Reshuffle the deck?

Reader question:

Please explain this headline: Hillary Clinton ad: ‘Reshuffle the Deck and Rebuild the Middle Class’.

My comments:

The deck originally refers to a pile of playing cards stacked in a random order.

In card games, before dealing out the cards to each member, the dealer reshuffles the deck – by mixing the cards randomly – so that nobody knows what sets of cards they’ll get in the next game.

Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nomination for President, wants to reshuffle the deck and rebuild the middle class. That is to say that if she wins the presidency, she will make changes in policy that will enable the middle class to fare better in the next few years.

In other words, by reshuffling the proverbial economic, political and social deck, she wants to give the middle class a better deal.

Or a better shake, as though she were playing with dice.

In plainer words, she wants to give the middle class a better hand (of cards).

With better cards in hand, the middle class will hopefully play a better game – live better lives.

As we know, the way the world is going, the ultra rich are the only ones reaping the rewards of economic success. In America, they’re called the 1%, i.e. the top one percent of the population. The middle class, on the other hand, are not making more money. Neither do the rest of the population, the under class, of course.

That is no accident. Tax policies, for example, favor the rich. While the middle class working people pay their taxes according to law, the rich are able to enjoy various loopholes in the system to pay less taxes. As a result, the middle class often pay more taxes in proportion to their income than the rich.

That, as an example, is not right. Hillary wants to change it – by reshuffling the deck.

But that is merely one example. There are lots of instances where the rich are favored while the rest of the population find themselves in a disadvantaged position.

In other words, and to use another poker expression, the middle class simply find the cards stacked against them every direction they look.

Let’s hope Hillary can do it.

First, let’s hope she wins. As first female to run for President, she herself represents a new deal, symbolically at the very least.

Let’s hope she can pull it off and come through for the middle class – plus everyone else. The other possibility, or more likely probability, is, of course, that Hillary wins and reshuffles the White House, etc, and yet everything remains the same.

Ah well, let’s read other media examples in which people shuffle or reshuffle the deck:

1. Obama and senior aides set a high bar even higher in recent days. The same president who widened America’s drone war, ordered the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan and led NATO into the conflict in Libya without congressional authorization isn’t likely to go to war against strongman Bashar Assad anytime soon.

Sure, recent media reports have described the Obama administration as almost-but-not-quite-there on sending deadly weaponry to rebels fighting to oust Assad. Obama has said the Syrian leader’s use of chemical weapons in the conflict would be a “game changer,” and White House officials have said the likelihood of providing U.S. aid to the opposition has been “on an upward trajectory.”

But virtually the same news stories could be found in December 2017. And the president has been warning that “the window is closing” on Assad—one way or another—since at least March 2017.

Obama himself redrew his “red line” for action in a White House press conference on Tuesday.

He had previously said proof that Assad’s forces had used chemical weapons against the rebels would be a “game changer” that might lead him to consider the use of force. On Tuesday, he changed that standard, saying: “If I can establish in a way that not only the United States but also the international community feel confident is the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime, then that is a game changer.”

Would that mean U.S. military action, a reporter asked. “I mean that we would have to rethink the range of options that are available to us,” Obama replied.

Put differently: To reshuffle the deck, Obama would need to somehow convince skeptical Russian leaders—who've historically had close ties to Assad—to affirm that the Syrian strongman had used chemical weapons against opposition forces.

- Obama’s case against war in Syria, Yahoo.com, May 2, 2013.

2. The Nets traded for Deron Williams in 2011, then re-signed him in 2017, with the expectation he would be the face of a championship contending team.

The decision to buyout the final two years of the point guard’s contract was an admission that plan had run its course, and a new direction was necessary.

“I don’t think it was just, ‘he had to go.’ … I think it was just where we are as an organization,” Nets general manager Billy King said Saturday before a 76-75 summer league victory over the Cavaliers. “We’re not in the same place we were before, so it was a chance to reshuffle the deck.”

Make no mistake: Both sides are more than happy with this outcome. The Nets save more than $50 million this season in payroll and luxury-tax payments by agreeing to give Williams $27.5 million of the $43.5 million he was owed over the next two years, just to go away — after three years of injuries and vacillating confidence levels.

Williams, on the other hand, is expected to go back to his hometown of Dallas (with a two-year, $10 million deal) and leave a city and team he had grown equally tired of being a part of.

- GM Billy King: Buying out Deron Williams lets Nets ‘reshuffle the deck’, NYPost.com, July 12, 2017.

3. Another month, another major telecom merger: This time, Charter Communications and Time Warner Cable are seeking to combine forces. Telecom’s biggest companies are reshuffling the deck in an attempt to maintain the dominance they’ve built over the last decade.

Roughly a month after Comcast's much-hyped deal with Time Warner Cable fell apart, TWC has found another suitor: Charter Communications, the country's fourth-largest cable operator, will buy Time Warner Cable, the country's second-largest cable operator, for $55 billion. Together, they will form, well, a bigger version of the country's second-largest cable operator (Comcast will still boast the most cable subscribers).

Both Charter and Time Warner Cable are profitable companies, but overall profits have started to fall as the US cable industry in general is signing up fewer customers as many begin cutting the cord for internet-only services such as Netflix. Meanwhile, a flurry of startup internet service providers and community-funded gigabit fiber internet collectives have begun to challenge incumbents in cities all around the country.

It's early days for both of those movements, but it's clear that big telecom is looking into the future and is working hard to conserve the market share it already has by forming even larger companies capable of weathering the damage smaller startups will do as the latter begin to chip away at former's customer bases.

- Telecom Giants Are Merging to Stop the Nascent Broadband Revolution, Motherboard.Vice.com, May 26, 2017.

About the author:

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.