Tag: Premium

by Katie Zavadski

The HBO adaptation of Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart,” an autobiographical tale of the onset of AIDS and the births of Act Up and GMHC, premieres this Monday. And Larry, visibly aged in the video seen above, was by all accounts as active on set with director Ryan Murphy as anywhere else. Patrick Healy looked into the making of the film (NYT):

Mr. Murphy said that he and Mr. Kramer, in the hospital, worked for months on the screenplay by email. They were determined, he said, to create a movie with “real immediacy” — visually graphic scenes that would pack a punch for New Yorkers who lived through the 1980s and that might motivate those continuing to fight for gay rights today. Harrowing monologues in the play, like the description of one character’s physical disintegration on a cross-country flight, have been opened up into fully rendered moments that show the agony of AIDS.

“I wrote the word ‘true’ on a notecard and put it on my computer,” Mr. Murphy said. “Larry was always trying to be on the right side of the angels, but he can be so abrasive, and he was so hurt by how he was treated by his friends and enemies in the ’80s. I wanted the movie to be true to all sides of him.”

After finding fault in so much, Mr. Kramer found little with the movie, and none with its depiction of his life’s work. “It’s about speaking up, being a buffalo if you have to, being mean if you have to,” Mr. Kramer said. “You do not get more with honey than with vinegar.”

Larry’s comments on Truvada in that interview, I’m sure, will get addressed by Andrew next week. But according to Richard Cohen, the original’s vinegar is still there:

The HBO movie is rough on Reagan and Koch.

They earned it. Reagan had gay friends and associates and was in no way a bigot. But he was clearly afraid of alienating his conservative base. The Moral Majority’s Jerry Falwell characteristically said later that “AIDS is the wrath of a just God against homosexuals.” Reagan did not even mention the word AIDS until the disease was impossible to ignore and his friend Rock Hudson had died from it.

As for Koch, mayor of a city hugely impacted by the epidemic, the movie flat-out declares him to have been a closeted homosexual — afraid to acknowledge the reality of AIDS lest his own secret be revealed. Koch always put his private life off-limits. He was entitled to this — but not at the price of ignoring a public health menace that needed immediate attention. The tendency then and somewhat still today was to blame gay men for their plight. The proposed remedy was to deprive them of their sex life — a remedy some felt was worse than the disease.

Emily Nussbaum reflects on the importance of the movie:

There are grittier routes to the history of this period, including excellent documentaries such as “gay Sex in the 70s” and “How to Survive a Plague.” There are more expansive books, like Randy Shilts’s “And the Band Played On,” and more richly philosophical plays, like “Angels in America.” Yet there’s something implacable and pure about “The Normal Heart,” not despite but because of its message-in-a-bottle specificity. Not for nothing was a 1994 book by Kramer titled “Reports from the Holocaust”; as a gay Jew, he saw one identity as a metaphor for the other, with a built-in warning system. When people began dying, the choice was clear: you could be the Warsaw resistance or you could be the American Jewish Congress, beggars who stayed behind the scenes, lobbying for help that never came. Even in 1985, Kramer knew the effect of this obsession on others. “All analogies to the Holocaust are tired, overworked, boring, probably insulting, possibly true, and a major turnoff,” Felix says. “Are they?” Ned replies.

In 2014, AIDS and gay identity are no longer tied together in a three-legged race. The idea of making real change through the system is no pipe dream, either: each day, more Bens switch sides, now that gay rights has become a safe, default liberal perspective. But Murphy’s adaptation is a useful time machine. It’s a corrective to complacency, a reminder of a period when rage itself was a necessary tonic, a caustic application that could burn through the misery of shame and isolation. What’s the use of an alarm, after all, if it’s not loud enough to wake people up?

I remember sitting with a copy of And The Band Played On in high school, pairing Larry’s characters with their real-life counterparts. That interest must have, on some level, been triggered by growing up with my own stories of the Jewish Holocaust: To borrow Larry’s analogy, it made sense to remember this one, too.

