Politics-What's on your mind?

[Orema]

I didn’t catch the first debate of candidates for NYC Mayor, but I see that Maya Wiley did well according to the NYTimes. I like her a lot but am not familiar with most of the other candidates. Looked like Andrew Yang is doing well but I’m not convinced he’d be good for NYC.

[homoe]

Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., has been downplaying a mob’s attempt to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election results for months, and on Wednesday night he went on Fox News to continue asserting that there was not an insurrection.

“Calling it an insurrection ... it wasn’t,” Johnson said in an interview with Laura Ingraham. “I condemn the breach, I condemn the violence, but to say there were thousands of armed insurrectionists breaching the Capitol, attempting to overthrow the government, is simply a false narrative.

“By and large, it was peaceful protests except for there were a number of people, basically agitators, that whipped the crowd and breached the Capitol, and that’s really the truth of what’s happening here,” Johnson added.

So far, over 400 people have been arrested for crimes tied to the Jan. 6 riot, which resulted in several deaths.

[homoe]

Paul Ryan slams Trump in speech about future of Republican Party.....


IF only "little Eddie Munster" of had a backbone when it really counted!

https://www.yahoo.com/news/paul-ryan...053116596.html

[homoe]

Texas Senator Ted Cruz is facing renewed criticism of his travel habits after spending the weekend in Israel touring damage from Hamas rocket strikes.

The firebrand Republican senator, who earlier this year was embroiled in controversy after it was reported that he traveled to Mexico for a family vacation amid a devastating winter storm that left millions in his state without power, now faces similar criticism after tweeting a video of himself inside an Israeli home damaged by rocket fire.

In the video, Mr Cruz discussed the death of an elderly woman’s caretaker in Ashkalon, Israel, resulting from a Hamas rocket strike that hit a residential home. Mr Cruz gives a brief tour of the damage in the home, and explains how the elderly resident was able to make it out of the home in time.

“I’m in Israel and I'm seeing the results of Hamas terrorism. A Hamas rocket destroyed this home and killed an elderly woman's caretaker,” reads the video’s caption.

Under the video, the senator was excoriated by angry Texas residents who demanded to know why he had not reacted similarly to the devastation wrought by the winter storms that largely shut down the state’s power grid in February.

“How much is this photo op costing us, Rafael? Did I miss the tour of frozen Texas homes?” wrote one commenter, who referred to the senator’s given name.

[homoe]

If there’s one thing that Donald Trump is good at is generating headlines, the latest news circulating has the former president telling those in his inner circle that he will be back in power by August, according to New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman. And of course, he has the support of his QAnon followers, who have been parroting the theory that the election was stolen from the 45th president, even though he lost the electoral and the popular vote in November 2020.

This all comes on the heels of Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, who suggested that a Myanmar-like coup should happen here in the U.S. while at a QAnon-affiliated conference in Dallas. He swears he never made those comments, even though they were caught on video. He went on to set the record straight later saying, “I am no stranger to media manipulating my words, and therefore let me repeat my response to a question asked at the conference: There is no reason it (a coup) should happen here (in America),” he wrote on the messaging app, Telegram, per The New York Times.

[Orema]

If Larry Elder loses in California today, as suspected, then I think Trump may have found his next running mate.

I still think Nikki has a shot at running on Trump's 2024 ticket, but Trump can work with Larry a lot easier than he can Nikki.

[Orema]

Joe Manchin Should Stop Talking About ‘Entitlement’

By Jamelle Bouie
New York Times Opinion Columnist


Joe Manchin. Credit: T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times

Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia has been coy about what he wants from the Democratic reconciliation bill meant to pass as much of the president’s agenda into law as possible. Other than a number — he wants to shrink the Biden administration’s Build Back Better proposal from $3.5 trillion to $1.5 trillion — Manchin has not said much about which policies he would keep and which he would cut.

Manchin does, however, have one red line.

“I’m just not, so you know, I cannot accept our economy or basically our society moving toward an entitlement mentality,” Manchin said last week. “I’m more of a rewarding, because I can help those who are going to need help if those who can help themselves do so.”

He repeated the point on Wednesday, criticizing Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who wants a larger bill. “I’ve been very clear when it comes to who we are as a society, who we are as a nation,” Manchin said. “I don’t believe that we should turn our society into an entitlement society. I think we should still be a compassionate, rewarding society.”

I find this incredibly useful not because it says anything about what Manchin wants but because it makes clear that this is a dispute over values as much as — or even more than — a dispute over policy.

In previous statements, Manchin used debt and inflation to justify his opposition to spending that went beyond his comfort level. “The nation faces an unprecedented array of challenges and will inevitably encounter additional crises in the future,” Manchin wrote in The Wall Street Journal last month. “Yet some in Congress have a strange belief there is an infinite supply of money to deal with any current or future crisis, and that spending trillions upon trillions will have no negative consequence for the future. I disagree.”

It should be said that Manchin’s case is not very persuasive. Interest rates are low and have been for the past decade. The Congressional Budget Office expects interest rates to stay low until at least the 2030s. For the government, then, borrowing is cheap, and there’s little risk that the additional debt will overheat the economy or crowd out private investment. We can, and should, spend much more than $3.5 trillion, especially since — when spread out over 10 years — that number would be 1.2 percent of our projected national income over the same period.

