#Deregulation Bill

[odinsblog]

I’ve seen tweets on Twitter and posts on Tumblr with blaming Reagan for the rise of Fox News because he vetoed the Fairness Doctrine.

And then again, I’ve also seen some objectively smart people play the role of devils advocate and try to refute this particular argument.

The truth is slightly more nuanced.

It’s true that the Fairness Doctrine was written at a time when most people did not get their news from cable news outlets. And it is also true that Reagan’s veto definitely did not help. But what David Cay Johnson and most neoliberal centrists miss (or aggressively ignore) is the fact that it was Bill (big government bad, deregulation good) Clinton who helped Republicans.

Without Clinton’s massive deregulation pushes of the 90s, we would be in a much better position than we find ourselves today.

PLEASE remember ALL of how we got here: This disaster is a direct result of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, signed into law by Bill Clinton. Among other things, the bill brought deregulation to the cable industry, deregulated price controls on how much cable companies could charge consumers, and lifted the national cap on radio station ownership. In the spirit of “pragmatic” compromise, “less government” and more “free market” competition, the legislation obliterated the rules that once placed ownership restrictions on broadcasters. 

The Telecommunications Act fueled media consolidation, and now over 90 percent of the media is owned by just six companies. Ninety percent of the top 50 cable stations are owned by the same parent companies that own the broadcast networks, which should destroy the notion that cable is any real source of competition. The bill was a giveaway to big business, but it was sold to the public as a consumer friendly bill.

Media consolidation is a threat to democracy. Corporations like Fox News and Sinclair Broadcasting Group are legally using lies, propaganda, disinformation and “alt facts” on an unsuspecting public.

The other disingenuous argument that David Johnson is making is that "people have a constitutional right to believe lies and to choose to be deceived" ..... Yes, but does the government have the right to be enabling those lies? Should the government really be facilitating privately owned, mass media corporations lying to the public??

Reaganism is and was bad for America. Clintonism made it worse in many many ways.

The simple answer is to reinstate a modern version of the Fairness Doctrine and also repeal the Telecommunications Act. Deregulation hurts citizens and consumers. We need more, not less, government regulation of big business.

[thoughtportal]

East Palestine

[felixwylde]

Tufton Tories, cry or laugh?

Well, sometimes you just have to shed a tear, or you’ll end up laughing your head off, don’t ya?So, when does that old saying “you’ve gotta laugh, or you’d cry” go a bit too far? When does the laughter stop, and you’re left feeling all miserable?When your family gets caught up in the dodgy dealings of some rich folks with some questionable ideas, what’s the right thing to do?Can you believe they…

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The health industry’s invisible hand is a fist

On June 21, I'm doing an ONLINE READING for the LOCUS AWARDS at 16hPT. On June 22, I'll be in OAKLAND, CA for a panel and a keynote at the LOCUS AWARDS.

The US has the rich world's most expensive health care system, and that system delivers the worst health outcomes of any country in the rich world. Also, the US is unique in relying on market forces as the primary regulator of its health care system. All of these facts are related!

Capitalism's most dogmatic zealots have a mystical belief in the power of markets to "efficiently allocate" goods and services. For them, the process by which goods and services are offered and purchased performs a kind of vast, distributed computation that "discovers the price" of everything. Our decisions to accept or refuse prices are the data that feeds this distributed computer, and the signals these decisions send about our desires triggers investment decisions by sellers, which guides the whole system to "equilibrium" in which we are all better off.

There's some truth to this: when demand for something exceeds the supply, prices tend to go up. These higher prices tempt new sellers into the market, until demand is met and prices fall and production is stabilized at the level that meets demand.

But this elegant, self-regulating system rarely survives contact with reality. It's the kind of simplified model that works when we're hypothesizing about perfectly spherical cows of uniform density on a frictionless surface, but ceases to be useful when it encounters a messy world of imperfect rationality, imperfect information, monopolization, regulatory capture, and other unavoidable properties of reality.

For members of the "efficient market" cult, reality's stubborn refusal to behave the way it does in their thought experiments is a personal affront. Panged by cognitive dissonance, the cult members insist that any market failures in the real world are illusions caused by not doing capitalism hard enough. When deregulation and markets fail, the answer is always more deregulation and more markets.

That's the story of the American health industry in a nutshell. Rather than accepting that people won't shop for the best emergency room while unconscious in an ambulance, or that the "clearing price" of "not dying of cancer" is "infinity," the cult insists that America's worst-in-class, most expensive health system just needs more capitalism to turn it into a world leader.

In the 1980s, Reagan's court sorcerers decreed that they could fix health care with something called "Prospective Payment Systems," which would pay hospitals a lump sum for treating conditions, rather than reimbursing them for each procedure, using competition and profit motives to drive "efficiency." The hospital system responded by "upcoding' patients: if you showed up with a broken leg and a history of coronary disease, they would code you as a heart patient and someone who needed a cast. They'd collect both lump sums, slap a cast on you, and wheel you out the door:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4195137/

As Robert Kuttner writes for The American Prospect, this kind of abuse was predictable from the outset, especially since Health and Human Services is starved of budget for auditors and can only hand out "slaps on the wrist" when they catch a hospital ripping off the system:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-13-fantasyland-general/

Upcoding isn't limited to Medicare fraud, either. Hospitals and insurers are locked in a death-battle over payments, and hospitals' favorite scam is sending everyone to the ER, even when they don't have emergencies (some hospitals literally lock all the doors except for the ER entrance). That way, a normal, uncomplicated childbirth can be transformed into a "Level 5" emergency treatment (the highest severity of emergency) and generate a surprise bill of over $2,700:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/27/crossing-a-line/#zero-fucks-given

The US health industry is bad enough to generate a constant degree of political will for change, but the industry (and its captured politicians and regulators) is also canny enough to dream up an endless procession of useless gimmicks designed to temporarily bleed off the pressure for change. In 2018, HHS passed a rule requiring hospitals to publish their prices.