And yet, a time machine may just be needed. The other day I asked a friend, a gay man in his mid-20s, whether he would watch the film version of the play with me. “Sure,” he replied. “What’s that about?” One of the film’s stars, Matthew Bomer, is just a decade older. It’s telling that his experience with the story is so different:

There’s a headline that keeps circulating from a quote that you gave, where you said, “Larry Kramer probably saved my life.”

Yeah. I’m sure he did. At the time I first read it, my first sexual relationships were with women. But even then he put the fear of God in me! (Laughs) He educated me in a lot of ways. It was a very useful fear. But it was also the education to be smart and be safe, and that carried over into my later relationships and also when I started to have relationships with men.

But I think he saved me on a more profound than practical level. Even at 14 when I still didn’t know who I was when I read this piece—I was still figuring out who my most authentic self was—to have this voice that was such a firebrand and so honest and so authentic, to know that that reality was out there, even though it was nowhere near my immediate experience in suburban Texas, to know that somewhere it was out there gave me a sense of hope. And I think I knew on some level that a part of me that hadn’t been acknowledged yet was going to be OK.

Read Andrew’s look back at Act Up here, and Larry’s response here.

by Jonah Shepp

Sabra, the company you may know but not necessarily love for their prepackaged hummus, is asking the government to create a standard definition of their signature product:

The Food and Drug Administration already does this with some other products like cream cheese (which must be 33 percent milk fat for manufacturers to market it as cream cheese). Sabra argues the hummus market has run amok; its time for Uncle Sam to step in. “Some products labeled as ‘hummus’ are made entirely from legumes other than chickpeas,” Sabra wrote in its filing with the Food and Drug Administration. “Because these products substitute other legumes, the marketing of these products as “hummus” undermines honesty and fair dealing.”

As a traditional Middle Eastern dip, hummus has two crucial ingredients: chickpeas and tahini (the latter being a paste made from ground sesame seeds). Sabra has surveyed the market and, in documents submitted to the FDA, finds these two ingredients decidedly lacking in many purported hummus products today. … “The marketing of a ‘hummus’ product made from legumes other than chickpeas is akin to the marketing of guacamole made with fruit other than avocados,” Sabra argues.

Strictly on the merits, they are correct here—the word “hummus” actually means chickpeas—though I find some irony in a company founded by Israelis demanding that the American government standardize the definition of an Arabic word. Of course, this move has nothing to do with the merits and everything to do with regulating competitors out of existence. Tim Cavanaugh sees right through it:

If Sabra wants to sell a chipotle hummus, more power to them. Consumers have spent millions of dollars on the company’s dry, bland, plastic-tasting product, and nobody was forcing them. But this FDA petition is about hobbling rivals, not helping restore the consumer’s “confidence in the food supply.” Only the excellent Tablet magazine even hints at the possibility that Sabra, which has about 60 percent of this rapidly growing market, might be looking to lock out competitors.

The phenomenon is called “regulatory capture,” and the reason you almost never hear about it is because the public and the media have fully internalized the language of good government. When big companies exert political influence, they are not trying to end regulation of their industries: They’re trying to create it so that competitors have a harder time completing. Notice how no company ever agitates for stronger regulations before it becomes the dominant player.

(Image: A screenshot from Sabra’s petition.)

by Jonah Shepp

Ali Wyne reviews Robert Kaplan’s new book, Asia’s Cauldron, which explains the South China Sea’s centrality to Pacific politics:

He emphasizes three points. First, Chinese primacy in the South China Sea “would go a long way toward making China more than merely the first among equals of Eastern Hemispheric powers.” Second, the principal risk for China’s smaller neighbors is not invasion, but “Finlandization.” The growing gravitational pull of China’s economy doubles as a carrot—your economy will continue to flourish if you keep yourself open to our exports and investments—and a stick—you will endanger an increasingly important component of your economy if you take actions that undermine our national interests. Behind that dual-use instrument is an increasingly capable People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Given its aspiration of achieving a peaceful rise, China would prefer that its smaller neighbors accommodate themselves to its perspectives on the territorial disputes that are roiling the region (essentially, Kaplan explains, “give in without violence”). Third, the US “must be prepared to allow, in some measure, for a rising Chinese navy to assume its rightful position, as the representative of the region’s largest indigenous power.”

