Health insurance grew with corporatism and health care costs in the fertile ground of the New Deal era nonprofit BC/BS system. Eventually the for-profit FIRE sector took over the reins of health insurance since the for-profit FIRE sector reigns supreme in our dollar democracy with the best justice that money can buy. So, why not depend upon commercial lending to fund higher education? Just like trusting our lives to FIRE sector profits, entrusting the futures of our children to FIRE sector profits makes a lot of cents.
Ron (RC) Weakley (A.K.A., Darryl For A While At EV) says:
WASHINGTON — The operator of a critical fuel pipeline on the East Coast paid extortionists roughly 75 Bitcoin — or nearly $5 million — to recover its stolen data, according to people briefed on the transaction, clearing the way for gas to begin flowing again but complicating President Biden’s efforts to deter future attacks.Colonial Pipeline made the ransom payment to the hacking group DarkSide after the cybercriminals last week held up the company’s business networks with ransomware, a form of malware that encrypts data until the victim pays, and threatened to release it online. DarkSide is believed to operate from Eastern Europe, possibly Russia. …Colonial Pipeline Paid Roughly $5 Million in Ransom to Hackers
If all politics is local and if all real estate is local, then might we correctly surmise that all politics is real estate? Should we be concerned when an idea that is so absurd on its face, then appears with due consideration to fit reality like a glove?
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/05/15/nation/why-reassembling-shattered-jobs-market-is-proving-so-difficult/?event=event25 Hiring strain shows fractured job market — and why reassembling it is proving so difficult WASHINGTON — About 8 million fewer people are working in the United States than before the pandemic hit and there are about 8 million job openings. That would seem to align perfectly for a booming and fast-healing labor market as the nation’s reopening accelerates.It’s proving not nearly that simple. … COVID hit the economy last year like a category 5 hurricane, blasting away more than 22 million jobs, upending entire industries, and exposing deep inequities in pay and working conditions. The upheaval is dramatically reshaping the jobs market, leading many Americans, especially in the low-wage restaurant sector, to reconsider their careers, while causing government officials to reassess their policies and business owners to redouble their efforts to lure workers as pandemic restrictions disappear. … “Putting Humpty Dumpty back together again is a monumental task,” said Mark Hamrick, senior economic analyst at financial information website Bankrate.com. “We lost 22 million jobs in March and April last year, and those puzzle pieces are not going to fit back together the same way they were before.” … A Pew Research Center survey in January found that nearly two-thirds of unemployed Americans had seriously considered changing their occupation or work field. In the restaurant industry, 53 percent of workers said they were considering leaving their jobs during the pandemic, with more than three-quarters citing low wages and reduced tips, according to a survey released this month by One Fair Wage, a Cambridge group advocating for higher pay for restaurant workers, and the Food Labor Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. All this change complicates the forecast for the labor market recovery. Job growth slowed sharply to 266,000 in April, well off the nearly 1 million new hires that analysts had predicted after overall economic activity soared in the first three months of the year.Economists were quick to warn that one month doesn’t make a trend and noted that the United States still has averaged a strong 524,000 new jobs over the past three months. But the report and other recent government data show there’s still a long way to go in reassembling a labor market hit by an unprecedented shock. …
Unemployment Pay May Again Require a Job Search. Is It Too Soon?
