Year-over-year, 255 more infants, defined as babies under one year old, died in 2022 than in 2021.
So, 1961 infant deaths in 2021 and 2216 in 2022, amounting to a 13% increase in total infant deaths. The rising mortality rate appears to be driven by congenital defects in the newborns.
The majority of excess deaths over the previous year were caused by congenital anomalies, the study found, while deaths due to other reasons like complications during the pregnancy also increased year over year; the data showed that babies born with congenital anomalies increased in Texas by nearly 23 percent but decreased across the U.S. by 3 percent.
So, basically, Texas mothers are being told the fetus is nonviable and doomed to die. But then the state prohibits the mother from terminating the pregnancy. She's got to carry the baby to term, give birth, and then watch the baby live a few tortured months in the NICU before expiring.
Part of the problem with criminalizing abortion is in how it creates large bureaucratic hurdles for doctors to prove they aren't committing a crime under necessary circumstances.
Texas law specifically allows for abortions in cases like this, but the state's AG has threatened to prosecute anyone who performs one, regardless.
Consequentially, no hospital will perform these "legal" abortions, for fear of a prosecuting convincing a jury it was illegal after all.
Negotiating with your current boss is significantly more difficult than negotiating with a future prospective firm, because your future prospective firm doesn't have the power to fire you.
Unions periodically renegotiate their salary and benefits through broad company-wide contracts, so its not just a single small bean asking to be paid a bit more. Its an entire department or firm demanding a bigger percentage of the gross revenue.
Seniority solves a lot of the "how much money do I even ask for?" questions when renegotiating salaries. It also establishes a clear-cut cost of living track. You know what you'll be making in five years, so you can buy a house or get married or have kids with some underlying expectation of how much you'll earn when your cost of living goes up.
On a less jokey note, pretty much every living mammal has been subjected to domestication attempts at some point in history. Bears, elephants, tigers, hippopotami, moose... More often than not, there's some kind of inherent physiological reason why it doesn't work.
Some animals don't breed well in captivity (pandas, famously, but cheetahs are another classic case). Some can't handle captivity at all - the few efforts at keeping Great Whites in captivity ended with the animals bludgeoning themselves to death on the walls of their enclosures. Others are consistently too aggressive to effectively tame (zebras, coyotes, chimps, elephants, and pythons are notable for all the historic instances domestication failed for these reasons). And some simply aren't pleasant household companions - skunks, raccoons, and foxes are all notable for their powerful odors and their propensity to destroy the interiors of homes.
There's some speculation as to whether cats ever were actually domesticated successfully, or whether we've simply chosen to ignore their feral habits as such.
"What the corporations have done is destroyed the principles of simple capitalism, that if you own something you have some control over it," Nader said in a hulking, stentorian voice, belied by his now-stooped shoulders and 80 years. "Managers control the process and define their own mergers and acquisitions and corporate strategy without any shareholder rights, as well as how much they pay themselves."
Only by putting aside the bitter anger and acrimony that forces us to take sides can we break the corporate stranglehold over government and the economy, Nader said.
You see, America hasn't tried the correct type of capitalism. They're stuck on Sparkling Corporatism, which is where all the problems come from.
This is how societies have traditionally operated. Far from failing, they are correcting back to the exploitative mean.
With no more free real estate to conquer and no frontier to expand into, we're boxed in by limited resources and forced to choose between socialism or barbarism.
Since we categorically and unequivocally proved Socialism Doesn't Work back in the 1980s, that only leaves one option.
Eh. There are times when a person in a uniform with some degree of authority on campus would be legitimately helpful, but they're never around for those moments.
UT campus rape was an epidemic when I was in school, back in the mid-'00s, and the police were notorious for just looking the other way.
and have enough money to quite literally solve most of the world’s problems
That’s true-ish from a strict finances perspective.
But consider the island of Haiti. We could “solve” the problem of chronic poverty on the island by simply showing up with boatloads of food and clothing and other consumer goods. But it would be a temporary fix, at best. A real investment - just on this tiny island - would mean large scale infrastructure improvements. And that takes an enormous amount of materials plus labor plus the logistics to move it all and assemble it.
