September 29, 2020

Black families average less than 15 percent of wealth of white families, Fed says

The findings underscore how different racial groups entered the coronavirus pandemic on uneven footing.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/28/racial-wealth-gap-federal-reserve-422658

The average Black family had less than 15 percent of the wealth of white families in 2019, a trend that barely budged despite economic gains among minorities over the past three years, the Federal Reserve said on Monday. According to a Fed survey of consumer finances conducted every three years, the median wealth of white families was $188,200, compared with only $24,100 for Black families. Central bank economists attributed that gap to “many complex societal, governmental, and individual factors that play out over the life cycle and across generations.”

For example, more young white families are able to get financial assistance from their parents for a down payment on a house than young Black or Hispanic families. “In addition to direct transfers or gifts, families can make investments in their children that indirectly increase their wealth,” according to a Fed paper on the survey results. “Families can invest in their children’s educational success by paying for college or private schools, which can in turn increase their children’s ability to accumulate wealth.”

“For these reasons, wealth (or a lack thereof) can persist across generations and reflect, among other factors, a legacy of discrimination or unequal treatment in housing, education, and labor markets,” it adds. The median Black family in the under 35 age group had only $600 in wealth, compared with $25,400 among young white families. The findings underscore how different racial groups entered the coronavirus pandemic on uneven footing, as incoming data continues to suggest that the crisis has exacerbated many of these disparities as millions remain out of work.

The stock market has recovered after panicked sell-offs in March and early April — a boon to anyone with those investments. The Fed survey shows that more than half of white families have equities, while only 34 percent of Black families and 24 percent of Hispanic families own stock. Similarly, white families have more emergency savings. The survey, which examines shifts between 2019 and the previous snapshot in 2016, more broadly demonstrates positive economic trends in the twilight years of the longest economic expansion in U.S. history.

snip

September 29, 2020

Hasta la vista Chump! MeidasTouch and @BetteMidler are proud to present our very special version of

‘You’re Moving Out Today.’

https://twitter.com/MeidasTouch/status/1310700817037627394

September 29, 2020

If I was a bird and Rump was a pre-teen now

https://twitter.com/RexChapman/status/1310590020127010822

September 28, 2020

He's Broke

The bombshell New York Times story reveals everything we need to know about Donald Trump's taxes, and why he is completely unfit for office.

https://thebanter.substack.com/p/hes-broke



Contrary to Donald Trump claims that he is a successful billionaire, he is in fact a broke, potentially tax cheating fraud. “Donald J. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750.” That was the New York Times yesterday in a bombshell report that finally revealed details on Trump’s tax returns from the past two decades. Trump paid almost nothing “largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.” According to the Times, Trump is also involved in a “decade-long audit battle with the Internal Revenue Service over the legitimacy of a $72.9 million tax refund that he claimed, and received, after declaring huge losses. An adverse ruling could cost him more than $100 million.” The Times report doesn’t just blow away the myth that Trump is a successful business mogul, it paints a picture of a desperate man engaged in extraordinary financial skulduggery in order to maintain his luxurious lifestyle and cover up his failings.

Most of Trump’s key businesses are losing money and he owes hundreds of millions of dollars in loans that he personally guaranteed. The report reveals for example that he paid Ivanka Trump, who was a full time employee of his company, $747,622 in consulting fees on hotel deals, and then wrote off the consulting fees as a business expense. Trump has written off “some $26 million” in consulting fees since 2010, millions of dollars in property taxes by claiming his properties are for investment purposes only, and has only made money from the Trump Tower in New York, his work on ‘The Apprentice’, and licensing out his name. Notably, the Times notes that, “the reported losses from the operating businesses were so large that they often fully erased the licensing income, leaving the organization to claim that it earns no money and thus owes no taxes.” It has not been proven in court (yet) that Trump is a tax cheat, but the evidence does not look good. More importantly though, Trump’s tax returns reveal he has cheated the American public by pretending to be a successful billionaire. He didn’t want to release his tax records for a reason: they reveal the true state of his financial affairs, and they are a complete mess. Trump of course dismissed the Times report as “totally fake news”.

“We went through the same stories, you could have asked me the same questions four years ago, I had to litigate this and talk about it,” he said at a press conference. “Totally fake news, no. Actually I paid tax. And you’ll see that as soon as my tax returns – it’s under audit, they’ve been under audit for a long time. The [Internal Revenue Service] does not treat me well … they treat me very badly. You have people in the IRS – they treat me very badly.” Trump could clear this up quickly if he did reveal his tax returns (he can, because the IRS does not forbid anyone under audit from releasing them), but of course he won’t because he knows the story is true — or perhaps even worse than the findings Times report has revealed. If Trump really is the billionaire he claims to be, then he has clearly defrauded the federal government of hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue. No real billionaire pays almost no federal taxes for close to two decades. The most likely scenario is spelled out in clear detail by the Times report: Trump is broke, and he has engaged in various forms of tax fraud.

