a few tried. Scorn and sometimes worse were universally heaped upon them.
On September 14 — while bodies were still buried under burning rubble in downtown Manhattan — Congresswoman Barbara Lee cast a lone vote against the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF). “Some of us must urge the use of restraint,” she said seventy-two hours after the attack, adding: “our country is in a state of mourning” and thus “some of us must say: let’s step back for a moment, let’s pause just for a minute, and think through the implications of our actions today so that this does not spiral out of control.”
Others also raised similar questions and issued similar warnings. On the left, people like Susan Sontag and Noam Chomsky, and on the right people such as Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan — in different ways and at different times — urged U.S. politicians and Americans generally to resist unleashing an orgy of domestic assaults on civil liberties, foreign invasions, and an endless war posture. They warned that such a cycle, once initiated, would be very difficult to control, even more difficult to reverse, and virtually guaranteed to provoke even greater violence. (...)
In retrospect, it is hard to deny that those who defied, or at least questioned, the potent 2001 emotional consensus by urging deliberation in lieu of reactionary rage were vindicated by subsequent events: the two-decade expansion of the war in Afghanistan to multiple countries, the enactment of the Patriot Act, the secret implementation of mass surveillance systems, the trillions of dollars of taxpayer wealth transferred to weapons manufacturers, and the paramilitarization of the domestic security state. At the very least, basic rationality requires an acknowledgement that when political passions and rage-driven emotions find their most intense expression, calls for reflection and caution can only be valuable even if ultimately rejected. (...)
There are other, more important historical lessons to draw not only from the 9/11 attack but subsequent terrorism on U.S. soil. One is the importance of resisting the coercive framework that demands everyone choose one of two extremes: that the incident is either (a) insignificant or even justifiable, or (b) is an earth-shattering, radically transformative event that demands radical, transformative state responses.
This reductive, binary framework is anti-intellectual and dangerous. One can condemn a particular act while resisting the attempt to inflate the dangers it poses. One can acknowledge the very real existence of a threat while also warning of the harms, often far greater, from proposed solutions. One can reject maximalist, inflammatory rhetoric about an attack (a War of Civilizations, an attempted coup, an insurrection, sedition) without being fairly accused of indifference toward or sympathy for the attackers.
Indeed, the primary focus of the first decade of my journalism was the U.S. War on Terror — in particular, the relentless erosions of civil liberties and the endless militarization of American society in the name of waging it. To make the case that those trends should be opposed, I frequently argued that the threat posed by Islamic radicalism to U.S. citizens was being deliberately exaggerated, inflated and melodramatized. (...)
It is stunning to watch now as every War on Terror rhetorical tactic to justify civil liberties erosions is now being invoked in the name of combatting Trumpism, including the aggressive exploitation of the emotions triggered by yesterday’s events at the Capitol to accelerate their implementation and demonize dissent over the quickly formed consensus. The same framework used to assault civil liberties in the name of foreign terrorism is now being seamlessly applied — often by those who spent the last two decades objecting to it — to the threat posed by “domestic white supremacist terrorists,” the term preferred by liberal elites, especially after yesterday, for Trump supporters generally. In so many ways, yesterday was the liberals’ 9/11, as even the most sensible commentators among them are resorting to the most unhinged rhetoric available.
by Glenn Greenwald, Substack | Read more:
Image: Samuel Corum/Getty Images)
Friday, January 15, 2021
Lost Passwords Lock Millionaires Out of Their Bitcoin Fortunes
Stefan Thomas, a German-born programmer living in San Francisco, has two guesses left to figure out a password that is worth, as of this week, about $220 million.
The password will let him unlock a small hard drive, known as an IronKey, which contains the private keys to a digital wallet that holds 7,002 Bitcoin. While the price of Bitcoin dropped sharply on Monday, it is still up more than 50 percent from just a month ago, when it passed its previous all-time high of around $20,000.
The problem is that Mr. Thomas years ago lost the paper where he wrote down the password for his IronKey, which gives users 10 guesses before it seizes up and encrypts its contents forever. He has since tried eight of his most commonly used password formulations — to no avail.
“I would just lay in bed and think about it,” Mr. Thomas said. “Then I would go to the computer with some new strategy, and it wouldn’t work, and I would be desperate again.”
Bitcoin, which has been on an extraordinary and volatile eight-month run, has made a lot of its holders very rich in a short time, even as the coronavirus pandemic has ravaged the world economy.
But the cryptocurrency’s unusual nature has also meant that many people are locked out of their Bitcoin fortunes as a result of lost or forgotten keys. They have been forced to watch, helpless, as the price has risen and fallen sharply, unable to cash in on their digital wealth.
Of the existing 18.5 million Bitcoin, around 20 percent — currently worth around $140 billion — appear to be in lost or otherwise stranded wallets, according to the cryptocurrency data firm Chainalysis. Wallet Recovery Services, a business that helps find lost digital keys, said it had gotten 70 requests a day from people who wanted help recovering their riches, three times the number of a month ago.
