ETHICALLY CHALLENGED CAPITALI$M

A dozen Congressional members traded stock in companies owned by Elon Musk in 2022: report

Alex Henderson, AlterNet
November 11, 2022

Elon Musk AFP

As Elon Musk turns his attention to his recent Twitter acquisition, a new report is shedding light on Congressional lawmakers' stock investments in the billionaire's companies this year.

According to Business Insider, "at least 12 members of Congress or their family members personally traded stocks in Twitter or Tesla in 2022."

The news outlet's report includes the following lawmakers: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Reps. Pat Fallon (R-Texas), John Garamendi (D-Calif.), Mike Garcia (R-Calif.), Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.), Kim Schrier (D-Wash.), Vicente Gonzalez (D-Texas), Chris Jacobs (R-N.Y.), Kathy Manning (D-N.C.), Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), and David McKinley (R-W.V.).

McKinley, Gonzalez, Garcia, Whitehouse, and Fallon personally purchased stock, and family members of the remaining lawmakers made the other purchases with values ranging from $1,000 to approximately $5,000,000.

The latest development comes as Congress deliberates over whether or not lawmakers, their spouses, and their dependent children should even have the opportunity to own or sell individual stocks. So far, lawmakers have failed to deliver on efforts to ban members of Congress from trading stocks.

"The delay is a momentous setback for the stock trading reform effort, which drew a rare confluence of support from an overwhelming majority of Republican and Democratic voters," the Hill reported.

“Passing a stock trading bill before the midterms would have been a good faith sign to the voters that Congress takes its responsibility to the public interest seriously,” said Danielle Caputo, an ethics lawyer for the Campaign Legal Center. “And so obviously, that’s disappointing.”

Other critics also expressed concern about a loophole in the bill that would still give lawmakers the ability to purchase stock. Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, an advocate working with the watchdog organization, The Project on Government Oversight (POGO), explained how the bill appears to be an example of "fake blind trust."

“The problem is that the bill allows people to create a trust that they can claim is blind and diversified, and yet it doesn’t actually have to meet the criteria that are currently in the law for it to officially be a blind trust,” said Hedtler-Gaudette.

“It’s basically a fake blind trust,” he said. “We don’t have that much trust in what the ethics committee is going to do because they’re notoriously weak in doing anything that’s particularly restrictive or robust around what happens internally.”

'Take some ownership': AOC hits back after defeated DCCC chair lashes out

Julia Conley, Common Dreams
November 11, 2022

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Thursday evening rebuked outgoing Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, who had earlier claimed in an interview with The New York Times that the progressive congresswoman contributed little to campaign efforts and suggested her policy priorities—several of them popular with Democratic voters—are harming the party.

Ocasio-Cortez has spoken at length to both the Times and The Intercept since Tuesday's midterm elections about progressive politics and the Democratic Party, taking aim at what she called a "calcified political machine" in her home state and blaming decisions by New York State Democratic Committee chair Jay Jacobs and the "infrastructure" built by former Gov. Andrew Cuomo for the party's losses in New York.

Republicans flipped four U.S. House seats in the state and now represent 10 of New York's 26 congressional districts.

The congresswoman, who easily won her own race with more than 70% of the vote, noted that the Republican Party poured millions of dollars into defeating a state ballot initiative which would have protected a district map that was favorable to Democrats.

"The New York State Democratic Party didn't drop $1 in making sure that we got this thing passed," Ocasio-Cortez told The Intercept on Wednesday.

Maloney sparked outrage on the left this year when he announced he would run in New York's 17th District instead of the 18th, which he has represented since 2013, ousting progressive Rep. Mondaire Jones.

Speaking to the Times on Thursday, Maloney brushed off the notion that redistricting hurt the party and suggested suburban voters in the state, like those in the district he narrowly lost in the Hudson Valley, are turning against the party due to Republicans' messaging on crime rates and are rejecting progressive policy proposals.

"You have these suburban voters who are experiencing those messages coming out of New York City outlets, which were heavily focused on crime," Maloney told the Times. "There are other voices who should be heard, especially when suburban voters have clearly rejected the ideas that [Ocasio-Cortez]'s most associated with, from defunding the police on down."

The congressman also accused Ocasio-Cortez of offering little help to her fellow candidates while claiming that funding she did offer wasn't wanted by other Democrats:
I didn't see her one minute of these midterms helping our House majority... She had almost nothing to do with what turned out to be an historic defense of our majority. Didn't pay a dollar of dues. Didn't do anything for our frontline candidates except give them money when they didn't want it from her...