Will this make a difference in the election? It is impossible to predict much in the volatile era of Donald Trump, but the story is truly extraordinary and there’s a strong chance it could help shift the needle further to Biden. The more the Emperor is revealed to have no clothes, the harder it is for Trump to win over voters in key demographics needed to beat Biden. Trump is losing with women, independents, and college educated whites — voters he desperately needs to court if he wants to catch up to Biden. The closer it gets to the election, the more attention these voters will be paying to stories like this, making the timing of the story extremely bad for the president. The revelation also gives Joe Biden a chance to hammer Trump over the issue in the presidential debate tomorrow alongside a huge list of his catastrophic failures while in office. Biden already has vast amounts of ammunition to create a powerful narrative about Trump’s unfitness to serve as president, and this will help solidify in many voters minds the notion that he is an active threat to democracy. Biden must remind viewers that Trump’s history of failure spans through all aspects of his life, and that the tax returns complete a deeply troubling psychological profile of a man who destroys literally everything he touches.

snip

September 28, 2020

GIVE ME FUTURE Official Documentary & Chasing the Sound: Major Lazer

GIVE ME FUTURE | Official Documentary



Ushering in a new era of cultural exchange, Major Lazer brings its groundbreaking international beats to Cuba to perform the first show of its kind in the island nation.


Chasing the Sound: Major Lazer



Travel with Major Lazer to Ghana and Nigeria to make the world smaller by making the party bigger. They are collaborating with cutting-edge Afrobeats artists including Mr.Eazi, Efya, Teni, Sarkodie and Amaarae as they explore the culture and history of Africa. Chasing the Sound: Major Lazer, watch now only on YouTube.

September 28, 2020

The rise of Christian nationalism in America

Or maybe it's how to legislate evil and punish the poor.

https://www.nationofchange.org/2020/09/28/the-rise-of-christian-nationalism-in-america/



On August 26th, during the Republican National Convention, Vice President Mike Pence closed out his acceptance speech with a biblical sleight of hand. Speaking before a crowd at the Fort McHenry National Monument in Baltimore, he exclaimed, “Let’s fix our eyes on Old Glory and all she represents. Let’s fix our eyes on this land of heroes and let their courage inspire.” In doing so, he essentially rewrote a passage from the New Testament’s Book of Hebrews: “Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross.” There’s nothing new, of course, about an American politician melding religion and politics on the campaign trail. Still, Pence’s decision to replace Jesus with the Stars and Stripes raised eyebrows across a range of religious and political persuasions. Indeed, the melding of Old Glory and Christ provided the latest evidence of the rising influence of Christian nationalism in the age of Trump. It’s no longer hard to find evidence of just how deeply Christian nationalism influences our politics and policymaking. During the pandemic, the Bible has repeatedly been used (and distorted) to justify Covid-19 denialism and government inaction, not to speak of outright repression. In late March, as cities were locking down and public health officials were recommending strict quarantine measures, one of Donald Trump’s first acts was to gather his followers at the White House for what was billed as a “National Day of Prayer” to give Americans the strength to press on through death and difficulty.

Later in the spring, protests against pandemic shutdowns, funded with dark money from the likes of the Koch Brothers, demanded that states reopen for business and social distancing guidelines be loosened. (Forget about masking of any sort.) At them, printed protest signs said things like: “Even Pharaoh Freed Slaves in a Plague” and “Texas will not take the Mark of the Beast.” And even as faith communities struggled admirably to adjust to zoom worship services, as well as remote pastoral care and memorials, President Trump continued to fan the flames of religious division, declaring in-person worship “essential,” no matter that legal experts questioned his authority to do so. And speaking of his version of Christian nationalism, no one should forget the June spectacle in Lafayette Square near the White House, when Trump had racial-justice protestors tear-gassed so he could stroll to nearby St. John’s Church and pose proudly on its steps displaying a borrowed bible. Though he flashed it to the photographers, who can doubt how little time he’s spent within its pages. (Selling those same pages is another matter entirely. After all, a Bible he signed in the wake of that Lafayette Square event is now on sale for nearly $40,000.)

The battle for the Bible in American history

To understand how power is wielded in America by wealthy politicians and their coteries of extremists in 2020, you have to consider the role of religion in our national life. An epic battle for the Bible is now underway in a country that has been largely ceded to white evangelical Christian nationalists. Through a well-funded network of churches and nonprofits, universities, and think tanks, and with direct lines to the nation’s highest political officials, they’ve had carte-blanche to set the terms of what passes for religious debate in this country and dictate what morality even means in our society. Under Trump, such religious nationalism has reached a fever pitch as a reactionary movement that includes technocratic billionaires, televangelists, and armed militias has taken root with a simple enough message: God loves white Christian America, favors small government and big business, and rewards individualism and entrepreneurship. Meanwhile, the poor, people of color, and immigrants are blamed for society’s problems even as the rich get richer in what’s still the wealthiest country in the history of the world.

