Another Republican President, Another Recession.

On Thursday, Rolling Stone reported that the Koch dark money machine is revving up to take down President Joe Biden's reconciliation package, commonly referred to as the "Build Back Better Act" — and is spending tens of millions of dollars in the effort.

"Koch-aligned groups are together spending millions of dollars on advertising, targeting moderate Democratic lawmakers, and pushing their influence in the halls of Congress to whittle down or outright kill the sweeping policy package, which would represent the largest expansion of the social safety net in the past 50 years and the biggest step toward addressing climate change in U.S. history," reported Andy Kroll and Geoff Dembicki.

The Build Back Better Act has not been fully negotiated yet, but Democrats hope to contain several new public programs, including a climate jobs guarantee, an extension of the child tax credit, expansions of Medicare benefits, and universal pre-K and community college.

The Koch network — named for right-wing billionaire brothers Charles Koch and the late David Koch — has consistently sought to block Democratic economic policies, and was prominent in the effort to kill the Affordable Care Act. Among the right-wing groups that are part of the lobbying effort, said the report, are the LIBRE Initiative, which focuses on conservative Latino messaging, and the 60 Plus Association, a right-wing senior advocacy group opposed to the plan to let Medicare negotiate drug prices.

"Many of the Koch-backed groups fighting Biden's spending package are also deeply concerned about the ambitious climate provisions the package contains," said the report, noting the heavy Koch holdings in fossil fuels. "Proposed policies include expanding tax credits for electric vehicles, as well as provisions pushing utilities to use clean energy instead of fossil fuels. Add up all the climate impacts, and this could reduce America's carbon footprint by nearly 1 gigaton worth of greenhouse gas emissions, the research firm Rhodium Group estimates. This would represent some of the most significant action ever taken on climate change in the U.S."

You can read more here.

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hanimmal said:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/09/29/if-america-were-smarter-about-math-our-politics-might-be-less-dumb/View attachment 4998536

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Dryxi said:

True stuff. Scale requires some critical thinking. I wonder what scale does to inequality of vaccine mandates. Before building these charts, it wasn't as easy to see how something like vaccine mandates could hurt a population but I have my doubts that the 80% of black Americans in NY are experiencing the many beneficial aspects of the vaccine mandate.

View attachment 4998663
Now a pie chart:
View attachment 4998664
Black population of NY
View attachment 4998665

Now let's say only vaccinated individuals can hold a job, go to an indoor establishment, travel on a plane, ya know typical vaccine rules atm. There is a population that is getting pretty hampered by the vaccine requirements which obviously benefit the greater white population and is leaving the others behind (doubtful that is completely due to individual choice but includes lack of access and whatever other reasons could keep someone from a vaccine).

And that is how most inequality builds on itself the mandates seem necessary but are definitely impacting more than the minority of white people who are unvaccinated.

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hanimmal said:

That is why the death cult propaganda being directed at our minority populations is so particularly evil.

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Dryxi said:

We can assume since mandates are now a national thing, they won't be going away anytime soon. I wonder how much farther behind those citizens will be in the coming decade after being locked out for however long it takes their population to get vaccinated. That was all just numbers for NY and a comparison of only Black v White, it's probably worse in other locations. Reaching that last 20% of the White population shouldn't be the focus when chances of ever reaching "herd immunity" are very small and we are locking the other populations out of parts of the economy as long as they don't catch up in vaccinations.

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https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/covid-vaccine-tracker-global-distribution/us-vaccine-demographics.html

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hanimmal said:

Bloomberg has some really good charts on this to get a better idea of where the states are with their vaccinated as a share of the racial statistics (updated Sept 12th).

Luckily it looks like in every state the disinformation campaign trying to hurt our minority populations are losing. It looks like in terms of the 'black' portion of the population in NY is one of the worst.

I would agree more with the not focusing on getting everyone possible (regardless of race) fully vaccinated and instead putting those resources to the minority communities if there was not enough vaccines to cover everyone. But I don't know if that is the problem, it is getting people to get the shot.

Luckily with social media companies waking up to their role in allowing our citizens to be attacked with the anti-vaccine propaganda hopefully gains can be made faster and we can finally get out of this mess that the Republicans have been trying to extend.