What we’re describing isn’t strictly a monetary problem. Its an engineering - and, to a greater extent - economic organization problem. Showing up with bricks of cash would be less beneficial than dredging their harbors and building out new power plants and fixing all the damage done by the last big earthquake. And that latter bit requires real engineering, which requires education, which requires skilled professionals willing to bring Haitians in and train them in the work necessary to improve the island.
And while we probably could perform a project like this across Haiti, by employing the Billionaire Money + Excuse Unused Capacity of global industry, I question whether we could do it globally. Not without reorienting an enormous amount of our existing infrastructure towards these tasks.
When people talk about “market economy v command economy”, this is the kind of problem they’re really facing off against. Not just “how do we pay for food?” but “how do we organize the supply chain from the farms/fisheries to the dinner tables?”
We could “fix” Haiti’s problems with far less than we’re currently spending to control their population. But that would mean building large earthquake resilient housing, energy, and transport components. And those buildings would divert the labor supply from making cheap textiles and agricultural goods. And that would mean people who buy cheap from Haiti’s functionally-still-enslaved population wouldn’t get to 100x mark-up the end products when they were sold in the US at American retail rates.
That’s what we’re really discussing when we talk about “billionaire wealth” versus “solving the world’s problems”.
Do Haitians get to live for themselves? Or do they spend all their waking hours making life cheaper for other people?
Literally an NPR article on the subject, outlining how that sum could solve world hunger.
In response to Musk’s request for details, Beasley (head of the World Food Program) tweeted him the math: “$.43 x 42,000,000 x 365 days = $6.6 billion.”
That’s how much it would cost to provide one meal a day for one year to this population in need, says WFP. The agency would deliver this “meal” in the form of food aid, cash or vouchers.
The food aid, says WFP, consists of commodities such as rice, maize and high-energy biscuits.
Musk estimated in December that he would pay “over $11 billion” in 2021 taxes. A large donation could help to offset that price tag.
So it looks like Musk was looking for a large tax write-off, not a cure-all for world hunger. And when he found a viable place to dump his money, he took it. This wasn’t about food aid at all. It was about Musk figuring out what he could buy for the price of a tax cut.
If we buy Haiti a bunch of food and deliver it, we have created the jobs and infrastructure to solve the issue precisely in the manner you describe.
We’ve created an import market, which is good for folks who aren’t Haitian who are shipping to the island.
But we haven’t created points on the island to receive the new cargo (their port system is in shambles) or distribute it (roads still wrecked from the earthquake, very few warehouses or retail facilities to distribute to local populations) or use it (no reliable electricity or housing).
You seem to take issue with the idea that the solution did not arise from capitalist market forces.
Just the opposite. I believe capitalist market forces are a big reason why Haiti remains poor. Keeping the majority of the population clustered along the coast and forced to compete for sweatshop jobs at the lowest conceivable bidding rate means foreign firms have monopolized the labor capacity of the island while denying them the ability to develop their own domestic capital (roads, power, housing, etc).
Getting construction materials to the island, along with skilled engineers to both rebuild shattered infrastructure and train up locals to maintain/expand on what was built, is the only real path to prosperity. And its denied to the Haitian people deliberately, in order to keep them subservient and to enrich the folks exporting their labor product off the island for pennies on the dollar.
The Professional Managerial Class, or Labour Aristocracy, is a broadly recognized sub-class that functions as agents of the bourgeois within the working class. In the same way that an Overseer and a Serf are both “working class” but one holds a clearly demarcated position relative to the other, PMCs and service/factory workers are well defined sub-components structured against one another.
Petite bourgeoisie is what the proletariat are expected to aspire towards. And the way you break into that class is by showing obsequiousness towards the bourgeoisie while enjoying the privilege of unchecked abuse towards the proles.
The crabs in a bucket get a prize if they can climb to the top for long enough.
