A thread for Democrats Only by THGRRI

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

A Few Ways Out of the Debt Ceiling Mess

How will we deal with a G.O.P.-inflicted crisis?

Let’s say you took out a large mortgage to buy a house. Maybe you made the right decision, maybe you didn’t. Either way, you signed the contract. And your next monthly payment on that mortgage is due.

So how do you respond? Do you (a.) grumble but pay the bill, since that’s what you promised to do? Or do you (b.) refuse to pay, giving a speech about how debt is bad and your family must cut spending, even though defaulting on your mortgage will ruin your credit rating and could cause you to lose your house?

On Monday, Kevin McCarthy, speaker of the House, decided to go for option (b.). Or maybe “decided” is the wrong word. McCarthy may be the weakest speaker in modern history, the notional leader of a caucus seemingly united by little but its loathing for President Biden, probably including a number of members who would rather see the U.S. economy burn than allow Biden to govern successfully. It’s not even clear that McCarthy could deliver on the dead-on-arrival, vague sketch of a deal he sort of offered in a speech at the New York Stock Exchange.

The issue at hand is whether to raise the federal debt ceiling. This ceiling is a peculiar — and destructive — quirk of the U.S. budget process. Here’s how it works: First, Congress passes legislation that determines federal spending and tax collection. This legislation may lead to a budget deficit. Whether that’s a good idea is beside the point: Congress made its choices, and the Treasury Department must do whatever is necessary to honor duly enacted legislation, which may require borrowing to cover the deficit.

But under current law Congress must also vote a second time to authorize federal borrowing by raising the limit on the allowed amount of debt. And we’re only a few months from the point where America won’t be able to keep paying its bills — that is, spend the money Congress has already told it to spend — unless Congress votes to raise that limit.

Yet now House Republicans aren’t willing to raise the limit unless they are given policy concessions they would never be able to enact via the normal legislative process. Basically, they’re saying, “Nice economy you have here. It would be a shame if something happened to it.”

Indeed, failing to raise the debt limit would have disastrous consequences, laid out in a useful recent paper from Moody’s Analytics titled “Going Down the Debt Limit Rabbit Hole.” At minimum, it would disrupt the functioning of the federal government. At worst, it would precipitate a global financial crisis, possibly as bad or worse than the crisis of 2008 — because U.S. government debt, normally considered the ultimate safe asset, is the linchpin of financial markets around the world, and many markets might freeze if investors lose confidence that we’ll honor that debt.

What can be done to avoid this potential disaster? McCarthy’s suggestions about what a deal might involve are barely worth discussing. On one side, giving in to blackmail — for that’s what a deal would amount to — would set a terrible precedent. On the other, it’s not clear that McCarthy could make good on a deal even if the Biden administration were willing to go along.

Still, for what it’s worth, McCarthy seems fixated on the idea that many Americans are refusing to work because they’re living off government aid and that we should impose more stringent work requirements on programs like food stamps and Medicaid. In reality, the employed percentage of Americans in their prime working years is near a 20-year high. And furthermore, there is abundant evidence that work requirements don’t actually encourage work — all they do is throw up bureaucratic hurdles that end up denying aid to people who really need it.

But this is, as I said, beside the point. What will actually happen next?

One possibility is that faced with looming financial chaos, McCarthy will allow a floor vote on the debt ceiling, and that a few sane members of his party will cross the aisle and help Democrats raise the ceiling. As far as I can tell, that’s the Biden administration’s plan A.

What about plan B? There are several options. Moody’s Analytics seems to think that the Biden administration might simply ignore the debt limit, invoking the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which says that the validity of U.S. public debt “shall not be questioned.”

Another possibility is the famous platinum coin. U.S. law allows the federal government to issue commemorative platinum coins in any denomination it chooses; so it could in principle mint a coin notionally worth, say, $3 trillion, deposit it at the Federal Reserve and pay its bills by drawing down the account thereby created. (The Fed would offset any effect on the money supply by selling off some of its large portfolio of U.S. government bonds, so this would in effect simply be borrowing through the back door.)

Yet another possibility would be to issue “premium bonds.” These are bonds that offer an unusually large “coupon,” i.e., annual interest payment, relative to their principal, the amount they pay when they come due. The Treasury could auction off these bonds for substantially more than their face value, in effect borrowing without increasing the official size of the debt.

All of these plans have drawbacks, and considered in isolation they each sound a bit silly. But they should be graded on a curve — compared not with normal fiscal management, but with the catastrophic consequences if the U.S. government simply stops paying its bills.

One thing should be clear: It’s unlikely that this situation will be resolved with something resembling the deal that ended the debt ceiling crisis of 2011. Democrats have gotten somewhat tougher: They believe that President Barack Obama gave in to blackmail, and they won’t do it again. Republicans, on the other hand, have gotten a lot crazier; even if Democrats were willing to make a deal, it’s highly doubtful that McCarthy could persuade his caucus to accept it.

I wish I could offer reassurance that all of this will work out. But I can’t. When the party that controls one body of Congress has no interest in keeping America governable, catastrophe is always a real possibility.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230418191112/https://www.nytimes.com/202
3/04/18/opinion/debt-ceiling-republicans.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Wednesday, April 19, 2023 9:19 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Yet now House Republicans aren’t willing to raise the limit unless they are given policy concessions they would never be able to enact via the normal legislative process. Basically, they’re saying, “Nice economy you have here. It would be a shame if something happened to it.”

Oh. You mean what politicians on both sides do every time a bill is passed. *yawn*

And how's this any different than Democrats spending the last two years getting around the filibuster via reconciliation.

You have a very selective and short term memory.

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Wednesday, April 19, 2023 10:26 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Yet now House Republicans aren’t willing to raise the limit unless they are given policy concessions they would never be able to enact via the normal legislative process. Basically, they’re saying, “Nice economy you have here. It would be a shame if something happened to it.”

Oh. You mean what politicians on both sides do every time a bill is passed. *yawn*

And how's this any different than Democrats spending the last two years getting around the filibuster via reconciliation.

You have a very selective and short term memory.

6ix, you should put a sign somewhere in your house that reads "6ix has health problems because he lives like a fool who believes absolute freedom to eat and drink whatever pleases is absolutely a Constitutional right." There is another group, in Congress, that believes in absolute freedom to do whatever pleases them. It is no surprise that this belief has made America unhealthy. Only the Senate uses the filibuster, not even the House of Representatives. Why? Because the filibuster was invented by slavery-loving Senators to protect themselves from being punished for their atrocious mistreatment of blacks. It would be healthier for America if those Senators understood they need severe self-control rather than the absolute freedom they crave like 6ix craves foods and drinks he should not consume.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Wednesday, April 19, 2023 12:01 PM

Sure thing.

Only if you put up the sign that says "Worlds Smallest Prick on the World's Biggest Dick" first.

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Wednesday, April 19, 2023 5:38 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Millions to lose Medicaid coverage under Congress’ plan

https://apnews.com/article/health-covid-304d921beee43d29f1862cd4d6ab52
97

Quote:
WASHINGTON (AP) — Millions of people who enrolled in Medicaid during the COVID-19 pandemic could start to lose their coverage on April 1 if Congress passes the $1.7 trillion spending package leaders unveiled Tuesday.

It passed a Democrat Senate and was signed into law by Joe Biden*.

Bernie Sanders is not happy.

Congressional Republicans just can’t resist trying to cut Medicaid

There is a certain logic to Republicans’ commitment to pursuing Medicaid cuts: Social Security and Medicare are universal programs. Everyone pays in while they work, and then enjoys the benefits when they retire. Medicaid, on the other hand, is targeted to people who have low incomes. Republicans argue that this program, like food stamps and cash welfare, discourages people from seeking work, since they only qualify for benefits if their income is below a certain threshold.

“Assistance programs are supposed to be temporary, not permanent,” McCarthy said. “A hand up, not a handout. A bridge to independence, not a barrier.”

A little more than half of the Republican base continues to consider Medicaid more akin to welfare than health care.

There’s even a risk that the GOP’s attempts to overhaul the program could further reinforce its popularity. An analysis published last year in the American Political Science Review studied the effects of the party’s attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, of which Medicaid expansion is a core part. The threat to the law helped to solidify its standing with the public, partly because some Republican voters became more resistant to the possibility of losing their benefits. Two of the Republican senators who doomed the party’s plans cited the Medicaid cuts as a major factor in their vote.

https://www.vox.com/policy/2023/4/19/23688022/debt-ceiling-2023-kevin-
mccarthy-medicaid-work-requirement

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Thursday, April 20, 2023 12:45 AM

Millions to lose Medicaid coverage under Congress’ plan

https://apnews.com/article/health-covid-304d921beee43d29f1862cd4d6ab52
97

Quote:
WASHINGTON (AP) — Millions of people who enrolled in Medicaid during the COVID-19 pandemic could start to lose their coverage on April 1 if Congress passes the $1.7 trillion spending package leaders unveiled Tuesday.

It passed a Democrat Senate and was signed into law by Joe Biden*.

Bernie Sanders is not happy.

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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

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Saturday, April 29, 2023 7:40 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Supreme Court Chief Justice’s wife, Jane Roberts, made $10.3 million in commissions from elite law firms who practice before the Supreme Court, whistleblower documents show

Two years after John Roberts’ confirmation as the Supreme Court’s chief justice in 2005, his wife, Jane Sullivan Roberts, made a pivot. After a long and distinguished career as a lawyer, she refashioned herself as a legal recruiter, a matchmaker who pairs job-hunting lawyers up with corporations and firms.

Roberts told a friend that the change was motivated by a desire to avoid the appearance of conflicts of interest, given that her husband was now the highest-ranking judge in the country. “There are many paths to the good life,” she said. “There are so many things to do if you’re open to change and opportunity.”

And life was indeed good for the Robertses, at least for the years 2007 to 2014. During that eight-year stretch, according to internal records from her employer, Jane Roberts generated a whopping $10.3 million in commissions, paid out by corporations and law firms for placing high-dollar lawyers with them.

That eye-popping figure comes from records in a whistleblower complaint filed by a disgruntled former colleague of Roberts, who says that as the spouse of the most powerful judge in the United States, the income she earns from law firms who practice before the Court should be subject to public scrutiny.

(Other advisory opinions have held that when a judge's spouse is actively recruiting for a firm appearing before that judge, or when a spouse has personally done "high level" recruitment work that generated "substantial fees," recusal would be appropriate.)

"When I found out that the spouse of the chief justice was soliciting business from law firms, I knew immediately that it was wrong," the whistleblower, Kendal B. Price, who worked alongside Jane Roberts at the legal recruiting firm Major, Lindsey & Africa, told Insider in an interview. "During the time I was there, I was discouraged from ever raising the issue. And I realized that even the law firms who were Jane's clients had nowhere to go. They were being asked by the spouse of the chief justice for business worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and there was no one to complain to. Most of these firms were likely appearing or seeking to appear before the Supreme Court. It's natural that they'd do anything they felt was necessary to be competitive."

Roberts' apparent $10.3 million in compensation puts her toward the top of the payscale for legal headhunters. Price's disclosures, which were filed under federal whistleblower-protection laws and are now in the hands of the House and Senate Judiciary committees, add to the mounting questions about how Supreme Court justices and their families financially benefit from their special status, an area that Senate Democrats are vowing to investigate after a series of disclosure lapses by the justices themselves.

"She restructured her career to benefit from his [John Roberts'] position," Price wrote in an affidavit accompanying his complaint. "I believe that at least some of her remarkable success as a recruiter has come because of her spouse's position."

Jane Roberts did not respond to emails with detailed questions. When reached by phone on Thursday morning, she declined to comment, as did a spokesperson for the Supreme Court. Totally unsurprising action by a crook.

In an emailed statement, John Cashman, the president of Major, Lindsey & Africa, said that Jane Roberts was "one of several very successful recruiters" at the firm. He attributed his recruiters' success to "the highest standards: Candidate confidentiality, client trust, and professionalism."

A spokesperson for the firm declined to comment further. A spokesperson for Macrae, the recruiting firm where Roberts now works, did not return an email requesting comment. Completely predictable action by crooks.

More at https://web.archive.org/web/20230429004942/https://www.businessinsider
.com/jane-roberts-chief-justice-wife-10-million-commissions-2023-4

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, May 1, 2023 6:55 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

The ‘I’ and the ‘We’
Posted on Monday, May 1, 2023 2:00AM by Martin Butler

Bemoaning the ills of individualism is nothing new. Jonathan Sacks’ bestseller, “Morality, Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times”(2020) provides us with one of the more comprehensive accounts of how we lost community and why we need it back. Justin Welby sums it up well in the foreword: “His message is simple enough: ours is an age in which there is too much ‘I’ and not enough ‘We’. Sacks himself puts the point succinctly when he says: “The revolutionary shift from “We” to “I” means that everything that once consecrated the moral bonds binding us to one another – faith, creed, culture, custom and convention – no longer does … leaving us vulnerable and alone.”

The book is divided into five parts, the first four giving a detailed account of how the shift from ‘We’ to ‘I’ took place and the fifth, entitled ’The Way Forward’, providing some suggestions as to how we might return to a more ‘We’-based society. The breadth and depth of knowledge Sacks displays is impressive, and he draws on a vast range of philosophers and numerous psychological and sociological studies to make his case, which is both detailed yet accessible to the general reader.

. . .

Because Sacks separates morality from political and economic policy, the last section of the book – The Way Forward – provides next to no actual suggestions for the way forward. No one denies that modern liberal democracies face enormous problems, but perhaps the next big ‘experiment’ should be to initiate economic and political policies that genuinely attempt to promote greater equality, more community, less poverty, less corporate greed and so one. Such policies are possible. It is at least worth a try.

More at https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2023/05/the-i-and-the-we.html

Download all of Jonathan Sacks’ books from the mirrors at https://libgen.unblockit.click/search.php?req=Jonathan+Sacks

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, May 1, 2023 9:26 AM

Nobody's reading any of that shit.

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Wednesday, May 3, 2023 6:25 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Nobody's reading any of that shit.

The next front in the GOP’s war on women:
the Republican Party of Texas added language to its platform calling for an end to no-fault divorce.

Like the crusades against abortion and contraception, the GOP is making it more difficult to leave a marriage

Steven Crowder, the right-wing podcaster, is getting a divorce. “No, this was not my choice,” Crowder told his online audience last week. “My then-wife decided that she didn’t want to be married anymore — and in the state of Texas, that is completely permitted.”

Crowder’s emphasis on “the state of Texas” makes it sound like the Lone Star State is an outlier, but all 50 states and the District of Columbia have no-fault divorce laws on the books — laws that allow either party to walk away from an unhappy marriage without having to prove abuse, infidelity, or other misconduct in court.

It was a hard-fought journey to get there. It took more than four decades to end fault-based divorce in America: California was the first state to eliminate it, in 1969; New York didn’t come around until 2010. (And there are caveats: Mississippi and South Dakota still only allow no-fault divorce if both parties agree to dissolve the marriage, for example.)

