“Trump’s Defeat Weakens Boris Johnson in Urgent Brexit Talks.
As the European Union knows, the British prime minister can ill afford to threaten peace in Ireland, an issue close to the President-elect Biden’s heart.”

This is from the NY Times.

Here’s why this matters to me:

A few months ago I was writing about Bibi, Bojo & Donnie as a triple threat to the world. Their 3-way admiration society boded ill for all the rest of us.

Now the alliance is shattered and improvement on a global scale seems a bit closer.

For one thing—and it’s a Big Thing—all talk of the USA buying bits of the UK’s NHS and privatizing it, is dead in the water. The idea was that there would be “special trade deals” between the UK and the USA if the USA got some things they want. None of those things would have been good for the working classes in either country.

Similarly, Bibi has lost his big supporter and a less racist ugly leader may yet win election in Israel.

The end of our Tyrant won’t solve all our problems. And soon enough, I will get back to kvetching about Joe.

For right now, however, I can see reasons to be cheerful.

Hello my fellow nesters, I’m happy to say surprisingly i beat the virus. im considering my pre existing conditions when I say this as I’ve read of people that died younger and in better shape than I. I get to go back to work Wed as well :(. It was no picnic dealing with covid and wish everyone whom has had it well as some symptoms dont go away right away, for me a nagging cough. This virus certainly effects everybody differently. I want to thank my fellow nesters for your kind words while i was dealing with this virus.

Those were not “mistakes” in the Obama era. They were the playbook and he executed it to the letter.

Doctorow has a thread on how we did in the past and continue to bankroll TPTB, enabling them to buy up everything we had and have. And now it’s on steroids. But Obama didn’t just make mistakes. He gave the banks a free pass (with a slap on the wrist here and there), so that even most fraudulent foreclosures stood. Stores closed.

So he set us up for what we have now.

Stock buybacks to keep the whole charade going.

Stores are closing all over. Word is that medical is going to speed up the wretched telehealth. I have less connection on zoom just hoping to help people going through a breakup. Imagine how screwed up it will be to hope to heal someone on zoom with the fracking insurance “scibe” in the background. Education, well, we know how that’s going. Kids are falling behind everywhere, as is natural.

TPTB are buying up every last thing standing and the people are losing any assets they had.

This may have been announced before.
WSJ has it, too.

Where's that pushing, and why aren't we striking yet? https://t.co/LbVOoshARQ

— HootHootBerns (@HootHootBerns) November 10, 2020

https://twitter.com/davidsirota/status/1326215800403881985?s=20

including AG? after the George Floyd incident? they know they do not have to do a damn progressive thing.

the dems are not on the right path if they don’t act on this

Unsustainable Inequalities
Social Justice and the Environment

A hard-headed book that confronts and outlines possible solutions to a seemingly intractable problem: that helping the poor often hurts the environment, and vice versa.

Can we fight poverty and inequality while protecting the environment? The challenges are obvious. To rise out of poverty is to consume more resources, almost by definition. And many measures to combat pollution lead to job losses and higher prices that mainly hurt the poor. In Unsustainable Inequalities, economist Lucas Chancel confronts these difficulties head-on, arguing that the goals of social justice and a greener world can be compatible, but that progress requires substantial changes in public policy.

Chancel begins by reviewing the problems. Human actions have put the natural world under unprecedented pressure. The poor are least to blame but suffer the most—forced to live with pollutants that the polluters themselves pay to avoid. But Chancel shows that policy pioneers worldwide are charting a way forward. Building on their success, governments and other large-scale organizations must start by doing much more simply to measure and map environmental inequalities. We need to break down the walls between traditional social policy and environmental protection—making sure, for example, that the poor benefit most from carbon taxes. And we need much better coordination between the center, where policies are set, and local authorities on the front lines of deprivation and contamination.

A rare work that combines the quantitative skills of an economist with the argumentative rigor of a philosopher, Unsustainable Inequalities shows that there is still hope for solving even seemingly intractable social problems.

I added the bold to the last paragraph. I went ahead and ordered book. Found out from this tweet

Don't miss Lucas Chancel, "Unsustainable Inequalities. Social Justice and the Environment" (translated by Malcolm DeVoise)@Harvard_Press, Full of useful data. Perfect to see why social inequalities are also ecological injustices.

— BrunoLatour (@BrunoLatourAIME) November 10, 2020

I sure hope that it delivers on the last sentence “hope for solving seemingly intractable problems”

Trump Administration Removes Scientist in Charge of Assessing Climate Change
Michael Kuperberg was told he would no longer oversee the National Climate Assessment. The job is expected to go to a climate-change skeptic, according to people familiar with the changes.

Go for it Trump –even after almost 4 years, still expertise to get rid of. Slow down transition to address climate change.