She's an important voice in our politics. But when it comes to passing our agenda through the Congress, or standing our ground on the political battlefield, she was nowhere to be found.

Ocasio-Cortez took to social media to respond, noting that she campaigned for Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) in late October and saying Maloney had reached out to her regarding fundraising for House candidates.


She added that many members were happy to receive "early financial support to position themselves early" in the election cycle, and called on the corporate-backed wing of the party to "take some ownership" for rejecting more help from progressives.



At The Intercept, Ocasio-Cortez expanded on progressive Democrats' support for policies that are popular with crucial factions of the party's voter base, and the "moderate" wing's rejection of those issues, comparing Rep. Tim Ryan—a vocal opponent of President Joe Biden's student debt relief plan who lost a U.S. Senate race in Ohio—with Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, a progressive who won the seat held by retiring Republican Sen. Pat Toomey:

I do hope that there is a reflection on being outwardly antagonistic towards a very enthused progressive base, especially one in which young people delivered these wins. If you look at the difference between Tim Ryan and John Fetterman, as races, some of the preliminary data is suggesting that they had the same turnout in almost every demographic except young people. And as we know, young people skew way progressive within the party. And so when you outwardly antagonize, and outwardly seek to belittle and distance oneself from progressive values, you demoralize your base.


"It's not to say that everybody has to be holding the same line on progressive causes dependent on their community," Ocasio-Cortez added "But it doesn't—I do think that this is a signal that being outwardly antagonistic, including trying to defeat progressive candidates, trying to demoralize those bases, is not healthy for the prospect of democratic gains."

Watch: Howls of protest at Biden's COP27 climate speech

Agence France-Presse
November 11, 2022



A quartet of protesters briefly interrupted US President Joe Biden's speech at the COP27 summit in Egypt on Friday by howling and trying to unfurl a banner before UN police removed them.

"Carbon offsetting is a false solution," one of them -- apparently an indigenous man from Latin or North America -- shouted as he was escorted away from the venue.

He was referring to a US scheme whereby business can compensate for CO2 pollution by investing in developing world climate projects that reduce planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions.

"We are headed toward impended climate collapse, and Jeff Bezos will not save us," the man said.

The Energy Transition Accelerator carbon offset unveiled by US special climate envoy John Kerry this week in Sharm el-Sheikh is backed by the Rockefeller Fund and the Amazon founder through his Bezos Earth Fund.

The use of so-called voluntary carbon markets to drive down CO2 pollution remains highly controversial, with many analysts saying such difficult-to-monitor practices do not give business a strong enough incentive to reduce their own emissions.

During the 22-minute speech in COP27's packed plenary hall, the climate activists howled like coyotes and were unfurling a banner when UN police stopped them.

It is not known whether the protesters were arrested, escorted out of the conference venue or simply released.

New research disputes the “lazy stoner” stereotype

2022/11/11


New research casts doubts on claims that chronic cannabis use results in “amotivational syndrome,” which is characterized by a lack of enjoyment of everyday life and a loss of motivation. The study, published in the International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology, found no difference in anhedonia, apathy, or motivation between cannabis users and non-users.

“Cannabis is the third most commonly used controlled substance worldwide, and with its legal profile currently changing in many countries it is more important than ever to know how cannabis affects the brain and cognition,” said study author Martine Skumlien, a PhD candidate in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge. “One common trope frequently perpetuated in movies, TV shows, and anti-cannabis PSAs is that of ‘the lazy stoner,’ which displays cannabis users as lazy, demotivated, and apathetic. However, this is based on a stereotype and not on scientific evidence.”

The researchers recruited 76 adolescents and 71 adults from the Greater London area who had been using cannabis 1 to 7 days per week, on average, over the past three months. Adolescents were 16-17 years of age, while adults were 26-29 years of age. The cannabis-using participants were matched with 63 adolescents and 64 adults who did not use cannabis.

“We compared teen and adult cannabis users and controls from the large MRC-funded UCL CannTeen study on several measures of reward and motivation, including apathy and willingness to expend physical effort for reward,” Skumlien told PsyPost.

The participants completed a measure of anhedonia known as the Snaith-Hamilton Pleasure Scale, in which they indicated the extent to which they agreed or disagreed with statements such as “I would find pleasure in my hobbies and pastimes” and “I would find pleasure in small things, e.g. bright sunny day, a telephone call from a friend.”

The participants also completed a questionnaire known as the Apathy Evaluation Scale, in which they indicated how well statements such as “I am interested in things” and “Getting things done during the day is important to me” applied to them.