Hospitals responded to this with a shrewd gambit: they simply ignored the rule. So in 2021, HHS made another rule, creating penalties for ignoring the first rule:

https://www.cms.gov/priorities/key-initiatives/hospital-price-transparency/hospitals

The theory here was that publishing prices would create "market discipline." Again, this isn't wholly nonsensical. To the extent that patients have nonurgent conditions and the free time to shop around, being able to access prices will help them. Indeed, if the prices are in a standards-defined, machine-readable form, patients and their advocates could automatically import them, create price-comparison sites, leaderboards, etc. None of this addresses the core problem that health-care is a) a human right and b) not a discretionary expense, but it could help at the margins.

But there's another wrinkle here. The same people who claim that prices can solve all of our problems also insist that monopolies are impossible. They've presided over a decades-long assault on antitrust law that has seen hospitals, pharma companies, insurers, and a menagerie of obscure middlemen merge into gigantic companies that are too big to fail and too big to jail. When a single hospital system is responsible for the majority of care in a city or even a county, how much punishment can regulators realistically subject it to?

Not much, as it turns out. Kuttner describes how Mass Gen Brigham cornered the market on health-care in Boston, allowing it to flout the rules on pricing. In addition to standard tricks – like charging self-pay patients vastly more than insured payments (because individuals don't have the bargaining power of insurers), Mass Gen Brigham's price data is a sick joke.

See for yourself! The portal will send you giant, unstructured, ZIPped text files filled with cryptic garbage like:

ADJUSTABLE C TAPER NECK PLUS|1|UNITED HEALTHCARE [1016]|HB CH UNITED HMO / PPO / INDEMNITY [34]|UNITED HEALTHCARE HMO [101604]|75|Inv Loc: 1004203; from OR location 1004203|52.02|Inpatient PAF; 69.36% Billed|75|Inv Loc: 1004203; from OR location 1004203|56.87|Outpatient PAF; 75.83% Billed

https://www.massgeneralbrigham.org/en/patient-care/patient-visitor-information/billing/cms-required-hospital-charge-data

These files have tens of thousands of rows. As a patient, you are meant to parse through these in order to decide whether you're getting ripped off on that HIP STEM 16X203MM SIZE 4 FEMORAL PRESS FIT NEUTRAL REVISION TITANIUM you're in the market for (as it happens, I have two of these in my body).

Kuttner describes the surreal lengths he had to go through to prevent his mother from getting ripped off by Mass Gen through an upcoding hustle. By coding her as "admitted for observation," Mass Gen was able to turn her into an outpatient, with a 20% co-pay (this is down to a GW Bush policy that punishes hospitals that charge Medicare for inpatient care when they could be treated as outpatients – hospitals reflexively game the system to make every patient an outpatient, even if they have overnight hospital stays).

Kuttner's an expert on this: he was national policy correspondent for the New England Journal of Medicine and covers the health beat for the Prospect. Even so, it took him ten hours of phone calls to two doctors' offices and Blue Cross to resolve the discrepancy. The average person is not qualified to do this – indeed, the average person won't even know they've been upcoded.

Needless to say that people in other countries – countries where health care is cheaper and the outcomes are better – are baffled by this. Canadians, Britons, Australians, Germans, Finns, etc do not have to price-shop for their care. They don't have to hawkishly monitor their admission paperwork for sneaky upcodes. They don't have to spend ten hours on the phone arguing about esoteric billing practices.

In a rational world, we'd compare the American system to the rest of the world and say, "Well, they've figured it out, we should do what they're doing." But in good old U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!, the answer to this is more prices, more commercialization, more market forces. Just rub some capitalism on it!

That's where companies like Multiplan come in: this is a middleman that serves other middlemen. Multiplan negotiates prices on behalf of insurers, and splits the difference between the list price and the negotiated price with them:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/07/us/health-insurance-medical-bills.html

But – as the Arm and a Leg podcast points out – this provides the perverse incentive for Multiplan to drive list prices up. If the list price quintuples, and then Multiplan drives it back down to, say, double the old price, they collect more money. Meanwhile, your insurer sticks you with the bill, over and above your deductible and co-pay:

https://armandalegshow.com/episode/multiplan/

The Multiplan layer doesn't just allow insurers to rip you off (though boy does it allow insurers to rip you off), it also makes it literally impossible to know what the price is going to be before you get your procedure. As with any proposition bet, the added complexity is there to make it impossible for you to calculate the odds and figure out if you're getting robbed:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/04/house-always-wins/#are-you-on-drugs

Multiplan is the purest expression of market dynamics brainworms I've yet encountered: solving the inefficiencies created by the complexity of a system with too many middlemen by adding another middle-man who is even more complex.

No matter what the problem is with America's health industry, the answer is always the same: more markets! Are older voters getting pissed off at politicians for slashing Medicare? No problem: just create Medicare Advantage, where old people can surrender their right to government care and place themselves in the loving hands of a giant corporation that makes more money by denying them care.

The US health industry is a perfect parable about the dangers of trusting shareholder accountable markets to do the work of democratically accountable governments. Shareholders love monopolies, so they drove monopolization throughout the health supply chain. As David Dayen writes in his 2020 book Monopolized the pharma industry monopolized first, and put the screws to hospitals:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/29/fractal-bullshit/#dayenu

Hospitals formed regional monopolies to counter the seller power of consolidated Big Pharma. That's Mass Gen's story: tapping the capital markets to buy other hospitals in the region until it became too big to fail and too big to jail (and too big to care). Consolidated hospitals, in turn, put the screws to insurers, so they also consolidated, fighting Big Hospital's pricing power.

Monopoly at any point in a supply chain leads to monopoly throughout the supply chain. But patients can't consolidate (that's what governments are for – representing the diffuse interests of people). Neither can health workers (that's what unions are for). So the system screwed everyone: patients paid more for worse care. Health workers put in longer hours under worse conditions and got paid less.

Kuttner describes how his eye doctor races from patient to patient "as if he was on roller skates." When Kuttner wrote him a letter questioning the quality of care, the eye doctor answered that he understood that he was giving his patients short shrift, but explained that he had to, because his pay was half what he needed, relegating him to a small apartment and an old car. The hospital – which skims the payments he gets for care – sets his caseload, and he can't turn down patients.

The answers to this are obvious: get markets out of health care. Unionize health workers. Give regulators the budgets and power to hold health corporations to account.

