Declines in remote work — and the recent proliferation of high-profile firms ordering workers back to the office — are a sign that the labor market is weaker than it might appear. That’s because return-to-office mandates are, effectively, an invisible pay cut. Let me explain.
Like other employment benefits (e.g., health insurance, paid leave), telework is not available to everyone. Only about 38 percent of full-time workers report being hybrid or fully remote, according to the Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes. Those jobs are disproportionately in higher-paid, white-collar occupations.
This amenity has real value to these workers. It saves them commuting time and transit costs, lets them live farther away (where housing might be cheaper), and offers other conveniences (quiet working spaces, less surveillance from bosses). Some economists have even quantified the value of all these benefits: On average, Americans value the option to work from home two or three days a week at an estimated 8 percent of pay (the equivalent of about $5,000 for the typical worker).
Some workers, such as those in their 30s, with kids or with a university degree, value it even more — at the equivalent of 10 to 15 percent of their pay, says Nick Bloom, a Stanford economics professor and longtime researcher on remote work.
In other words, many workers effectively banked a sizable raise around the start of the pandemic. And it didn’t even cost employers anything! At least, it didn’t show up on pay stubs, per se.
There are many ancillary expenses you don’t have when you can work from home. All those lunches out, dry cleaning, work clothes, wear and tear on your car etc. It costs money to go to the office.
I’m not sure why the companies are requiring their people to come back to the office. I suppose some of them believe they aren’t getting the productivity they should when they aren’t there to crack the whip? Probably not true. My experience of years in the corporate workplace was that massive amounts of time was wasted in useless mettings, shooting the shit, paper shuffling and many other activities that didn’t translate into anything one would call productivity. I think that many people are much more efficient at home.
I also recall that for many years the idea of remote work was one hope for the future of the planet since the elimination of the commute would have a positive effect on pollution and ultimately climate change. I guess we’ve all decided that doesn’t matter anymore.
It’s about control, nothing more. Bosses like to be able to intimidate their workers and direct their working habits regardless of whether it works best for the worker or positively affects the outcome. Working from home changes the relationship of boss and worker and the bosses don’t like it.
Maybe Donald Trump doesn’t have the actual energy to do the job. Maybe letting Elon Musk basically conduct diplomacy and talk to Hill lawmakers while Trump collects awards from his fans is just the division of labor Trump can handle,” –— Chris Hayes
That Star-Bulletin box headline above points to the “other” Pearl Harbor day attack in the Philippines. Not sure I even knew about that one. Have another cup of coffee:
In the early morning hours of December 8, 1941 (still December 7 in Hawaii), Japanese land-based naval bombers and Zero fighters from Formosa were detected by radar heading over Lingayan Gulf in the direction of Manila. American planes were alerted and took off from Clark Field and Iba Field but, after hours of searching, they failed to make contact. The Japanese, on the other hand, had no problem finding their American targets.
The most serious aspect of the raid was the destruction of and damage to the 18 Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses that were on the ground at Clark in the midst of refueling and rearming when the attack came. Most of the Curtis P-40 Kittyhawk fighters of the 20th Pursuit Squadron were lost when 10 of the warplanes were caught in the Japanese bomb pattern as they were preparing to take off, while several of the 3rd Pursuit’s fighters ran out of fuel and had to crash-land. The radar facility at the remote airfield at Iba was destroyed.
But half of the 35-plane force of B-17s had been deployed to Del Monte Field at Mindanao, and more than half of the P-40s in the islands had not been involved in the attacks at all. Although its strength had been greatly reduced, the U.S. Army Air Force in the Pacific was still very much in the war.
On Dec. 7, 1941, the Empire of Japan launched an air raid on the U.S. Navy base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, killing more than 2,300 Americans. The United States declared war against Japan the following day.Read more about what happened on this date: t.ly/sJ7Un
I’m neither rich enough nor libertarian enough to have invested my time in deciphering how cryptocurrency works, much less invested any of my money. But uber-rich crypto investors, Chris Hayes reports, now have a president-elect ready to backstop their funny money with public money. Even after watching his Friday night report, I still don’t understand how crypto works. But he confirms how oligarchy does.