The rewards tend not to be for hard work, but for clever exploitation and excess cruelty.
If you can successfully commit/facilitate a bunch of crimes (particularly, but not exclusively, white collar crimes) then you can break into the petite bourgeoisie. Florida’s Rick Scott, a guy who made a fortune scamming Medicare is a great example. The WWE’s Vince McMahon, a guy who encouraged his rooster of steroid abusing thugs by offering them the opportunity to rape his female staff members, is another.
If you can stomach the grisly work of denying dying children their insurance claims or evicting elderly residents illegally foreclosed on during the 2008 housing crash or overseeing the butchery in Iraq/Afghanistan during the Bush Era or the torture prison in Guantanamo Bay (another Florida favorite, Ron DeSantis, broke out as a conservative darling after his tenure writing legal briefs that justified waterboarding and sexual abuse of terrorism suspects), then you can get a leg up.
Plenty of these professions are functionally quite easy and the quality of the work is incidental to the reliability with which you adhere to the company/party line. The real pay out is in cultivating friends higher up the ladder and proving yourself a loyal little footsoldier, not in proving you can march the farthest or carry the heaviest loads.
If anything, jobs that consist of shitty drudge-work tend to be the worst paying and are the least reliable for promotion. The pimp makes far more than the prostitute and has to do none of the dirty work.
You’ll get it from folks like Richard Wolff (on the more academic end) and Amber Lee-Frost / November Caldwell Kelly (on the podcasty end). Piketty’s “Capitalism in the 21st Century” also takes a deep dive into Managerial Capitalism and the modern method of corporate administration.
More orthodox Marxists tend to dismiss it as a distraction, but I tend to think there’s real value in understanding the class elements of the administrative state as distinct from both proletariat labor and bourgeoisie owners.
Bakunin never had to be in charge of anything as vast as a Soviet Union. Marxist-Leninists can be the victims of their own success in that regard. But I think Bakunin was more speaking of bureaucrats broadly, while your more modern Marxists are concerned specifically with how the organs of capitalist states function in the era of industrial finance.
I think it was more like the guy before him drug us into multiple, decades long wars
We got into a shooting war in Syria under Obama. We overthrew the Libyan government with US-French joint airstrikes, too. We fostered relations with the fascist Modi regime in India and failed to secure any kind of lasting peace with Iran. We couldn’t actually end the embargo of Cuba or even close down Gitmo. Instead we ended up ramping up police powers in the wake of the Baltimore and Ferguson riots.
Despite having a supermajority in the Senate, we never managed to get DC or Puerto Rico their statehoods… which is a shame because DC statehood alone could have kept Mitch McConnell out of the Senate majority position and flipped a host of federal judicial appointments including two in the SC. Extra important given that we lost the Voting Rights Act case under Obama’s DOJ and a bunch of redistricting fights as well. That gave us a Republican House Majority despite those districts representing less than 45% of the total voting base.
Hell, one of the first things the Obama House, Senate, and Presidency did after a sweeping win in 2008 was… to strip federal funds from ACORN!
Maybe some of those fuck-ups were what cost him the House, the Senate, the SCOTUS, and then the Presidency in the snowball of failure that lead up to 2016.
having an 8 year break of semi-normalcy was refreshing
Having an 8 year break of a smooth operator in office definitely blinded us to the decay of the republic that accelerated under his watch. But who did that ultimately benefit?
I guess it benefited our nation’s budding crop of fascists.
I mean, “best” by what standard? He’s a continuation of the Reagan tradition.
I would prefer FDR in some kind of undead emperor setup but sadly that’s not available.
FDR got where he was thanks to a large popular movement that his administration ultimately undermined and dismantled. The guy that delivered Harry Truman, J. Edgar Hoover, and Allen Dulles onto the American system was a compromise at best.
Fixating on Presidents as modern day messiah figures has been uniformly bad for American politics and social progress. And its illustrated by this latent desire for a Lich-King President, a shambling corpse propped up by hagiography and revisionist history, who we’re taught to venerate as the fountain of progress rather than merely the man at the helm during a hurricane who didn’t sink the ship.