Posner analyzes China’s escalating disputes with Vietnam and the Philippines over maritime borders and islands in the sea:

One question that arises is why China and its neighbors are suddenly having so many conflicts that are violent or near-violent. The conflicting territorial claims have existed for decades but violence has been sporadic until recently (aside from the China-Vietnam War).

M. Taylor Fravel argues that China seeks to “consolidate” its claims by keeping other countries out of disputed areas. That would explain why China reacts aggressively–by sending in ships and planes–typically after the neighbors pass some law or take other actions that make clear that they consider their claims valid. But why are those countries provoking China in this way, and why now?

As Fravel suggests, China’s strategy is one of delay while claiming that the disputes are unresolved. The neighbors, by contrast, claim that there is no dispute and their claims are valid. China’s strategy thus seems more passive. And the reason is surely that time is on China’s side. China has grown more rapidly than all of its neighbors and looks likely to continue to do so for the near future, at least. As it becomes more dominant–both economically and militarily–its neighbors will be in a worse position to counter its claims in their shared waters.

Hugh White suspects that Beijing’s recent aggressiveness is also meant to limit American influence:

By using direct armed pressure in these disputes, China makes its neighbours more eager for US military support, and at the same time makes America less willing to give it, because of the clear risk of a direct US-China clash. In other words, by confronting America’s friends with force, China confronts America with the choice between deserting its friends and fighting China. Beijing is betting that, faced with this choice, America will back off and leave its allies and friends unsupported. This will weaken America’s alliances and partnerships, undermine US power in Asia, and enhance China’s power.

This view of China’s motives explains its recent conduct.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader can relate to these would-be hires:

I was rejected by the FBI because of pot! I applied to be a special agent shortly after 9/11. I had two major complaints about the process.

First, I had just finished two years of service in Morocco with the Peace Corps, and I thought I could leverage my language ability in Arabic. However, the only Arabic that they could test 0r give credit for was “FousHa”, or the educated version of Arabic that would be nearly unintelligible to uneducated Arabic speakers. No credit was available to speakers of dialects.

Second, they said I would have to make several certifications, including (if memory serves), “I have not used marijuana more than three times in the last five years,” and “I have not used marijuana more than 10 times in my life.” Since most of my marijuana experience was from a few trips to Amsterdam, I asked if it was relevant that I never smoked marijuana in violation of US law, or if I had never done so in violation of any law (I would have had to look a bit more carefully at Dutch law before certifying to that last one). Answer: Nope – look for another job.

I think the FBI recruiter said the marijuana policies were even more strict before Bill Clinton’s administration – the logic, perhaps, being that President Clinton wouldn’t want policies that would have excluded him. I left thinking, with all due respect to the FBI, that they didn’t have a clue of what they were recruiting for. The Arabic they were testing for would be useless to anyone trying to understand spoken Arabic in any country, and they were excluding otherwise qualified candidates on the basis of insignificant and lawful recreational pot use. So, no surprise here that they’re having trouble hiring hackers.

by Tracy R. Walsh

Amanda Hess takes note of a new meta-analysis indicating that most prejudice is not due to hostility toward others, “but rather simple preferences for people like ourselves”:

In a review of five decades of psychological research, [the study’s authors] found that while most researchers defined prejudice as an expression of hostility, the more pervasive form of bigotry in the United States comes from people who favor, admire, and trust people of their own race, gender, age, religion, or parenting status. Even people who share our birthdays can catch a break. That means that – to take just one example – sexist bias isn’t largely perpetuated by people who hate women. It’s furthered by men who just particularly like other men.