Like much libertarian dogma, protestations by these shrugging Atlases that government stay out of the way of their Randian penis-enhancement schemes is so much Trumpian puffery. Government is not their enemy. It’s a tool of the moneyed class for making more money.
Matt Taibbi in his heyday understood this. He wrote in Griftopia (2011), “There are really two Americas.” For the grifter class, government is “a tool for making money,” while “in everybody-else land, the government is something to be avoided.”
Elon Musk invested — what other word is there for it? — over a quarter billion dollars in getting Donald Trump reelected. Now it’s time for Trump to pay dividends. Not from his own stash, of course. From America’s. “They’re just backing the truck up to the government,” Hayes warns.
In July, Cynthia Lummis, a US senator from Wyoming, introduced a bill to establish what she called a “strategic bitcoin reserve”, a programme instructing the Treasury and the Federal Reserve to buy a million bitcoins over the next five years to then hold them for at least 20 more years.
Greeley roughs out the basic details but, more importantly, explains what this reserve would mean to the hodlers (I had to look it up):
The bill lays out a mechanism for paying for the reserve. Any surplus the Federal Reserve returns to the Treasury would be spent instead on bitcoin. The Fed doesn’t currently return any money to the Treasury. No matter. The bill also proposes that Fed banks mark all their gold certificates to the current market price of gold, then remit the difference to the Treasury to buy bitcoin. This is all plausible, but the bill doesn’t answer the most important question facing any piece of legislation: how will this change anything at all, for anyone?
A reserve would present both a consummation and an irony for bitcoin’s hardcore supporters — the hodlers. The state would recognise what hodlers call freedom money, but also prop that up with a state programme. The preamble to Lummis’s bill argues that in return, a million bitcoin would diversify America’s assets, improving financial and monetary resilience. Unlike a traditional banking reserve, however, they would be held by the Treasury and couldn’t start to be sold until 2045. An asset you cannot sell does not give you resilience. It gives you storage costs.
Greeley considers the financial ins and outs of this effort by the oligarchs, but there is another more insidious aspect of this scam.
What do men with more money than God, like Elon Musk, do with themselves when adding to their dragon hoards is as pointless as making the rubble bounce after a nuclear exchange?
Money is a kind of power. Controlling billions of dollars is even more power. But it’s like bitcoin that way. Money power is not altogether tangible. If an oligarch wants realpower, life-and-death power, he wants political power. Naturally, without the bother of rich narcissists having to serve humanity, perfect the union, defend the proposition that all persons are created equal, or any of that nonsense.
Oligarchs have discovered there are indeed more worlds to conquer: yours.
Christmas arrived early in the Kibwezi Forest: We just received the most beautiful gift, in the form of Lima Lima’s brand new baby boy! He is Lima Lima’s first child and our second Umani grandbaby.
Christmas arrived early in the Kibwezi Forest: We just received the most beautiful gift, in the form of Lima Lima’s brand new baby boy! He is Lima Lima’s first child and our second Umani grandbaby.
The story began on Tuesday, 3rd December 2024. That morning, Lima Lima and her fellow ‘nightclubbers’ linked up with the dependent orphans, as they always do. At the mud bath, we noticed Lima Lima rolling around on the dust pile, clearly trying to soothe her heavily pregnant belly. When she got to her feet, Keeper Evans put his ear to her side — as we joked, she was getting a house call from her personal obstetrician!
The story began on Tuesday, 3rd December 2024. That morning, Lima Lima and her fellow ‘nightclubbers’ linked up with the dependent orphans, as they always do. At the mud bath, we noticed Lima Lima rolling around on the dust pile, clearly trying to soothe her heavily pregnant belly. When she got to her feet, Keeper Evans put his ear to her side — as we joked, she was getting a house call from her personal obstetrician!
In hindsight, Lima Lima was in the early stages of labour. She had been moving slowly and showing obvious discomfort in recent days, so we wondered if this moment was on the horizon. However, the rest of Tuesday passed normally. All the orphans, both dependent and independent, spent the afternoon together before going their separate ways in the evening.
The next morning, more unusual behaviour was afoot. Quanza — who is typically a quiet, placid elephant — ran over to the staff quarters and started making a huge commotion, charging around and trumpeting at the top of her lungs.