The researchers found that cannabis users scored slightly lower than non-users on the Snaith-Hamilton Pleasure Scale, suggesting that they are better able to enjoy themselves. But there was no significant difference when it came to apathy. Skumlien and her colleagues also found no correlation between cannabis use frequency and anhedonia or apathy.

In addition, 139 participants completed two task-based measures of motivation, which assessed the willingness to expend effort for reward, reward sensitivity, effort sensitivity, reward wanting, and reward liking.

In the first task, participants were given the option to perform button-presses in order to win points, which were later exchanged for chocolates or sweets to take home. There were three difficulty levels and three reward levels; more difficult trials required faster button pressing. On each trial the participant could choose to accept or reject the offer; points were only accrued if the trial was accepted and completed.

In a second task, participants were first told to estimate how much they wanted to receive each of three rewards (30 seconds of one of their favourite songs, one piece of chocolate or a sweet, and a £1 coin) on a scale from “do not want at all” to “intensely want.” They then received each reward in turn and were asked to rate how pleasurable they found them on a scale from “do not like at all” to “intensely like.”

In line with the self-reported questionnaires, the researchers found no difference between cannabis users and non-users on either task. “I was somewhat surprised to find that the groups weren’t any different on the measures, as this is not what we hypothesised,” Skumlien told PsyPost. “We also expected adolescent cannabis users to be worse off than the adult users, as drug use in adolescence is often thought to be particularly harmful. However, we found no evidence of such adolescent vulnerability.”

“In short, we found no support for the idea that cannabis use is linked with amotivation,” the researcher said.

Co-author Will Lawn added in a news release: “There’s been a lot of concern that cannabis use in adolescence might lead to worse outcomes than cannabis use during adulthood. But our study, one of the first to directly compare adolescents and adults who use cannabis, suggests that adolescents are no more vulnerable than adults to the harmful effects of cannabis on motivation, the experience of pleasure, or the brain’s response to reward.”

“In fact, it seems cannabis may have no link – or at most only weak associations – with these outcomes in general,” Lawn said. “However, we need studies that look for these associations over a long period of time to confirm these findings.”

The findings provide evidence that cannabis use is not associated with persistent disruption to reward processing in adults or adolescents. But it is still possible that cannabis induces acute disruptions in reward processing.

“Crucially, participants in our study had not used any cannabis prior to participating. It is therefore still possible that people find themselves less motivated to do certain things while they are high,” Skumlien explained. “We plan to look at this in a future investigation from the CannTeen study! It is also worth emphasizing that motivation is a broad concept, and measures that assess motivation in a laboratory setting may not always translate to real-life situations.”

“Stereotypes can be stigmatizing and get in the way of harm-reduction messages around drug use,” Skumlien added. “We need to be honest about what are and are not potential consequences of cannabis use, and not use harmful and untrue stereotypes in efforts to discourage people from using cannabis.”

The study, “Anhedonia, apathy, pleasure, and effort-based decision-making in adult and adolescent cannabis users and controls“, was authored by Martine Skumlien, Claire Mokrysz, Tom P. Freeman, Vincent Valton, Matthew B. Wall, Michael Bloomfield, Rachel Lees, Anna Borissova, Kat Petrilli, Manuela Giugliano, Denisa Clisu, Christelle Langley, Barbara J. Sahakian, H. Valerie Curran, and Will Lawn.

© PsyPost

People who earn less than they think they should tend to attribute this to unfairness of the economy

2022/11/11


An online experiment on thousands of U.S. residents shows that people who are made to realize that their earnings are lower than their self-assessed earning ability tend to attribute this to the unfairness of the economy. They tend to believe that other people also earn less than their abilities merit.

 The study was published in theEuropean Journal of Political Economy.

People tend to be overconfident about their abilities in many situations. For example, a 1981 study in the US showed that 88% of respondents considered themselves safer than the median driver. In a similar manner, workers tend to overestimate their productivity and CEOs overestimate the returns on investment they are producing.

When it comes to earnings, overconfident people generally do not earn what they think they can. This means that they might be perceiving a negative gap between their economic results and their own evaluations of their abilities. But would the perception of this gap lead people to see the economy as unfair and support more income equality?

“Inequality is rising in the United States and other countries,” noted study author Daiki Kishishita, a junior associate professor at the Tokyo University of Science. “The existing studies have shown that the view on whether the economy is fair shapes the support for redistribution. We were interested in how people’s personal experience shapes the view whether the economy is fair. In daily life, people often complain that their income is too low compared with their earning ability. Motivated by this daily observation, we analyzed how this complaint shapes the perception about whether the economy is fair.”