Researchers who tracked the emergence of no-fault divorce laws state by state over that period found that reform led to dramatic drops in the rates of female suicide and domestic violence, as well as decreases in spousal homicide of women. The decreases, one researcher explained, were “not just because abused women (and men) could more easily divorce their abusers, but also because potential abusers knew that they were more likely to be left.”

Today, more than two-thirds of all heterosexual divorces in the U.S. are initiated by women.

Republicans across the country are now reconsidering no-fault divorce. There isn’t a huge mystery behind the campaign: Like the crusades against abortion and contraception, making it more difficult to leave an unhappy marriage is about control. Crowder’s home state could be the first to eliminate it, if the Texas GOP gets its way. Last year, the Republican Party of Texas added language to its platform calling for an end to no-fault divorce: “We urge the Legislature to rescind unilateral no-fault divorce laws, to support covenant marriage, and to pass legislation extending the period of time in which a divorce may occur to six months after the date of filing for divorce.”

It wouldn’t take a vote of the Legislature to end no-fault divorce in Texas. A motivated plaintiff could bring the case before a sympathetic judge — and there happens to be one sitting on the federal bench in Amarillo. Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk — who has issued rulings attacking access to birth control and mifepristone, a critical component of the abortion pill — repeatedly bemoaned the idea that the “sexual revolution” ushered in a world of “permissive contraception policies,” abortion — and no-fault divorce.

More at https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/stephen-crowde
r-divorce-1234727777/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Thursday, May 4, 2023 12:44 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

This week it was discovered that Harlan Crow paid on the order of $150,000 in private school tuition for Clarence Thomas's grand-nephew, who Thomas raised "like a son." Needless to say, none of this was reported. A bank statement for the school, buried in unrelated court filings, shows the sneaky tuition payment.

Last month, ProPublica reported that Thomas accepted luxury travel from Crow virtually every year for decades, including international superyacht cruises and private jet flights around the world. Crow also paid money to Thomas and his relatives in an undisclosed real estate deal, ProPublica found. After he purchased the house where Thomas’ mother now lives rent-free, Crow poured tens of thousands of dollars into improving the property. And roughly 15 years ago, Crow donated much of the budget of a political group founded by Thomas’ wife, which paid her a $120,000 salary.

Crow has long been an influential figure in pro-business conservative politics. He has given millions to efforts to move the law and the judiciary to the right and serves on the boards of think tanks that publish scholarship advancing conservative legal theories.

Crow had cases in front of the Supreme Court. Clarence Thomas never recused himself. Neither Crow nor Thomas has admitted to the money exchanges, until after being caught, at which point they dare anybody to do anything about it. Thomas refuses to resign and the Senate can't remove Thomas until there are only 33 or fewer GOP Senators.

https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-harlan-crow-private
-school-tuition-scotus

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Thursday, May 4, 2023 6:29 PM

Racist.

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Friday, May 5, 2023 5:22 AM

A sub forum of the Communities dot win website called TheDonald . Win, trolling or offensive

Quote:

When the citizen justice part of "Defund the Police" kicks in.

link

https://communities.win/c/TheDonald/p/16b64EyVgB/when-the-citizen-just
ice-part-of/c/

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Saturday, May 6, 2023 8:05 PM

BlackRock and Vanguard alone control enough assets to buy every company listed in the London Stock Exchange at least three times over?

Ukraine Latest: Zelenskiy Meets BlackRock Executives in Kyiv

https://news.yahoo.com/ukraine-latest-russia-wagner-renews-083841559.h
tml

'Is Ukraine being privatised': Netizens fume over President Zelensky's meet with BlackRock management

https://www.businesstoday.in/latest/world/story/is-ukraine-being-priva
tised-netizens-fume-over-president-zelenskyys-meet-with-blackrock-management-380295-2023-05-06

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Wednesday, May 10, 2023 7:04 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Racist.

Every Trumptard I know says that they are not racists. It is the Democrats that are the real racists. I have told a few of those dimwit Trumptards that that is the reason I am firing them. Not because they are racist, but because they get simple concepts upside down and backward. They confuse the colors of wires, get left/right mixed up, install filters backward that have flow arrows printed on the filter, etc. Here is dimwit Clarence Thomas getting confused about simple ethical ideas:

Clarence and Ginni Thomas: Politics, Power and the Supreme Court (full documentary) | FRONTLINE

Over the past three decades, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has risen to the center of power in Washington, impacting issues affecting millions of Americans — from abortion to affirmative action. By his side has been his wife and best friend, Ginni Thomas. Together, the Thomases have left an indelible mark on America — in the legal realm and in conservative politics. But what has fueled their rise and expanded influence, and what have been the consequences?

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Wednesday, May 10, 2023 8:48 AM

Democrats are the racists.

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Wednesday, May 17, 2023 6:50 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

The War on Poverty Is Over. Rich People Won

The sociologist Matthew Desmond believes that being poor is different in the U.S. than in other rich countries.

By Annie Lowrey

Why do so many Americans live in poverty? Because so many rich people benefit from it.

This is the thesis of the lauded sociologist Matthew Desmond’s new book, Poverty, by America. The best seller is at once a careful exploration of poverty statistics; a deeply reported depiction of the lived experiences of the poor; an examination of the ways America’s wealthy exploit the masses; and a case for ending poverty. Desmond shows how the country’s employers, financial institutions, and landlords extract money from low-income families while rich families hoard opportunity for themselves. He also demonstrates how America’s safety-net programs are not just too stingy but poorly designed.

Desmond is a professor at Princeton. His previous book—Evicted, about the low-income rental market in Milwaukee—won a Pulitzer Prize. We discussed how the rich came to win the War on Poverty and what’s necessary to end poverty.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230514122550/https://www.theatlantic.com
/ideas/archive/2023/05/poverty-in-america-book-matthew-desmond-interview/674058/

Annie Lowrey: How is poverty different in America than in its peer countries?

Matthew Desmond: We have more of it. We have double the child-poverty rate of Germany and South Korea. We have a lot less to go around with, in terms of fighting poverty. We collect a much smaller share of our GDP in taxes every year.

It’s different because it’s so unnecessary. We have so many resources. Our tolerance for poverty is very high, much higher than it is in other parts of the developed world. I don’t know if it’s a belief, a cliché, or a myth. You see a homeless person in Los Angeles; an American says, What did that person do? You see a homeless person in France; a French person says, What did the state do? How did the state fail them?

Government programs obviously work. I’ve been with people when they receive a housing voucher. They praise Jesus. They fall on their knees. They pray and weep and cry. We have massive amounts of evidence about the benefits of government spending on anti-poverty programs. But poverty is also about exploitation. We have all these anti-poverty programs that accommodate poverty without disrupting it. They’re not eliminating poverty at the root.

Lowrey: Who benefits from that exploitation? Who benefits from a person being homeless?

Desmond: A lot of us benefit from it. I don’t just mean the guy that’s a little richer than you or a lot richer than you. I mean a lot of us, those who have found security and comfort in America consuming the cheap goods and services that the working class produces for us.

Half of us are invested in the stock market. Many times, we see our savings going up and up and up when someone’s pay is going down and down and down. Those two things are related. Or think about the housing crisis: Many times, it’s not just corporate landowners who are benefiting from high rents. It’s homeowners whose housing values are propped up and kept high by a scarcity of housing that they contribute to.

Lowrey: Let’s drill down on housing. Talk me through how something wealth-generating for some families is wealth-sapping for others.

Desmond: This is a unique feature of American life. If you go to Germany, a lot of professionals live in social housing. It’s not stigmatized. They’re living shoulder to shoulder with folks that might be in a very different place than they are economically.

Here, the housing market is bifurcated. For two-thirds of the country — people who own homes — the housing market is almost miraculous. Homeownership is not a winning proposition for everyone — that was a resounding lesson of 2008. But for a lot of folks, it is their biggest source of wealth creation. It’s one of the biggest carve-outs in the tax code, with the mortgage deduction and other housing subsidies. And there are no rent hikes when you’re a homeowner. Then you have this other one-third. The rental market is just utterly brutal, especially for the poorest among them.

Those two experiences aren’t just different; they’re connected. If you think of zoning laws — that is how we build walls around our communities, how so many affluent communities keep out not just affordable housing, but any multifamily housing. That doesn’t just create these pockets of affluence; it also creates pockets of concentrated poverty.

Lowrey: How do wealthy neighborhoods fight against poorer families coming in?

Desmond: I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a zoning-board meeting where folks are debating affordable housing. It shows you just how much work and effort and force goes into defending segregation. The folks who show up for those meetings are really not representative of the broader community. They tend to be whiter, more affluent, more likely to be homeowners. It’s this interesting thing wherein a democratic process has an undemocratic outcome, because representation in this case is a defense of the status quo.

Lowrey: How do these dynamics affect lower-income families?

Desmond: It boils down to choice. You have no choice, you get screwed. Are poor renters being overcharged for housing? There’s really strong evidence that the answer is yes, because they have no other choice. They’re shut out of homeownership. They’re shut out of public housing, because the waiting lists are stretching into the years, even into the decades. They’re shut out of other kinds of housing assistance, because only one in four families that qualify for them receive any kind of help. So they have to take the best of bad options. They rent at the bottom of the market and still fork over enormous chunks of their income.

Lowrey: How much can you reduce this to a white desire to not have Black folks in their neighborhoods, to not have Black kids in their schools?

Desmond: It is impossible to write a book called Poverty, by America without writing a book about racism. It is crucial. It is huge. One of the big things that makes Black poverty and white poverty different is segregation. In white America, there’s no equivalent of the incredibly segregated and poor neighborhoods so many Black families find themselves in.

It’s interesting to read the histories of segregation in the 1950s or 1930s. The segregationists used the same exact arguments that we do today. They talk about property values, schools, and crime.

Lowrey: As you point out, this segregation benefits higher-income homeowners.

Desmond: I did a study with Nate Wilmers at MIT showing that landlords in poor neighborhoods don’t just make more than landlords in affluent neighborhoods. They make double. That blew me away. When I started my research for Evicted, I was like, Why would you want to buy a trailer park? The landlord of the mobile-home park I lived in let me see his rent rolls, his books. He was bringing home over $400,000 a year after expenses, running the poorest trailer park in the fourth-poorest city in America.

I checked to see if it was anomalous or a national pattern. And it was a national pattern. The reason I think this isn’t a bigger news story is that it isn’t the case in San Francisco, D.C., or Seattle, places where we all live. It is better to be a landlord in SoHo than the South Bronx. But in Milwaukee, Cleveland, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, the opposite is true.

Lowrey: What’s the policy solution for housing exploitation?

Desmond: We need to stem the bleeding. Then we need policies that treat the disease. Evicted concluded with this call for a massive expansion of housing vouchers. Housing organizers are calling for rent control and rent-stabilization measures. I totally think that should be on the table. Even eviction-diversion programs — they have high success rates, and keeping families housed really, really matters.

Then let’s think about how to end housing exploitation among poor families. What works in New York or San Francisco is probably not the solution for rural Alabama or Cleveland. I’m for extending our investment in permanent affordable housing. That could be through a land bank and building out more co-op and tenant-run buildings. We could be building more of this amazing public housing that we started building over the last 10, 15 years, stuff that blends into the community and is just full of pride and color and life. I am totally for expanding homeownership opportunities to low-income families. There’s a strong case that there are huge returns on investment when you do that.

Lowrey: What about federal spending on housing?

Desmond: We’re giving a patient with Stage 4 cancer an Advil and wondering why it doesn’t work. In 2020, we spent $53 billion on direct housing assistance to the needy, through public housing, Section 8 vouchers. We spent $193 billion on homeowner tax subsidies. Most of the benefit goes to families with six-figure incomes. Most white Americans are homeowners. Most Black and Latinx Americans aren’t, because of our systematic dispossession of people of color from the land. It is really hard to think of a social policy that does a better job of amplifying our economic and racial inequalities than our current housing policy does.

Lowrey: There was this old line on Medicaid: that it wasn’t insurance worth having. Is public housing really housing worth having?

Desmond: This image of old, Soviet, segregated housing is stuck in the American psyche. But we’ve learned from our sins. And today, we have these low-slung, often integrated, affordable housing units. The kids grow up in this stable environment. I don’t mean to romanticize it. It’s not perfect. But it is stable.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been to eviction court. But if you go, there are just tons of kids. Until recently, one in the South Bronx had a daycare inside it because there were so many kids coming through housing court. What we are comparing is not a family growing up in public housing versus a homeowner in Naperville, Illinois. We’re comparing a family growing up in public housing versus another family paying 50, 60, 70 percent of its income on housing and facing eviction on a routine basis, and maybe homelessness.

That has a profound effect on kids. They lose their school, their teachers, their neighborhood. There are massive health implications and job implications for the parents. I think it’s worth a tour. Go look at the affordable housing in your community. Change your mindset about it.

Lowrey: How much of the exploitation is driven by gentrification, by wealthy people displacing poorer people from a neighborhood and shutting them out as it gets richer?

Desmond: Eviction is not rare. Gentrification is. If you want to study eviction, you typically aren’t studying gentrified neighborhoods. You’re studying poor, segregated neighborhoods where, even there, housing costs have outrun people’s incomes.

But if we care about community change, if we care about the people investing their lives in neighborhoods getting the benefit of that investment, we should care about those families paying this externality for the neighborhood getting a new subway stop. They don’t get to benefit. That’s hugely important to think about. But if we are asking questions like Why are so many people losing their homes? Why is eviction so commonplace? Why is it affecting so many kids?, to answer those questions, we have to expand the aperture.

Lowrey: The book points out that our financial institutions, housing markets, and labor market all extract money from low-income families. How does that work for banking, given that wealthy families are the ones with all the money to begin with?

Desmond: By my calculation, financial institutions pull $61 million a day out of the pockets of the poor in fees — just fees, so they can access their money. Often this is just straight-up exploitative. Banks don’t have to charge overdraft fees. That’s not a thing they have to do to keep the lights on. That’s an incredible source of revenue. And people like you and me benefit from it, because we get free checking accounts subsidized by other people’s overdraft fees. Only 9 percent of bank users pay 84 percent of those fees, $11 billion a year. Payday-loan fees and check-cashing fees are part of that, but the overdraft costs are higher. This isn’t just about check-cashing stores with the bright-red signs in the poor neighborhoods. It’s also about the banks that you and I use.

Lowrey: Tell me more about your critique of the earned-income tax credit — which is usually considered one of our biggest and most effective means-tested programs, in terms of moving people above the poverty line.

Desmond: There’s strong evidence that it depresses wages. It’s both super helpful and vital for families, given the hand they’ve been dealt in today’s market. But it isn’t attacking the root cause of the problem. We don’t have the market doing its job.

Lowrey: I want to go back to this idea that there isn’t just more poverty in America, but that poverty in America is different, more precarious.