These guys aren’t prime movers, they’re consequences of much larger and more sweeping social movements. I would love to be in a country that elects a guy like FDR, but I do not believe that magically making FDR president again would result in anything remotely like the policies we got under his original administration.
If he’d done a great job, the Dems would have maintained their majorities and Hillary would have won the Presidency.
He did a shit job. He sold out to the big banks. He failed to implement democractic reforms and protect civil rights. He undermined public education, health care, and social welfare. He continued to funnel hundred of billions of dollars to military contractors, heightened tensions in Europe and the Middle East, and ultimately gave us the socio-economic conditions that made Trump a viable candidate for the Presidency.
But he talked good. So, for some reason, we overlook all of that.
Trying what? When he took office in 2009, he had all the accumulated Unitary Executive authority accrued under Bush plus direct Treasury Ownership of the six largest banks in the country, plus a Senate supermajority and overwhelming House majority, plus the world’s most powerful military.
What did he do with all this in his first two years? Bailouts for the richest of the rich and Mitt Romney’s solution to insurance industry reform. No mortgage debt relief, despite naked criminal behavior by the banks his US Treasury Department then owned. No student debt relief. No emergency authorization to expand Medicaid and Medicare - something even dumb-dumb Trump happily waved through without Congressional approval by way of the Stafford Act. No immigration reform which he had the votes for but was afraid to pass without Lindsey Graham’s blessing. No climate change bill despite the fact that it was John McCain’s fucking bill, he just didn’t want to pass it without McCain’s official endorsement.
He did not try. He was notable for how much he didn’t do, particularly relative to Bush before and Trump after, because he was afraid of looking bad on cable news shows. He was entirely fixated on his public image, rather than on the real social impact of the administration he was orchestrating.
The GOP blocked the aid
The GOP didn’t block shit. They had no majorities anywhere in government for two full years.
The Super majority in the Senate didn’t even last a full year.
Donald Trump did more with a simple majority than Obama did with 60 votes. And when he lost that majority, he pulled every lever available to the executive branch. Trump was turning out executive orders as fast as his fat little fingers could sign them. Obama couldn’t even be bothered to nominate a full slate of federal judges to fill Bush-Era vacancies.
Finally, he didn’t lose shit in 2016. He wasn’t running
He didn’t try to campaign for Hillary in big swing midwestern states. Given how he was underwater on approval through most of his last year of office, maybe it wasn’t even the worst move. But this was yet another instance in which he just couldn’t be bothered to try.
A pigeon playing chess may look like it’s doing a lot
You can place at least two of the biggest military conflagrations at the feet of that pigeon. Trump destabilized peace talks between Ukraine and Russia back in 2018, leading to border clashes and the eventual invasion in '21. And his decision to move the US embassy to Jerusalem kicked off a wave of Israeli/Palestinian violence that brought us to October 7th. That’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Obama inherited a failing economy
That he bequeathed to Trump eight years later. FFS, black wealth dropped 30% under the Obama presidency, primarily thanks to the robo-signing of foreclosures under his administration. He sided with WellsFargo and Bank of America over tens of millions of middle class homeowners and functionally bankrolled their illegal home seizures via TARP.
Your local medical system and its workers is the reason you’re alive. You’d be just as alive under a Single Payer model or a fully public health care model. Its very possible you’d be alive without the ACA, just a lot broker.
(Am I pretending that Clinton didn’t happen? Yes.)
They were administrative repeats, minus the sex scandal.
Trade deals and bailouts and immigrant witch hunts and government shut downs and echoes of a prior war that they never managed to clean up. Both presidents focused themselves on the project of further privatization, with Clinton giving us HMOs and Obama delivering the ACA. Both presided over tech booms, which were promised as a panacea to poor wage growth. Both squandered their majorities and frittered away their executive authority, while the market economy swelled and the labor economy sagged. Both ushered in fascist televangelists because they couldn’t improve the material conditions of their constituents.