Unemployment Pay May Again Require a Job Search. Is It Too Soon?The requirement, eased because of the pandemic, is being reimposed. Some say it presents an undue hardship.A tenet of the American unemployment system has been that anyone collecting benefits, in good times and bad, must look for work.That quid pro quo changed early in the pandemic. Profound fears of contagion and the sudden need for millions of workers to become caregivers led states to lift the requirements for reasons both practical and compassionate.But as vaccinations increase and the economy revs back to life, more than half of all states have revived their work search requirements. Arkansas and Louisiana did so months ago in an effort to push workers off their swollen unemployment rolls. Others, like Vermont and Kentucky, have followed in the last few weeks. … The rest may be on the way. President Biden on Monday ordered the Labor Department to “work with the remaining states, as health and safety conditions allow,” to put such requirements in place as the pandemic abates. Employers may welcome the moves as potentially enlarging the pool of job seekers. But for many workers, the search obligation is a premature declaration that the world has returned to normal even as legitimate concerns persist about contracting the virus and about child care constraints. …
Hiring strain shows fractured job market — and why reassembling it is proving so difficultCOVID hit the economy last year like a category five hurricane, blasting away more than 22 million jobs, upending entire industries, and exposing deep inequities in pay and working conditions. The upheaval is dramatically reshaping the jobs market, leading many Americans to reconsider their careers. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/05/15/nation/why-reassembling-shattered-jobs-market-is-proving-so-difficult/?event=event25
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/05/16/opinion/dont-despair-liberals/?event=event25Don’t Despair Liberals Yes, the filibuster stands in the way of climate action and gun control and everything else you hold dear. But there may be another path. … Last month, nearly 100 restive House Democrats sent an urgent letter to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, arguing that the country is facing an “existential moment” with the “very survival” of many of their constituents at stake and insisting “there is simply no avenue for bold legislation that meets the needs of everyday Americans without ending the filibuster.” The letter writers, who included prominent progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, may be right.But this much is clear: There’s no discernible path, at the moment, to jettisoning the filibuster. Senator Joe Manchin, a West Virginia moderate who holds outsize power in the Democrats’ can’t-spare-a-vote majority, insists it’s a critical lifeline to the chamber’s dying tradition of bipartisanship. And he has made it clear that he will never agree to spike the rule — no matter how many times progressive colleagues plead with him or members of the press ask him about it. “J—- C—–,” he told a group of reporters back in March. “What don’t you understand about ‘never’?”And just as important: It’s possible that the liberal despair animating that letter to Schumer is premature — that there is, in fact, a path to substantial change. A way around the filibuster. … Lawmakers are also discussing a reconciliation-friendly tax-and-credit scheme that would force a dramatic increase in the production of clean energy — and take the country a long way toward meeting its obligations under the Paris climate accord.And with a little creativity, one can imagine similar legislation in the realms of election reform and gun control.Of course, it’s possible that the ideas floated here won’t pass muster with the Senate parliamentarian, the chamber’s chief rule enforcer. And twisting enormously important legislation to fit the parameters of an obscure parliamentary maneuver is no one’s idea of good governance.Finding a clever way to get big progressive ideas to the Senate floor won’t matter much anyway if moderate Democrats like Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona refuse to vote for them. …
Health insurance grew with corporatism and health care costs in the fertile ground of the New Deal era nonprofit BC/BS system. Eventually the for-profit FIRE sector took over the reins of health insurance since the for-profit FIRE sector reigns supreme in our dollar democracy with the best justice that money can buy. So, why not depend upon commercial lending to fund higher education? Just like trusting our lives to FIRE sector profits, entrusting the futures of our children to FIRE sector profits makes a lot of cents.
Legal Profession Statistics (americanbar.org) According to the demographics of licensed lawyers in the US, then the rule of lawyers is still the rule of men.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/13/us/politics/biden-colonial-pipeline-ransomware.html?smid=tw-share
If all politics is local and if all real estate is local, then might we correctly surmise that all politics is real estate? Should we be concerned when an idea that is so absurd on its face, then appears with due consideration to fit reality like a glove?