Desmond: In Evicted, I followed this woman I called Arlene. After one eviction, she started applying for housing. She applied to 20 apartments. Then 40 apartments. Then 60. Then 80. I was counting, and she was accepted to none of them. Finally, the 90th person said yes. She got rejected 89 times before she heard yes. Rejection, rejection, rejection, rejection, rejection, then to have someone ask you to think about job training? Or even showing up at your kid’s parent-teacher conference? Poverty just taxes your mind. It captures your mind.

That’s so crucial to our policy debate, because many times we have the causality backwards. Folks will say, If you want to get out of poverty, get a better job and make better decisions. But the evidence is that once we have a floor under people, that’s when they can start self-actuating. I love the health research about what happens when states raise the minimum wage. People stop smoking. Their babies are healthier at birth. Child-neglect charges go down. All these massive prosocial events.

The theory behind that: When you’re like Arlene — rejection, rejection, rejection, eviction, rejection, where are my kids going to sleep at night? — the willpower you might have to stop smoking is diminished. This is crucial to understanding the lived experience of poverty.

Lowrey: We’ve seen large declines in the poverty rate in the past few years, after decades of slower progress. How and why did that happen?

Desmond: During COVID, we saw this incredible, bold relief, unmatched since the War on Poverty and the Great Society. If you look at the extended child tax credit, it dropped child poverty 46 percent in six months. If you look at emergency rental assistance, eviction rates drop to the lowest on record. If you look at incomes of families in the bottom half of the distribution — after the Great Recession, it took them 10 years to recover. This time, it took a year and a half. Night and day.

I see this as incredible, incredible evidence of what robust government spending can do. But those things are going away. We’re seeing evictions tick up again. We’re seeing the poverty rate tick up again. That should be troubling.

Lowrey: Do you think the policy response to the COVID recession changed how we understand poverty in America?

Desmond: I think it opened up the Overton window. In my world, when COVID hit, we immediately started worrying about the eviction crisis. Advocates started arguing for an eviction moratorium, and they were getting laughed out of the room at first. Even liberal activists thought this would never happen. One state passed it. Another state passed it. Pretty soon North Dakota had an eviction moratorium! And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention passed it under the Trump administration. It lasted almost a year and decreased the COVID death rate by 11 percent, according to a study out of Duke. It completely changed our imagination about what’s possible.

Lowrey: Yet there’s been relatively little agitation for the restoration of, say, the child tax credit.

Desmond: There’s this idea that the CTC didn’t gain popularity because it was pitched, marketed, and reported on as an anti-poverty project. That it didn’t poll well. The lesson was: Let’s pitch it differently. For me, that’s not the lesson. The lesson is How do we change common sense? It is time to push back against these old, tired, boring debates: Can we afford the CTC? I just feel like that question is deeply dishonest and even immoral. We can clearly afford it if we had real tax enforcement that made sure that the richest among us paid the taxes they owed. This isn’t just talk.

Download the free book Poverty, by America from the mirrors at https://libgen.unblockit.asia/search.php?req=Matthew+Desmond+poverty

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Friday, May 26, 2023 7:23 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

The Two Constitutions by David W. Blight

James Oakes’s deeply researched book argues that two very different readings of the 1787 charter put the United States on a course of all but inevitable conflict.

June 8, 2023 issue

Reviewed: The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution
by James Oakes
Norton, 256 pp., $26.95; $17.95 (paper)

Download all of James Oakes books for free from the mirrors at https://libgen.unblockit.asia/search.php?&req=James+Oakes

Historians can and do change their minds about interpretations of events and the uses of evidence. We may be dead certain, or even mildly sure, about facts and the stories we tell about them, but our craft requires us to remain open to new persuasions, new truths. James Oakes used to believe that the United States Constitution was essentially proslavery in its foundations, and that any attempt to breathe antislavery meaning into it was strained or rhetorical and not textually supported. But no more. In his remarkable and challenging book The Crooked Path to Abolition, he makes the case that there were effectively two constitutions written in Philadelphia that summer of 1787, one proslavery and one antislavery, which would be in conflict with each other for more than the next fourscore years.

Oakes, a distinguished professor of history at the CUNY Graduate Center, is not the only historian to have changed his view on this matter. In my first book, in 1989, I treated Frederick Douglass’s development of an antislavery interpretation of the Constitution as a slowly evolving perspective on his road to becoming a pragmatic political abolitionist and as a form of wish fulfillment in the absence of alternatives. I called his antislavery constitutionalism “dubious”—a search for political and moral ground on which he could stand to avoid embracing violent revolution by the 1850s. But I have come to see him as a deeply committed political thinker who argued his way, through what he called “careful study,” using legal and moral logic, to a vision of an antislavery Constitution. Guided by the natural rights tradition, Douglass found the core meaning of the American crisis. “Liberty and Slavery—opposite as Heaven and Hell,” he wrote in 1850, “are both in the Constitution.” What divided the nation was a Constitution “at war with itself.”1

It has long been understood that without the compromises that were struck to bolster the interests of the slave states, there might have been no constitution achieved in 1787, and the thirteen original states might have careened off into regional coalitions at best. With the publication in 1840 of James Madison’s notes from the Constitutional Convention, more information emerged about pivotal crises and compromises in those famous debates. The notes fueled the endless arguments over the meaning and intent of the “founders,” a term that defies any unified definition, as Oakes argues. For instance, the notes record a dispute over a proposed tax on future slave imports, to which Roger Sherman of Connecticut fiercely objected “because it implied that they [slaves] were property.” Madison agreed and, in what may seem rather startling language for a Virginia slaveholder, declared it “wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men.”

The original Constitution reeked of complicity with the peculiar institution. It contained prominent proslavery features: a fugitive slave clause requiring retrieval of escaped bondspeople (although ambiguous about adjudication), the provision that the end of the foreign slave trade would be postponed until at least 1808 (both sides claimed victory in this matter), and the numerous elements that embedded federalism deeply into the document, enabling the doctrine of states’ rights to flourish. Above all, the three-fifths clause counting enslaved people in such a robust fraction for the purpose of representation in Congress and the Electoral College, which enhanced significantly the slave states’ power in the legislative branch and presidential elections, explicitly gave the United States, it seemed, a permanent proslavery future.

Proslavery advocates made the Fifth Amendment’s guaranteed protection of property ownership their “linchpin,” Oakes shows, in one crisis after another in the antebellum era, including the dangerous controversy around the admission of Missouri as a state in 1820. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 drew its power, at least slaveholding southerners believed, from original, if vague, constitutional guarantees of the return of escapees. But so did the passionate resistance to that hated provision in the North because of the Constitution’s equally explicit guarantee in the Fifth Amendment of due process to “all persons.”

Southerners would, of course, claim that the Constitution permitted their secession in 1861, following the argument of John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, who maintained that the United States had been from its inception a contractual arrangement balanced between slave- and free-state interests. And they confidently held that, according to the Tenth Amendment, all powers not delegated to the federal government were reserved to the states. The proslavery Constitution had previously sustained slaveholders’ faith in their power within the Union, and in “King Cotton” as economic leverage, down to the late 1850s, despite their increasing minority status.

On the other hand, Oakes identifies several parts of the Constitution as inherently antislavery. The preamble’s call for a “more perfect union” inspired abolitionists, who also pointed to section 4 of article 4 and its “guarantee to every state in this Union a republican form of government.” Section 2 of article 4 buttressed a growing antebellum claim of Black citizenship, rooted in the privileges and immunities clause.2 Antislavery constitutionalists also found support for their principles in the Fourth Amendment: the rights of Americans to be “secure in their persons…against unreasonable searches and seizures” offered language to protect fugitive slaves and promote human rights.

The Fifth Amendment served both sides, but abolitionists drew increasingly on its stricture that no “person” shall be “deprived of life, liberty…without due process of law.” They avoided the word “property,” which followed “liberty” in the text, not just out of convenience but because of their long-standing legal and moral rejection of the idea of “property in man.” Antislavery activists further employed the war powers provisions for both Congress and the president to forge a potent theory of “forfeiture of rights”: if states engaged in domestic insurrection or secession, they immediately lost their rights in property, especially human chattel, as the federal government was duty-bound to crush such rebellion. And finally, the entirety of the Bill of Rights was a shining antislavery star for those seeking an egalitarian spirit in the Constitution.

The combination of all these clauses and principles allowed some abolitionists to declare the Constitution a bulwark for human equality and not merely, as Oakes says, a “hypocritical fantasy” crushed by white supremacy and a larger history. Some modern readers who are now conditioned to see the United States only as a progenitor of racial inequality may, misguidedly, find this claim on behalf of abolitionists a bridge too far.

The Crooked Path to Abolition is deeply researched in the Abraham Lincoln archive and is as much about Lincoln’s political skill and his intellectual road to emancipation as it is about antislavery constitutionalism. But it ultimately seeks to persuade readers that from the founding, two very different readings of the 1787 charter put the country on a course of all but inevitable conflict. The book’s importance rests in its case for an antislavery Constitution more than its likelihood of settling any battles in Lincoln scholarship, despite the author’s intensity in defending the prairie lawyer’s antislavery credentials.

Oakes demonstrates that antislavery thinkers such as Alvan Stewart, William Goodell, and Lysander Spooner developed a multilayered, coherent theory that the Constitution could be used to destroy slavery as early as the 1830s and 1840s, and traces their quest back to the founding. He draws upon and extends Sean Wilentz’s provocative book No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding,3 which also showed how antislavery constitutionalism eventually became, in Oakes’s words, “conventional wisdom among millions of northerners” and reached the highest ranks of the Republican Party by the mid-1850s, setting the stage for the tragic struggle soon to arrive.

The alternative was the influential vision of William Lloyd Garrison and his many followers. Garrison proclaimed the Constitution a “covenant with death” and an “agreement with hell,” and famously burned a copy at a rally in 1854. So devoid of antislavery features was the Constitution, Garrisonians believed, that abolitionists had no future using the document or even participating in the government it created.

To oppose these formidable, even anarchic, arguments, Goodell crafted the theory that the Constitution must be read in its “original organic structure,” meaning its overall purpose as well as its actual words. Goodell was a New York–based temperance advocate, radical abolitionist, journalist, and writer on religion; in 1852 he was the Liberty Party’s candidate for president. His reading of the Constitution, he insisted, did not necessarily explain how “the successive administrations of the National Government” advanced either freedom or slavery, but it deciphered the document’s true meaning and ultimate use against slavery. He contended that the Constitution, as an assertion of natural rights for all, fully empowered the federal government to end slavery everywhere, thus giving abolitionists a formidable weapon.

Salmon Chase of Ohio, an antislavery lawyer, defender of fugitive slaves, and eventual senator and member of Lincoln’s cabinet, offered yet another position, seemingly more moderate but no less potent. Chase and the emerging Republican Party upheld what was called the “federal consensus,” the idea that the national government could not eliminate slavery in states where it was protected by law but could end it anywhere else Washington held jurisdiction, including the territories and the District of Columbia. This bred one of the core ideas of antislavery politics in the 1850s: that slavery was local and sectional, and freedom was national.

A particularly powerful example of antislavery constitutionalists’ fervor emerged in their resistance to the Dred Scott case of 1857, in which the Supreme Court ruled resoundingly, 7–2, in favor of proslavery constitutionalism. Oakes aptly reminds us that Lincoln himself became an active conspiracy theorist after Dred Scott, embracing the idea of a cabal of proslavery southerners controlling the branches and levers of federal power.

In his announcement of his campaign for the US Senate in 1858, after the opening prose poetry about a “house divided against itself…half slave and half free,” as well as the telling pledge that slavery must be put on a “course of ultimate extinction,” Lincoln spent several pages condemning Chief Justice Roger Taney’s majority opinion in Dred Scott, which infamously declared that Black people had “no rights” under American law. Oakes stresses that Taney’s foreclosure of Blacks’ future in the American polity is rarely balanced with the two dissenting opinions, by Justices John McLean and Benjamin Curtis. Curtis denied the racial ideology on which the Dred Scott decision relied, and McLean declared citizenship the birthright of all free Blacks. Taney had forced American law to accept slaves as chattel property in perpetuity; Lincoln represented his party’s position that there could never be “property in man.”

By 1860 Douglass had explicitly enlisted Madison on the antislavery side of the Constitution, taking dead aim at the “property in man” argument. He saved his most poignant eloquence, though, for a broader claim. The “language” of the preamble, Douglass pointed out in a speech in Glasgow, Scotland, is

“we the people”; not we the white people, not even we the citizens, not we the privileged class, not we the high, not we the low, but we the people; not we the horses, sheep, and swine, and wheel-barrows, but…we the human inhabitants; and if Negroes are people, they are included in the benefits for which the Constitution of America was ordained and established.

These, then, were the positions in the constitutional battle on the eve of the Civil War: one Constitution birthed secession and rebellion, and the other a political coalition determined to surround slavery and destroy it. Both Constitutions had grown in tandem in an age of great expansion westward and of tremendous growth in the world’s most powerful slave society. Both sides of this struggle, writes Oakes perceptively, tried to “colonize” the Constitution for their own aims. Each side appropriated important clauses as justification to give slavery legal permanence, in one view, and put it on a course of “ultimate extinction,” in the other. The Constitution contained sufficient ambiguity, even warring logics, to give this story a drama like few others in our political past.

Abraham Lincoln’s thinking on slavery and the Constitution began with the federal consensus. For seventy years of bitter debates and controversial compromises, it had held, and in Oakes’s telling, Lincoln had joined the antislavery constitutionalists’ position: “Freedom was the rule, slavery the exception.” Wherever the federal government had jurisdiction, they argued, it could and was required to thwart and eliminate enslavement. Proslavery advocates, of course, maintained their right under the Fifth Amendment to carry their slaves as property anywhere they wished. Whether the US would have a slave-labor or a free-labor future was at stake in the 1860 presidential election, which Lincoln won with far less than half the popular vote.

Lincoln scholars and constitutional historians may quarrel with parts of the analysis in this book; Oakes enjoys a good historiographical rumble, and he is likely to find one. His larger scholarly purpose is to demonstrate the antislavery bona fides of the nineteenth-century Republican Party, especially against a popular perception of its present racist underside. Here he confines his criticisms of other scholars mostly to the endnotes; as a historian Oakes is primarily a careful prosecutor showing us what we have missed, not a polemicist. He is indignant at his colleagues’ and the larger culture’s needs, as he sees it, to wallow in the country’s persistent racism, especially in judging Lincoln. So much ambiguity abounds in Lincoln’s racial thought that one can generally find what one seeks. Too many people like their Lincoln pure—as racist or as emancipator.

“It is sometimes said,” Oakes writes, “that Lincoln’s commitment to emancipation was held in check by his racial prejudice, but the evidence suggests something like the opposite.” Many writers on Lincoln fall into using words like “sometimes” and “something” for good reason; their subject is elusive. “As his immersion in antislavery politics deepened,” says Oakes,

and his commitment to antislavery constitutionalism intensified, it became harder for Lincoln to distinguish his opposition to slavery from his baseline commitment to fundamental equality for whites and Blacks.