Strange that the Democrats were never able to do the same under Trump or Bush.
You’re looking at a president and expecting a king.
I’m looking at an Obama and expecting him to exercise all the powers Congress invested in George Bush. I’m looking at a guy who was literally handed direct ownership of the entire financial system at the end of 2008 and choose to appoint a Fed Reserve hack to the Treasury who would hand it all back to the same bad actors that brought about the crash.
I’m expecting a President to behave like a President and not simply an employee of Wall Street.
Obama was 32 when universal healthcare blew up pretty spectacularly in Clinton’s first year in office.
The Clintons weren’t advancing universal health care in '93. They advocated a network of regional private plans that would compete for membership under a single regulatory framework. They flatly rejected universal Medicaid expansion. Far from threatening private industry, it was designed as a means of guaranteeing poorer regional networks could thrive with state support (much in the same way Medicare Plan C and the privatized Veterans Care and the privatization of the USPS ultimately are just kick backs to local business owners).
One of the better aspects of the Obama plan was to simply up the qualified enrollment numbers of Medicaid. This was the only part of ACA that really worked. And it was only shoe-horned in to contain costs, as subsidized memberships in private plans had enormous administrative overhead that was normally covered by employers.
But, again, efforts to simply open up Medicaid enrollment to the general population was killed from within the Democratic Party. Even as written, the bill allowed individual states to block Medicaid expansion piecemeal. The private insurance industry had to be protected, both under Hillary’s plan and under Obama’s.
Could Obama have passed Medicare for all instead, or would we have just seen a repeat of Clinton’s failure?
If Obama and Clinton had supported Ned Lamont, the Democratic nominee for CT Senate, back when he won the primary in 2006, their odds certainly would have been better. But Obama and Clinton and their good friend Joe Lieberman had no intention of passing Medicare for All, because they were all - quite literally - heavily invested in the well being of the insurance industry.
She had an enormous base of support and a rabid following for decades. She’s at least as likeable as Donald Trump.
The DNC is to blame for pushing an unlikable, unpopular candidate
The DNC does what the donors tell them. And Hillary commanded one of the most successful donor-bundling operations in the party’s history. In no small part because so many people liked her.
They’d rather lose with Hillary, than win with Bernie
That’s true. But Bernie also had a huge hurdle of likeability to overcome. He had at least as many dings on his score card, being an East Coast Jewish Man who once said nice things about Fidel Castro. Dude was DOA in Florida on that resume alone.
Where Hillary fucked up (and where Bernie had a lot of potential) was in the Midwest. And all that is thanks to NAFTA. The Democratic Party is still wrestling with the ghost of 1993 and Bill’s decision to move ahead with NAFTA after campaigning against it. Obama fucked Hillary horribly when he pushed ahead with the TPP, which dredged up all those skeletons and gave everyone in the Midwest flash-backs to the de-industrialization of the prior decade.
Trump was able to campaign on “America First” against a Democratic Party that is far too in-bed with international business interests to say anything in defense of domestic labor. Bernie could have countered that, which is the main reason why he was the preferred candidate against Trump.
But then, four years later, Joe Biden takes the stage and makes all the same “pro-labor” noises that Bernie is making. Plus COVID. Plus liberals being too terrified of Trump to contemplate anyone but the safest of safe bets.
Clinton enacted Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, while Obama was much friendlier in general to LGBTQ people
Clinton enacted DADT with the blessing of the liberal movement while Obama dragged his feet on gay marriage until long after the SCOTUS had ruled on Obergefell v Hodges. The Respect for Marriage Act wasn’t even Obama’s legislation. It was signed in 2022 under Biden.
Unfortunately, under a fundamentally capitalist system, there’s not a lot that can be done to make sure real wages grow for the workers
Sure there is. The US Federal Government is the largest employer in the country. If the President wants to raise wages, one of the most straightforward decisions he can make is to simply raise starting salaries for government workers. This instantly puts upward pressure on the national wage rate, makes federal jobs more desirable, and improves the economic conditions of millions of federal workers.