But for market cultists, all of that can't work. Instead, we have to create more esoteric middlemen like "pharmacy benefit managers" and Multiplan. We need more prices to shovel into the market computer's data-hopper. If we just capitalism hard enough, surely the system will finally work…someday.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/13/a-punch-in-the-guts/#hayek-pilled

[wumblr]

The number of commercial-scale Bitcoin mining operations in the U.S. has increased sharply over the last few years; there are now at least 137. Similar medical complaints have been registered near facilities in Arkansas and North Dakota. And the Bitcoin mining industry is urgently trying to push bills through state legislatures, including in Indiana and Missouri, which would exempt Bitcoin mines from local zoning or noise ordinances. In May, Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt signed a “Bitcoin Rights” bill to protect miners and prevent any future attempts to ban the industry. Much of the American Bitcoin mining industry can now be found in Texas, home to giant power plants, lax regulation, and crypto-friendly politicians. In October 2021, Governor Greg Abbott hosted the lobbying group Texas Blockchain Council at the governor’s mansion. The group insisted that their industry would help the state’s overtaxed energy grid; that during energy crises, miners would be one of the few energy customers able to shut off upon request, provided that they were paid in exchange. After meeting with the lobbyists, Abbott tweeted that Texas would soon be the “#1 [state] for blockchain & cryptocurrency.” Technically there is federal mandate to regulate noise, which stems from the 1972 Noise Control Act—but it was essentially de-funded during the Reagan administration. This leaves noise regulation up to states, cities, and counties. New York City, for instance, has a noise code which officially caps restaurant music and air conditioning at 42 decibels (as measured within a nearby residence). Texas’s 85 decibels, in contrast, is by far the loudest state limit in the nation, says Les Blomberg, the executive director of the nonprofit Noise Pollution Clearinghouse. “It is a level that protects noise polluters, not the noise polluted,” he says. The residents of Granbury feel they’ve been lied to. In 2023, the site’s previous operators, US Bitcoin Corp, constructed a wall around the mine almost 2,000 feet long and claimed that they had “solved the concern.” But Shirley says that the complaints from the community about the sound actually increased when the wall was nearing completion last fall. Since Marathon bought the facility outright in December, its hash rate, or computational power expended, has doubled. Any statewide legislation is sure to hit significant headwinds, because the very idea of regulation runs contrary to many Texans’ political beliefs. “As constitutional conservatives, they have taken our core values and used that against us,” says Demetra Conrad, a city council member in the nearby town of Glen Rose. In the week before this article’s publication, two more Granbury residents suffered from acute health crises. The first was Tom Weeks. “This whole thing is an eye opener for me into profit over people,” Weeks says in a phone call from the ICU. The second person affected was the five-year-old Indigo Rosenkranz. Her mother, Sarah, was terrified and now feels she has no choice but to get a second mortgage to move away from the mine. “A second one would really be a lot,” she says. “God will provide, though. He always sees us through.”

shocking! texans suffer from deregulation and ineffective walls

[phoenixyfriend]

me, shaking people: the economy is more simple than economists make it out to be but it is still more complicated than you think, please stop thinking Trump will 'fix' prices. every proposal I've seen from his campaign will increase prices, with only the very slight possibility that gas might drop in response to Trump relaxing pressure on Russia and giving Putin the go-ahead to kill hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians. Even that's unlikely, because Biden had all oil production in the US pushed to max in order to combat rising gas prices after Russia and the Middle East started trying to do a price squeeze on the rest of the world.

Deportation of migrants will increase food costs.

Increased tariffs will increase the costs of goods that we primarily get from the targeted countries.

Removal of further FDA regulations will result in higher rates of infection of the masses, meaning more healthcare bills, and every time a recall happens, any money the producer saved with cutting corners will be lost to the recall, meaning your prices still go up.

Deregulation of corporate mergers will result in monopolies that, again, raise your prices.

Continuation of the 2017 tax cuts to the wealthy will continue to incentivize higher taxes on the lower and middle class, as the tariffs will not be enough to cover that hole in the budget, even with the proposed budget cuts to things like Social Security and the EPA.

Trump is not good for the economy, unless you happen to be Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or Warren Buffet.

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Years after the Quebec government deregulated the taxi industry to allow services like Uber to operate, taxi drivers in Quebec have scored a court victory to the tune of $143 million, plus interest.

On Friday, a Quebec Superior Court judge awarded the sum as part of a ruling in a class-action lawsuit.

In 2019, Bill 17 was passed into law. The law abolished the taxi permit system while integrating app-based ride-hailing services into provincial regulations.

Around the time the law was passed, services like Uber were expanding their operations in the province, prompting anger and protests from taxi drivers who had spent tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, to purchase their taxi permits.

After the bill became law, the Quebec government doled out more than $800 million in compensation to taxi drivers in the province, but drivers didn't believe that amount was enough to make up for their losses.

Continue Reading

Tagging: @newsfromstolenland

[mariacallous]

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris’s selection of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate was met with enthusiasm from Democrats across the party, including from the party’s left wing. A big part of this is Walz’s solidly pro-labor governing record and his appeal to working-class voters, which was on display on Wednesday when he spoke at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Although his championing of working Americans’ jobs, pay, and rights has obvious and important domestic appeal, it also has a potentially significant implication for foreign policy under a Harris-Walz administration.

One of the Biden administration’s most important projects, sometimes summarized as “post-neoliberalism,” has been the move away from unfettered so-called free trade—the pro-corporate theology that dominated the past few decades of economic policymaking. The government is now fully back in the business of investing in U.S. workers and communities. (A 2023 report tracking this progress was published by the Roosevelt Institute, a think tank helping to drive this transformation.)

As vice president, Harris has played a key role in this pivotal project, and selecting one of the  most pro-worker governors in the country as a running mate signals that she is all-in on this shift. This is great news, because not only is this post-neoliberal, pro-worker agenda likely where the election will be won, but it is also central to the larger goal of defending global democracy.