A short while later, we understood why Quanza was behaving so uncharacteristically: She was heralding the arrival of a brand new family member! As Umani Head Keeper Philip drove back from the mud bath, Quanza intercepted him and directed his attention to an area just outside the stockades. Philip saw Lima Lima and Sonje standing sentry, with a tiny, newborn baby sleeping between them.
As soon as word got out, the other Keepers and orphans rushed over. This was exactly the moment Lima Lima had been waiting for: She proudly showed off her baby to her human-elephant family, inviting everyone to come close and admire her son. The celebration was off the charts, with happy rumbling and mile-wide smiles as we welcomed a new baby into our midst.
Established in 2004, Ithumba is one of our most successful Reintegration Units, where dozens of orphaned elephants have reclaimed their place in the wild. Located in the vast, untouched northern sector of Tsavo East, it has become a hub for wild elephants, with herds visiting… pic.twitter.com/cKgPXW2T9M
In the Atlantic (gift link) Law professors Akhil Reed Amar, Josh Chafetz, and Thomas P. Schmidt analyze Trump and Co’s nefarious plan to circumvent the Senate’s advise and consent role:
The Senate’s check on the president can of course lead to friction and frustration at the start of an administration, while a new president’s nominees are considered and sometimes even rejected by the Senate. Advice and consent takes time. But as Justice Louis Brandeis famously observed, checks and balances exist “not to promote efficiency but to preclude the exercise of arbitrary power.” The purpose of the Constitution “is not to avoid friction” but “to save the people from autocracy.”
Trump would prefer that the Senate agree to recess so that he can install the rogues gallery of drunks, traitors, rapists and freaks to the cabinet positions he needs to wreak revenge on his enemies. So far, it doesn’t seem that the Senate is willing to go along, preferring to maintain their prerogatives. For now, at least.
But Trump has a Plan B, which I’ve written about before. The authors say it’s unconstitutional on its face:
[S]ome House Republicans have begun to discuss a more extreme scheme, one Trump considered during his first term: Trump could instead send the Senate home against its will and fill the government during the resulting “recess.” This is flagrantly unlawful.
How, one might ask, would such a plan even work? After all, the president, unlike an absolute monarch, does not have the power to dismiss Congress whenever he wants. Three of the first six “abuses and usurpations” charged in the Declaration of Independence related to King George III’s treatment of legislatures: He had “dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly,” he had refused to hold elections after these “dissolutions,” and he had “called together legislative bodies” at “distant” and “uncomfortable” places. The Framers were careful not to entrust the new office of president with such potent tools of “tyranny.” Instead, the president was given the power to “adjourn” the houses of Congress in only one narrow circumstance: “in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment.” This power is so limited that it has never been used in all of American history.
The plan is for Trump and Mike Johnson to collude to create a phony “disagreement” by passing a resolution to recess after which the senate supposedly will resist and refuse to pass it. Then Trump will say they disagree and adjourn both houses and appoint all the weirdos he chooses. They say this isn’t the way any of this works:
Under the Constitution, each house can generally decide for itself how long it will sit. As Thomas Jefferson, an expert on legislative procedure, wrote in 1790: “Each house of Congress possesses [the] natural right of governing itself, and consequently of fixing it’s [sic] own times and places of meeting.”
The Constitution limits this autonomy in one key way: “Neither House, during the Session of Congress, shall, without the Consent of the other, adjourn for more than three days, nor to any other Place than that in which the two Houses shall be sitting.” In other words, if one house of Congress wants to leave in the middle of a session, it has to get the permission of the other house. The House of Representatives can’t just skip town if the Senate thinks important legislative business remains. But note that this provision limits each house’s power to “adjourn,” and not each house’s power to remain “sitting.” Neither house needs the agreement of the other to stay in session. If the Senate wants to let the House of Representatives leave while it considers appointments or treaties, that is perfectly fine. Indeed, there are plenty of examples of one house giving the other permission to go home. Under Article I, then, each house requires consent of the other to quit, but not to sit.