Bitcoin owners who are locked out of their wallets speak of endless days and nights of frustration as they have tried to get access to their fortunes. Many have owned the coins since Bitcoin’s early days a decade ago, when no one had confidence that the tokens would be worth anything.
“Through the years I would say I have spent hundreds of hours trying to get back into these wallets,” said Brad Yasar, an entrepreneur in Los Angeles who has a few desktop computers that contain thousands of Bitcoin he created, or mined, during the early days of the technology. While those Bitcoin are now worth hundreds of millions of dollars, he lost his passwords many years ago and has put the hard drives containing them in vacuum-sealed bags, out of sight.
“I don’t want to be reminded every day that what I have now is a fraction of what I could have that I lost,” he said.
The dilemma is a stark reminder of Bitcoin’s unusual technological underpinnings, which set it apart from normal money and give it some of its most vaunted — and riskiest — qualities. With traditional bank accounts and online wallets, banks like Wells Fargo and other financial companies like PayPal can provide people the passwords to their accounts or reset lost passwords.
But Bitcoin has no company to provide or store passwords. The virtual currency’s creator, a shadowy figure known as Satoshi Nakamoto, has said Bitcoin’s central idea was to allow anyone in the world to open a digital bank account and hold the money in a way that no government could prevent or regulate.
This is made possible by the structure of Bitcoin, which is governed by a network of computers that agreed to follow software containing all the rules for the cryptocurrency. The software includes a complex algorithm that makes it possible to create an address, and associated private key, which is known only by the person who created the wallet. (...)
But the structure of this system did not account for just how bad people can be at remembering and securing their passwords.
by Nathaniel Popper, NY Times | Read more:
Image: via
The password will let him unlock a small hard drive, known as an IronKey, which contains the private keys to a digital wallet that holds 7,002 Bitcoin. While the price of Bitcoin dropped sharply on Monday, it is still up more than 50 percent from just a month ago, when it passed its previous all-time high of around $20,000.
The problem is that Mr. Thomas years ago lost the paper where he wrote down the password for his IronKey, which gives users 10 guesses before it seizes up and encrypts its contents forever. He has since tried eight of his most commonly used password formulations — to no avail.
Bitcoin, which has been on an extraordinary and volatile eight-month run, has made a lot of its holders very rich in a short time, even as the coronavirus pandemic has ravaged the world economy.
But the cryptocurrency’s unusual nature has also meant that many people are locked out of their Bitcoin fortunes as a result of lost or forgotten keys. They have been forced to watch, helpless, as the price has risen and fallen sharply, unable to cash in on their digital wealth.
Of the existing 18.5 million Bitcoin, around 20 percent — currently worth around $140 billion — appear to be in lost or otherwise stranded wallets, according to the cryptocurrency data firm Chainalysis. Wallet Recovery Services, a business that helps find lost digital keys, said it had gotten 70 requests a day from people who wanted help recovering their riches, three times the number of a month ago.
Bitcoin owners who are locked out of their wallets speak of endless days and nights of frustration as they have tried to get access to their fortunes. Many have owned the coins since Bitcoin’s early days a decade ago, when no one had confidence that the tokens would be worth anything.
“Through the years I would say I have spent hundreds of hours trying to get back into these wallets,” said Brad Yasar, an entrepreneur in Los Angeles who has a few desktop computers that contain thousands of Bitcoin he created, or mined, during the early days of the technology. While those Bitcoin are now worth hundreds of millions of dollars, he lost his passwords many years ago and has put the hard drives containing them in vacuum-sealed bags, out of sight.
“I don’t want to be reminded every day that what I have now is a fraction of what I could have that I lost,” he said.
The dilemma is a stark reminder of Bitcoin’s unusual technological underpinnings, which set it apart from normal money and give it some of its most vaunted — and riskiest — qualities. With traditional bank accounts and online wallets, banks like Wells Fargo and other financial companies like PayPal can provide people the passwords to their accounts or reset lost passwords.
But Bitcoin has no company to provide or store passwords. The virtual currency’s creator, a shadowy figure known as Satoshi Nakamoto, has said Bitcoin’s central idea was to allow anyone in the world to open a digital bank account and hold the money in a way that no government could prevent or regulate.
This is made possible by the structure of Bitcoin, which is governed by a network of computers that agreed to follow software containing all the rules for the cryptocurrency. The software includes a complex algorithm that makes it possible to create an address, and associated private key, which is known only by the person who created the wallet. (...)
But the structure of this system did not account for just how bad people can be at remembering and securing their passwords.
by Nathaniel Popper, NY Times | Read more:
Image: via
Thursday, January 14, 2021
Wednesday, January 13, 2021
Bernie Sanders Wants to Go Big
Shortly before the 2016 election, Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, the Republican nominee for vice president and the speaker of the House, told a group of college Republicans why he thought Democrats winning control of the Senate would be a policy nightmare.