Conservatives have noticed. “By picking Tim Walz as her running mate, Harris has gone a long way toward bolstering her left-populist flank and neutralizing [Republican vice presidential candidate J.D.] Vance’s potential appeal,” wrote Sohrab Ahmari, the founder and editor of the conservative nationalist magazine Compact and a leading voice of the populist new right, when the pick was announced. “Walz can’t be framed as a neoliberal Democrat in the Clinton-Obama mold.”

Vance’s own speech at the Republican National Convention in July was billed as foreign policy-focused, but it was really all about how U.S. elites had failed the country’s struggling workers. Playing up his family roots in a small Ohio town—“a place that had been cast aside and forgotten by America’s ruling class in Washington”—Vance attacked U.S. President Joe Biden for his past support of the North American Free Trade Agreement, for China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, and for “the disastrous invasion of Iraq.”

“At each step of the way, in small towns like mine in Ohio, or next door in Pennsylvania or Michigan, in other states across our country, jobs were sent overseas, and our children were sent to war,” Vance said. While larded over with common right-wing tropes and xenophobic invective, the speech sounded like a road map for how the Republican Party intends to capture the working class.

In its own way, Vance’s speech was a darker, divisive version of a more affirmative and unifying  address that U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan gave in April 2023, which laid out the Biden administration’s global economic agenda. Confronting the flawed assumptions that dominated U.S. statecraft in the past 40 years—“that markets always allocate capital productively and efficiently”—Sullivan rejected the philosophy that “championed tax cutting and deregulation, privatization over public action, and trade liberalization as an end in itself.”

Like Vance a year later, Sullivan acknowledged that elites had failed working people in the United States. He said that not only had an economic integration approach failed as a geopolitical strategy—not stopping China from military expansion or deterring Russia from invading its neighbors—but it also radically increased economic and political inequality, both globally and domestically. The speech marked an important step forward in Washington’s thinking.

However, much less noticed was a speech that Sullivan gave a week later at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which showed how the Biden administration still had one foot in the previous era. In that speech, Sullivan laid out the administration’s plan to maintain U.S. hegemony in the Middle East by buttressing relationships with various repressive, undemocratic regimes and stitching together an alliance intended both to contain Iran and box China out of the region.

I noted to administration colleagues at the time that the second speech was a formula for squandering the opportunities of the first. While the Biden administration had discarded some of the flawed foreign-policy assumptions of the past, it continued to hold fast to the idea that Washington can purchase security and prosperity for U.S. workers by exporting insecurity and repression to others, whether in the Middle East, China, or anywhere else. The past 10 months of catastrophic war in Gaza should have discredited that notion, if it wasn’t already.

The United States can build a more equitable global order, or it can frantically try to maintain global primacy, but it can’t do both. The Harris-Walz team has an important task and a big opportunity to diminish this contradiction and complete this transformation. Just as the neoliberal era proved that giving carte blanche to big corporations—whether they’re car companies or weapons manufacturers—is not a means for achieving broad economic progress or security, the past 20 years of the “war on terror” showed that a heavily militarized foreign policy feeds global insecurity and shreds the fabric of international norms.

As outlined by Trump and Vance, the Republican vision is essentially zero-sum: The United States and its workers only win by others losing, and vice versa. The Harris-Walz team can offer a vision of contrasting solidarity, which doesn’t seek to build political consensus by vilifying the foreign enemy of the moment but rather seeks ways to uplifts workers and their communities in every country.

The U.S. public needs to hear more about how diplomacy and cooperation—including with China, can provide other benefits for Americans, as evidenced recently when China imposed new controls on fentanyl precursor chemicals—and about how the issue of irregular migration, which has been a driving force in far-right populism, can only be addressed by improving conditions and reducing violence in the home countries of those migrants—a shared struggle that the labor movement understands and embraces.

A real pro-worker foreign policy doesn’t pit the security and prosperity of Americans against workers in other countries but recognizes that our security and prosperity are bound together. We saw the outlines of that in the speech from Walz, the good neighbor and the inspiring coach, on Wednesday. That is the winning global vision that he and Harris should embrace.

[whilomm]

Okay, hey, maybe a casual strategy for getting people around you to pay any fucking attention to politics going forward, dunno how effective itll be but its an idea: when your relatives/coworkers/whoever talk about day to day issues in this coming years, when it has a connection to trump, connect it to trump. dont belabor the point, dont go in depth unless they start asking a lotta questions, just casually point out "oh yeah..."

like FDA recalls, when we have 20 more listeria outbreaks in lettuce, casually point out the deregulation and defunding of the FDA under the trump admin. Well, you cant be surprised that when you stop regulating stuff, companies get lax, ya know? and then dont lecture or anything, just casually connect bad thing thats happening to trump, if they ask questions and make it a conversation go for it, but leave it as a comment if thats all it needs.

if they succeed at gutting the NOAA at all like they want to per project 2025 (with the exact wording being "breaking up and downsizing" it), and weather reporting gets worse, connect it. point out the fact that theyve been defunding the agency who tracks weather, if theres been layoffs, etc. yeah, kind of hard to track the weather on a shoestring budget, half the staff laid off, no budget for upgrading equipment... isnt it weird that theyre so obsessed with climate change being fake that they fired half the people tracking tornados?

they reduce the budget for infrastructure shit when our infrastructure is already so fucking shit? point it out, and point out the potholes. and the issues with the bridges and dams. another one of our old ass bridges crumbles? yeah biden was trying to fix stuff with the infrastructure bill but trump reduced the funding again when he came back to office.

Obviously these are all hypothetical bc im not psychic, but im just saying, pay attention to the little boring everyday agencies that are deregulated, cause trump LOVES deregulation and there are explicit plans for more. and when the cracks start to show, point it out to your normie ass relatives and coworkers and friends. make them realize and mentally connect trump to shit crumbling. Not a lecture or anything, if it leads to deeper convos cool, but just casual observations.

[libraford]

I remember early on in the trump administration- I was sitting at the mechanic's lobby and he was on the news with a giant stack of papers wrapped in a big red ribbon. And he talked about how the regulations imposed by previous administrations got in the way of business and prevented every day americans from reaching the american dream. And he took a pair of shears and cut the ribbon, symbolically cutting the red tape, as a promise to undo all regulations that hot in the way of moving forward.