View attachment 4998695

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Latest Data on COVID-19 Vaccinations by Race/Ethnicity | KFF

KFF is collecting and analyzing data on COVID-19 vaccinations by race/ethnicity to gain increased insight who is receiving the vaccine and whether some groups are facing disparities in vaccination.

www.kff.org

Dryxi said:

For some reason Bloomberg has the share of Black NY vaccinated at 45%, while https://covid19vaccine.health.ny.gov/vaccine-demographic-data has it at ~15% vaccinated.

Latest Data on COVID-19 Vaccinations by Race/Ethnicity | KFF

KFF is collecting and analyzing data on COVID-19 vaccinations by race/ethnicity to gain increased insight who is receiving the vaccine and whether some groups are facing disparities in vaccination.

www.kff.org

- this one also has it at 47% vaccinated

(Haven't looked at why.)

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hanimmal said:

Might be the difference between NY city and NY state?

I thought it was weird that they listed it as NYC too. I don't know much about New York to know why though.

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Dryxi said:

Lol all comes back to how someone wants to frame numbers and they did it differently. My graphs would look considerably different if I used Bloomberg numbers, so now idk if those graphs I created are remotely accurate. The difference between 45% and 15% is rather large.

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CatHedral said:

Ok dumb question about vax and race disparity.
The vaccine is freely available to everybody except our youngest at this time.

What is driving the unevenness in vaccination by race? It does not appear to be about access or cost, the usual suspects. And I have trouble believing that there are different susceptibilities by skin color to the disinformation. So what then?

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Fogdog said:

There is a long history of medical malfeasance that makes Black people in the US distrustful of the medical establishment. Fauci and other old white men don't resonate well with those communities either. Put those barriers in with the disinformation that is flooding us right now and it's not a surprise that fewer in Black people are willing to get vaccinated.

What I want to know is what is driving the low rate of vaccination among white people? They don't have the Tuskeegee experiment in their history.

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Fogdog said:

There is a long history of medical malfeasance that makes Black people in the US distrustful of the medical establishment. Fauci and other old white men don't resonate well with those communities either. Put those barriers in with the disinformation that is flooding us right now and it's not a surprise that fewer in Black people are willing to get vaccinated.

What I want to know is what is driving the low rate of vaccination among white people? They don't have the Tuskeegee experiment in their history.

View attachment 4998794

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CatHedral said:

This is at variance with the shocking pie chart a few posts earlier.

I don’t know what to think.

my #1 hypothesis goes to quality of education. White districts did better on that case than nonwhite districts.

If you ask me, that sort of skew in what we teach our next generation massively confirms CRT, to the anger of the millions of cryptoracists. So much grief because people are not being counted as people.

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US Coronavirus vaccine tracker

Each state has a different plan — and different challenges — in distributing vaccines. Learn more about who is getting vaccinated by parsing the data by age, sex and race.

usafacts.org

Fogdog said:

Per the CDC:

29% of all Black people in the US have been vaccinated by at least one shot
37% of all white people in the US have been vaccinated by at least one shot.

US Coronavirus vaccine tracker

Each state has a different plan — and different challenges — in distributing vaccines. Learn more about who is getting vaccinated by parsing the data by age, sex and race.

usafacts.org

Those numbers aren't all that different from the histograms for New York and NYC that @hanimmal posted

I think the pie chart @Dryxi put up was inaccurate. Or from a different time. They are shocking, I agree. But it's not true. I don't know why Dryxi was trying to mislead. I don't know who meta charts is. He's posted misleading shit before, I don't know what his agenda is but having an honest discussion is not one of them. Which is why I have him on ignore. I think I'll go with CDC information.

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mooray said:

If not for the taco diddling, that Clinton guy would be a-ok.

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CatHedral said:

Ok dumb question about vax and race disparity.
The vaccine is freely available to everybody except our youngest at this time.

What is driving the unevenness in vaccination by race? It does not appear to be about access or cost, the usual suspects. And I have trouble believing that there are different susceptibilities by skin color to the disinformation. So what then?

Click to expand...