“Do you know who becomes chair of the Senate Budget Committee?” Mr. Ryan asked. “A guy named Bernie Sanders. You ever heard of him?”
Republicans have long feared the prospect of Mr. Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist from Vermont, taking the helm of the powerful committee given his embrace of bigger government and more federal spending with borrowed money. With Democrats reclaiming the Senate, that fear is about to become a reality. Mr. Sanders, the most progressive member of the chamber, will have a central role in shaping and steering the Democrats’ tax and spending plans through a Congress that they control with the slimmest of margins.
Mr. Sanders, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats and twice ran unsuccessfully for the party’s presidential nomination, said he would move quickly in his new role to push through a robust and deficit-financed economic stimulus package soon after President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. takes office.
“I believe that the crisis is of enormous severity and we’ve got to move as rapidly as we can,” Mr. Sanders said in an interview.
“Underline the word aggressive,” he said. “Start out there.”
Despite Democrats’ narrow control of the Senate, Mr. Sanders is expected to exert heavy influence over taxes, health care, climate change and several other domestic issues. That is because his role as budget chairman will give him control over a little-known but incredibly powerful congressional tool that allows certain types of legislation to win Senate approval with just a simple majority.
That tool — a budget mechanism called reconciliation — allows Congress to move some legislation without gaining 60 votes. It has become the vehicle for several major legislative efforts this century, including tax cuts under President Trump and President George W. Bush, and the final version of President Barack Obama’s signature health care bill.
The reconciliation process begins with lawmakers adopting a budget resolution, originating in the House and Senate Budget Committees, which can include directions to congressional committees on how much to increase federal spending or taxes.
The nature of the process effectively gives Mr. Sanders a leading role in deciding how expansive — and expensive — Mr. Biden’s ambitions for new taxes and spending will be.
Mr. Sanders said in the interview that he wanted an initial, emergency stimulus package to be “big.” He thinks it must include an additional $1,400 in direct payments for adults and children, on top of the $600 that Congress just passed, along with money for states and cities to fund coronavirus vaccine distribution, testing and contact tracing. He also wants to create an emergency universal health care program, so that anyone can get medical treatment during the pandemic, whether they currently have insurance or not.
Mr. Sanders said he had been speaking with Mr. Biden about the scale and timing of stimulus legislation. He said that he did not intend to try to force his long-held priorities, such as “Medicare for all,” into a relief bill. However, he does intend to test the legal bounds of how reconciliation can be used so that Democrats can pass policies that go beyond traditional budget items and address “structural problems in American society.”
by Alan Rappeport and Jim Tankersley, NY Times | Read more:
Image:Elizabeth Frantz for The New York Times
[ed. Go Bernie, go!]
“Do you know who becomes chair of the Senate Budget Committee?” Mr. Ryan asked. “A guy named Bernie Sanders. You ever heard of him?”
Mr. Sanders, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats and twice ran unsuccessfully for the party’s presidential nomination, said he would move quickly in his new role to push through a robust and deficit-financed economic stimulus package soon after President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. takes office.
“I believe that the crisis is of enormous severity and we’ve got to move as rapidly as we can,” Mr. Sanders said in an interview.
“Underline the word aggressive,” he said. “Start out there.”
Despite Democrats’ narrow control of the Senate, Mr. Sanders is expected to exert heavy influence over taxes, health care, climate change and several other domestic issues. That is because his role as budget chairman will give him control over a little-known but incredibly powerful congressional tool that allows certain types of legislation to win Senate approval with just a simple majority.
That tool — a budget mechanism called reconciliation — allows Congress to move some legislation without gaining 60 votes. It has become the vehicle for several major legislative efforts this century, including tax cuts under President Trump and President George W. Bush, and the final version of President Barack Obama’s signature health care bill.
The reconciliation process begins with lawmakers adopting a budget resolution, originating in the House and Senate Budget Committees, which can include directions to congressional committees on how much to increase federal spending or taxes.
The nature of the process effectively gives Mr. Sanders a leading role in deciding how expansive — and expensive — Mr. Biden’s ambitions for new taxes and spending will be.
Mr. Sanders said in the interview that he wanted an initial, emergency stimulus package to be “big.” He thinks it must include an additional $1,400 in direct payments for adults and children, on top of the $600 that Congress just passed, along with money for states and cities to fund coronavirus vaccine distribution, testing and contact tracing. He also wants to create an emergency universal health care program, so that anyone can get medical treatment during the pandemic, whether they currently have insurance or not.
Mr. Sanders said he had been speaking with Mr. Biden about the scale and timing of stimulus legislation. He said that he did not intend to try to force his long-held priorities, such as “Medicare for all,” into a relief bill. However, he does intend to test the legal bounds of how reconciliation can be used so that Democrats can pass policies that go beyond traditional budget items and address “structural problems in American society.”
by Alan Rappeport and Jim Tankersley, NY Times | Read more:
Image:Elizabeth Frantz for The New York Times
[ed. Go Bernie, go!]
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