The dangers posed by today’s Christian nationalists are all too real, but the battle for the Bible itself is not new in America. In the 1700s and 1800s, slaveholders quoted the book of Philemon and lines from St. Paul’s epistles to claim that slavery was ordained by God. They also ripped the pages of Exodus from bibles they gave to the enslaved. During the Gilded Age of the nineteenth century, churches and politicians alike preached a “prosperity gospel” that extolled the virtues of industrial capitalism. Decades later, segregationists continued to use stray biblical verses to rubberstamp Jim Crow practices, while in the late 1970s the Moral Majority helped to mainstream a new generation of Christian extremists into national politics. In my own youth, I remember politicians quoting Thessalonians in the lead up to the passage of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act as proof that God believes in work-requirements for public assistance programs.

snip

September 28, 2020

From superpower to failed state: Inequality and the public health crisis in America

The pandemic has shined a spotlight on the failings of leaders and elites.

“[President Donald] Trump has made matters worse by weakening an already frayed health care safety net.”

~Jeffrey Young, Huffpost Politics, August 3, 2020



Earlier this week, the novel coronavirus death toll in the United States exceeded 200,000. As the highest in the world, it’s a distinction no self-respecting nation would desire or wish upon another. But there’s another “distinction” other democracies will happily abjure, namely, a history of social injustice trending in the wrong direction. The Covid-19 pandemic has thrown a glaring light on inequality in America at the same time as it has greatly widened the wealth gap between rich and poor. A particularly painful upshot of the gross income disparity between social classes—one that is unique to America among advanced economies—involves universal, affordable access to health care. According to Families USA, an estimated 5.4 million people became uninsured between February and May of this year. The socio-economic fallout associated with the public health crisis has “caused the greatest health insurances losses in American history.” Tragically, in an era of Republican rule, “The U.S. health care system is designed to fail when it’s needed most.” Worse still, the Trump administration is deliberately deepening this crisis-within-a-crisis.

The myth of equality in America

Contrary to a common popular belief encouraged and perpetuated by leaders of both major political parties, America has made little or no progress toward a more equal society in the past half century. In fact, by many of the most important measures America has become less equal. This pattern toward ever greater inequality has nothing to do with partisan perceptions or cherry picking the facts. Harvard’s Raj Chetty* has developed a data tracker that provides a detailed real-time view of the pandemic-induced effects on local economies down to the neighbourhood level.* The data doesn’t lie and what it makes absolutely clear is that the recession and related unemployment rates have returned to near normal for high-wage workers but “they remain significantly lower for low-wage workers.” One chart shows by April, the bottom quarter of wage earners, those making less than $27,000 a year, had lost almost 11 million jobs, more than three times the number lost by the top quarter, which earn more than $60,000 annually. In the following weeks and months, the gap widened. By June, the recession was all-but over for “high income individuals” while 80% of jobless workers were in the bottom half of the labour force. It was exactly 50 years ago this month that Milton Friedman wrote a seminal essay denouncing the idea that corporations should have a “social conscience” and arguing that such a misguided business ethic would undermine “the basis of a free society.”

If a corporation “takes seriously its responsibilities for providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else may be the watchwords of the contemporary crop of reformers,” it’s game over for American ascendency. It would be Friedman’s views— given a rocket boost with the election of Ronald Reagan election in 1980—that gained the ascendency. And the rest, as they say, is history: The promise of vital legislative protections against the excesses of unconstrained capitalism — including the National Labour Relations Act, minimum wage laws, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, antitrust regulations and consumer safety laws, to name a few — were undercut by two generations of ceaseless attack. Between 1948 and 1979 worker productivity grew 108%; wages grew apace, rising an impressive 93%. The stock market rose by 603% during these three decades. From 1979 to 2018, worker productivity grew 70% but wages stagnated, rising by less than 12%. But no worries: Compensation for chief executives grew by 940% and the stock market rose 2,200 percent! Donald Trump is not responsible for what happened before 2016, of course, but he has used the prodigious power of the American presidency to double down on Milton’s Friedman cruel image of what America should be. And he has done his damnedest to propel America from its superpower past to its future as a failed state.