And I looked to the woman waiting in the lobby with me, in her 60s, who shook her head along with me at the gesture, because we both lived on a low income side of town and people in our tax bracket know what happens when regulations are slack- people get sick, they get hurt, they die.

Disaster happens when people are careless and each regulation is written in blood.

Fuck that guy.

Picture id/transcript: (a screenshot of a news report by Heather Cox Richardson from february 15 2023)

But the derailment of fifty Norfolk Southern train cars, eleven of which carried hazardous chemicals, near East Palestine, Ohio, near the northeastern border of the state on February 3 has powerfully illustrated the downsides of deregulation. The accident released highly toxic chemicals into the air, water, and ground, causing a massive fire and forcing about 5,000 nearby residents in Ohio and Pennsylvania to evacuate. On February 6, when it appeared some of the rail cars would explode, officials allowed the company to release and burn the toxic vinyl chloride stored in it. The controlled burn sent highly toxic phosgene, used as a weapon in World War I, into the air.

Republican Ohio governor Mike DeWine has refused federal assistance from President Biden, who, he said, called to offer “anything you need.” DeWine said he had not called back to take him up on the offer. “We will not hesitate to do that if we’re seeing a problem or anything, but I’m not seeing it,” he said.

Just over the border, Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, said that Norfolk Southern had botched its response to the accident. “Norfolk Southern has repeatedly assured us of the safety of their rail cars—in fact, leading Norfolk Southern personnel described them to me as ‘the Cadillac of rail cars’—yet despite these assertions, these were the same cars that Norfolk Southern personnel rushed to vent and burn without gathering input from state and local leaders. Norfolk Southern’s well known opposition to modern regulations [requires] further scrutiny and investigation to limit the devastating effects of future accidents on people’s lives, property, businesses, and the environment.”

Shapiro was likely referring to the fact that in 2017, after donors from the railroad industry poured more than $6 million into Republican political campaigns, the Trump administration got rid of a rule imposed by the Obama administration that required better braking systems on rail cars that carried hazardous flammable materials.

According to David Sirota, Julia Rock, Rebecca Burns, and Matthew Cunningham-Cook, writing in the investigative journal The Lever, Norfolk Southern supported the repeal, telling regulators new electronically controlled pneumatic brakes on high-hazard flammable trains (HHFT) would “impose tremendous costs without providing offsetting safety benefits.” Railroads also lobbied to limit the definition of HFFT to cover primarily trains that carry oil, not industrial chemicals. The train that derailed in Ohio was not classified as an HHFT.

Nonetheless, Ohio’s new far-right Republican senator J. D. Vance went on the Fox News Channel show of personality Tucker Carlson to blame the Biden administration for the accident. He said there was no excuse for failing infrastructure after the passage last year of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, and said that the administration is too focused on “environmental racism and other ridiculous things.” We are, he said, “ruled by unserious people.”

:end id/transcript

[warsofasoiaf]

Harris' economic "plan" is populist, anti-capitalist, and anti-investor. "Price gouging" is just whining about corporate profits and keeping new housing from going to investors is openly Socialist. I can't and won't support the dissolution of capitalism and trust you won't either.

That's clearly bait and falling into the all-too-common progressive false dichotomy of "you either support my policies or you're just a tool of big business and thus safe to disregard," a fallacy that largely dominates progressive thinking and sadly inhibits proper debate. But that being said, Harris's recent proposed economic plans are actually quite stupid from an economics perspective. Sadly, Trump and Harris are both racing to see who can create the stupidest economic policy possible this electoral cycle: Trump seemingly trying to turbocharge inflation with removing the Fed's independence to increase market instability and slapping tariffs on everything to pander to the nativists versus Harris seemingly trying to create price controls, inevitably resulting in shortages, out of a desire to pander to progressives. Either way, it's crafting bad policy largely to suit their particular vibes.

The "price gouging" bill is questionably constitutional at the federal level. insofar as she appears to be pushing for executive power to enforce the edict via the FTC. This would be a vast expansion of the FTC's purview - which should alarm anyone actually slightly concerned by the idea of the vast expansion of presidential authority.

But even if you don't, price controls are a terrible idea. Historically speaking, there aren't any examples in the US where they work out in a positive fashion save one - the price control system during the Second World War, where wartime rationing completely altered aggregate consumer demand to the point where it's an ineffective analogue (and the uniting purpose of defeating the Axis powers to enforce compliance and reduce control evasion simply doesn't exist today). Neither do we see much success globally, they typically end up presiding over a high degree of shortages and don't have much of an effect on actual prices, economists are very much in lock-step on this particular point. But price controls do have one benefit: they're popular, of course, because it reduces any complexities to a simple binary state. Why are groceries expensive? Clearly it's because the EVIL grocery store is jacking up prices. That's what "greedflation" keeps telling us, despite it being provably wrong. The fact that profit margins in grocery stores are razor thin and barely moved during the pandemic and the periods of inflation is irrelevant. After all, it doesn't suit the vibes.

This is particularly hilarious because if you look at the data, we've actually largely conquered inflation from a food prices perspective. Here's the inflation index for food prices - they've been hovering at about zero percent for about 32 months now. And it gets even worse when you look at wages versus food prices - it's been climbing steadily upwards. There was a bad hit during the time of inflation back in 2021 and 2022, but has been on an upward trend ever since 2023. So this is a policy trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist in the way Harris has defined it and so won't actually effect a negative push on prices, but that simple fact is a mere technicality - it isn't congruent with the vibes.

But people still believe that grocery prices are too high because of price jumps in those years, which is primarily due to supply shocks and the unprecedented printing of new money under both the Trump and Biden administrations. There are plenty of policies we could propose or enact to address that. We could stop drastically expanding the money supply (which we have, sort of) or we could break out the policy toolkit to reduce prices. We could use industrial and tax policy to increase supplies, we could deregulate to cut the cost of production, we could reduce tariffs (or actually fix our dysfunctional ports) to increase competitive pressure. We could increase oil production to reduce the cost of fuel (and thus shipping) or work on developing ways to reduce the cost of energy by building more solar or nuclear (which is roundabout and minimally effective but also has a knock-on effect across the board). But that's boring! That doesn't make me out to be the scrappy underdog under assault from all sides by nefarious actors! I don't want logical answers derived from the data with coherent policy goals to address those issues designed by people who know what they're doing, I want to stick it to the people who I know are making me suffer! I want my pre-existing biases to be repeated back to me so that I can reassure myself of my inherent virtue. In short, I want vibes!