Hence the trouble for the House Republicans’ plan: If the House of Representatives wants to recess, the Senate can simply let it. And if the Senate agrees to let the House go, the House can leave and there is no relevant “disagreement” for the president to resolve by adjourning Congress. The Senate would still be in session as normal.
The president’s adjournment power is not a backdoor way for one house of Congress to force the other into recess against its will. If both the Senate and the House want to leave, but cannot agree on a “time of adjournment,” then the president can step in.
Here is their advice:
If the House attempts this maneuver, the Senate should resist it by continuing to meet, and the courts should refuse to recognize any resulting appointments. The threat to adjourn the Senate should be seen and called out for what it is: an autocratic move that is not just unlawful but contemptuous of constitutionalism.
For some reason, my first impulse was to think “well, that means they’re definitely going to do it.” That’s because the majority is obviously contemptuous of constitutionalism and I suspect the courts are highly unlikely to defy the president’s prerogative to do what he wants.
Whether Trump has to do this is another story. My guess is that the senate will approve any picks he wants them to approve. What we’re seeing is that Tump doesn’t really care that much about any of this and will dump them if they’re too much trouble. So, it probably will never come to this. They’ll give him what he wants.
Data from the White House Office of Management and Budget indicates that about 12 percent of federal spending this year will be on Medicare, about 1 in 8 dollars the government disburses. Spending on Medicare is equivalent to 95 percent of the amount spent on national defense.
This means that those interested in cutting federal spending — like President-elect Donald Trump’s allies (and fellow billionaires) Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy — were almost necessarily going to eventually arrive at the idea that the government should spend less on programs such as Medicare and Medicare specifically. They like to talk about how they will trim federal spending by targeting the federal workforce, but firing every single nonmilitary employee would eliminate only about 4 percent of the budget. If your plan is to cut a third of the budget (as Musk has said he wants to do)? You’ve got to aim higher than that.
On Thursday, as YouGov was asking people about their insurance coverage, Fox Business was reporting that such cuts were under consideration.
“Nothing is sacrosanct,” Rep. Ralph Norman (R-South Carolina) said after a meeting with Musk, Ramaswamy and Republican lawmakers. “Nothing. They’re going to put everything on the table” — which, the Fox host noted, included Social Security and Medicare.
During the campaign, YouGov asked voters to evaluate the importance of different health-care issues. Nearly three-quarters of those age 65 and over said that Medicare and Medicaid were among their most important issues. Those older voters were also more likely than younger ones to say that they trusted Donald Trump on the issue — and were the only group to say they trusted Trump more than they trusted Vice President Kamala Harris.
Those older voters were stupid to take the greatest liar in world history’s word for anything and Republicans have been lying about their plans to cut them for years as well. What a mistake.
Bump makes the point that I’ve been making about all this: Trump isn’t running again and doesn’t have to care about the plebes anymore. However, GOP legislators do:
But there are a lot of Republican legislators, like Norman, who will need to go back to voters in 2026 or 2028, and the Billionaire Boys’ interest in submarining older Americans’ health-care program might be expected to turn up in a lot of campaign ads. Trump has never indicated much concern about the broader Republican Party; his second term in office is poised to put that indifference to the test.
He will not care. It’s all about him. Musk and Ramaswamy know nothing about politics or governance and they are happy to take a meat ax to programs that are irrelevant to them and their rich firends in the name of “efficiency.” Republicans generally are so cowed and flaccid now that a whole bunch of them may put themselves on the chopping block to appease Dear Leader but with a small handful of votes in the House majority I’d bet money that a few will not be willing to sacrifice themselves for this. We’ll have to see.
I hope they try it. It might be the wake up call (woke call?) people need to understand who it is that actually gives a damn about the people and who are living in some abstract dream world where they own the libs and everyone lives happily ever after.
Just Wednesday Ramaswamy went on CNBC and in addition to discussing various other ideas about innovation and efficiency noting that there are “hundreds of billions of dollars of savings to extract just from basic program integrity measures” out of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. The rest of the quote suggests he thinks he can claw back these savings by cutting off benefits to people who don’t really deserve them or are legally entitled to them.
Whatever!!!