Kishishita and two colleagues devised an experiment that was to be done in the scope of an online survey. The experiment was conducted on 4,697 MTurk workers from the US, who were each paid $1.00 for their participation.

At the beginning of the survey, each participant was asked questions on demographics, political attitudes (left, center or right-leaning), to disclose their household income, and to rate their earning ability. Respondents were asked to assess the relative location of their income relative to the income distribution in the US. If they answered incorrectly, survey would give them the correct result. This was done to make sure that all participants correctly assessed their relative income at the start of the experiment.

Based on the difference between the self-reported income of the participant and his/her self-rated earning ability, the authors of the study calculated a measure of the income-ability gap. 2,744 participants considered their incomes did not reflect their abilities correctly (61,4% of all participants). Of these, 1,526 considered their incomes to be lower than their abilities i.e., that their income-ability gap was negative (55% of the participants with the income-ability gap).

After this initial phase, participants were randomly assigned into one of the two groups. In the first group, participants were first reminded through a statement what their income and abilities are in evaluative terms (low, high, very high etc.). They were than asked to rate the gap between their income and their abilities (the income-ability gap). Researchers did this to make sure that the participants in this group will be aware of the gap going forward. The other group did not pass through this treatment, but proceeded directly to the final phase.

In the final phase, participants were asked to rate the unfairness of the economy and the preference for reducing income inequality. The former was done by asking participants whether incomes of ordinary people in the US are higher, equal to or lower than their abilities. The later was done by asking participants whether the US society should reduce income inequality and whether they would support government intervention to achieve this.

Authors report that realizing the negative income-ability gap through the experimental manipulation “increased the perceived degree of unfairness of the economy by 7.85 percent.” However, this manipulation did not increase the support for reducing income inequality.

“We expected that realizing the negative income-ability gap would increase support for reducing inequality. However, this was not supported by the data, which was pretty surprising,” Kishishita said.

There was no difference between left- and right-leaning participants in the effect of the experimental manipulation on their views regarding the unfairness of the economy, although the authors expected effects on left-leaning participants to be higher.

“People often complain that their income is too low compared with their earning ability, which can be regarded as overconfidence,” Kishishita told PsyPost. “This complaint induces them to think that the economy is non-meritocratic and unfair. However, this does not increase the support for reducing inequality. We hope that this finding will be helpful in understanding public opinion on inequality and redistribution.”

The study highlighted an important link between overconfidence and social perceptions, focusing on the views about economy. However, authors note that at least some of the respondents might have guessed correctly the goals of the study and provided answers in a way that they thought would satisfy the authors. To try to mitigate this fact, authors reanalyzed the data after excluding participants who could be identified as trying to satisfy desires of authors through their answers, but results remained the same.

“Our results would also be relevant for other countries because overconfidence is prevalent in many non-U.S. contexts,” Kishishita said. “However, we might expect some international differences because the view on whether the economy is fair differs across countries. Replicating our results in other countries is left to future work.”

The study, “Overconfidence, income-ability gap, and preferences for income equality“, was authored by Daiki Kishishita, Atsushi Yamagishi, and Tomoko Matsumoto.

© PsyPost

‘One of the greatest damn mysteries of physics’: we studied distant suns in the most precise astronomical test of electromagnetism yet

Michael Murphy
The Conversation
November 11, 2022

The Sun (Shutterstock)

There’s an awkward, irksome problem with our understanding of nature’s laws which physicists have been trying to explain for decades. It’s about electromagnetism, the law of how atoms and light interact, which explains everything from why you don’t fall through the floor to why the sky is blue.

Our theory of electromagnetism is arguably the best physical theory humans have ever made – but it has no answer for why electromagnetism is as strong as it is. Only experiments can tell you electromagnetism’s strength, which is measured by a number called α (aka alpha, or the fine-structure constant).

The American physicist Richard Feynman, who helped come up with the theory, called this “one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics” and urged physicists to “put this number up on their wall and worry about it”.

In research just published in Science, we decided to test whether α is the same in different places within our galaxy by studying stars that are almost identical twins of our Sun. If α is different in different places, it might help us find the ultimate theory, not just of electromagnetism, but of all nature’s laws together – the “theory of everything”.

We want to break our favorite theory

Physicists really want one thing: a situation where our current understanding of physics breaks down. New physics. A signal that cannot be explained by current theories. A sign-post for the theory of everything.

To find it, they might wait deep underground in a gold mine for particles of dark matter to collide with a special crystal. Or they might carefully tend the world’s best atomic clocks for years to see if they tell slightly different time. Or smash protons together at (nearly) the speed of light in the 27-km ring of the Large Hadron Collider.