For Hess, the study suggests why discrimination remains such an intractable problem:

We’re not asking the powerful to stop hating; we’re asking them to cede some of their power to others. If the powerful are required to extend their networks to offer jobs to people who aren’t like them, that means that they can’t keep hiring their friends (or people who they feel have the educational pedigree and family background to one day become their friends). … Housing and employment discrimination against minorities isn’t just a case of some people missing out on the opportunities they deserve, but also of white people getting opportunities that they don’t.

In the lead-up to Egypt’s presidential election next week, Max Rodenbeck examines the findings of a recent Pew survey, which puts putative winner Abdel Fatah Al-Sisi’s favorability at 54 percent and shows “declining faith in democracy”:

In the heady days of 2011, 54% favoured “democracy, even with some risk of political instability”, over stable government without full democracy. Those proportions have now reversed, a factor that has clearly played to Mr Sisi’s electoral advantage.

But Egypt’s new leader should take little comfort from other trends. Trust in national institutions, including the army, the media, religious leaders and the courts has slumped to an all-time low; in the case of the military from 88% approval in 2011 to just 56% now. This is an indication that the post-coup-regime’s use of harsh policing and harsher justice has carried a heavy cost in public support. Significantly, some 63% or respondents said the government now “does not respect” personal freedoms, up from 44% under Mr Morsi.

Perhaps most ominously, a solid 72% of respondents say they are dissatisfied with the country’s general direction. That is a higher proportion than in 2010, the year before Egyptians rose up and overthrew Hosni Mubarak, their dictator for three decades.

Richard Wike focuses on what Pew found out about the Muslim Brotherhood:

Back in 2011, just after the revolution, three-quarters of Egyptians had a favorable opinion of the Muslim Brotherhood, and even in the spring of 2013 a solid majority (63 percent) still expressed a positive view. In the new survey, however, just 38 percent give the Brotherhood a positive rating. Still, the fact that roughly four in 10 Egyptians continue to have a favorable opinion of the Islamist organization, which the Egyptian state has declared a terrorist group, means that Sisi will come to office facing significant opposition to his rule.

In some ways, the Brotherhood’s resilience shouldn’t be a surprise: The organization has been around for nearly nine decades and has survived varying levels of repression over time, adapting and transforming itself as the political context changes. Egypt remains a country where many Islamist positions enjoy a great deal of acceptance, providing groups like the Brotherhood an ongoing base of support.

Meanwhile, Eric Trager interviews Sisi’s quixotic challenger Hamdeen Sabahi:

Sabahi, who finished a strong third in the 13-candidate 2012 presidential election, knows that the odds are severely stacked against him. “I think the political atmosphere says that there is a state candidate,” he said, referring to Sisi, during an interview at his Giza-based office in early April. “I think this atmosphere does not give an equal competitive opportunity in this election.” … Yet despite the hopelessness of his relatively small campaign, Sabahi is making one important contribution to Egypt’s political landscape. In an otherwise repressive political environment, he is working to preserve Egyptians’ ability to challenge Sisi’s emerging regime. …

Yet despite the hopelessness of his relatively small campaign, Sabahi is making one important contribution to Egypt’s political landscape. In an otherwise repressive political environment, he is working to preserve Egyptians’ ability to challenge Sisi’s emerging regime. “I am not an idealist who stays at home waiting for this state to be neutral,” he told me. “For this reason, I believe in running for this presidential election so that democracy becomes a right.”

by Jonah Shepp

Reviewing Brigid Schulte’s Overwhelmed, Elizabeth Kolbert ties Schulte’s exploration of American busyness back to John Maynard Keynes’s famously incorrect prediction that dramatic increases in productivity would lead to less work and more leisure time in the 21st century:

