BeyondGeography
BeyondGeography's JournalMillennials don't suck at voting
Turnout among 18-29 year olds was 50 percent in 2016. That's not terrible, historically speaking.
The first election 18-year-olds could vote, participation in that group was 58 percent (1972), which remains the all-time high.
2000 was the low point at 40 percent. Obama 08 pushed the number up to 52 percent and it went down to 49 percent in 2012. Of course, those are presidential year numbers.
60 percent of them (18-29) voted for Obama in 2012 and 55 percent went for HRC. In 2000, Gore and and Bush tied among 18-24 year-olds at 47 percent. Our buddy Ralph Nader got 5 percent.
Anyway, the kids are alright. I've got a couple of them myself. They vote. They march. They volunteer. One of them does complain about her tax bite though...Can't take these kids for granted.
End Stock Buybacks, Save the Economy
The principal tool for extracting value from companies and handing it to shareholders is the stock buyback, which usually boosts a companys stock price. Buybacks are favored by top executives, who are paid primarily in stock options and stock awards, and encouraged by ever-more-powerful hedge-fund activists. From 2008 to 2017, 466 S.&P. 500 companies distributed $4 trillion to shareholders as buybacks, equal to 53 percent of profits, along with $3.1 trillion as dividends.
...Corporations already had a way to provide a yield to shareholders: dividends. But by 1997, stock buybacks had surpassed dividends as a mode of distribution to shareholders.
To understand the magnitude of this shift, we analyzed financial data from 232 companies in the S.&P. 500 Index that were publicly listed in 1981, before the rule, and were still public through 2016. We found that from 1981 to 1983, these companies spent 4.3 percent of profits on buybacks. In comparison, from 2014 to 2016, these same companies spent 59 percent of their profits buying back their own stock. Dividends absorbed just under half of profits in both periods.
...Defenders of buybacks contend that they do no harm because the funds are reallocated through financial markets and used elsewhere in the economy. A companys profits are, however, the financial foundation for investments in productive capabilities, first and foremost in employees. Investment in training and retaining employees is the key to productivity growth and innovation, for individual companies and for the economy. According to our research, when trillions of dollars of corporate cash are extracted from companies through buybacks, on top of dividends, the result is a dramatic concentration of income among the richest American households and the destruction of middle-class employment opportunities...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/23/opinion/ban-stock-buybacks.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fopinion&action=click&contentCollection=opinion®ion=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=9&pgtype=sectionfront
Some perspective via a reader comment:
Pelosi says impeachment 'not a priority' after Cohen's guilty plea
Source: The Hill
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Wednesday said impeaching President Trump is "not a priority," despite Michael Cohen's guilty plea to campaign finance violations that implicated the president.
"Impeachment has to spring from something else," Pelosi, who has long downplayed the possibility of impeachment, told The Associated Press.
Cohen, who was Trump's longtime lawyer and fixer, pleaded guilty on Tuesday to a number of tax and bank fraud charges as well as a campaign finance violation. He said in court that Trump had directed him to arrange payments to two women during his 2016 presidential campaign in exchange for their silence about alleged affairs with Trump.
"If and when the information emerges about that, we'll see," Pelosi said. "It's not a priority on the agenda going forward unless something else comes forward."
Read more: http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/403024-pelosi-says-impeachment-not-a-priority?amp&__twitter_impression=true
Ummm...See Jerrold Nadler for what an appropriate reaction to yesterdays developments sounds like:
https://nadler.house.gov/press-release/ranking-member-nadler-statement-felony-convictions-paul-manafort-and-michael-cohen
Democratic congressman says party leaders' rising ages are a 'problem'
Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, the chairman of the centrist New Democrat Coalition, told CNN that party leaders' rising ages are a "problem" and declined to say whether he would support House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., for speaker if Democrats take control of the House in the midterm elections.
...Acknowledging he is a "huge admirer of Nancy Pelosi's operational ability," Himes, 52, said Democrats will soon need leaders who can communicate effectively with younger voters.
"The fact that our top three leaders are in their late 70s - I don't care who those leaders are - that is, in fact, a problem," he said.
"We are at a moment in time where young people are involved as they never have been before," he said. "I don't care how good you are - there is a generation gap.
More at https://m.ctpost.com/news/article/Democratic-congressman-says-party-leaders-rising-13164315.php
The White Working Class (w/ Joan C. Williams)
The King - Official Trailer
Recommended; saw it yesterday. Theres a simple and very true message at the end of all this.
Whatever Happened to Moral Rigor?
James Baldwin understood the difference between empathy and approval. Today, we would rather condemn than understandI felt very close to him, he writes about Muhammad, and really wished to be able to love and honor him as a witness, an ally and a father. Yet, reflecting on the moment when the two men said goodbye, Baldwin writes, we would always be strangers, and possibly, one day, enemies.
Baldwin was as committed as any writer has ever been. But the stuff of his commitment was a moral clarity steeped in intellectual difficulties and ethical complications a labyrinthine clarity that he refused to sacrifice to prescribed attitudes.
Today we still revere Baldwin, but by and large we no longer follow his lead as a thinker. There is little patience now for such a rigorous yet receptive moral and intellectual style; these days we prefer ringing moral indictment, the hallmarks of which are absolute certainty, predetermined ideas and conformity to collective sentiments.
In the process of abandoning the type of complex moral clarity that Baldwin practiced, we have made behavior that is unacceptable the equivalent of behavior that is criminal. An equal amount of fury is directed toward actions as morally and legally distinct from each other as rape, harassment, rudeness, boorishness and incivility. The outrage over a police shooting of an unarmed black teen unfolds at the same level of intensity as the outrage over what might or might not be a case of racial profiling by a salesperson in a small Brooklyn boutique.
This is intentional: The general feeling seems to be that distinguishing between degrees of morally repugnant conduct will lead to some sort of blanket pardon of all such conduct; that to understand is always to forgive. Such concern is understandable, but misplaced it flattens and obfuscates, rather than clarifies...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/25/opinion/james-baldwin-public-morality-empathy.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fopinion&action=click&contentCollection=opinion®ion=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=7&pgtype=sectionfront
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