The trouble is, it’s hard to know where to look. Our current theories can’t guide us.

Of course, we look in laboratories on Earth, where it’s easiest to search thoroughly and most precisely. But that’s a bit like the drunk only searching for his lost keys under a lamp-post when, actually, he might have lost them on the other side of the road, somewhere in a dark corner.


The Sun’s rainbow: sunlight is here spread into separate rows, each covering just a small range of colors, to reveal the many dark absorption lines from atoms in the Sun’s atmosphere.

N.A. Sharp / KPNO / NOIRLab / NSO / NSF / AURA, CC BY

Stars are terrible, but sometimes terribly similar

We decided to look beyond Earth, beyond our Solar System, to see if stars which are nearly identical twins of our Sun produce the same rainbow of colors. Atoms in the atmospheres of stars absorb some of the light struggling outwards from the nuclear furnaces in their cores.

Only certain colors are absorbed, leaving dark lines in the rainbow. Those absorbed colors are determined by α – so measuring the dark lines very carefully also lets us measure α.

Hotter and cooler gas bubbling through the turbulent atmospheres of stars make it hard to compare absorption lines in stars with those seen in laboratory experiments. 

NSO / AURA / NSF, CC BY

The problem is, the atmospheres of stars are moving – boiling, spinning, looping, burping – and this shifts the lines. The shifts spoil any comparison with the same lines in laboratories on Earth, and hence any chance of measuring α. Stars, it seems, are terrible places to test electromagnetism.

But we wondered: if you find stars that are very similar – twins of each other – maybe their dark, absorbed colors are similar as well. So instead of comparing stars to laboratories on Earth, we compared twins of our Sun to each other.

A new test with solar twins

Our team of student, postdoctoral and senior researchers, at Swinburne University of Technology and the University of New South Wales, measured the spacing between pairs of absorption lines in our Sun and 16 “solar twins” – stars almost indistinguishable from our Sun.

The rainbows from these stars were observed on the 3.6-meter European Southern Observatory (ESO) telescope in Chile. While not the largest telescope in the world, the light it collects is fed into probably the best-controlled, best-understood spectrograph: HARPS. This separates the light into its colors, revealing the detailed pattern of dark lines.

HARPS spends much of its time observing Sun-like stars to search for planets. Handily, this provided a treasure trove of exactly the data we needed.


The ESO 3.6-meter telescope in Chile spends much of its time observing Sun-like stars to search for planets using its extremely precise spectrograph, HARPS.

Iztok Bončina / ESO, CC BY

From these exquisite spectra, we have shown that α was the same in the 17 solar twins to an astonishing precision: just 50 parts per billion. That’s like comparing your height to the circumference of Earth. It’s the most precise astronomical test of α ever performed.

Unfortunately, our new measurements didn’t break our favorite theory. But the stars we’ve studied are all relatively nearby, only up to 160 light years away.

What’s next?

We’ve recently identified new solar twins much further away, about half way to the centre of our Milky Way galaxy.

In this region, there should be a much higher concentration of dark matter – an elusive substance astronomers believe lurks throughout the galaxy and beyond. Like α, we know precious little about dark matter, and some theoretical physicists suggest the inner parts of our galaxy might be just the dark corner we should search for connections between these two “damn mysteries of physics”.

If we can observe these much more distant suns with the largest optical telescopes, maybe we’ll find the keys to the universe.

Michael Murphy, Professor of Astrophysics, Swinburne University of Technology

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Confidence in science has plummeted. Here’s why we might want to rethink that
2022/11/11

LIFE-SCIENCE-SKEPTICISM-DMT. - Evgeniy Salov/Dreamstime/TNS

At the start of the pandemic, concerned friends and family turned to Jennifer Dixon for all of their COVID-19 questions: Should I wipe down my groceries? Are packages from China dangerous?

But just a few months later, Dixon, an infection prevention specialist of nearly two decades at WakeMed, noticed a shift. Some of the neighbors and friends who texted and called her for advice were suddenly deeply suspicious about her intentions and qualifications.

“Those same people are the ones who now look at me and go, ‘Yeah, I don’t believe you,’” she said.

Acquaintances unfriended her on Facebook when she posted about masks. Neighbors confronted her after seeing her talk about the vaccine on television. Close friends stopped talking to her.

“The naysayers have become stronger naysayers and then people on the fence have fallen off one side or the other,” she said.

The COVID-19 pandemic was both a lesson in how scientific research can be used to save lives and how far public trust in scientific institutions has slipped.