‘Tis not for me to question why one of Donald Trump’s budget cutting czars says he wants to cut hundreds of billions of dollars from Social Security and Medicare and another seems to want to abolish Social Security altogether. All that matters is that they do.
Are you represented by a Republican member of Congress? Or really are you represented by a Democratic one? I would right away call their office and ask if they support this plan to make these drastic cuts to Social Security and Medicare. He says “hundreds of billions”, draconian level cuts. They’ve made numerous comments like this over the last few days. But the clearest is this comment to CNBC which I linked above. Ask if they support this or have a position on it. And I’d be grateful if you let me know what you heard.
Thanks.
That’s a good idea. Blogs and indy websites used to gather information like this when Bush was trying to cut social security. It has an effect.
Indiscretions = rape, sexual harrassment, financial mismanagement and serious alcohol use disorder.
Roy is not alone in that belief, of course. After all, the man they all worship is guilty of all but the alcohol problem. He’s an adjudicated rapist, fraudster and sexual harrasser. And 75 million or so Americans voted for that so you can’t say that it’s a deal breaker.
I don’t know if Hegseth will make it. But I won’t be surprised if he does. He’s a quintessential Republican alpha male.
Last February, as Donald Trump was running for the Republican presidential nomination, he appeared at SneakerCon in Philadelphia to debut his latest branded product, gold sneakers emblazoned with the number 45. They retailed for $399 and reportedly sold out immediately, or at least orders for them did. They ended up going for thousands of dollars on ebay.
Nobody knew exactly where these sneakers were made or who was making them but Newsweek reported that the designs were trademarked by CIC Ventures LLC out of Palm Beach and its managers were two Trump associates. The website states that the company selling the shoes is located in a small town in Wyoming and declares that the shoes “are not designed, manufactured, distributed or sold by Donald J. Trump, The Trump Organization or any of their respective affiliates or principals.” It uses the name, image and likeness under a license agreement. That same company is now selling a new product called “Fight, Fight, Fight” cologne and perfume which sell for $199, also under a license agreement.
There’s also a $100,000 gold watch and guitars that go for as much as $11,500 for an American Eagle edition autographed by Trump himself all of which come out of the same company in Wyoming.
These licensing deals are the same sort of consumer branding he did before he was president when he put his name on everything from steaks to water to ties and more. It was his most lucrative business in the years he was starring on “The Apprentice” and it appears he has no intention of stopping now that he’s going to be president again. I’d imagine he’ll be signing those guitars right in the oval office. Perhaps he feels that because he is just licensing the rights (for which he gets paid handsomely) it’s not really a side gig? Certainly no one would think to buy one of those expensive watches or guitars just to curry favor with the most powerful man in the world, right?
Trump famously refused to divest his businesses in his first term and nobody did anything about it. He made millions as president, whether it was through people currying favor by spending vast sums at Trump hotels and resorts or charging the government top dollar for stays at his own commercial properties. His sons were still running around the world representing the Trump organization despite their pledge to refrain from all foreign business dealings.
In the wake of Donald J. Trump’s election victory, his family business is poised to capitalize on his presidency with a variety of new ventures, according to a New York Times review of financial records and interviews with people knowledgeable about his finances. And unlike in his first term, the people said, the Trump Organization aims to issue a more limited ethics plan that is unlikely to significantly curb its growth.
They say they won’t do any deals directly with foreign governments which is awfully big of them. And anyway, why should they? They can just do what Jared Kushner did with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and wink and nod at foreign governments until Trump’s out of office to get their pay off. According to the Times, the company is now “free to profit from an array of business in countries essential to American foreign policy interests:”
In the months leading up to Election Day, Eric Trump struck real estate deals in Vietnam, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and he has shown interest in new hotel projects in Israel and other countries across the Middle East, Latin America and Asia.
All of these projects will have the name of the President of the United States plastered all over them.
As the Times lays out, they aren’t confining their foreign businesses to real estate and hospitality this time. The family helped create a cryptocurrency platform called World Liberty Financial. It’s already made millions for Trump through just one transaction from a Chinese entrepreneur that could eventually personally net him as much as $22 million. This investor, Justin Sun, made it clear that he was doing it to suck up to Trump with a post on twitter/X saying he’s committed to “making America great again.”