But Oakes might have reconsidered the statement that Lincoln, “though relatively untouched by racial prejudice, was nevertheless surrounded by it” in Illinois, where the culture “bred” in him “a profound pessimism about the future of African Americans in the United States.” Oakes too easily uses that to explain away Lincoln’s advocacy of the removal of willing Blacks by colonization.

This book needs to be read, though, for its uses of contradiction. Oakes places Lincoln squarely in the vanguard of what he calls the “antislavery project” of the Republican Party, and not as a reluctant late arrival. While Eric Foner analyzed Lincoln’s evolution toward the pivotal decisions for abolition in the midst of the Civil War, Oakes sees the sixteenth president as a full believer progressing pragmatically toward ever more radical views. These are really two complementary variations on the story of Lincoln’s growth on race and slavery.4

Once in a while Oakes breaks from the meticulous treatment of Lincoln’s balancing act on emancipation. Lincoln did engage in “periodic bowings and scrapings before the racist peanut gallery,” as in one or more of the debates with Illinois senator Stephen Douglas in 1858. Occasionally Oakes finds Lincoln “running for cover” on questions of racial prejudice. But in his first inaugural address, in March 1861, he endorsed citizenship rights for free Blacks, specifically citing the privileges and immunities clause of the Constitution. If the new president had turned around to Chief Justice Taney and Senator Douglas, sitting immediately behind him, and “slapped both men in their faces,” Oakes writes, “his repudiation could not have been more stunning.” The book could have benefited from more dramatic writing like that.

Oakes shows that, along with most antislavery voices, Lincoln believed that only states could abolish slavery, until the Civil War changed all imperatives. With other Republicans, he believed that his party should legally build a “restrictive fence,” a “cordon” around the slave states, eventually leading them to the economic necessity, if not the wisdom, of ending slavery on their own. Hence Lincoln was by instinct and constitutional principle a gradualist. He hated slavery but preferred its demise to come with compensation to slaveholders, and with at least a degree of voluntary emigration by Blacks.

Lincoln deferred to the racist “prejudices of the majority,” Oakes acknowledges, while holding firm to Republican Party positions. He charts the contingencies that shaped the president’s response to fugitive slaves entering Union lines. The distinction the administration and the army tried to make between escaped slaves of “loyal” and “disloyal” owners was confounding, even confusing, in 1861, and it is even to some extent in this book. Oakes helps us grasp, though, the harrowing challenges Lincoln faced in trying to fashion a military emancipation policy in a country at war that he did not believe would ever adopt real racial equality. Lincoln had no faith that racial prejudice could be sufficiently defeated.

The repeated efforts of Lincoln’s administration to plan, recruit, and provide finances to induce African Americans to renounce their birthright and leave for foreign lands needs more explanation than Oakes provides. Lincoln did indeed include Blacks in the natural rights of the Declaration of Independence; he used his war powers and an increasingly bold vision of the Constitution to make Black freedom possible. But to call Lincoln’s repeated endorsements of colonization “odd” seems off the mark; he remained a colonizationist down to the end of 1862, and his position was more consistent than odd. Nor does it feel accurate to use a modern term like “antiracist” to describe Lincoln’s inclusion of Blacks within the moral imperative of natural rights. He was the first president to do so, and for that he deserves honor. Yet we might want to be as careful in making him a modern progressive as we are in resisting the ahistorical label of “racist” for this most mythic and real of American leaders.

“Anyone,” writes Oakes, “could have anticipated that when the war came Lincoln and the Republicans would respond to the myriad eventualities in ways that reflected their long-standing commitment to the principles of antislavery constitutionalism.”

Well, not anyone. Douglass and other radicals did not trust Lincoln and his administration to wage an antislavery war during its first year. Like all Black abolitionists, Douglass was not yet an insider in Republican circles, nor did he adhere to the federal consensus once a sanctioned war commenced. Black leaders felt insulted and outraged by the colonization schemes, which Lincoln did not fully abandon until the Emancipation Proclamation, in January 1863. Douglass’s estimation of the president changed markedly between 1863 and 1865; his sense of Lincoln’s growth on the emancipation question by the end of the war is a moving story of mutual transformation.

Oakes, however, has made a strong case for his essential thesis. Antislavery constitutionalism, he argues, had firmly conditioned Republicans like Lincoln to wield federal power to destroy slavery well before the Battle of Antietam, in 1862, which prompted the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. Oakes puts it adroitly:

“Historians sometimes tell us that the destruction of slavery was the incidental by-product of the war, that the war “changed everything.” It would be more accurate to say that slavery was abolished because the Civil War radically accelerated the decades-long shift in the balance of power between slave and free states.”

Such an acceleration happened, Oakes shows, because of secession, but the instruments used by antislavery Republicans in wartime had long been tuned and rehearsed. Their interpretation prepared them for what Oakes calls the “single most revolutionary moment in the political history of the United States: the liberation of four million enslaved Americans.”

We still have two Constitutions on many issues: the nature of federalism, voting rights, election laws, the right to bear arms, and much more. We have a majority on the Supreme Court determined to return every power possible to the states, reverting the “Union” to many decades ago when it was a collection of battling legal sovereigns with common borders. The historical template for these and other future debates may always be the profound failures and triumphs of antislavery constitutionalism’s struggle against proslavery constitutionalism in the 1850s and 1860s. The heat in our public history wars today needs the light of this kind of scholarship, however difficult it is to sustain faith in truth, persuasion, and historical consciousness itself.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230520043453/https://www.nybooks.com/art
icles/2023/06/08/the-two-constitutions-abraham-lincoln-james-oakes/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Thursday, June 1, 2023 7:44 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

During oral arguments, this Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority viewed the 14th Amendment as merely promoting a theory of “color blindness” — in which race is simply ignored. The newest justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, made headlines at one of her first oral arguments, when she took pains to debunk this historically dubious theory.

In the voting rights case, Allen v. Milligan, the first Black woman to hold a seat on the Supreme Court explained that the drafters of the 14th amendment intended that its vision be applied “in a race-conscious way” so that freed former slaves “were actually brought equal to everyone else in the society.” She went on to urge “that’s not a race-neutral or race-blind idea.”

Unfortunately, Justice Jackson will likely be raising these points again as the Supreme Court is poised to end the term by using the “color blind” formulation to gut affirmative action in higher education and weaken a key part of the Voting Rights Act.

More at https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/06/supreme-court-term-william
-rehnquist-segregation.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Thursday, June 1, 2023 8:30 AM

Affirmative Action is cancer and Wakanda Brown Jackson is a moron.

--------------------------------------------------

Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

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Saturday, June 3, 2023 10:08 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

This article has been adapted from Peter Turchin’s forthcoming book, End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration.
https://tertulia.com/book/end-times-elites-counter-elites-and-the-path
-of-political-disintegration-peter-turchin/9780593490501?affiliate_id=atl-347

America Is Headed Toward Collapse

History shows how to stave it off.

By Peter Turchin, June 2, 2023

As most Americans’ quality of life declines, growing competition among elites is tipping the U.S. toward collapse.

How has America slid into its current age of discord? Why has our trust in institutions collapsed, and why have our democratic norms unraveled?

All human societies experience recurrent waves of political crisis, such as the one we face today. My research team built a database of hundreds of societies across 10,000 years to try to find out what causes them. We examined dozens of variables, including population numbers, measures of well-being, forms of governance, and the frequency with which rulers are overthrown. We found that the precise mix of events that leads to crisis varies, but two drivers of instability loom large. The first is popular immiseration—when the economic fortunes of broad swaths of a population decline. The second, and more significant, is elite overproduction—when a society produces too many superrich and ultra-educated people, and not enough elite positions to satisfy their ambitions.

These forces have played a key role in our current crisis. In the past 50 years, despite overall economic growth, the quality of life for most Americans has declined. The wealthy have become wealthier, while the incomes and wages of the median American family have stagnated. As a result, our social pyramid has become top-heavy. At the same time, the U.S. began overproducing graduates with advanced degrees. More and more people aspiring to positions of power began fighting over a relatively fixed number of spots. The competition among them has corroded the social norms and institutions that govern society.

The U.S. has gone through this twice before. The first time ended in civil war. But the second led to a period of unusually broad-based prosperity. Both offer lessons about today’s dysfunction and, more important, how to fix it.

To understand the root causes of the current crisis, let’s start by looking at how the number of über-wealthy Americans has grown. Back in 1983, 66,000 American households were worth at least $10 million. That may sound like a lot, but by 2019, controlling for inflation, the number had increased tenfold. A similar, if smaller, upsurge happened lower on the food chain. The number of households worth $5 million or more increased sevenfold, and the number of mere millionaires went up fourfold.

On its surface, having more wealthy people doesn’t sound like such a bad thing. But at whose expense did elites’ wealth swell in recent years?

Starting in the 1970s, although the overall economy continued to grow, the share of that growth going to average workers began to shrink, and real wages leveled off. (It’s no coincidence that Americans’ average height—a useful proxy for well-being, economic and otherwise—stopped increasing around then too, even as average heights in much of Europe continued climbing.) By 2010, the relative wage (wage divided by GDP per capita) of an unskilled worker had nearly halved compared with mid-century. For the 64 percent of Americans who didn’t have a four-year college degree, real wages shrank in the 40 years before 2016.

As wages diminished, the costs of owning a home and going to college soared. To afford an average house, a worker earning the median wage in 2016 had to log 40 percent more hours than she would have in 1976. And parents without a college degree had to work four times longer to pay for their children’s college.

Even college-educated Americans aren’t doing well across the board. They made out well in the 1950s, when fewer than 15 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds went to college, but not today, when more than 60 percent of high-school grads immediately enroll. To get ahead of the competition, more college graduates have sought out advanced degrees. From 1955 to 1975, the number of students enrolled in law school tripled, and from 1960 to 1970, the number of doctorate degrees granted at U.S. universities more than tripled. This was manageable in the post–World War II period, when the number of professions requiring advanced degrees shot up. But when the demand eventually subsided, the supply didn’t. By the 2000s, degree holders greatly outnumbered the positions available to them. The imbalance is most acute in the social sciences and humanities, but the U.S. hugely overproduces degrees even in STEM fields.

This is part of a broader trend. Compared with 50 years ago, far more Americans today have either the financial means or the academic credentials to pursue positions of power, especially in politics. But the number of those positions hasn’t increased, which has led to fierce competition.

Competition is healthy for society, in moderation. But the competition we are witnessing among America’s elites has been anything but moderate. It has created very few winners and masses of resentful losers. It has brought out the dark side of meritocracy, encouraging rule-breaking instead of hard work.

All of this has left us with a large and growing class of frustrated elite aspirants, and a large and growing class of workers who can’t make better lives for themselves.

The decades that have led to our present-day dysfunction share important similarities with the decades leading to the Civil War. Then as now, a growing economy served to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. The number of millionaires per capita quadrupled from 1800 to 1850, while the relative wage declined by nearly 50 percent from the 1820s to the 1860s, just as it has in recent decades. Biological data from the time suggest that the average American’s quality of life declined significantly. From 1830 to the end of the century, the average height of Americans fell by nearly two inches, and average life expectancy at age 10 decreased by eight years during approximately the same period.

This popular immiseration stirred up social strife, which could be seen in urban riots. From 1820 to 1825, when times were good, only one riot occurred in which at least one person was killed. But in the five years before the Civil War, 1855 to 1860, American cities experienced no fewer than 38 such riots. We see a similar pattern today. In the run-up to the Civil War, this frustration manifested politically, in part as anti-immigrant populism, epitomized by the Know-Nothing Party. Today this strain of populism has been resurrected by Donald Trump.

Strife grew among elites too. The newly minted millionaires of the 19th century, who made their money in manufacturing rather than through plantations or overseas trade, chafed under the rule of the southern aristocracy, as their economic interests diverged. To protect their budding industries, the new elites favored high tariffs and state support for infrastructure projects. The established elites—who grew and exported cotton, and imported manufactured goods from overseas—strongly opposed these measures. The southern slaveholders’ grip on the federal government, the new elites argued, prevented necessary reforms in the banking and transportation systems, which threatened their economic well-being.

As the elite class expanded, the supply of desirable government posts flattened. Although the number of U.S. representatives grew fourfold from 1789 to 1835, it had shrunk by mid-century, just as more and more elite aspirants received legal training—then, as now, the chief route to political office. Competition for political power intensified, as it has today.

Those were cruder times, and intra-elite conflict took very violent forms. In Congress, incidences and threats of violence peaked in the 1850s. The brutal caning that Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina gave to Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts on the Senate floor in 1856 is the best-known such episode, but it was not the only one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preston_Brooks#After_the_attack In 1842, after Representative Thomas Arnold of Tennessee “reprimanded a pro-slavery member of his own party, two Southern Democrats stalked toward him, at least one of whom was armed with a bowie knife,” the historian Joanne Freeman recounts. In 1850, Senator Henry Foote of Mississippi pulled a pistol on Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri. In another bitter debate, a pistol fell out of a New York representative’s pocket, nearly precipitating a shoot-out on the floor of Congress.

This intra-elite violence presaged popular violence, and the deadliest conflict in American history.

The victory of the North in the Civil War decimated the wealth and power of the southern ruling class, temporarily reversing the problem of elite overproduction. But workers’ wages continued to lag behind overall economic growth, and the “wealth pump” that redistributed their income to the elites never stopped. By the late 19th century, elite overproduction was back, new millionaires had replaced the defeated slave-owning class, and America had entered the Gilded Age. Economic inequality exploded, eventually peaking in the early 20th century. By 1912, the nation’s top wealth holder, John D. Rockefeller, had $1 billion, the equivalent of 2.6 million annual wages—100 times higher than the top wealth holder had in 1790.

Then came the New York Stock Exchange collapse of 1929 and the Great Depression, which had a similar effect as the Civil War: Thousands of economic elites were plunged into the commoner class. In 1925, there were 1,600 millionaires, but by 1950, fewer than 900 remained. The size of America’s top fortune remained stuck at $1 billion for decades, inflation notwithstanding. By 1982, the richest American had $2 billion, which was equivalent to “only” 93,000 annual wages.

But here is where the two eras differed. Unlike the post–Civil War period, real wages steadily grew in the mid-20th century. And high taxes on the richest Americans helped reverse the wealth pump. The tax rate on top incomes, which peaked during World War II at 94 percent, stayed above 90 percent all the way until the mid-1960s. Height increased by a whopping 3 inches in roughly the first half of the 20th century. Life expectancy at age 10 increased by nearly a decade. By the 1960s, America had achieved a broad-based prosperity that was virtually unprecedented in human history.