Scientists who had dedicated their lives to researching coronaviruses were suddenly the subject ofharassment and conspiracy theories. Large swaths of the population declined a potentially life-saving vaccine.

Just over the last two years, the share of Americans who have “a great deal of confidence in scientists to act in the public’s best interests” is down by 10 percentage points to just 29%,according to a Pew survey.

Dr. Cameron Wolfe, a Duke infectious disease expert, became the subject of particularly vitriolic distrust in the last two years.

He fielded letters with “blunt threats” and nasty comments on social media. Conspiracy theorists claimed online that Wolfe was injecting HIV into the vaccines and that his children died after participating in the vaccine clinical trials.

Wolfe doesn’t have a problem questioning science. He thinks that critiquing methodologies and evaluating data is a key part of the scientific process. But it didn’t seem to Wolfe his critics were pushing for better COVID-19 research — it seemed like they were rejecting the entire scientific process with surprising aggression.

“I hadn’t ever seen it come from an inherently skeptical place, almost like that was the base framework where so many people would sit,” he said.

While the pandemic exacerbated mistrust in scientists, confidence in research has been slowly eroding for decades.

Another poll from Gallup found that confidence in science has declined since the 1970s, particularly among Republicans.

“The crisis of trust in our society didn’t start with COVID-19 and won’t end with COVID-19,” read anarticle from the Association of American Medical Colleges. “The pandemic provided a fertile environment for myriad social and technological forces to breed confusion and distrust.”

Scientists fear rampant disinformation and waning trust in scientific institutions will make it difficult to address some of the most pressing problems facing the world, like climate change, pandemics and social inequality.

© The Charlotte Observer

Democrats Averted Disaster, But the Working Class Did Not

Opinion by Ben Burgis - Thursday- The Daily Beast

The Democrats have averted disaster—for now. They might hold on to the Senate, thanks in large part to the efforts of John Fetterman. And as I write this it’s still just barely possible that they’ll hold onto the House.

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty

But it’s hard to avoid the feeling that their current strategy is running on fumes. Even as President Joe Biden and his party describe the GOP as “semi-fascist” and never miss an opportunity to remind the nation of the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, early polling shows that Republicans have continued to pick up black and Hispanic support.

Slogans like “democracy is on the ballot” play well with managers at non-profits listening to NPR in their cars, but they move the needle a lot less with working-class people who can tell perfectly well that the current version of American democracy isn’t doing much to improve their lives. And, while solid majorities of Americans have basically progressive views on social policy issues, using language so performatively inclusive that it sounds strange and synthetic to anyone who went to a state university—rather than a liberal arts college—is going to do nothing to stop the slow purpling of traditionally Democratic constituencies.

If Democrats want to do more going forward than just limp from barely-averted-disaster to barely-averted-disaster, they need a winning message on the material issues most immediately relevant to the lives of ordinary voters. As one of my all-time least favorite Democrats once put it, “It’s the economy, stupid.”

Democracy on the Ballot?

There is a version of “democracy is on the ballot” that might move a broader segment of the electorate. But it would have to be a more grounded one.

Accusations of “fascism” tend to involve a big enough dose of hyperbole to be ultimately unpersuasive, and I’d argue that tenuous analogies to the brownshirts of yore obscure more than they clarify. Could a future presidential election be stolen? Certainly! It’s happened before. But that’s far more likely to happen again the way it happened in the Bush v. Gore election in 2000—by means of guys wearing suits and ties operating within established institutions, not Proud Boys wielding lead pipes somehow overwhelming the Leviathan of the American national security state.

It makes sense to criticize laws passed in Republican-dominated state legislatures that make it more difficult to vote, or to express alarm at the election of Republican secretaries of state who trafficked in conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. But when the “democracy” under threat is an abstraction, and no connection is drawn to kitchen table issues with an immediate impact on voter’s lives, this can ring a little hollow to all but the most dialed-in liberal partisans.

A Sunoco Gas pump reads cash and credit card prices nearing $4 a gallon in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. 

Aimee Dilger/SOPA Images/LightRocket 

After all, it’s not like elections don’t keep happening or Democrats don’t often win. The price of food, gas, and pharmaceuticals are more pressing issues for most people.

As progressive journalist Ryan Grim suggested in a conversation last week with his conservative co-host Emily Jashinsky on their show Counterpoints, a far more effective pitch would be that Republicans want to undermine democracy “so they can fleece you.” And there’s an abundance of evidence that fleecing is what they have in mind.