Eighty years after Keynes first composed “Economic Possibilities,” a pair of Italian economists, Lorenzo Pecchi and Gustavo Piga, got to chatting about it. How could “a man of Keynes’s intelligence,” they wondered, have been “so right in predicting a future of economic growth and improving living standards” and so wrong about the future of leisure? They decided to pose this question to colleagues in Europe and the United States. Perhaps some of those they asked were women; in any event, all those who responded were men. The result, “Revisiting Keynes” (2008), suggests that Nobel Prize-winning economists, too, are perplexed by “the overwhelm.”

Several contributors to the volume attribute Keynes’s error to a misreading of human nature. Keynes assumed that people work in order to earn enough to buy what they need. And so, he reasoned, as incomes rose, those needs could be fulfilled in ever fewer hours. Workers would knock off earlier and earlier, until eventually they’d be going home by lunchtime. But that isn’t what people are like. Instead of quitting early, they find new things to need.

But Derek Thompson pushes back on the notion that Americans are busier than ever:

For much of the essay, this premise survives unchallenged. Obviously, we’re working more than ever, because it feels like we are. Right? Actually, no, we’re not.

As a country, we’re working less than we did in the 1960s and 1980s and considerably less than we did in the agrarian-industrial economy when Keynes foresaw a future of leisure. It’s not until the end of Kolbert’s essay that the reader steals a glimpse of the cold hard statistical truth: Every advanced economy in the world is working considerably fewer hours on average than it used to. …

For many Americans, particularly less-educated men and women, Keynes’ crystal ball has correctly foretold a future of historically high leisure time. But single parents in the U.S. report the most hours worked and severe time shortage in the developed world, and higher-educated men and women are actually working more than they were 50 years, bucking the global trend. Economists call this the “leisure gap,” and it’s a mirror reflection of the income gap. When it comes to leisure, the rich have less, and the poor have more.

He thinks this leisure gap reveals Schulte’s and Kolbert’s biases:

It’s appropriate that both Brigid Schulte and Elizabeth Kolbert are successful working moms, since this category of workers has seen its leisure time fall despite rising incomes. Since 1950, young married women’s work hours have tripled while married men’s hours have declined, according to the Philadelphia Fed. The well-educated rich, married, working mother is overwhelmed. But there are a lot of Americans who are neither well-educated, nor rich, nor working, nor parents. For them, there are probably more pressing concerns than belonging to (in the words of Swedish economist Staffan Linder) a “Harried Leisure Class.”

Previous Dish on Overwhelmed here.

by Jonah Shepp

Earlier this week, Ramesh Ponnuru urged Republicans to embrace alternatives to the minimum wage that he believes would better help low-wage workers and the middle class, such as raising the Earned Income Tax Credit and addressing rising costs of living:

Republicans should attack both ends of the problem. Rising health-insurance premiums are a big reason wages have stagnated. Scaling back the tax break for the most expensive policies, as part of a market-based reform of health care, could help wages rise again. And wages would stretch further if costs were lower. Higher education seems ripe for reforms that make financing easier and create lower-cost alternatives to a traditional four-year degree. Energy costs could be restrained through increased exploration and decreased regulatory mandates. The cost of raising children would fall if the tax code did more to recognize it as an investment in the future.

Chait responds that the Republicans of Ponnuru’s idyll are not the ones who actually sit in Congress:

One problem with this plan to get Republicans to increase the Earned Income Tax Credit is that, as Ezra Klein points out, they’re currently fighting extremely hard to cut the Earned Income Tax Credit. Ponnuru’s column doesn’t mention this highly relevant detail.

What’s more, one of the main reasons the Earned Income Tax Credit exists is to cushion the impact of state taxes, which often force workers on the bottom half of the income spectrum to pay higher rates than the rich. And why are state taxes so regressive? Well, a main reason is that Republicans want it this way. The states that raise the highest proportion of their taxes from the poor are Republican states. The EITC is in large part a way of using the federal tax code to cancel out Republican-led policies of taking money from poor people, so naturally Republicans at the national level oppose it, too.