The New Deal elites learned an important lesson from the disaster of the Civil War. The reversal of elite overproduction in both eras was similar in magnitude, but only after the Great Depression was it accomplished through entirely nonviolent means. The ruling class itself was an important part of this—or, at least, a prosocial faction of the ruling class, which persuaded enough of their peers to acquiesce to the era’s progressive reforms.

As the historian Kim Phillips-Fein wrote in Invisible Hands, executives and stockholders mounted an enormous resistance to the New Deal policies regulating labor–corporate relations. But by mid-century, a sufficient number of them had consented to the new economic order for it to become entrenched. They bargained regularly with labor unions. They accepted the idea that the state would have a role to play in guiding economic life and helping the nation cope with downturns. In 1943, the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—which today pushes for the most extreme forms of neoliberal market fundamentalism—said, “Only the willfully blind can fail to see that the old-style capitalism of a primitive, free-shooting period is gone forever.” President Dwight Eisenhower, considered a fiscal conservative for his time, wrote to his brother:

Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things … Their number is negligible and they are stupid.

Barry Goldwater ran against Lyndon Johnson in 1964 on a platform of low taxes and anti-union rhetoric. By today’s standards, Goldwater was a middle-of-the-road conservative. But he was regarded as radical at the time, too radical even for many business leaders, who abandoned his campaign and helped bring about his landslide defeat.

The foundations of this broad-based postwar prosperity—and for the ruling elite’s eventual acquiescence to it—were established during the Progressive era and buttressed by the New Deal. In particular, new legislation guaranteed unions’ right to collective bargaining, introduced a minimum wage, and established Social Security. American elites entered into a “fragile, unwritten compact” with the working classes, as the United Auto Workers president Douglas Fraser later described it. This implicit contract included the promise that the fruits of economic growth would be distributed more equitably among both workers and owners. In return, the fundamentals of the political-economic system would not be challenged. Avoiding revolution was one of the most important reasons for this compact (although not the only one). As Fraser wrote in his famous resignation letter from the Labor Management Group in 1978, when the compact was about to be abandoned, “The acceptance of the labor movement, such as it has been, came because business feared the alternatives.”

We are still suffering the consequences of abandoning that compact. The long history of human society compiled in our database suggests that America’s current economy is so lucrative for the ruling elites that achieving fundamental reform might require a violent revolution. But we have reason for hope. It is not unprecedented for a ruling class—with adequate pressure from below—to allow for the nonviolent reversal of elite overproduction. But such an outcome requires elites to sacrifice their near-term self-interest for our long-term collective interests. At the moment, they don’t seem prepared to do that.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230602125601/https://www.theatlantic.com
/ideas/archive/2023/06/us-societal-trends-institutional-trust-economy/674260/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Saturday, June 3, 2023 10:33 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
(It’s no coincidence that Americans’ average height—a useful proxy for well-being, economic and otherwise—stopped increasing around then too, even as average heights in much of Europe continued climbing.)

And it's a good thing too...

Why Tall People Die Younger: The ideal height for the longest life

SPOILER ALERT: My height. 5'7" for a man is the perfect height. (5'3" for a woman). Every 4cm above that increases cancer risk by 10%, let alone all the other issues such as heart failure.

--------------------------------------------------

Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

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Saturday, June 3, 2023 2:16 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
(It’s no coincidence that Americans’ average height—a useful proxy for well-being, economic and otherwise—stopped increasing around then too, even as average heights in much of Europe continued climbing.)

And it's a good thing too...

Why Tall People Die Younger: The ideal height for the longest life

SPOILER ALERT: My height. 5'7" for a man is the perfect height. (5'3" for a woman). Every 4cm above that increases cancer risk by 10%, let alone all the other issues such as heart failure.

--------------------------------------------------

Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

Maybe that's why big dogs die a lot younger than small dogs?

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

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Saturday, June 3, 2023 4:37 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

US warships cost at least twice as much as they should

CNN has a remarkable story today about the vast difference in cost between warships built in the US and those built in Japan https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/02/asia/japan-south-korea-naval-shipbuildi
ng-intl-hnk-ml-dst/index.html

The country’s newest Maya-class destroyers are armed with 96 VLS cells that can fire both anti-ballistic and anti-submarine missiles, while the “quality of its sensors and systems stands at the very top end of the spectrum.”...Those 96 VLS cells put the Mayas on par with the newest of the US Arleigh Burkes, but there’s a crucial difference between them: The Arleigh Burkes cost $2.2 billion; the Mayas cost a billion dollars less.

....And it’s not just the Mayas. Take Japan’s Mogami-class frigates; speedy, stealthy 5,500-ton warships with 16 VLS cells that fire surface-to-air and anti-ship missiles. All done with a crew of 90 and a price tag of about $372 million each. By contrast, the first of the US Navy’s under development Constellation-class frigates are expected to cost three times as much and require twice as many crew.

These Japanese ships, along with others from South Korea, are designed to be very similar to American ships:

All these Japanese and South Korean vessels are designed to incorporate US technology, weapons, spy radars and the Aegis command and control system.

So why the vast difference in cost?

Cost overruns, endemic in US defense contracting, are not common in Japan, Schuster says, because — unlike the US — the country holds manufacturers to their estimates.

“A Japanese shipbuilder’s bid is an absolute. If they finish it below expected cost, they make a larger profit. If they encounter delays and mistakes, the builder has to correct it at their own expense,” Schuster said.

That sounds . . . a little too easy. There has to be more to it than "we won't pay a nickel more than you bid." Requirements change, specs change, and timetables change. It's hardly possible in the real world for a bid to stay frozen in the face of that.

And yet, unless there are some accounting tricks involved, there's the bare fact that the Japanese ships are similar but cost billions less than US versions. How? Are the US ships not actually all that similar? Or is our procurement really so screwed up that we pay twice as much for basically the same ship?

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Saturday, June 3, 2023 4:52 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
US warships cost at least twice as much as they should

US everything costs at least twice as much as it should.

--------------------------------------------------

Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

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Saturday, June 3, 2023 7:52 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
US warships cost at least twice as much as they should

US everything costs at least twice as much as it should.

The Japanese and Koreans make cars cheaper and better than Americans. And the Japanese/Koreans have those car factories in America with American workers. The Japanese/Koreans could do the same with warships, since they sell warships at low cost to their own military, assuming Congress wants to stop American defense contractors from cheating the hell out of the country. But that assumption might be incorrect. For example, Congress recently passed a law that prevents the IRS from collecting the $1 trillion that rich cheaters don't pay each year, so it is not obvious that Congress would want to stop defense contractors from cheating.

IRS chief says $1 trillion in taxes goes uncollected every year
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-treasury-irs/irs-chief-says-1-t
rillion-in-taxes-goes-uncollected-every-year-idUSKBN2C0255

Cutting IRS funding is a gift to America’s wealthiest tax evaders
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2023/01/26/cutting-irs-funding-i
s-a-gift-to-americas-wealthiest-tax-evaders/

What The Debt Ceiling Agreement Means For The IRS
What policymakers give, policymakers can take away. Nine months after Congress enacted President Biden’s proposal to boost the Internal Revenue Service’s 10-year budget by $80 billion, the president and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) have agreed to cut the IRS’s budget by up to $21.4 billion over the next three years as part of a deal to raise the debt ceiling.
https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/what-debt-ceiling-agreement-mea
ns-irs

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Sunday, June 4, 2023 12:38 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
US warships cost at least twice as much as they should

US everything costs at least twice as much as it should.
The Japanese and Koreans make cars cheaper and better than Americans. And the Japanese/Koreans have those car factories in America with American workers. The Japanese/Koreans could do the same with warships, since they sell warships at low cost to their own military, assuming Congress wants to stop American defense contractors from cheating the hell out of the country. But that assumption might be incorrect. For example, Congress recently passed a law that prevents the IRS from collecting the $1 trillion that rich cheaters don't pay each year, so it is not obvious that Congress would want to stop defense contractors from cheating.

IRS chief says $1 trillion in taxes goes uncollected every year
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-treasury-irs/irs-chief-says-1-t
rillion-in-taxes-goes-uncollected-every-year-idUSKBN2C0255

Cutting IRS funding is a gift to America’s wealthiest tax evaders
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2023/01/26/cutting-irs-funding-i
s-a-gift-to-americas-wealthiest-tax-evaders/

What The Debt Ceiling Agreement Means For The IRS
What policymakers give, policymakers can take away. Nine months after Congress enacted President Biden’s proposal to boost the Internal Revenue Service’s 10-year budget by $80 billion, the president and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) have agreed to cut the IRS’s budget by up to $21.4 billion over the next three years as part of a deal to raise the debt ceiling.
https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/what-debt-ceiling-agreement-mea
ns-irs

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

I SAID EVERYTHING.

Stop focusing just on the military because that's what your Media Masters are bitching about today.

The American Government wastes money everywhere it spends it.

--------------------------------------------------

Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

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Sunday, June 4, 2023 7:30 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

I SAID EVERYTHING.

Stop focusing just on the military because that's what your Media Masters are bitching about today.

The American Government wastes money everywhere it spends it.

East Texas is overflowing, like a plugged toilet, with people complaining about the Federal government. I guess it is too complicated for them to understand that there are actually two kinds of people at the level of Congress and the top echelons of government procurement. One kind sets up a program to accomplish an admirable task and the other kind exploits that program to make themselves rich. The wealth seekers claim that they are the other kind of people, the ones who want to accomplish something admirable, but every step of the way they are cooperating and coordinating with outsiders who are cheating the government. When the cheaters resign from the government, they go work for the corporations that cheated the government.

Although the influence powerhouses that line Washington's K Street are just a few miles from the U.S. Capitol building, the most direct path between the two doesn't necessarily involve public transportation. Instead, it's through a door—a revolving door that shuffles former federal employees into jobs as lobbyists, consultants and strategists just as the door pulls former hired guns into government careers.
https://www.opensecrets.org/revolving/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Sunday, June 4, 2023 7:31 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

White resistance to federal power

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n11/eric-foner/the-little-man-s-bi
g-friends

Earlier? this year, Randy McNally, the speaker of the Tennessee Senate, issued a proclamation declaring April 2023 Confederate History Month. He urged ‘citizens from across this state’ to remember their ancestors’ ‘heroic struggle’ for ‘individual freedom’. Observers outside Tennessee may find it incongruous to identify a war fought to preserve slavery with the ideal of freedom, but Jefferson Cowie, who teaches history at Vanderbilt University, in the heart of the state, wouldn’t be surprised. His new book seeks to explain why so many Americans, especially but not exclusively in the South, have understood freedom as an entitlement limited to white people. Cowie argues that ‘white freedom’ has long entailed the power to dominate others, especially non-whites, without interference from the national government. The fear that white freedom is under assault by Blacks, or immigrants, or a faraway national government, helps to explain why in the last election Donald Trump carried Tennessee in a landslide, winning 60 per cent of the vote and all but three of the state’s 95 counties. In many parts of the US, every month is Confederate History Month.

Since the election of Ronald Reagan, historians have struggled to explain why so many members of the white working class have abandoned their loyalty to the Democratic Party of Franklin D. Roosevelt and decided to vote for candidates whose policies, including tax cuts for the rich, hostility to trade unions and an embrace of economic globalisation, undermine their own economic interests. In perhaps the most widely read book on the subject, What’s the Matter with Kansas? (2004), Thomas Frank argued that the upheavals of the 1960s generated fears and resentments that allowed issues such as abortion rights and racial equity to eclipse economics. Cowie’s book is both an ambitious history lesson and a contribution to this ongoing discussion, recently reinvigorated by working-class support for Trump.

Cowie’s previous work includes Capital Moves (1999), an account of how RCA, a manufacturer of radios and televisions, obsessively pursued cheap labour at home and abroad, and Stayin’ Alive (2010), which drew on images of workers in popular culture to argue that organised labour is no longer a self-conscious power in American life. In both, he was able to weave class, culture, politics and ideology into a consistent narrative and to connect local histories with national and global events. The same qualities are evident in Freedom’s Dominion. The book covers more than two centuries of American history, seeking to explain the evolution and enduring power of a racially inflected understanding of freedom.

The oldest of clichés and the most inspiring of human aspirations, freedom is fundamental to Americans’ sense of themselves as individuals and as a nation. ‘Every man in the street, white, black, red or yellow,’ the statesman Ralph Bunche wrote in 1940, ‘knows that this is “the land of the free” ... [and] the cradle of liberty.’ Cowie’s account builds on Tyler E. Stovall’s recent book White Freedom, which argued that the crystallisation of the notion of freedom as a natural right, simultaneous with the expansion of slavery in the Atlantic world, led to it being increasingly racialised as an ideal. ‘Oppression and freedom are not opposites,’ Cowie writes, nor is a rhetorical commitment to liberty incompatible with an insistence on the right of those who enjoy freedom to enslave others.

Cowie focuses on four eras in the history of a place most readers won’t have heard of: Barbour County, located in south-eastern Alabama. It might seem counterintuitive to pick a county located in the pre-Civil War cotton kingdom, later the site of rigid racial segregation, to epitomise the evolution of American freedom. Some readers will recoil from the idea that the US is Barbour County writ large: why not choose New York City or a county in California to illustrate the dream of individual mobility and economic opportunity? What about somewhere in the Midwestern ‘heartland’, where American values – family, religion and hard work – supposedly flourish? But, for Cowie, Barbour’s history exemplifies the rise of the idea of freedom as a white prerogative. It’s also the birthplace of George Wallace, one of the most influential political figures of the 20th century, who struck electoral gold by claiming that an alliance of the federal government and the civil rights movement was undermining the freedom of whites. Cowie uses Barbour to describe the way a ‘racialised, domineering version of American freedom’ became increasingly linked to ‘anti-statism’, hostility to federal intervention in local affairs.

Fear of an autocratic central state goes back at least as far as the revolutionary era. After the US Constitution was adopted, significantly strengthening the existing national government, a considerable number of Americans, known as Anti-Federalists, warned of impending tyranny. To mollify them, the Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution, protecting Americans’ essential liberties against abuses of national power. Initially, no clear connection existed between freedom, whiteness and fear of centralised authority. (A large majority of the presidents and Supreme Court justices between the Revolution and Civil War were, after all, Southern slaveholders or, as opponents called them, ‘Northern men with Southern principles’; the national government did not pose a threat to Southern interests.) Cowie identifies conflicts in the 1830s between the Creek nation, whose lands included most of Barbour County, and a small army of white settlers in the region, as a key development in the definition of freedom as racialised anti-statism. Local and state governments aided and abetted the intruders, but at first officials in Washington sided with the Native Americans, who had signed treaties with the federal government that ceded much of their land but guaranteed ownership of the rest in perpetuity. Even President Andrew Jackson, whose career, Cowie writes, revealed a ‘merciless hostility’ to the Native American population, insisted that states’ rights must yield to national authority and treaties must be obeyed. Jackson threatened to dispatch troops to Alabama to drive out whites who had illegally settled on Creek land.