Kevin McCarthy’s Signed Confession

We have, for example, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s “Commitment to America” document, in which the man who will become Speaker if Republicans take the House openly announces his intention to “save” Social Security and Medicare by cutting benefits. The “save” part is nonsense on stilts—the plan is to simply steal promised benefits from elderly people who have paid into the system their entire lives and who would deserve a secure and dignified retirement even if they hadn’t.



House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., addresses an Election Night party at The Westin Washington hotel in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, November 8, 2022. Rep. Tom Emmer, R-Minn., chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, and RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel also appear. 

We often hear that Social Security is “economically unsustainable” or that it will “become insolvent” and that the proposed cuts will prevent “insolvency”—but that’s just not how the system works.

The program can’t become “insolvent” because the way the law is currently written builds in a solvency requirement. If Social Security taxes don’t generate revenues sufficient to pay out benefits at the originally projected rate, that triggers an automatic benefit cut. But as Matt Bruenig of the People’s Policy Project points out, the law could easily be amended “to state that, whenever revenue falls short of scheduled benefits, the Social Security payroll tax will automatically be increased to make the two sums balance.” You could even restrict the automatic increases to people making over $150,000 a year and still easily solve the problem typically misdescribed as “insolvency.”

Instead, McCarthy wants to prevent “insolvency” (i.e. benefit cuts) through steeper benefit cuts. The reality of the situation is better described by the late George Carlin’s classic warning that the ruling class in this country is a “big club” that most of us aren’t in and “they’re coming for your Social Security.”

This could have been productively combined with the point about the Republicans’ anti-democratic instincts. “They want to make it harder for you to vote,” Biden could have spent the last year telling people, “so you can’t vote them out when they try to steal your Social Security money.”

Better yet, he could have framed the midterms around an aggressive push for the public health care option he promised during the 2020 campaign and then immediately stopped talking about when he took office. Or better still, he could have gone a step beyond that and adopted Bernie Sanders’s call for a system of Medicare for All where the parasitical private insurance companies were taken out of the picture entirely.


Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) speaks during a health care rally at the Convention of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee on Sept. 22, 2017 in San Francisco, California.

 Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Opinion polls consistently show that these proposals have widespread public support. Surely the fact that they’re considered to be unacceptably radical in Beltway politics says something about the state of American democracy. Biden could point to all the polls where a solid majority—even among Republicans—support at least a public option. Then the president could ask why, if we live in a democracy, the people’s will isn’t being done?

The reason he and other prominent Democrats haven’t done any such thing is that this isn’t the kind of pro-democracy message they have any interest in promoting. As Thomas Frank argued in his indispensable book Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People, the current version of the Democratic Party has been thoroughly shaped by the cultural sensibilities and political worldview of affluent middle-class professionals, who see social justice as a matter of removing any barriers to the best and brightest from each demographic group rising to the top—so they can craft the smartest technocratic solutions to our problems.

They believe in democracy in so far as they believe that Democratic politicians shouldn’t have elections stolen from them. But they don’t really believe in asking a bunch of people who don’t have postgraduate degrees (and probably haven’t even read Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility), how they want to solve society’s problems.

Which Way for 2024 Democrats?

Right now, Democrats are doing everything short of spraying each other with bottles of champagne to celebrate the results of an election where they might have held onto control of the Senate by their fingernails—and they might not have even done that. As of the time I’m writing, The New York Times election forecast says that Republicans will “probably” retake the House. The happy surprise is that they weren’t blown out of the water completely by the party that openly wants to slash Medicare and Social Security.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren addresses a rally in support of Social Security and Medicare on Capitol Hill Sept. 18, 2014 in Washington, DC. 

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

If Democrats do manage to hold onto the Senate, a big part of the reason why will be that John Fetterman beat Republican Mehmet Oz for the U.S. Senate seat in Pennsylvania. This was a remarkable victory—and one that can tell us a lot about what a better approach than the one most Democrats are taking right now might look like.

Fetterman outperformed Biden’s 2020 vote in almost every county in the state, “including in rural areas where Trump racked up votes.” That’s a particularly impressive accomplishment, after he suffered a stroke early in the campaign that left him with auditory processing issues many observers mistook for cognitive impairment.

So why did he win? Elections are never laboratory experiments in which we can test individual factors in isolation from everything else. There are any number of reasons why Fetterman won (and Oz lost) and if you reran the election with one or two other variables changed you might well end up with a different result. But it’s hard to deny that one important reason Fetterman was able to do so well is that he has left-populist instincts that are utterly foreign to the mentality of far too many other Democratic politicians.