The number of houses that goes to investors is in the single-percentile range, which drops dramatically when you remove the small investor category (individual investors owning <=5 homes including their own residence - which also includes older and/or wealthier folks who may own a primary home and a vacation home and are not technically in the "housing investor class" per say), where now it's not even a single percentage point. Whereas building more houses and enacting deregulation on zoning to allow mixed-use zoning, single-staircase apartments, and other YIMBY pro-housing policies have such a dramatically more positive effect on homeowners (and reduces the price which makes housing a *less* attractive investment - which would actually reduce large-scale investor purchases of homes if someone actually cared about doing that). But no, let's set up a costly apparatus for minimal effect. It's not very effective, but at least there's a clear evil bad guy - some rich investor that the honest man can give the what-for! So in essence, vibes.

But hey, who cares how effective policy is? After all, who needs data when you have V I B E S.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

[odinsblog]

Republican hostage demands include:

Increasing and not cutting the defense budget, nor the Border Patrol budget

Cut funding to the following programs and agencies by 51 percent: Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the Social Security Administration, Environmental Protection Agency, Veteran’s Assistance Program, Health and Human Services, Department of Education, Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Justice Department, the State Department, the Department of Transportation, NASA, the Labor Department, and more (source)

Rescind any student loan relief and make borrowers pay back any payments that were paused or recently forgiven

Defund the IRS so that it cannot go after wealthy tax evaders

New, harsher work requirements for Medicaid recipients

Raise the work retirement age for people enrolled in the SNAP, from 50 to 55 years old

More stringent work requirements for food stamp recipients

Deregulation of drilling and mining permitting

Repeal any tax breaks that encouraged using renewable energy sources

Pledges to increase domestic production of oil and other fossil fuels

In short, the Republican demands to raise the debt ceiling is a manufactured crisis. It’s yet another GOP wish list to attack poor people by eviscerating the social safety net, while simultaneously deregulating big businesses and defunding the government agencies that could hold polluters and exploiters accountable

👉🏿 https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/heres-whats-in-the-gop-bill-to-lift-the-u-s-debt-limit

👉🏿 https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2022/12/12/voters-want-congress-to-raise-the-debt-ceiling-and-protect-social-programs

👉🏿 https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/debt-ceiling-house-republicans-bill-limit-save-grow-act/

[thoughtportal]

Congressman Bill Johnson takes $18k from Norfolk Southern Pack

creator of the video: https://linktr.ee/heyjohnrussell

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Daniel Marans at HuffPost:

LANGHORNE, Pa. — In a hotel conference room a little over 20 miles northeast of the Philadelphia venue where the two major parties’ presidential nominees were set to debate hours later, a conservative group was preparing to rally its supporters Tuesday morning behind a Republican candidate locked in a tight battle for Pennsylvania votes. No, the candidate w,as not former President Donald Trump. Americans for Prosperity Action, or AFP Action — a libertarian-leaning conservative group funded by the Koch network of conservative donors — and its Latino outreach arm, Libre Action, were instead holding a canvass kickoff event for Dave McCormick, a former hedge fund manager and Gulf War veteran engaged an uphill battle to unseat U.S. Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.). “We’re fighting for our American dream — the American dream that is slipping away from us,” Jennie Dallas, the Harrisburg-based strategic director of the affiliated Libre Initiative, told the multiracial crowd of staff members and paid canvassers clad in light blue organizers T-shirts. “And we know that David McCormick knows that.”

AFP Action’s Tuesday event in the heart of suburban Bucks County — one of the most contested counties in a critical swing state — offers a window into what a non-Trump-aligned right looks like in 2024. It means waging campaigns more focused on tax cuts and deregulation than on mass deportation or populism, and focusing on Senate and House races with more conventionally conservative candidates. A win for McCormick, who is considered far more of an underdog than GOP Senate challengers in Montana and Ohio, would virtually ensure Republican control of the Senate come November. While Democrats have a 51-49 edge in the chamber now, they are certain to lose West Virginia and their best pickup opportunities are long shots. GOP control of the Senate could prove especially critical for conservatives if Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris defeats Trump in the White House contest, according to Emily Greene, a senior adviser to Americans for Prosperity Action who runs the group’s Pennsylvania operations.

[...] Shaping — and, more recently, surviving — changes in the Republican governing coalition and policy agenda are nothing new for Americans for Prosperity and its political spending arm, AFP Action. But the Koch network — as AFP/AFP Action, The Libre Initiative/Libre Action, and their affiliate partners are often known — now finds itself in an extended period of ideological exile from the highest levels of Republican power. AFP opposes Trump’s trade tariffs, has a much more moderate approach to immigration policy than Trump and, unlike Trump himself, continues to defend the bipartisan sentencing reform bill he signed in 2018. Americans for Prosperity’s surviving founder, the oil and manufacturing billionaire Charles Koch — who co-created the group with his late brother, David Koch — has made his aversion to Trump abundantly clear. AFP Action decided not to endorse a candidate in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, dedicating its federal resources to electing Republicans to Congress. And in June 2023, the Kock network announced that it had raised $70 million to help the Republican Party move away from Trump. When Trump eventually emerged as the Republican presidential nominee this year, despite AFP Action’s $31 million super PAC spending on primary opponent Nikki Haley’s behalf, the group once again pivoted to Congress.

[...] To American progressives, Charles and David Koch were once the country’s chief ideological villains. They bankrolled the tea party movement, which gave birth to a hard-line faction of congressional Republicans committed to obstructing then-President Barack Obama’s policy agenda. But while many rank-and-file tea party activists were actually more concerned about immigration than their budget rhetoric would suggest, and welcomed Trump’s nativist program with open arms, the Kochs — and the cadre of right-wing libertarian activists and intellectuals they cultivated — were not ready to make the jump.