Half a century earlier, in the Proclamation of 1763, the imperial government in London had tried to establish peace between Indigenous peoples and colonial settlers by barring whites from acquiring land west of the Appalachian mountains. The resentment caused by this edict helped to inspire the movement for American independence. The Earl of Dunmore, the governor of colonial Virginia, later notorious for arming slaves to fight on the British side during the War of Independence, complained that Americans ‘do not conceive that government has any right to forbid their taking possession’ of Indian land. Even the bellicose Jackson could not overcome the combined power of white settlers, land speculators and local courts that consistently ruled in favour of those Cowie calls ‘land thieves’. Jackson’s effort to protect the Native Americans accomplished nothing except to persuade many whites that the federal government posed a threat to their freedom, defined in part as access to land. Ironically, the eventual triumph of white settlers required a powerful exercise of national authority, the removal beyond the Mississippi of tens of thousands of Native Americans, including many Creeks, in the Trail of Tears. Cotton plantations worked by slaves replaced Native communities in the states of the Lower South. Some of the resulting wealth, Cowie points out, is visible today in the mansions that dot the streets of Eufaula, Barbour County’s largest city.

In his second section, Cowie examines the way the crisis that produced the Civil War, emancipation and Reconstruction ended up powerfully reinforcing white Alabamans’ view of the federal government as a threat to their ability to rule over the region’s Black population. During the 1850s, white residents of Barbour County became increasingly insistent on being left alone to manage their affairs, including ownership of slaves, without national interference. When Abraham Lincoln, who had pledged to halt the westward expansion of slavery, was elected president in 1860, they doubled down on the idea that the national government was their enemy and moved to create a new nation, a slave owners’ republic. In the end, the mobilisation of federal power was crucial in bringing about what Southern whites considered a loss of freedom: the end of slavery, the ousting of the old ruling class from local power and the establishment of the first biracial democratic governments in American history. Constitutional amendments guaranteed the end of slavery, Black citizenship, the equal protection of the laws regardless of race and, for Black men, the right to vote. Each amendment ended with a clause empowering the federal government to enforce its provisions – a promise (or threat) of future national action. Unfortunately, as Sidney Andrews, a Northern journalist who visited the South in 1865, observed, ‘the whites seem wholly unable to comprehend that freedom for the Negro means the same thing as freedom for them.’ To white citizens of Barbour, the expansion of freedom for Blacks meant its diminution for whites. The white population resolved to overturn Reconstruction, first by political mobilisation, then by violence.

If the Civil War proved anything, Supreme Court Justice Samuel F. Miller declared in 1887, it was that those who believed a strong federal government posed a danger to liberty ‘were in error’. But the enjoyment of freedom by former slaves depended on outside power. For a time, such power was forthcoming. In the early 1870s, President Grant sent troops to South Carolina and federal marshals to Alabama to protect former slaves. The willingness to intervene with force soon waned, however, and the violent overthrow of Reconstruction followed, a process whites called Redemption, or the restoration of ‘home rule’.

With the end of Reconstruction, Cowie turns to the era of ‘Federal Power in Repose’. The provisions of the amended Constitution became dead letters as far as Blacks were concerned. No longer fearing federal intervention, Southern states enacted measures to solidify white power. To illustrate the practical consequences of national inaction, Cowie provides a description of the convict lease system that subjected countless Blacks convicted of petty crimes to servitude. He makes clear, however, that the reestablishment of ‘white freedom’ did not erase class differences within the white population. While the rest of the country moved forward economically, the planters and merchants who governed Alabama and other Southern states adopted a low-wage developmental model, which impoverished many whites as well as African Americans. As in other parts of the South, the People’s Party, or Populists, rose to prominence in Barbour County in the late 19th century, a direct challenge to elite domination. For a time, some white Populists even advocated that poor Black and white farmers join forces for mutual economic benefit. After crushing the Populists with the same combination of fraud, violence and appeals to white solidarity that had overturned Reconstruction, in 1901 Alabama’s leaders pushed through a new state constitution that disenfranchised nearly all Blacks: in order to vote, people had to persuade registrars, all white, that they were of ‘good character’ and understood ‘the duties and obligations of citizens’. Future interracial political co-operation became impossible.

Is? ‘repose’ the right way to describe the status of the federal government in the era between Reconstruction and the New Deal? Certainly, those years witnessed the abdication of national responsibility for protecting the rights of Black citizens. But Cowie’s local focus creates problems. The role of the federal government has always been more contested than Cowie suggests. Anti-statism may be the dominant outlook, but there is another tradition in which the national government actively promoted economic growth and the interests of business. Its roots go back as far as Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist Party in the early republic. National power may have disappeared from Barbour, but elsewhere it was much in evidence, especially when the interests of corporations, closely tied to the nationally dominant Republican Party, were at stake. More than once, labour uprisings were met by the intervention of federal troops. Indeed, some of the same soldiers who were withdrawn from the South as part of the Bargain of 1877 that ended Reconstruction were deployed in the North to suppress a national railroad strike. Meanwhile, the army was battling Indians in the West, bent on opening their lands to exploitation by railroads, mining companies and farmers. Native Americans did not think the federal government was in ‘repose’. And an activist Supreme Court invalidated numerous state laws that sought to regulate the conditions of labour. This protection of corporate interests inspired reformers to conceive of new ways the federal government might use its power. The Populists called for the nationalisation of the railroads and government control of the credit system to help ease the plight of small farmers. Progressives in both major parties supported an expansion of federal economic regulation. Not ‘repose’ but national power seemed a more reliable shield for corporate interests than local ‘home rule’.

In The Great Exception (2016), Cowie portrayed the New Deal, which brought into being an administrative state and a national safety net, as a detour from the main trajectory of American history, in which anti-statism is the default position. But this fails to explain why the New Deal coalition enjoyed widespread support throughout the country for decades as Americans looked to the federal government for economic relief. To be sure, white freedom still reigned in the South. But FDR actively promoted a definition of freedom as economic security for ordinary Americans guaranteed by the federal government, implicitly offering a contrast to the notion that national power was the embodiment of tyranny.

Cowie turns finally to the era of the civil rights movement and the ensuing backlash. Some participants called these years the Second Reconstruction, a successor to the time when federal power was used against the Southern racial system. With its freedom rides, freedom songs and insistent cry ‘freedom now’, liberty became the movement’s rallying cry. Many white Southerners adopted their own equation of the era with Reconstruction, warning that federal civil rights legislation violated local freedom. Cowie argues that despite the courage of the mass protesters, Black political rights still depended on federal enforcement. And the more the national government intervened, the more whites associated it with a loss of freedom. In Barbour, white officials sought to undermine Blacks’ newly regained political rights through gerrymandering, manipulation of voting qualifications, harassment of those who went to the polls and other subterfuges. At one point, white Eufaulans came up with a plan to avoid school integration by having the city’s Housing Authority employ the power of eminent domain – funded, ironically, by federal slum clearance grants – to seize the homes of African Americans living in proximity to whites. Once the city was segregated residentially, school district lines could follow without explicit mention of race. Eufaula’s school board cancelled non-academic events to prevent Black and white students from socialising, and the city’s high school didn’t hold an integrated prom until 1991. All this was defended in the name of freedom.

Legally speaking? , the backlash failed. Federal laws and court rulings dismantled de jure segregation and Southern Blacks regained the right to vote. But in the Democratic primaries of 1964 and an independent run for president four years later, Barbour’s favourite son, Governor George Wallace, brought the politics of white freedom to the rest of the nation. Wallace began his career as a supporter of Big Jim Folsom, an imposing figure known as ‘the little man’s big friend’. Folsom spoke the language of economic populism, castigating the elite that controlled state politics while calling vaguely for fair treatment of the state’s Blacks. But sensing that resistance to civil rights was eclipsing economic issues, Wallace shifted his focus to maintaining white supremacy. After losing the gubernatorial election of 1958 to the even more racist John Patterson, Wallace vowed never to allow himself to be outdone in playing the race card. He was elected governor in 1962, for the first of four terms. ‘Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,’ he proclaimed in his inaugural address. The central theme of his speech, however, was not segregation but freedom, a word he used 25 times. With a keen sense of political theatre, Wallace created an indelible image for TV by blocking the doorway of the University of Alabama’s registration building to prevent the court-ordered admission of the first Black students. He withdrew and the students entered. But he had made himself a national standard-bearer for white freedom.

Earlier than many politicians, Wallace realised that support for his views was not confined to the South. In the Newtonian physics of American politics, any action designed to improve the condition of Black Americans called forth an equal and opposite reaction. In 1964, the year that Lyndon Johnson, who had identified himself with the civil rights movement, won an overwhelming national victory, the voters of California approved a referendum prohibiting the state government from promoting housing integration. Wallace received an enthusiastic reception from ethnic working-class voters in cities like Milwaukee with his message that freedom was under assault. His campaigns were a harbinger of a conservatism in which, in the name of freedom, racists united with business-oriented opponents of New Deal economic policies. While Wallace’s dream of using white resentment as a ticket to the White House failed to materialise, his campaigns cast a long shadow over American politics. In the South, Wallace helped to catalyse a remarkable transformation of political alignments. White voters en masse abandoned the Democratic Party, which had controlled the region since the end of Reconstruction, for the once despised Republicans. ‘The “Wallace factor”,’ Cowie insists, ‘became the key variable for understanding the future of American politics.’ Shortly before his death in 1998, Wallace reminisced: ‘Nixon. Reagan. Clinton. Welfare reform. Crime. Big government ... They [are] all saying now what I was saying then.’ Trump can be added to this list.

Cowie makes a convincing case for the enduring power of the idea that freedom, however defined, is a white entitlement. But not all hostility to the federal government can be explained by racism. As Anne Kornhauser showed in Debating the American State (2015), even as the New Deal was being launched, some liberal reformers echoed conservatives’ concerns about the implications for political democracy of government by unelected experts. In 1971, the lawyer Lewis Powell Jr, later appointed to the Supreme Court by Nixon, wrote an influential memorandum for the US Chamber of Commerce urging corporate executives to enlist in what he described as an ideological war in which freedom, defined as free-market economics, was ‘under broad attack’, especially on college campuses. The Powell Memorandum inspired the creation of an array of conservative think tanks ready to do their part in the battle of ideas. It didn’t mention race: Powell was addressing elites, not mobilising voters. But the prospect of an alliance between anti-government activists bent on repealing the New Deal and Wallace’s electoral base proved too alluring for conservatives to resist. The result was a Faustian political bargain exemplified by Nixon’s ‘Southern strategy’, Reagan’s decision to launch his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers had been murdered, and the infamous 1988 campaign ad by George H.W. Bush that identified his Democratic opponent Michael Dukakis with Willie Horton, a dangerous Black criminal. Today’s corporate Republicans who find Trump’s inflammatory appeals to white grievances and his demagogic hostility to the ‘deep state’ distasteful have never acknowledged that they themselves helped lay the groundwork for his political ascent.

Recent presidents have not said much about freedom. Obama didn’t often invoke it, preferring to speak of community, equality and responsibility. Trump preferred the language of raw power. Cowie begins his book by calling for the idea of white freedom to be replaced by ‘a vigorous, federally enforced model of American citizenship’ that will ‘fight the many incarnations of the freedom to dominate’. Biden seems to have been listening. In April he launched his campaign for re-election with a brief speech that promised to rescue the idea of freedom from Republicans. Cowie’s narrative, however, suggests that this is unlikely to happen soon. More than half a century after he stood in the ‘schoolhouse door’, the ghost of George Wallace still haunts American politics.

Download all of Jefferson Cowie’s free books from the mirrors at https://libgen.unblockit.asia/search.php?&req=Jefferson+Cowie

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Sunday, June 4, 2023 8:16 AM

Democrats want everyone to be slaves.

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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

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Sunday, June 4, 2023 9:16 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Democrats want everyone to be slaves.

That's another one I constantly hear from East Texas voters for Trump. I have never known one of them who could get the relationship correct so I won't try to inform them. Trying makes them act crazier than they naturally are. They just gotta go to their early graves being wrong-headed, never understanding yet absolutely certain they understand everything.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Sunday, June 4, 2023 9:37 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Democrats want everyone to be slaves.
That's another one I constantly hear from East Texas voters for Trump. I have never known one of them who could get the relationship correct so I won't try to inform them. Trying makes them act crazier than they naturally are. They just gotta go to their early graves being wrong-headed, never understanding yet absolutely certain they understand everything.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

What you need to do is stop projecting all of your own shortcomings on everyone around you.

You are the lowest common denominator in all of your failures and unhappiness.

--------------------------------------------------

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Sunday, June 4, 2023 10:19 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

What you need to do is stop projecting all of your own shortcomings on everyone around you.

You are the lowest common denominator in all of your failures and unhappiness.

That's still another one I constantly hear from East Texas voters for Trump. These guys never read "Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free" by Charles P. Pierce. If I were to mention this book, those Trump voters' rejoinder will be simpler than 6ix's: "You're the idiot, not me!" They've got to say it or else they will feel bad about themselves.

The three Great Premises of Idiot America:
- 1) Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings, or otherwise moves units
- 2) Anything can be true if someone says it loudly enough
- 3) Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is determined by how fervently they believe it

With his trademark wit and insight, veteran journalist Charles Pierce delivers a gut-wrenching, side-splitting lament about the glorification of ignorance in the United States. Pierce asks how a country founded on intellectual curiosity has somehow deteriorated into a nation of simpletons.

https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/idiot-america-how-stupidity-became-a-vir
tue-in-the-land-of-the-free_charles-p-pierce/272427/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, June 5, 2023 7:31 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

A Tragically American Approach to the Child-Care Crisis
Elliot Haspel
https://web.archive.org/web/20230604175536/https://www.theatlantic.com
/family/archive/2023/06/child-care-united-states-employer-based/674269/

The U.S. is returning to a tired old playbook: If at first you fail to make something a universal right, try making it an employee benefit.

For a brief moment, it looked like America could get a real child-care system—one that wasn’t defined by lengthy waitlists, sky-high fees, and crossed-fingers quality. When the House of Representatives passed the Build Back Better Act in 2021, it included $400 billion in funding, part of which would have paid programs enough to boost providers’ wages, in turn increasing the supply of available slots. The act also would have capped all but the wealthiest families’ child-care bills at 7 percent of their income. This overhaul would have put child care squarely in the same category as Social Security, Medicare, and other guaranteed supports: It would have, in other words, become a right. Since Joe Manchin and 50 Republican senators killed the bill, however, many policy makers have started following a tired old playbook: If at first you fail to make something a universal right, try making it an employee benefit.

The instinct to make for any policy port in a storm is understandable, and the American child-care system is stuck in a years-long hurricane. At its core is a financial paradox. Child-care providers have very high fixed costs due to the need for low child-to-adult ratios, so they can’t pay their staff well without significantly increasing parent fees (many child-care workers make less than parking attendants). In other words, child care simultaneously is too expensive for parents and brings in too little revenue for programs to operate sustainably. In fact, the industry is still down more than 50,000 employees from pre-pandemic levels. Centers have shut down for want of staff, long waitlists have stretched to the point of absurdity, and the rising cost of care continues to exceed inflation.