Ramesh fires back, and Ross Douthat comes to his aid with an argument that Republican tax policy has helped the poor:

If you look at this table, for instance, you’ll see that federal income tax liability for the poorest 10 percent declined pretty steadily from the 1986 tax reform onward — quite often thanks to policy changes that Republicans either accepted or actively endorsed. Or again, if you look at this chart, you’ll see that we cut taxes on low-wage workers three times (relying on the EITC and child tax credits) in the twenty years before the Obama era: first in the ’86 tax reform, under Reagan; then in 1997, in a Clinton-Gingrich deal, and finally in 2001, in the Bush tax cuts. Those were not policies supported by all Republicans and conservatives by any means — hence the internal party debate, which swung in more Randian direction in 2009-2012 — but they were ideas that many Republican leaders embraced, pushed for, and signed into law.

And of course they were accompanied, as in many of today’s reformist proposals, by changes and cuts to existing welfare programs, with the overall goal of changing the incentive structures facing the poor, so that work would become more rewarding and attractive and idleness less so. Reasonable people can disagree about the consequences of these reforms, but there’s a pretty plausible case that this combination of increased take-home pay and lower guaranteed benefits, rather than punishing the poor, tended to help them: At the very least, we seemed to make more progress reducing child poverty from the 1990s onward, as Scott Winship argued earlier this year in Politico, then we did in the years before the EITC/welfare reform/child tax credit combination became federal policy.

Chait remains convinced that “the reformers are massively understating the obstacles before them”:

There are reasons Republicans have fought so hard to claw back subsidies for the least fortunate. Active philosophical opposition to redistribution is one. A general detachment from the poor is another. The unforgiving zero-sum math of budgets, which means a dollar spent on helping a Walmart mom is a dollar in higher taxes or lower defense or politically painful cuts in retirement benefits, is a third. I do think the Republican reformers can nudge their party to a better, or at least less terrible, place. But I don’t think they’re being very straight about it.

by Patrick Appel

On Monday, a Detroit meatpacking company recalled 1.8 million pounds of beef. Susannah Locke conveys how the centralization of the meat industry amplifies the risks of widespread contamination:

Just four companies slaughter 80 percent of cattle in the United States. (The meat-packing company involved in the current recall isn’t one of those big four, however.) And three companies control half of America’s chicken, according to Christopher Leonard’s new book The Meat Racket.

That industry concentration has, in turn, led to more meat being slaughtered and processed in larger, centralized facilities — since it’s more efficient that way. And that, in turn, can make it easier for contamination to spread more widely.

Lindsay Abrams also warns of the disease-spreading potential of modern-day slaughterhouses:

As thousands of cows pass through assembly lines, a single ceiling drip, to take one example, could contaminate large swaths of them in record time, and safety inspectors can have a hard time spotting a problem amid the chaos. Then, of course, there’s the poop: “These animals are all raised on factory farms now,” Leonard explained, “where they’re much more crowded than ever before. And chickens and cows literally live their whole lives standing on beds of manure and feces.” They enter the slaughterhouse already covered in fecal matter, upping the odds of contamination once they’re killed.

It’s not just your mass-produced, factory farmed meat that’s in danger, however. A full quarter of the cows slaughtered in Ranchero’s slaughterhouse, site of the 8.7 million pound recall [in February], came from small, local and sustainable ranchers who sold “niche” products like grass-fed and organic beef. Even mid-sized slaughterhouses are closing their doors, said Leonard, meaning those ranchers didn’t have much of a choice but to rent out space from a large facility that was also processing cattle for the big four meat companies. Once there, those animals, regardless of how responsibly they were raised, became a disease risk as well.