With programs like The Libre Initiative and Libre Action, the Koch network is also betting that appeals to Latino voters’ pocketbooks and interest in upward mobility would be more effective than Trump’s personality-centered populism — regardless of what polling suggests about his inroads with Latino voters. The Libre Initiative has, for example, argued that the Biden administration’s attempts to make it harder to classify workers as independent contractors would “hurt Latino workers,” since half of Latino workers fall under this category. “They’re opening up, and they’re seeing what’s most important to us now is our prosperity,” said Dallas, the strategic director. “It’s about being able to prosper in America.” At the same time, Libre’s moderate rhetoric on immigration, which combines calls for strict border enforcement with support for legalizing Dreamers and other bipartisan reforms, also hearkens back to the time period after Republicans’ loss in the 2012 presidential election, when the GOP began looking at softening its stance on immigration to appeal to more Latino voters.

The Koch Brothers, determined to stay in the GOP apparatus of influence, are focused on the #PASen race in a quest to flip control of the Senate.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Boeing, Spirit and Jetblue, a monopoly horror-story

Catch me in Miami! I'll be at Books and Books in Coral Gables TONIGHT (Jan 22) at 8PM. Berliners: Otherland has added a second date (Jan 28) for my book-talk after the first one sold out - book now!

Last week, William Young, an 82 year old federal judge appointed by Ronald Reagan, blocked the merger of Spirit Airlines and Jetblue. It was a seismic event:

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mad.254267/gov.uscourts.mad.254267.461.0_6.pdf

Seismic because the judge's opinion is full of rhetoric associated with the surging antitrust revival, sneeringly dismissed by corporate apologists as "hipster antitrust." Young called America's airlines and "oligopoly," a situation he blamed on out-of-control mergers. As Matt Stoller writes, this is the first airline merger to be blocked by the DOJ and DOT since deregulation in 1978:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/antitrust-enforcers-block-the-jetblue

The judge wasn't shy about why he was reviving a pre-Jimmy Carter theory of antitrust: "[the merger] does violence to the core principle of antitrust law, 'to protect] markets –- and its market participants — from anticompetitive harm."

The legal arguments the judge advances are fascinating and worthy of study:

https://twitter.com/johnmarknewman/status/1747343447227519122

But what really caught my eye was David Dayen's American Prospect article about the judge's commentary on the state of the aviation industry:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/01-19-2024-how-boeing-ruined-the-jetblue-spirit-merger/

Why, after all, have Spirit and Jetblue been so ardent in pursuing mergers? Jetblue has had two failed merger attempts with Virgin, and this is the third time they've failed in an attempt to merge with Spirit. Spirit, meanwhile, just lost a bid to merge with Frontier. Why are these two airlines so obsessed with combining with each other or any other airline that will have them?

As Dayen explains, it's because US aviation has been consumed by monopoly, hollowed out to the point of near collapse, thanks to neoliberal policies at every part of the aviation supply-chain. For one thing, there's just not enough pilots, nor enough air-traffic controllers (recall that Reagan's first major act in office was to destroy the air traffic controller's union).

But even more importantly, there are no more planes. Boeing's waitlist for airplane delivery stretches to 2029. And Boeing is about to deliver a lot fewer planes, thanks to its disastrous corner-cutting, which grounded a vast global fleet of 737 Max aircraft (again):

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/2024-01-09-boeing-737-max-financial-mindset/

The 737 disaster(s) epitomize the problems of inbred, merger-obsessed capitalism. As Luke Goldstein wrote, the rampant defects in Boeing's products can be traced to the decision to approve Boeing's 1997 merger with McDonnell-Douglas, a company helmed by Jack Welch proteges, notorious for cost-cutting at the expense of reliability:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/2024-01-09-boeing-737-max-financial-mindset/

Boeing veterans describe the merger as the victory of the bean-counters, which led to a company that chases short-term profits over safety and even the viability of its business:

https://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=213075

After all, the merger turned Boeing into the single largest exporter in America, a company far too big to fail, teeing up tens of billions from Uncle Sucker, who also account for 40% of Boeing's income:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/its-time-to-nationalize-and-then

The US government is full of ex-Boeing execs, just as Boeing's executive row is full of ex-US federal aviation regulators. Bill Clinton's administration oversaw the creation of Boeing's monopoly in the 1990s, but it was the GOP that rescued Boeing the first time the 737 Maxes started dropping out of the sky.

Boeing's biggest competitor is the state-owned Airbus, a joint venture whose major partners are the governments of France, Spain and Germany – governments that are at least theoretically capable of thinking about the public good, not short-term profits. Boeing's largest equity stakes are held by the Vanguard Group, Vanguard Group subfiler, Newport Trust Company, and State Street Corporation:

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-01-18-airbus-advantage/

As Matt Stoller says, America has an airline that the public bails out, protects, and subsidizes but has no say over. Boeing has all the costs of public ownership and none of the advantages. It's the epitome of privatized gains and socialized losses.

This is Reagan's other legacy, besides the disastrous shortage of air-traffic controllers. The religious belief in deregulation – especially deregulation of antitrust enforcement – leads to a deregulated market. It leads to a market that is regulated by monopolists who secretly deliberate, behind closed board-room doors, and are accountable only to their shareholders. These private regulators are unlike government regulators, who are at least nominally bound by obligations to transparency and public accountability. But they share on thing in common with those public regulators: when they fuck up, the public has to pay for their mistakes.

It's a good thing Boeing's executives are too big to fail, because they fail constantly. Boeing execs who are warned by subcontractors of dangerous defects in their planes order those subcontractors to lie, or lose their contracts:

https://www.levernews.com/boeing-supplier-ignored-warnings-of-excessive-amount-of-defects-former-employees-allege/

As a result of Boeing's mismanagement, America's only aircraft supplier steadily has lost ground to Airbus, which today enjoys a 2:1 advantage over Boeing. But it's not just Boeing that's the weak link aviation. US aviation is a chain entirely composed of weak links.

Take jet engines: Pratt & Whitney are Spirit's major engine supplier, but these engines suck as much as Boeing's fuselages. Much of Spirit's fleet is chronically grounded because the engines don't run. The reason Spirit buys its engines from those loveable goofballs at Pratt & Whitney? The Big Four airlines have bought all the engines for sale from other suppliers, leaving smaller airlines to buy their engines from fat-fingered incompetents.