Pandemics and people

The Covid-19 public health crisis has shed new light on another fact of life, namely that human nature is not a singular thing. The famous Pogo cartoon is relevant here: “Yep son,” Pogo says to Porkypine, “we have met the enemy and he is us.” As this pandemic has proven so clearly, human nature varies significantly. For some, it means taking responsibility for our actions—like social distancing and wearing a mask in a pandemic. For others, it means the exact opposite—taking off any pre-crisis mask of social responsibility. The pandemic has shined a spotlight not only on the failings of leaders and elites but also on the most selfish, ignorant, and reckless “ordinary” human beings among us. And it has made them spectacularly easy to identify. Because of its extremely infectious nature—but also because it is often asymptomatic—it has put the worst of our species—the ones who are too stunted to be heedful of science or respect expertise of any kind—in a position to prevent efforts to flatten the curve. And the smallest minded, many with morals to typify the tiniest mentality, are led by the man at the top with the biggest ego and a megaphone to match.

*The American Economic Association has described Chetty as “arguably the best applied microeconomist of his generation.”

snip

September 28, 2020

Official Biden Store: I Paid More In Taxes Than Donald Trump Vinyl Stickers

https://store.joebiden.com/I-Paid-More-In-Taxes-Than-Donald-Trump-Vinyl-Stickers-2-Pack/

September 27, 2020

How to make southern Sweden's farmers' egg cake

https://www.thelocal.se/20160219/how-to-make-southern-swedish-farmers-egg-cake



Äggakaga (egg cake) is a traditional dish originating from Skåne in southern Sweden. You can eat it any time of the year and it is best served hot straight from the pan, but at one time it was made for farm labourers helping with the harvest in autumn, because it could easily be wrapped up and eaten in a field for lunch. In Skåne it is called äggakaga, but in the rest of Sweden it is called äggakaka. Skåne was ruled by the Danes for many years and so some of their words and their dialect still have a Danish influence. When they pronounce it, it sounds more like äggakaga (or even äggakauga), which is how they spell it.

Summary
Serves: 4
Preparation: 5 minutes
Cooking: 35 minutes

Ingredients...........................

snip

Tips

- Swedes usually serve äggakaga with fried slices of rimmat sidfläsk (salted pork). I have suggested using streaky bacon which looks similar, isn't quite as salty and is generally much easier to obtain. However, if you can find some salted pork, I suggest you try both to see which you prefer.
- Äggakaga is much easier to cook in an oven, but the flavour and texture tend not to be quite as good. To do so, preheat your oven to 220C, pour the batter into a buttered ovenproof dish and bake for 20-25 minutes, until the egg is set.
- Serve äggakaga with apple wedges that have been fried in butter or the bacon fat. As apples grow well in Skåne, this is especially popular in southern Sweden.

snip

September 27, 2020

New coronavirus mutation could be evolving to get around mask-wearing and hand-washing

Covid-19 may have become more contagious as it has mutated, the largest genetic study carried out in the US into the virus has suggested

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/09/24/new-coronavirus-mutation-could-evolving-get-around-mask-wearing/



Covid-19 may have become more contagious as it has mutated, the largest genetic study carried out in the US into the virus has suggested, as scientists warn it could be adapting to interventions such as mask-wearing and social distancing. One variant of the novel coronavirus is now one of the most dominant in America, accounting for 99.9 per cent of cases in one area studied. The paper concluded that a mutation that changes the structure of the “spike protein” on the surface of the virus may be driving the outsized spread of that particular strain.

Researchers have been sequencing the genomes of the coronavirus at Houston Methodist, one of the largest hospitals in Texas, since early March, when the virus first appeared in the city. To date, they have documented 5,085 sequences. In the first wave of the outbreak in Houston around March, some 71 per cent of the viruses were characterised by the mutation, which originated in China and is known as D614G. By the second wave, which began in May and is ongoing, the D614G mutation leaped to 99.9 per cent prevalence. A tiny tweak in the spike protein of the dominant variant switches an amino acid from aspartic acid to glycine. The new mutation appears to be outdistancing all of its competitors. The graphic below explains more.



The researchers, who include some from the University of Chicago and the University of Texas at Austin, found that people infected with this strain had higher "loads" of virus in their upper respiratory tracts, which allows a virus to spread more effectively. One of the authors offered that D614G has been increasingly dominant in Houston and other areas because it is better adapted to spreading among humans. "Strains with a Gly614 amino acid replacement in the spike protein, a polymorphism that has been linked to increased transmission and in vitro cell infectivity, increased significantly over time and caused virtually all Covid-19 cases in the massive second disease wave," according to the authors.

Their paper, published on Wednesday by preprint server MedRxiv, however, did not find that it was more deadly. A similar study published in the UK had similar results, finding that D614G was increasing in frequency at “an alarming rate” and had rapidly become the dominant Covid-19 lineage in Europe and had then taken hold in the US, Canada and Australia. By failing to control the spread in the US - which has the highest number of cases in the world - the virus has been given more opportunity to mutate in a shorter amount of time. David Morens, a virologist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), told the Washington Post the findings point to the possibility that the virus has become more transmissible and that this “may have implications for our ability to control it”.



snip