The system desperately needs a large infusion of permanent public money so that programs can compensate educators well, parent fees can be slashed, and supply can rise to meet demand. As Annie Lowrey wrote last year, “The math does not work. It will never work. No other country makes it work without a major investment from government.”

In his public remarks and his proposed budget for the 2024 fiscal year, President Joe Biden is certainly insistent about the need for a permanent answer to child-care funding. Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren and Patty Murray, along with their House counterparts, have each submitted a major child-care bill in recent months. Yet in the face of congressional gridlock, Democrats and Republicans alike are turning to employers as a salve.

At the federal level, the Biden administration is nudging companies to offer employees child-care assistance, embedding such encouragement in the semiconductor CHIPS Act and a recent executive order on care. Red states such as Oklahoma and Missouri have proposed—along with other actions, like tax credits for donors to child-care programs—sweetening the incentive pot for employer child-care benefits. States such as Michigan and Kentucky are piloting programs in which child-care costs can be split among the employer, the employee, and the government.

The problem is that these are quarter measures at best. Millions of gig workers who don’t receive benefits will be left out by default. And employer-sponsored benefits are unreliable because people may switch or lose their job—and because employers can simply change their mind. According to a recent Care.com survey of 500 companies, nearly one-third said they might cut child-care benefits if a recession takes hold. Even putting all of that aside, none of these programs can ever hope to help even the barest fraction of the millions of families who want and need care.

For instance, two years after its inception, Michigan’s well-intentioned Tri-Share initiative reaches a grand total of 277 families. On-site child-care centers can quickly fill up and may not meet the needs or preferences of blue-collar workers who require care during nontraditional hours. Moreover, none of these initiatives significantly addresses providers’ wages, and opening new programs when you can’t even find staff for existing ones is a bridge to nowhere. A child-care system that relies on the employer-employee relationship is fundamentally flawed. There is a reason we do not offer public schooling as part of a benefits package.

That is not to say that employers should be ignored. Some parents benefit greatly from having child care located where they work. However, those programs do not have to be funded and run by the employer; in a publicly funded system, on-site centers can be one option among many. Similarly, employers can and should be asked to contribute to the child care their employees rely on, but through taxation instead of fringe benefits. Vermont is set to become the first state to substantially increase child-care funding with a small payroll tax, at least 75 percent of which will be paid by employers. The resulting funds will allow the state to make many more families eligible for child-care assistance and help providers raise their wages.

We’ve been at this crossroads before, with health care. During World War II, companies began offering health insurance as a perk. This was done to get around wage caps established in 1942 to prevent the economy from going haywire as companies competed for the suddenly shrunken labor force. Coming out of the war, President Harry Truman proposed a national health-insurance system akin to what would become the U.K.’s National Health Service. The plan failed under opposition not just from business interests but from several major labor unions that had become invested in the idea of employer-sponsored insurance—a decision whose effects the country still feels today.

Child care itself serves up a cautionary tale. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, a wide-ranging coalition of advocates and elected officials pushed for a universal, affordable, choice-based child-care system. Their efforts culminated in the Comprehensive Child Development Act of 1971, which would have created a nationally funded, locally run network of child-care sites. The legislation passed Congress on a bipartisan basis before President Richard Nixon vetoed it. Soon thereafter, the coalition splintered. The historian Anna Danziger Halperin has written that, “following this narrowing of political possibilities and shift of the policy landscape to the right, by the 1980s advocates … no longer pressured policymakers for universal approaches. Instead they focused on more limited provisions, like tax incentives for employers to provide child care.”

The logic behind leaning on employer-sponsored child care is easy: Something is better than nothing. Yet this is not always the case, in life or in public policy. In the middle of a hurricane, handing out umbrellas is a waste of time and energy. As America learned with health care, if we get used to a service being tied to employment, that idea can become entrenched and very hard to change. Today’s stopgap measures become tomorrow’s status quo. Marching down such a path will make it even harder to gain the momentum needed to build and fund a child-care system that works for everyone.

Part of the difficulty in gathering that momentum is the lack of a popular child-care proposal that captures the public imagination. Murray’s plan has the most support within the Democratic Party and formed the basis for the Build Back Better child-care provisions. Although transformational, the bill uses a complicated income-based sliding fee scale and a bureaucratic “activity test” whereby parents must prove they are engaged in work or school, or have a legitimate reason not to be. One would be hard-pressed to summarize either Murray’s or Warren’s plan in a sentence, much less a viral sound bite.

The time and energy spent promoting employee child-care benefits, then, would be better spent developing a simply communicated, comprehensive reform plan. To maximize its popularity, such a plan should help with the early years as well as after-school and summer care, and follow the lead of some Nordic countries with stipends for stay-at-home parents. The simplest, strongest plan to capture the public's attention could be to mimic the public-school system, and propose universal and free child care. Ideally, any plan would be tied into a suite of pro-family policies that includes paid family leave and a monthly allowance for helping with general child-rearing costs. There is significant political upside to getting this right: The child-care pain point is deep and broad, and fixing child care is an astoundingly popular policy area that could be put front and center in a campaign.

The miserable state of American child care is not a given. In the past 30 years, Germany, Canada, Ireland and other peer nations with market-based child-care systems have undergone tremendous reforms. Canada aims to halve child-care fees nationwide, and some families have already seen their bills reduced by thousands of dollars. Within the U.S., in addition to Vermont’s recent victory, New Mexico is proposing to make child care free for most families while boosting educator wages. The common thread? Large amounts of permanent public money.

In the end, the country must decide what child care is: a right that every family deserves and that is worth investing in, or a luxury to be purchased by those with means and bestowed upon a lucky few at their employers’ whim.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, June 5, 2023 9:08 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

What you need to do is stop projecting all of your own shortcomings on everyone around you.

You are the lowest common denominator in all of your failures and unhappiness.
That's still another one I constantly hear from East Texas voters for Trump. These guys never read "Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free" by Charles P. Pierce. If I were to mention this book, those Trump voters' rejoinder will be simpler than 6ix's: "You're the idiot, not me!" They've got to say it or else they will feel bad about themselves.

The three Great Premises of Idiot America:
- 1) Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings, or otherwise moves units
- 2) Anything can be true if someone says it loudly enough
- 3) Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is determined by how fervently they believe it

With his trademark wit and insight, veteran journalist Charles Pierce delivers a gut-wrenching, side-splitting lament about the glorification of ignorance in the United States. Pierce asks how a country founded on intellectual curiosity has somehow deteriorated into a nation of simpletons.

https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/idiot-america-how-stupidity-became-a-vir
tue-in-the-land-of-the-free_charles-p-pierce/272427/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

I'd say he did a great job exploiting premise #1, but people like you don't pay for anything.

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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

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Friday, June 9, 2023 6:49 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

In a 5 to 4 Supreme Court decision, John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh Saved the Voting Rights Act (VRA)

It is difficult to overstate the impact of Milligan on voting rights law. For several years now, many progressive attorneys have assumed that the VRA is pretty much dead, and the only question was when SCOTUS would deliver the final blow. Alabama wanted to play that role; it failed. Republican Justice Clarence Thomas’ dissent — joined by Republican Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett — described the court’s decision as a “disastrous misadventure.” But the real disaster here was white Alabama Republicans’ crusade to obliterate the VRA based on arrogant certainty that they had five or six justices in their pocket. Their miscalculation wound up reaffirming Congress’ constitutional authority to combat state assaults on our multiracial democracy.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/06/john-roberts-brett-kavanau
gh-save-voting-rights-act.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Friday, June 9, 2023 9:10 AM

It's fine. Every election cycle more blacks vote against Democrats anyhow.

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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

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Tuesday, June 13, 2023 7:43 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

The central political fact of our era is that Donald Trump is a total piece of shit and scumbag. It long ago became “cringe” to center one’s politics on this point, but it remains fundamentally true.

https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-orange-man-is-bad

That, more than anything else, is what his recent indictment by Special Counsel Jack Smith reminds us. When the matter of the missing classified documents improperly stored at Mar-a-Lago first came to light, it raised the specter of a politically motivated inquiry or an effort to hang charges on Trump that others had been allowed to slide on. In particular, it raised the question of whether other former high-ranking officials of the United States

government had brought documents home and never returned them. And the answer turned out to be yes — both former vice president Mike Pence and current president Joe Biden (though, as I understand it, in his capacity as a former vice president) did something structurally similar on a smaller scale. But they both said sorry, they cooperated fully with investigators, they returned the documents promptly, and that was that.

In an earlier iteration of Trump scandals, I would have leapt to the conclusion that his refusal to follow the Pence/Biden model is a clear sign that he’s guilty of something darker and more nefarious.

Which he might be. But having seen a few of these play out now, I’m open to the possibility that he’s just a piece of shit scumbag. He’s stubborn, he doesn’t think the rules apply to him, he doesn’t like other people telling him what to do, and he thinks that being charged helps him stay at the center of attention and neuter his intraparty rivals, so fuck it. Trump simply stands head and shoulders above the average American politician in his willingness to take things to the edge, to flout the law, and to act with reckless disdain for the consequences his actions will have for anyone. The law is important, and the fact that this particular act of scumbaggery is apparently illegal gives it a special significance. But for my money, the most morally shocking thing about Trump’s post-presidency is still the extent to which he sullenly refused to be a constructive player in promoting Covid vaccination in 2021.

A very large number of people — Trump voters — got sicker than they might have because of this, and a bunch of them died. And I think that’s a crucial fact about Trump that tends to be overlooked despite the volume of coverage he attracts. His efforts to supposedly own the libs mostly involve deceiving and betraying his own supporters.

Trump markets himself as a down-and-dirty fighter who champions the right’s causes through his refusal to play the game with kid gloves. In truth, he’s a sub-par politician who’s not good at winning elections or advancing a legislative agenda or convincing people of conservative ideas.

He’s a con man, and conservatives are the marks.

You can’t con an honest man

I used to enjoy a BBC show called “Hustle” about a team of high-end con artists. One of the structural challenges of a series like that is how to make a gang of criminals seem sympathetic. Scamming lonely and confused old people out of their meager savings wouldn’t make for a very entertaining show.

So they introduce the idea that you see in this clip, that the best marks are people who are themselves shady and dishonest. The mark’s own dishonesty makes them less likely to go to the authorities and less likely to ask questions about why the setup they’re involved in is so unorthodox. The whole premise is that you are participating in a shady scheme, so when it starts to seem like you’re enmeshed in a shady scheme, you don’t notice that you are the victim.

And that, to me, is Trump.

His con is not that he’s convinced conservatives that he’s honest. It’s that he’s convinced conservatives that his lying and shamelessness is a superpower that he deploys on behalf of their issues and causes. And it is true that he has at times deployed dishonesty and shamelessness to advance conservative causes. But much more frequently, he deploys dishonesty and shamelessness to advance himself, often at the expense of conservative causes.

The awful events of January 6, 2021, remain the core example of this.

What happened that day was less a real effort to seize power in a putsch than a bit of kayfabe that got out of hand because the crowd took the shoot too seriously. The election denial bit has been nothing but a disaster for GOP candidates and conservative politics. But it’s served the particular aim of keeping Donald J. Trump at the top ranks of the 2024 primary polling extremely well. Conservatives have never managed to adopt as conventional wisdom the much simpler explanation that in 2020, a really disorganized and incompetent president blew a very winnable election, even though this level of chaos was typical of his whole presidency.

And because the authentic conservative position is that 2020 was somehow “rigged,” Ron DeSantis even years later only dares allude vaguely to the idea that maybe actually what happened is Trump fucked up.

Unhinged moderation

The key thing, as Jonathan Chait writes, is that Trump has managed to convince huge numbers of conservatives that all of his negative attributes are actually positive because they signal ruthlessness, and ruthlessness is what Republicans need.

In recent years, the Republican Party’s long rightward march on policy has ground to a halt, and it has instead radicalized on a different dimension: ruthlessness. Attributing their political travails to weakness, Republicans converged on the belief that their only chance to pull back from the precipice of final defeat is to discard their scruples. A willingness to do or say anything to win was the essence of Trump’s appeal, an amorality some Republicans embraced gleefully and others reluctantly.

There was a Cold War cliché about the various rightist dictators the U.S. government supported: “he may be a sonofabitch but he’s our sonofabitch.”

But the idea that Trump’s ruthless sonofabitch qualities are important to his electoral success is a wild misperception. The genuinely savvy thing Trump did was stop talking about cutting Social Security and Medicare. Pretty much any political party anywhere in the world could gain votes by ditching its most-unpopular stances. Mitt Romney could have done this in 2012 and he probably would’ve won. Some non-Trump nominee could have done it in 2020 and probably could have won. Joe Biden’s original debt ceiling strategy was premised on the idea that Kevin McCarthy was going to demand entitlement cuts and Biden could hammer him. But McCarthy just… didn’t.

I like to think of this kind of popularism as true ruthlessness and am constantly imploring various Democrats to give some ground on policy, win elections, and make Republicans pay for being so nutty.

Trump did a version of that and it worked. But he also ran this other bizarre con where he got Republicans to go along with the idea that it was fine if he ran a sleazy hotel where corporate lobbyists and foreign governments could make direct cash payments to the president of the United States. Or that he could discuss affairs of state with private club members. Or steal secret government documents with impunity. Because he sold them all on the idea that Donald Trump personally breaking all kinds of legal and ethics rules for his own personal gain is a form of ruthless partisanship.

But it’s obviously the opposite. Hunter Biden was ruthlessly trying to make money for himself, but his dad and the Democratic Party would be better off if that weren’t the case. The way you practice ruthless partisanship is to conduct yourself with a lot of integrity because that helps your allies. The Republicans, though, are essentially led by their grifter figure, who has talked them into idolizing him rather than feeling embarrassed by him.

Grifts inside grifts

As soon as Trump’s indictment was announced, Rep. Elise Stefanik hit up her email list to raise money for an Official Trump Defense Fund.

Except as Jennifer Bendery reports, she’s basically running a scam.

If you click the link, you get a prompt to donate money. If you read the fine print on the prompt, you’ll see that it defaults to a split where Stefanik gets 99% of the money and just 1% goes to Trump. It’s also set up, by default, as a recurring monthly donation. So you could think you’re giving $100 to Trump but actually donate nearly $1,200 a year to Elise Stefanik.

There are absolutely shady players operating in the Democratic Party ecosystem, just as there are in any system with lots of money flying around. But the cons are much closer to the seats of power on the GOP side. There are a lot of reasons for that, but the core reason is Trump himself and his distortionary impact: he brings grifters and opportunists in his wake, he drives out people of character and integrity, and he forces everyone else to twist around his presence. A guy like McCarthy now has to deal with the reality that a huge part of his job is managing his relationship with a colleague who doesn’t seem to have any principled commitment to the political party they are trying to lead together. Someone like J.D. Vance who’s sincere but also ambitious sees that the way forward is to become this absurd make-believe Trump acolyte.

