Reading Material – September 9, 2018

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The immediate question is how the court will handle Donald Trump’s obstruction of justice, which is likely to reach epic levels very soon… Beyond that, what will happen if we eventually get a Democratic Congress and president, who try to move forward with a center-left agenda? What I mean by that, by the way, are things like expanding health coverage and raising taxes on high incomes — things that aren’t radical, and in fact have broad popular support.

There’s every reason to believe that a court including Kavanaugh would strike down everything elected officials tried to do. Policy substance aside, this would destroy the court’s legitimacy, making its naked partisanship — based, again, on two stolen seats — clear to all.

At the university, service workers on the payroll of an outside contractor earn the same pay and benefits they would get as direct university employees — including health insurance and pension benefits, paid vacation and child care assistance.

This parity policy was formally adopted across the university 16 years ago by Lawrence H. Summers, then Harvard’s president. At a stroke, it ended the practice of outsourcing dining, security and other such services simply to save on labor costs. “The effect of this policy is to remove some of the economic incentives to contract out those positions,” said Michael Kramer, organizing director at the Cambridge area local of Unite Here, the union covering food service workers.

Critically, unions covering Harvard’s in-house janitors, cooks and guards — which had been losing ground to outside contractors — were empowered to bargain hard for pay and benefits without fear of encouraging more outsourcing. What’s more, contractors themselves became more union-friendly once the university took over the determination of wages and benefits. In 2001, before the policy was put in place, only 58 percent of the workers at outside contractors operating at Harvard were represented by a union. By 2013, the share was 96 percent.

Should Read

The necessity for the Fairness Doctrine, according to proponents, arises from the fact that there are many fewer broadcast licenses than people who would like to have them. Unlike publishing, where the tools of the trade are in more or less endless supply, broadcasting licenses are limited by the finite number of available frequencies. Thus, as trustees of a scarce public resource, licensees accept certain public interest obligations in exchange for the exclusive use of limited public airwaves. One such obligation was the Fairness Doctrine, which was meant to ensure that a variety of views, beyond those of the licensees and those they favored, were heard on the airwaves. (Since cable’s infrastructure is privately owned and cable channels can, in theory, be endlessly multiplied, the FCC does not put public interest requirements on that medium.)

The Fairness Doctrine had two basic elements: It required broadcasters to devote some of their airtime to discussing controversial matters of public interest, and to air contrasting views regarding those matters. Stations were given wide latitude as to how to provide contrasting views: It could be done through news segments, public affairs shows or editorials.

Formally adopted as an FCC rule in 1949 and repealed in 1987 by Ronald Reagan’s pro-broadcaster FCC, the doctrine can be traced back to the early days of broadcast regulation.

Libraries are being disparaged and neglected at precisely the moment when they are most valued and necessary. Why the disconnect? In part it’s because the founding principle of the public library — that all people deserve free, open access to our shared culture and heritage — is out of sync with the market logic that dominates our world. But it’s also because so few influential people understand the expansive role that libraries play in modern communities.

The dueling images of a president on the edge and a conservative Congress soldiering forward explain succinctly why almost all elected Republicans here have quietly supported Mr. Trump through his travails — or at least not chastised him too loudly. The payoffs for what Senator Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona, called the party’s “Faustian bargain” have been rich and long awaited: deep cuts in corporate and personal tax rates, confirmation of a wave of conservative judges for the lower courts, and soon an ideological shift in the highest court of the land.

When a patient arrived this spring at the only abortion clinic in western Arkansas, the doctor had startling news: A new state law had gone into effect, and clinics could no longer perform abortions via medication in the state.

“Wait — all of Arkansas?” the patient asked her doctor, Stephanie Ho.

“Yes,” Dr. Ho remembered replying.

Worth Reading

What’s unique about [UK] Labour’s nationalization plans with regard to energy is that they would make Britain the first country to nationalize its power sector with the express intention of weaning it off fossil fuels and with an eye toward decarbonizing the economy.

Others have proposed steps still more dramatic than those laid out by Labour. Researchers with the Next System Project, for instance, have outlined what it would look like for the U.S. government to nationalize major U.S.-based fossil fuel producers through a process known as quantitative easing, wherein the government spends money into existence by changing the makeup of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet, as it did when it purchased toxic mortgage assets from major banks in 2008. In a paper released this week, Carla Santos Skandier argues that staying within the world’s “carbon budget” — the limited amount of emissions that can be put into the atmosphere before we risk catastrophic warming — will require the state (and central banks, in particular) to play a more active role in economic planning.

Ending on a Positive Note