This is why – as Dayen notes – smaller US airlines are so horny for intermarriage. They can't grow by adding routes, because there are no pilots. Even if they could get pilots, there'd be no slots because there are no air traffic controllers. But even if they could get pilots and slots, there are no planes, because Boeing sucks and Airbus can't make planes fast enough to supply the airlines that don't trust Boeing. And even if they could get aircraft, there are no engines because the Big Four aviation cartel cornered the market on working jet engines.

Part of Jetblue and Spirit's pitch was that they hand off the routes that they'd cut after their merger to other small airlines, like Frontier and Allegiant. But Frontier and Allegiant can't service those routes: they don't have pilots, slots, planes or engines.

Spirit hasn't been profitable since 2019 and is sitting on $4b in debt. Jetblue was proposing to finance its acquisition with another $3.5b in debt. The resulting airline could only be profitable by sharply cutting routes and massively raising prices, cutting 6.1m seats/year. With a debt:capital ratio of 111%, the company would have no slack and would need a bailout any time anything went wrong. Not coincidentally, the Big Four airlines also have debt:capital ratios of about 100-120%, and they do get bailouts ever time anything goes wrong.

As William McGee reminds us, it's been 14 years since anyone's started a new US airline:

https://twitter.com/WilliamJMcGee/status/1747363491445375072

US aviation is deeply cursed. But Boeing's self-disassembling aircraft show us why we can't fix it by allowing mergers: private monopolies, shorn of the discipline of competition and regulation, are extraction machines that turn viable businesses into debt-wracked zombies.

This is a subject that's beautifully illustrated in Dayen's 2020 book Monopolized, in the chapter on health care:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/29/fractal-bullshit/#dayenu

The US health care system has been in trouble for a long time, but the current nightmare starts with the deregulation of pharma. Pharma companies interbred with one another in a string of incestuous marriages that produced these dysfunctional behemoths that were far better at shifting research costs to governments and squeezing customers than they were at making drugs. The pharma giants gouged hospitals for their products, and in response, hospitals underwent their own cousin-fucking merger orgy, producing regional monopolies that were powerful enough to resist pharma's price-hikes. But in growing large enough to resist pharma profiteering, the hospitals also became powerful enough to screw over insurers. Insurers then drained their own gene pool by combining with one another until most of us have three or fewer insurers we can sign up with – companies that are both big enough to refuse hospital price-hikes, and to hike premiums on us.

Thus monopoly begets monopoly: with health sewn up by monopolies in medical tech, drugs, pharmacy benefit managers, insurance, and hospitals, the only easy targets for goosing profits are people:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/05/hillrom/#baxter-international

This is how you get a US medical system that costs more than any other rich nation's system to operate, delivers worse outcomes than those other systems, and treats medical workers worse than any other wealthy country.

Now, rich people can still buy their way out of this mess, but you have to be very rich indeed to buy your way out of the commercial aviation system. There's a lot of 1%ers who fly commercial, and they're feeling the squeeze – and there's no way they're leasing their own jets.

Stein's Law holds that "anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop." America's aviation mergers – in airlines, aircraft and engines – have hollowed out the system. The powerful, brittle companies that control aviation have so much power over their workforce that they've turned air traffic controller and pilot into jobs that no one wants – and they used their bailout money to buy out the most senior staff's contracts, sending them to early retirement.

Now, I'm with the people who say that most of US aviation should be replaced with high-speed rail, but that's not why our technocrats and finance barons have gutted aviation. They did it to make a quick buck. A lot of quick bucks. Now the system is literally falling to pieces in midair. Now the system is literally on fire:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/19/us/miami-boeing-plane-engine-fire.html

Which is how you get a Reagan appointed federal judge issuing an opinion that has me punching the air and shouting, "Yes, comrade! To the barricades!" Anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop. When the system is falling to pieces around you, ideology disintegrates like a 737 Max.

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/21/anything-that-cant-go-on-forever/#will-eventually-stop

Image: Vitaly Druchenok (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ECAir_Boeing_737-306_at_Brazzaville_Airport_by_Vitaly_Druchenok.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

--

Joe Ravi (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Panorama_of_United_States_Supreme_Court_Building_at_Dusk.jpg

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

[tomorrowusa]

There's been another tranche of student debt forgiveness by the Biden administration.

The Biden administration on Friday announced another $5 billion in debt forgiveness for 74,000 student loan borrowers. Why it matters: Although the Supreme Court blocked Biden's signature student loan forgiveness plan, his administration has found alternative ways to provide relief to more than 3.7 million people.

The Republican Supreme Court has tried to block student loan relief, but the Biden administration hasn't stopped looking for legal ways around SCOTUS for specific groups of Americans burdened by such debt.

Since 1981 Republicans have serially backed enormous tax breaks for their filthy rich contributors, but they vehemently oppose loan forgiveness for middle class and poorer taxpayers.

House GOP advances bill to block Biden’s student loan repayment program

Supreme Court, Republicans to blame for lack of debt forgiveness, students say in poll

In general, Republicans oppose higher education. Their base is made up of dumbass morons who believe conspiracy theories and they need more voters like that who won't question the bullshit that comes out of the GOP.

The Republican jones for deregulation since the Reagan-Bush era has led student debt to spiral out of control. The vicious circle of more burdensome loans feeding ever-increasing tuition fits well into the GOP agenda. It's a system that discourages post-secondary education for anyone who isn't rich.

President Dwight Eisenhower was no radical. But he knew what made America strong. The highest federal income tax rate for the filthy rich during most of his administration was 91%. And it was universally regarded as a period of enormous economic growth and prosperity.

A portion of that tax revenue went into the National Defense Education Act which, among other features, provided for grants and loans for post-secondary education – particularly for STEM, teacher education, and foreign languages. That was the impressive start of the federal student loan program. It was never meant to be a permanent chain around the necks of college graduates.

National Defense depends on smart Americans. But certain Russia-friendly Republicans have no interest in standing in Putin's way.