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Part One:
HOW’D THOSE DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATES DO LAST NIGHT?
We speak with Russ Muirhead, chair of the government department at Dartmouth College, about the fallout after last night’s Democratic presidential debate. It’s clear that Warren is the frontrunner, the leader, whom the other candidates are all trying to take down. And Warren’s ideas are driving the Democratic debate. Is Joe Biden still a viable candidate? Did Bernie succeed in allaying concerns about his health (and his age)? Do any of the other candidates have a chance at winning the nomination? We shall see.
At the debate, several Democratic candidates jumped all over Elizabeth Warren for not getting down into the weeds of every detail of costing out her Medicare for All plan. And Warren did not give a direct answer to their questions.
We wonder why the moderators and the public allowed this pressure on Warren for more details, and yet gave the other candidates a free pass. Why not require Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar to explain all the details about how much *their* health care proposals would cost the average American: i.e., any increase or decrease in taxes that would be needed to administer their plans, *plus* the costs of obtaining health care under their plan. The latter cost must include the cost of having millions of Americans *still* unable to afford any health insurance at all (so they use ERs as their PCPs; and the cost to working people of taking the *risk* that their employer may *change health insurance companies or raise employees’ *premiums (and deductibles) for the same insurance coverage, or the *risk that their employer will close their plants and *move the jobs – and insurance coverage – to India or Costa Rica.
During the debate, candidates like Andrew Yang spent a fair amount of time discussing people’s fears that they will lose their jobs due to automation. Technology has displaced a lot of workers, even as it has created more profits for a small number of investors with a lot of wealth and power.
Elizabeth Warren pushed back on the notion that we should be afraid of automation. Certainly, we want to continue enjoying the benefits of technological development. And we’ll want to mitigate (or at least share equally the burdens of) its harmful effects, such as inequality and declining opportunities?
But technology is not really the driving force in America’s exploding economic inequality. The driver is the extreme concentration of economic and political power in the hands of a very few people (less than 1%) and their monopolistic (or oligopolistic) power.
Warren and Sanders argue that we can do something about these forces. We can break up monopoly power, in the tech industry, in banking, and on Wall Street. We can prevent economic power from becoming more concentrated. We don’t have to allow multinational corporations to become even more powerful, avoiding paying their fair share of taxes to the U.S. And we can help to even the playing field between working people and their employers.
What we saw in last night’s debate (and this year’s campaign) is a discussion about what the Democratic Party should be. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are trying to re-found the Democratic Party, to bring it back to its original roots in the New Deal. They want the Party to stop letting Wall Street control it. The Party should stand up for ordinary citizens who are trying to make ends meet and give their children a better life.
The Democratic Party has two competing answers to how we make changes so we can succeed in the new technological economy: The first possibility (the centrist/”liberal” answer offered by most of the candidates) is to invest in people’s skills, train them so workers can compete in the new economy. In contrast, Warren and Sanders don’t think that’s enough. As in the past, this approach will result in working people being underpaid and powerless. *In addition* to investing in social capital, we must make the economic game fair. The economically powerful are exploiting people, rigging the system, and we have to de-rig it. Warren and Sanders worry that, if we stick with Clinton-type “liberalism,” we’ll produce more Trumps, because that liberalism is not musculur enough to protect people from the parasitic actions of concentrated economic power.
WHICH VIEW WILL PREVAIL AMONG THE VOTERS?
Part Two:
WHY DID 3 CHEMISTS WIN THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR THEIR RESEARCH SUPPORTING LITHIUM ION BATTERIES?
We speak with Robert Masse, a Ph.D. student at the U of Wash, about his work on the development of lithium ion batteries. He describes how this new type of battery has transformed the ways we communicate (laptops, smartphones) and how we transport people and products (electric vehicles).
Masse explains the science of how these batteries differ from the AA’s and AAA’s that we relied upon until very recently. He also alerts us to possible downsides of lithium ion technology, some of which might be minimized through future research.
We also learned how Masse’s new company provides technical data support to the chemists who are researching improvements to the lithium ion battery and potential next-generation products.