He supports equal rights for trans people, for example, but it’s impossible to imagine him using terms like “birthing people.” When he spoke out against a law that would have prevented trans teens from participating in high school sports, Fetterman explained his position the way you might explain your progressive views about something like that to a conservative friend at a bar—saying the law was “cruel” and calling it a distraction from Pennsylvania’s real problems.

And when it comes to those real problems, he’s sometimes shown himself willing to appeal to deep wells of popular anger against the plutocrats in the “big club.” In an op-ed for the Pennsylvania Times Leader, he urged the criminal prosecution of executives at food, pharmaceutical, and oil and gas companies who have been “gouging customers at the pump and at the grocery store” even as they brag to investors in earnings calls that they’ve been raking in record profits.

I’m not suggesting that Fetterman is perfect. (He isn’t.) But his against-the-odds success in a purple state offers a tantalizing glimpse into what might be possible elsewhere if Democrats get sick of narrowly averting disaster and decide, at long last, to try something else.

Hawayo Takata and the Circulatory Development of Reiki in the Twentieth Century North Pacific 

Justin B. Stein 

Doctor of Philosophy 

Department for the Study of Religion

 Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies 

University of Toronto

 2017 

Abstract 

Scholarly literature on religion in contemporary North America and Europe has taken Reiki, a form of spiritual healing, to be indicative of broader trends in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. 

These works generally assume Reiki is either a form of American unorthodox medicine in Oriental trappings or a form of Japanese religious practice that has found a place in Western biomedical settings. 

This dissertation avoids such characterizations by foregrounding transnational exchange instead of national culture. It argues Reiki is best understood as a product of the twentieth century North Pacific (specifically Japan, Hawaii, and North America).

 It proposes an analytical framework of “circulatory development” to understand Reiki’s movement through transnational networks. Circulatory development describes how the movement of practices transforms both the practices (as they are adapted for new audiences) and the people who encounter them (by embedding them in new social and spiritual relationships). 

This dissertation also proposes a category of “spiritual medicine” for practices that transcend the assumed differentiation of religious and medical spheres. iii 

Usui Mikao (1865–1926) fashioned Reiki’s earliest forms from a mix of elements in 1920s Japan, including some with long local histories and some that had been recently imported from North America. Since the mid twentieth century, Reiki’s most prevalent forms have been reconfigurations of Usui’s practice adapted for audiences in Hawaii and North America by a second-generation Japanese American named Hawayo Takata (1900–1980). 

Using archival materials and oral history interviews, this dissertation analyzes how Takata creatively transformed Reiki practice from the 1930s through the 1970s. It focuses on the relation between her gendered racialization as a Japanese American woman, her development of spiritual capital in social networks, and shifts in the meanings assigned to Japanese religion in Territorial Hawaii and mainland North America. 

It concludes that Takata’s innovations to Reiki practice both accommodated and resisted elements of North American cultural hegemony by gradually introducing practices intended to: 

1) professionalize Reiki as a practice of spiritual medicine;

 2) transmit “Japanese” values to her students, and 

3) establish a form of “particular universalism” that valorized Japan while promoting Reiki as a “universal” practice.

 STONE OF POWER: 

DIGHTON ROCK, COLONIZATION, AND THE ERASURE OF AN INDIGENOUS PAST

©DOUGLAS HUNTER, 2015

Abstract

This dissertation examines the historiography of Dighton Rock, one of the most contested artifacts of American antiquity. 

Since first being described in 1680, the forty-ton boulder on the east bank of the Taunton River in Massachusetts has been the subject of endless speculation over who created its markings or “inscription.” 

Interpretations have included Vikings, Phoenicians and visitors from Atlantis. In its latest incarnation the rock is celebrated in a dedicated state park museum as an artifact of a lost Portuguese explorer, Miguel Corte-Real. 

I accept the Indigeneity of its essential markings, which has never been seriously contested, and show how antiquarians and scholars into the twentieth century pursued an eccentric range of Old World attributions.

 I contend that the misattribution of Dighton Rock (and other Indigenous petroglyphs, as well as the so-called Mound Builder materials) has been part of the larger Euro-American/Anglo-American colonization project and its centuries-long conceptualization of Indigenous peoples. As with colonization itself, the rock’s historiography is best understood through the criteria of belonging, possession and dispossession. 

The rock’s historiography not only reflects that colonization project and its shifting priorities over time, but its interpretation has also played a significant role in defining and advancing it. By disenfranchising Indigenous peoples from their own past in the interpretations of Dighton Rock and other seeming archaeological puzzles, colonizers have sought to answer to their own advantage two fundamental questions: to whom does America belong, and who belongs in America?