WASHINGTON — The White House has removed the scientist responsible for the National Climate Assessment, the federal government’s premier contribution to climate knowledge and the foundation for regulations to combat global warming, in what critics interpreted as the latest sign that the Trump administration intends to use its remaining months in office to continue impeding climate science and policy.

Michael Kuperberg, executive director of the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which produces the climate assessment, was told Friday that he would no longer lead that organization, people with knowledge of the situation said.

According to two people close to the administration, he is expected to be replaced by David Legates, a deputy assistant secretary at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who previously worked closely with climate change denial groups.

Dr. Kuperberg’s departure comes amid a broader effort, in the aftermath of Mr. Trump’s defeat last week by President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., to remove officials who have fallen afoul of the White House. Also on Friday, Neil Chatterjee, head of the agency that regulates the nation’s utility markets, was demoted by the White House, after he publicly supported the use of renewable power.

found in this tweet

the elephants trampling the planet

a continuing theme of Bruno Latour is that the divide is as great as living on different planets

this at the time when what we should be doing is “Down To Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime”

https://www.crainsdetroit.com/government/congressman-levin-has-union-support-be-bidens-labor-chief

Michigan congressman and former union organizer Andy Levin is securing some union leaders’ support in a bid to become President-elect Joe Biden’s Labor secretary.
Levin’s family has long been involved in Michigan politics. His seat was held by his father, Sandy Levin, for 36 years, and an uncle, Carl Levin, was a U.S. senator from 1979 until 2015.”He’ll be able to do the job from the moment he walks in there,” said Communications Workers of America President Chris Shelton. “I think there are lots of unions who would throw their support behind him.”

The president-elect, Shelton said, will “want a secretary of Labor who’s pro-labor, and I don’t know that he can find one that’s more pro-labor than Andy Levin.”

Shelton said he’s shared his support for Levin with the AFL-CIO, and will be making the case for him to the Biden transition team and to fellow labor leaders. After President Donald Trump chose management-side attorney Eugene Scalia to run the department, Shelton said, choosing a former organizer “would be a great contrast.”

The Biden transition didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Things we can thank Trump for showing what is going on

could the following also be part of understanding establishment dems?

Trump tore off the curtain which divides citizens, the spectators of the political game, from the rulers and displayed the wheeling-dealing, exchange of favors, the use of public power for private gain in an open, in-your-face manner, available for all who attended the show to see. While in the past administrations such illegal and semi-legal actions, as receiving money from foreign potentates, moving from one to another lucrative position, cheating on taxes were done with discretion and some decorum, with the curtain lowered so that spectators could not see and participate in the malfeasance, this was now done in the open. It was thus thanks to Trump that we could see the immense corruption lying at the heart of the political process.

Thus from knowing more about Trump we know more about the means used to succeed in the rich business milieu of New York, and even of the world, as Trump and his companions, made deals in Scotland, Russia, the Middle East, China and elsewhere. His close confidantes and family members who betrayed him in order to garner multi-million dollar contracts exhibited a behavior that Trump himself would have done (and approved of) but that showed clearly what kind of ethical standards are prevalent in that environment. Trump thus gave us another very valuable lesson: it showed the rot, corruption and impunity that lay at the heart of many powerful businesses.

What we owe to Donald J Trump

The author is ab economist at CUNY in the STONE Center on socio-economic inequality

His name has come up before, but I followed the above link to his article

Trump as the ultimate triumph of neo liberalism

He gives an excellent short summary of neo liberalism and how it burrows into democracy.

By introducing economic rules into politics, neoliberals have done an enormous harm to the “publicness” of decision-making and to democracy. They have brought many societies to a stage inferior to that of being ruled by self-interested despots. Mancur Olson in his famous distinction between rulers who are roving or stationary bandits recounts the anecdote of a Sicilian farmer who supports a one-man despotic rule by arguing that the ruler has “an all encompassing interest”: in order to maintain his rule and maximize his own tax intake, he does have an interest in prosperity of his subjects. This is different, and much superior, Olson argued, to a roving bandit who, like the Mongol invaders, has interest only in the short-term extraction from his (temporary) subjects.

Why is a neoliberal ruler worse than the “all-encompassing-interest” despot? Precisely because he lacks the all-encompassing interest in his polity as he does not see himself as being part of it; rather he is the owner of a giant company called in this case the United States of America where he decides who should do what. People complain that Trump, in this crisis, is lacking the most elementary human compassion. But while they are right in diagnosis, they are wrong in understanding the origin of the lack of compassion. Like any rich owner he does not see that his role is to show compassion to his hired hands, but to decide what they should do, and even when the occasion presents itself, to squeeze them out of their pay, make them work harder or dismiss them without a benefit. In doing so to his putative countrymen he is just applying to an area called “politics” the principles that he has learned and used for many years in business.

Trump is the best student of neoliberalism because he applies its principles without concealment.

I added the bold. Hence, the dems are NOT the best student because they HIDE what they are doing!!!!