The fact that he’s currently under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission and Trump will be appointing new commissioners surely has nothing to do with it. As Judd Legum at Popular Information reported, he is suspected of:
“fraudulently manipulating the secondary market” for a crypto token “through extensive wash trading.” Wash trading involves “the simultaneous or near-simultaneous purchase and sale of a security to make it appear actively traded without an actual change in beneficial ownership.”
Sun is now on the board of World Liberty Financial and is essentially Trump’s business partner.
And then there is Trump’s publicly traded social media company, DJT, which is also open to foreign investors. Trump owns about $4 billion of its stock, making it his most valuable asset. As CBS News reported, the stock has been extremely volatile moving wildly on news about Trump, making it more of a “meme”stock defined as “companies that trade on social media buzz rather than financial fundamentals such as revenue and profit growth.” Since the company has made virtually no money that sounds like a pretty good definition.
CBS also noted that Trump was very upset about all that saying the company had been the target of “probably illegal rumors and/or statements” demanding an investigation by the SEC, — which will soon be answering to him. That’s not an appearance of conflict of interest it’s a straight up conflict and any president other than Trump would be embarrassed to flaunt his corruption this blatantly.
Trump says they plan to offer a “white paper” outlining their new ethical guidelines which appear to be nothing more than a vague promise not to work with foreign governments. According to the Times they figure that will “help the company contend with lawsuits based on the so-called foreign emoluments clause of the Constitution, which prohibits federal officials from accepting gifts or payments from other governments.”
The fact that they are already in bed with certain governments in one way or another will have to be litigated which takes a lot of time, particularly since Trump excels at deploying delaying tactics. The emoluments lawsuits that were filed during his first term took so long they ended up being rendered moot since he had already left office by the time they got to the Supreme Court. No doubt that’s exactly what they’re counting on happening again.
I’ve never fully understood why so few people seem to care about Trump’s flagrant corruption. The Democrats only half-heartedly investigated it and certainly didn’t bother to make it a campaign issue. Apparently, not selling the presidency to the highest bidder is just another one of those vaunted norms that was easily discarded, soon to be forgotten. Well, unless the son of a Democratic president traded on his father’s name in years past. Then all bets are off.
We’ve warned plenty here about Christian nationalism, the New Apostolic Reformation, and the Seven Mountains mandate. Considering the Second Coming of Trump already features cabinet nominees associated with efforts to turn our democracy into a theocracy (what’s the big deal about swapping out two letters?), it’s time for another look. Amanda Marcotte this morning offers a hair-raising glimpse at Salon.
“You think you ‘know’ what’s in it,” Marcotte introduces it on Bluesky, “but I promise it’s much crazier. I went deep in the research on this. Lots of quotes from Christian nationalists Trump has appointed, and experts.”
Plenty of those, but some key points before you click over to read the whole thing:
“the Christian nationalist movement … believes the purpose of the U.S. government should be to enforce far-right Christianity on not just Americans, but the whole world“
“the plan was always to reduce Congress to a ceremonial body and concentrate all the power in the hands of the president [committed to enforcing] a “biblical worldview” by fiat”
Russell Vought, Trump’s pick to run the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), “argues that the law or separation of powers should not constrain him and the president, because this is a ‘post-constitutional moment'”
Vought aims to make the lives of civil servants so miserable “that they are ‘traumatically affected’ and forced to quit…. He plans to refill those jobs with Christian nationalists.”
Trump’s Christian nationalist enablers plan “to replace respectable civil servants with bug-eyed fascist ideologues who oppose the most basic values of our country, such as religious freedom, equal justice, and democracy.”
Just because we’ve heard this all before does not mean they are any less of a threat this time around. Believe them the first time. They don’t want to govern; they want to rule. The oligarchs behind Trump are in it for more money and power and because they are Randian adolescents. The Christian nationalists are after dominance with a capital “D.”
It's pretty telling that the thing most upsetting to Christian nationalist MAGA cultist Lance Wallnau about the controversy over Pete Hegseth is that the allegations against him are being reported in the media. pic.twitter.com/r2b5sMfpDA