But the reality of America’s fiscal capacity isn’t the point. For as much as he talks about debt and spending, Manchin’s objection is more moral than it is practical. To say that you don’t want to foster an “entitlement” mentality among America’s able-bodied adults is to make a statement about the proper order of things, as you understand them.

Take tuition-free community college, one of the proposals tucked into President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda. Where Biden sees a pathway to opportunity for ordinary American families, Manchin seems to see another lane on the road to dependency, to a world where most adults do not have to work to receive benefits.

Indeed, even just using a word like “entitlement” speaks to a particular critique of the welfare state — in particular the view that a capitalist economy will not work without the threat of poverty and immiseration. If the market runs on the promise of reward and mobility, then to reward individuals without work is to undermine the very engine of the American economy.

As with so much of our national political discourse, this isn’t a new idea. In “Free Enterprise: An American History,” the historian Lawrence B. Glickman shows how proponents of “free enterprise” and laissez-faire capitalism used the language of entitlement and dependency to condemn the economic guarantees of the New Deal.

“For the first time in my lifetime, we have a president who is willing to mislead the people on fundamental questions of finance,” Robert Taft declared in a 1936 speech to the Women’s National Republican Club, “who is willing openly to attack the very basis of the system of American democracy, who is willing to let the people believe that their problems can be solved and their lives made easier by taking money away from other people or manipulating the currency, who is willing to encourage them to believe that the government owes them a living whether they work or not.”

Or, as Strom Thurmond put it in 1949, when he was the governor of South Carolina, “Nothing could be more un-American and more devastating to a strong and virile nation than to encourage its citizens to expect government to provide security from cradle to grave.”

This “hiving of the country into productive makers and unproductive takers,” Glickman notes, “formed the basis of the traditional American belief in ‘producerism,’ the idea that people who made and grew things deserved pride of place in the republic.” In the 19th century, this producerist ideology fueled labor and agrarian revolts against concentrated power in finance and industry. The great orator and three-time Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan captured this in his famous “Cross of Gold” speech at the 1896 Democratic National Convention in Chicago:

Mr. Carlisle said in 1878 that this was a struggle between the idle holders of idle capital and the struggling masses who produce the wealth and pay the taxes of the country, and my friends, it is simply a question that we shall decide upon which side shall the Democratic Party fight. Upon the side of the idle holders of idle capital or upon the side of the struggling masses? That is the question that the party must answer.

For conservative opponents of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, however, the makers and takers were reversed. “Rather than an artisan, the maker was now described as a company,” writes Glickman. “The taker was no longer an unscrupulous employer or an enslaver who unfairly took the fruits of labor from the worker but the government, which now did the same through its system of confiscatory taxes and extravagant spending.”

It is this right-wing producerism that, I think, is the most relevant antecedent for Manchin’s fear of an “entitlement” society. Although, in fairness to him, there was a point — in the very recent past — when his views were the dominant ideological position within the Democratic Party, both a consequence of and a driving force in the neoliberal transformation of the United States.

Ronald Reagan was, of course, an important part of this development. He brought right-wing producerism into the mainstream, captivating the voting public with a simple story of undeserving takers and welfare cheats, social parasites who undermined the “hard-working people” who “put up with high taxes,” as he put it during his 1976 campaign for president.

Inextricably tied up in race hierarchy — to be white was to be a worthy taxpayer, and to be nonwhite, and specifically Black, was to be dependent — this producerism was the “common sense” behind the austerity and deregulation of the 1980s and 1990s, from Reagan’s tax cuts to Bill Clinton’s “welfare reform.” Americans would receive a “hand up” — a tax cut or a tax subsidy — and not a “handout” in the form of direct benefits.

These ideas don’t just fade away, and the extent to which they are recapitulated by the media, politics and, most important, the material conditions of our society, all but guarantees their continued potency, especially when the rising costs of housing, education and health care encourage zero-sum competition for every available advantage.

It is this potency that we see in the present debate, from Manchin’s resistance to an “entitlement” society to a public that appears not to want Congress to renew the child tax credit — a no-strings-attached benefit for almost every American family — in its current form.

We can also see it in Donald Trump’s appeal to broad swaths of the American electorate. Trump made his name as a builder in America’s largest city, then leveraged that celebrity in a popular television show that sold him as the nation’s greatest businessman. Years before he entered politics, Trump embodied the producerist ideal of a man who dominates but is never dominated.

At $3.5 trillion, Biden’s Build Back Better plan is more ambitious than anything offered during the Obama administration. If, to win the votes of Manchin and Senator Kyrsten Sinema, Democrats have to scale their bill back to under $2 trillion, it will still be one of the largest spending bills to ever come out of Congress under a Democratic majority.

From that perspective, it might seem odd to speak of the influence of conservative producerist ideology on present-day American politics. And yet a major ideological obstacle to the social democracy progressives hope to build is this sorting of people into winners and losers, deserving and undeserving. “The myth of opportunity for energetic individuals,” Irving Howe once wrote, “has taken on a power independent of, even when in conflict with, the social actuality.” Manchin, in other words, is not the only American who fears an “entitlement” society.

In which case, the ideological challenge for progressives is to redefine what it means to be “entitled” — to return, in a sense, to that older meaning, in which it is the owners of capital who are the takers and the ordinary citizens of this country who are the makers.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/08/o...hin-biden.html