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/05/15/nation/why-reassembling-shattered-jobs-market-is-proving-so-difficult/?event=event25 Hiring strain shows fractured job market — and why reassembling it is proving so difficult WASHINGTON — About 8 million fewer people are working in the United States than before the pandemic hit and there are about 8 million job openings. That would seem to align perfectly for a booming and fast-healing labor market as the nation’s reopening accelerates.It’s proving not nearly that simple. … COVID hit the economy last year like a category 5 hurricane, blasting away more than 22 million jobs, upending entire industries, and exposing deep inequities in pay and working conditions. The upheaval is dramatically reshaping the jobs market, leading many Americans, especially in the low-wage restaurant sector, to reconsider their careers, while causing government officials to reassess their policies and business owners to redouble their efforts to lure workers as pandemic restrictions disappear. … “Putting Humpty Dumpty back together again is a monumental task,” said Mark Hamrick, senior economic analyst at financial information website Bankrate.com. “We lost 22 million jobs in March and April last year, and those puzzle pieces are not going to fit back together the same way they were before.” … A Pew Research Center survey in January found that nearly two-thirds of unemployed Americans had seriously considered changing their occupation or work field. In the restaurant industry, 53 percent of workers said they were considering leaving their jobs during the pandemic, with more than three-quarters citing low wages and reduced tips, according to a survey released this month by One Fair Wage, a Cambridge group advocating for higher pay for restaurant workers, and the Food Labor Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. All this change complicates the forecast for the labor market recovery. Job growth slowed sharply to 266,000 in April, well off the nearly 1 million new hires that analysts had predicted after overall economic activity soared in the first three months of the year.Economists were quick to warn that one month doesn’t make a trend and noted that the United States still has averaged a strong 524,000 new jobs over the past three months. But the report and other recent government data show there’s still a long way to go in reassembling a labor market hit by an unprecedented shock. …
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/16/business/unemployment-job-search-requirements.html?smid=tw-share
Unemployment Pay May Again Require a Job Search. Is It Too Soon?The requirement, eased because of the pandemic, is being reimposed. Some say it presents an undue hardship.A tenet of the American unemployment system has been that anyone collecting benefits, in good times and bad, must look for work.That quid pro quo changed early in the pandemic. Profound fears of contagion and the sudden need for millions of workers to become caregivers led states to lift the requirements for reasons both practical and compassionate.But as vaccinations increase and the economy revs back to life, more than half of all states have revived their work search requirements. Arkansas and Louisiana did so months ago in an effort to push workers off their swollen unemployment rolls. Others, like Vermont and Kentucky, have followed in the last few weeks. … The rest may be on the way. President Biden on Monday ordered the Labor Department to “work with the remaining states, as health and safety conditions allow,” to put such requirements in place as the pandemic abates. Employers may welcome the moves as potentially enlarging the pool of job seekers. But for many workers, the search obligation is a premature declaration that the world has returned to normal even as legitimate concerns persist about contracting the virus and about child care constraints. …
Hiring strain shows fractured job market — and why reassembling it is proving so difficultCOVID hit the economy last year like a category five hurricane, blasting away more than 22 million jobs, upending entire industries, and exposing deep inequities in pay and working conditions. The upheaval is dramatically reshaping the jobs market, leading many Americans to reconsider their careers. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/05/15/nation/why-reassembling-shattered-jobs-market-is-proving-so-difficult/?event=event25
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/05/16/opinion/dont-despair-liberals/?event=event25Don’t Despair Liberals Yes, the filibuster stands in the way of climate action and gun control and everything else you hold dear. But there may be another path. … Last month, nearly 100 restive House Democrats sent an urgent letter to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, arguing that the country is facing an “existential moment” with the “very survival” of many of their constituents at stake and insisting “there is simply no avenue for bold legislation that meets the needs of everyday Americans without ending the filibuster.” The letter writers, who included prominent progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, may be right.But this much is clear: There’s no discernible path, at the moment, to jettisoning the filibuster. Senator Joe Manchin, a West Virginia moderate who holds outsize power in the Democrats’ can’t-spare-a-vote majority, insists it’s a critical lifeline to the chamber’s dying tradition of bipartisanship. And he has made it clear that he will never agree to spike the rule — no matter how many times progressive colleagues plead with him or members of the press ask him about it. “J—- C—–,” he told a group of reporters back in March. “What don’t you understand about ‘never’?”And just as important: It’s possible that the liberal despair animating that letter to Schumer is premature — that there is, in fact, a path to substantial change. A way around the filibuster. … Lawmakers are also discussing a reconciliation-friendly tax-and-credit scheme that would force a dramatic increase in the production of clean energy — and take the country a long way toward meeting its obligations under the Paris climate accord.And with a little creativity, one can imagine similar legislation in the realms of election reform and gun control.Of course, it’s possible that the ideas floated here won’t pass muster with the Senate parliamentarian, the chamber’s chief rule enforcer. And twisting enormously important legislation to fit the parameters of an obscure parliamentary maneuver is no one’s idea of good governance.Finding a clever way to get big progressive ideas to the Senate floor won’t matter much anyway if moderate Democrats like Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona refuse to vote for them. …