In fact, this is one of Obama’s few direct actions. He signed an EO raising base pay for federal workers to $10.10 back in 2014. A meager improvement, particularly when national cost-of-living had long since exceeded what amounts to a $20k/year salary. But hey? Notably better than $7.25.
I oppose a strong executive branch that can enact edict without oversight.
That’s cool. Your opinion doesn’t matter. You have no control over the extent to which Presidents exercise their authority.
You might applaud Obama for spending eight years sitting on his hands and boo Trump for taking a direct and aggressive role in shaping national policy. But Obama’s fecklessness put no constraint on his successor. No more than Clinton’s limited Bush. No more than Hoover’s limited FDR.
That’s an awful precedent.
Its a precedent that’s been in effect under dozens of prior administrations. You govern the country with the tools you’re given. Or you don’t. But there’s no reward for pulling a Calvin Coolidge or a Rutherford B. Hayes and sitting on the sidelines while your country circles the drain.
The only precedent you’ll have set is one in which your party gets booted from office when the people you’re selected to represent continue to suffer under conditions you failed to alleviate.
Carter was a nuclear technician with a 15 year long political career fixated on privatizing the state and national economy. He inherited a peanut farm from his dying father and kept the business afloat precisely because he understood how to obtain cheap lines of credit. Carter wasn’t tilling soil in the 50s. He was a spreadsheets guy.
It’s a precedent because presidents take power–not use the power they were given
Bush was given several literal blank checks during his two terms in office by a legislature that was more than happy to invest enormous power in the chief executive (so long as that executive was a Republican). The Patriot Act, the No Child Left Behind Act, the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003, the Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act, 2007, the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, and the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 were all on the books before Obama took office.
They each invested the Presidency with new powers via the national bureaucracy, enormous slush funds through which to shape economic activity, and regulatory authorities only vaguely defined by the legislature that the President’s appointees could fine tune as they saw fit.
In point of fact, Obama’s restraint did put constraints on Trump. It meant that he had to go to court multiple times over things
Trump’s trips to court were notable only in so far as they illustrated how toothless the modern judiciary is in the face of a Unitary Executive. Policies that failed to pass judicial muster were continued in defiance of court orders and over the objection of administrative bureaucracies - border wall funding and illegal incarceration of asylum seekers, kick-backs to private security firms and Homeland Security contractors, wildly illegal misuse of military assets in Iraq and Afghanistan and Eastern Europe and Latin America, leaking state secrets to foreign nationals, harassing and spying on minority groups and political opponents, using federal money for self-enrichment and as kick-backs to cronies, using federal money for campaigning in defiance of campaign finance laws - all ended up either being swept under the rug or continued under the incoming Biden Administration.
Obama did nothing to restrain Trump. In fact, Trump’s team deliberately pushed the boundaries of what was already generously afforded them just to see how other branches would respond. And the response was, more often than not, to ratify his actions after the fact - either at the national level or via state policies in red states that sympathized with him.
Infant Mortality Rose 13 Percent in Texas After Abortion Ban, Study Finds ( truthout.org )
Employees Who Stay In Companies Longer Than Two Years Get Paid 50% Less ( www.forbes.com )
It's just not fair! ( lemmy.world )
The starting salary for a new American Airlines flight attendant is low enough to qualify for food stamps in some states ( fortune.com )
xkcd #2929: Good and Bad Ideas ( imgs.xkcd.com )
https://xkcd.com/2929...
Riot cops line up next to a sign at University of Texas at Austin. ( slrpnk.net )
Edit: Name of University fixed.
All billionaires under 30 have inherited their wealth, research finds ( www.theguardian.com )
Surprise, surprise!
Make no mistake, the owning class is actively working against your interests ( i.redd.it )
A billionaire wrote this letter to Google a year ago. How likely is that Google's layoffs and actions since then are at least partly because of this? ( lemmy.world )
xkcd #2875: 2024 ( imgs.xkcd.com )
xkcd.com/2875/...