It’s the Republicans’ problem

The worst-kept secret in Washington is that a significant fraction of Democratic Party professionals are hoping Trump will re-secure the nomination in 2024, even though their official position is that Trump is a unique menace to American democracy.

I’ll just say that I, personally, think it’s extremely amusing that Trump has the dominant position in the primary, even though that’s clearly a huge gift to Biden, and it’s especially amusing that the specific means by which this came about is that Trump has persuaded Republicans that he’s some crusading lib-killer. Fundamentally, what happens in the GOP primary is up to GOP primary voters, and I don’t know that my expressing an opinion about it one way or another is relevant.

But I do think it’s good for people to acknowledge reality.

And I wish more Republicans could see that nobody will be less owned by Trump Redux than the libs. He was great for subscriptions and ratings. He was great for fundraising. He was like Miracle-Gro for the mainstreaming of far-left ideas. Think Republicans have some good ideas about civil service or permitting reform? There is literally nobody on earth less likely to secure bipartisan cooperation for any kind of meaningful policy change on any topic.

To me, this seems like a bad situation. Trump is corrupt. He’s incompetent. He acknowledges no responsibilities or laws or anything above his self-interest. And he’s managed to convince the conservative movement in America that this is good and that somehow the “real issue” is some kind of half-imagined petty hypocrisy on the other side. But the only way out of it is for Republicans to wake up and realize that Trump is bad for them, too. Maybe this prosecution will somehow fix everything, but it seems overwhelmingly likely that Trump (especially given a friendly judge) will be able to drag this out through Election Day. And while the specific details we’re learning are hilarious and shocking, nobody is really surprised at this point. He’s a bad person. But it’s Republicans who need to do something about it.

https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-orange-man-is-bad

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Tuesday, June 13, 2023 9:38 PM

Orange Man Rad.

Trump will be fine, little dick.

--------------------------------------------------

Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

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Wednesday, June 14, 2023 6:05 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Orange Man Rad.

Trump will be fine, little dick.

Trump stands head and shoulders above the average American politician in his willingness to take things to the edge, flout the law, and act with reckless disdain for the consequences.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Wednesday, June 14, 2023 7:50 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Orange Man Rad.

Trump will be fine, little dick.
Trump stands head and shoulders above the average American politician in his willingness to take things to the edge, flout the law, and act with reckless disdain for the consequences.

If the sane population of America wasn't witnessing criminal Democrat politicians get away with criminal behavior daily and people like you running defense for them while they get rich in office, people might take you seriously.

The economy is in shambles and we've been in a recession for over a year that they won't admit is a recession.

Nobody cares about your obsession with Trump or Russia.

--------------------------------------------------

Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

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Sunday, July 2, 2023 7:34 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Orange Man Rad.

Trump will be fine, little dick.
Trump stands head and shoulders above the average American politician in his willingness to take things to the edge, flout the law, and act with reckless disdain for the consequences.

If the sane population of America wasn't witnessing criminal Democrat politicians get away with criminal behavior daily and people like you running defense for them while they get rich in office, people might take you seriously.

The economy is in shambles and we've been in a recession for over a year that they won't admit is a recession.

Nobody cares about your obsession with Trump or Russia.

6ix, I live around Trumptards and I can see that their lives are, shall we say, sub-optimal because they are fucking crazy. But I expect that a well-functioning society will not treat crazy people well whereas the crazy people think they deserve the same or better than sane people. It has never been about a clash of values between Democrats and Trumptards but always a clash between sane and crazy. That is the reason why certain people who are Democrats in name only do not prosper in America. They are every bit as crazy as Trumptards. Likewise, certain Republicans in name only (in Trump's opinion) who are sane will prosper while the crazy Trumptards do not.

Six, smoke a pack of cigarettes today. The cigarettes represent your freedom to be as crazy as you want and the smoke is good for your lungs. Just ask Rush Limbaugh. He "knew" smoking equals freedom was true. (Rush also "knew" that coal burning equals freedom since Climate Change is a Hoax.) Trump gave Rush the Medal of Freedom as Rush was dying from lung cancer, proving that insanity will win a Medal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rush_Limbaugh#Health_problems_and_death

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Sunday, July 2, 2023 7:35 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

The Right’s Desperate Push to Tank ESG and Avoid Disclosing Climate Risks

Pro-business politicians embraced the idea of so-called green investing — until the SEC suggested companies should report their full emissions.

Amy Westervelt

July 2 2023, 6:00 a.m.

https://theintercept.com/2023/07/02/esg-investing-sec-climate/

The House of Representatives released the first report from its ESG Working Group in late June, highlighting priorities for the rest of the 118th Congress and making clear that Republicans won’t stop “investigating” environmental, social, and governance investing while there’s still a chance to save polluting companies from having to report their actual emissions.

At its core, ESG is about information: When companies report on their environmental, social, and governance risks, which can range from high greenhouse gas emissions to particular hiring practices, investors use that information to determine whether they think a company is a good investment.

The Republican-led House isn’t the only entity that’s become obsessed with ESG investing over the past two years. From political advocacy organizations like the Texas Public Policy Foundation to state treasurers, the American Legislative Exchange Council and the Republican Attorneys General Association, the right wing has been on fire about this issue since the Securities and Exchange Commission made what seemed like a pretty boring announcement back in 2021: The SEC was going to help provide some stability in the ESG space by laying out parameters for how companies could disclose climate risk to investors that care about such things.

Absent those proposed guidelines, due to be finalized this year, it’s doubtful that an anti-ESG movement would exist. It only emerged after the SEC made its intentions known, despite the fact that ESG investing has been around for more than 20 years.

In fact, the same polluting industries and pro-industry politicians screaming about ESG as “woke capital” today previously embraced the idea. It was a handy greenwashing tool that also helped unlock easy capital for corporations that could lay claim, however spurious, to reducing emissions or improving the diversity of their workforce. The SEC’s suggestion that companies should disclose their Scope 3 emissions — the emissions associated with the entire supply chain of their product, including its ultimate use — set off the current frenzy.

To date, fossil fuel companies have preferred to report only on Scope 2 emissions — those associated with their own operations — which account for less than 10 percent of their overall emissions. Scope 3 reporting would require a full accounting, from upstream to downstream, with no way to distract from a company’s actual climate impact.

The ESG backlash has included the introduction of 165 anti-ESG bills across 37 states in 2023 alone, according to a report from Pleiades Strategy; a coordinated push by Republican state treasurers to kick investment firms that consider ESG factors out of state finances; and a legal strategy that has Republican attorneys general alleging that ESG investors are “colluding” against the fossil fuel industry. Now Congress has gotten in on the action, with the House Oversight Committee hosting two hearings on ESG in May and June, Finance Committee hearings expected in July, and proposed legislation in the works.

Just as remarkable as the speed with which this coordinated movement came together is the lack of support for it among Republican voters. According to a poll conducted by Penn State’s Center for the Business of Sustainability and the communications firm ROKK Solutions, Republican voters are even more opposed to limiting ESG investing than Democrats are. The Pleiades report found that out of the 165 anti-ESG bills proposed this year, only 22 were approved by state governments.

That hasn’t stopped GOP allies from ramping up the fight as the SEC inches closer to finalizing its climate risk disclosure guidelines. In the Oversight Committee hearing last month, Jason Isaac, who focuses on energy for the Texas Public Policy Foundation, an industry-funded conservative think tank, opened his testimony with the claim that has become central to the anti-ESG agenda: ESG investing violates antitrust laws.

It’s a legal strategy to derail ESG investing that Isaac helped create and has successfully imparted to some heavy hitters in the conservative policy space: the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, which brings state legislators together with corporate executives to craft legislation that limits regulation; the Republican Attorneys General Association; the Heritage Foundation; and Consumers’ Research, a political group funded by former Federalist Society President Leonard Leo. The argument is that financial firms considering ESG factors are “colluding” to boycott polluting companies, which amounts to an antitrust violation.

The watchdog group Documented shared audio with The Intercept from two ALEC planning sessions focused on ESG. “These companies are coordinating their activities,” Will Hild, executive director of Consumers’ Research, said during a panel conversation with Isaac at an ALEC meeting in July 2022. “They talk about how they’re going to set a policy across the market. Now, it’s been a while since I was in law school, but when I was there, that was antitrust 101.”

At another ALEC meeting, in June 2021, Isaac pointed to an investigation by the Texas Legislature’s state affairs committee as a key step in the legal strategy to combat ESG investing. “We anticipate truckloads of documents being delivered,” he said. “We believe that there is corporate collusion, liability risk for the ESG agenda to charge higher fees and rig the market. We believe that there’s antitrust violations. So I hope our committee gets a ton of paper back from these large financial institutions and they get hammered in the courts. And our attorneys general around the country file antitrust violations.”

At the Oversight Committee hearing in May, it was clear that Republican attorneys general planned to do exactly that. Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall and Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes took up Isaac’s antitrust argument, focusing on groups like the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, a global coalition of financial institutions that came together at the Glasgow climate conference in 2022 and committed to decarbonizing the economy.

“These alliances also hurt consumers through anti-competitive conduct,” Marshall testified. “Alliance members appear to be conspiring to restrain trade and commerce by colluding with other members to reduce competition among themselves and coordinating restricted investment in action toward specific companies unless ESG policy objectives are implemented. And let’s be clear, ESG activity is subject to antitrust laws.”

Marshall also noted that the Republican Attorneys General Association was aggressively pursuing the antitrust legal strategy. “Republican attorneys general have been active on the investigative side using both our consumer protection laws as well as the antitrust laws,” he said. “Multiple investigations are now pending.”

At the June Oversight Committee hearing, Isaac himself testified. “Today, I want to discuss with you the detrimental effects the collusory ESG agenda is having on American energy producers and why Congress must do everything in its power to stop this overreach into what is supposed to be a free market,” he said. “ESG investing isn’t just harmful to our economy and energy industry — it could violate antitrust laws.”

Isaac first introduced the antitrust legal strategy at the ALEC meeting in 2021. Soon afterward, several state attorneys general began acting on the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s advice. In March 2022, then-Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich launched an investigation into “this potentially unlawful market manipulation,” warning that climate disclosure might be “the biggest antitrust violation in history.” The following month, Utah’s Sean Reyes, alongside the state’s treasurer and congressional delegation, sent a letter to S&P objecting to the use of climate-related disclosures and warning that “state antitrust” statutes might be relevant. Missouri AG Eric Schmitt and Louisiana AG Jeff Landry also sent letters warning that ESG conflicted with “securities law.” In August 2022, a month after the second ALEC panel, 19 Republican state attorneys general signed onto a letter to the investment firm BlackRock alleging potential “antitrust violations” related to climate disclosures.

Far from “ensuring a free market,” as Isaac claims, regulations banning ESG considerations will limit investors’ access to information. The Democrats’ witness at the May Oversight Committee hearing, Illinois State Treasurer Michael Frerichs, pointed to the opioid investigations as a good example. “ESG is about looking at a wider range of risks and value opportunities that can have a material financial impact on investment performance,” he said. “If you’re investing in a pharmaceutical company, it’s thinking about whether that company has exposure to massive lawsuits because of its role in the opioid epidemic.”

“Making recommendations about which sectors to invest in — including expressing negative views about the risks of investing in a dying industry like coal, for example, or giving opinions about the benefits of investments, for example investing early in the transition to cleaner energy — does not violate the terms of the Sherman Act, the Clayton Act, or the FTC Act,” said Lisa Graves, executive director of True North Research, who formerly served as a legal adviser to all three branches of government. Such recommendations, she added, are “what investment groups have been hired to do on a daily basis for decades.”

According to Graves, sweeping anti-ESG legislation like the bill Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recently signed into law is a violation of the First Amendment. “It’s actually dangerous for our society when officials use their public offices to try to chill freedom of speech and the sharing of vital knowledge and expertise,” she said.

The politicization of ESG investing and the threat of antitrust suits has already had a chilling effect. Earlier this year, BlackRock President Larry Fink estimated that the ESG backlash had cost BlackRock $4 billion. In April, Munich Re, the largest reinsurer in the world, left the insurers subgroup of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, citing the “material legal risks” of continued membership. BlackRock’s top competitor, Vanguard, left another group targeted by the anti-ESG movement — Net Zero Asset Managers — and sent its CEO Tim Buckley on an apology tour. “It would be hubris to presume that we know the right strategy for the thousands of companies that Vanguard invests in,” Buckley told the Financial Times, adding that Vanguard was “not in the game of politics.”

Meanwhile, the SEC has delayed the finalization of its climate risk disclosure guidelines. Although the agency has not confirmed that the delay has anything to do with the threat of legal action, the parallel timing is hard to ignore.

“We won’t really know how successful that pressure has been until these rules come out,” said Jesse Coleman, a researcher with Documented who’s been following the ESG backlash since it began. “But the thing that we can predict is that they’re gonna get sued. And there’s going to be a lot of legal wrangling around these rules once they’re published.”

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, July 3, 2023 8:28 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

I Worked With Anita Hill to Fight Clarence Thomas’ Confirmation. Our Worst Fears Came True.

As I sat on the steps of the Capitol with a colleague after the narrow confirmation of a man who opposed much of the legacy of Thurgood Marshall, the great American civil rights lawyer who Thomas was being tapped to replace, we both came to the same conclusion: This appointment was going to shape the rest of our lives.

Unfortunately, history has confirmed our fears. As national commitments to racial justice and basic civil rights continue to unravel, under what is functionally regarded as the Thomas Court, the very health of our multiracial democracy is a long-term casualty of that day.

Thomas bet that he could obscure his well-established hostility to antiracism and the anti-civil rights agenda of the party that nominated him, and it yielded a big payout, for him and the conservative movement.

And there is perhaps no one figure who more singularly symbolizes the cyclical nature of racial progress and retrenchment than Thomas, who is at once a beneficiary of every hard-fought civil rights advancement in this country and an arsonist of the very policies that set the conditions of his possibility.

Voting rights, bodily autonomy via abortion rights, and now affirmative action — these policies are all hallmarks of a functioning multiracial democracy and also the ones that Thomas himself has been eager to burn, leaving a trail of ash in his wake instead of clear pathways for others to walk where he has.

His confirmation to the Court in 1991 was a turning point for our country, not only because of the conservative views he would infuse into the architecture of federal law but also because of how he challenged the general public’s understanding of race and racism: Thomas showcased how a Black man who consistently opposes measures that would benefit Black Americans can in fact be a perpetrator of systemic racism despite the color of his skin.

It is in this way that Thomas’ long standing opposition to affirmative action has played a significant role in setting the tone for today’s culture wars. Thomas gave a high-profile platform to the central idea of modern conservative politics — that any policy or action that levels the playing field for those who have been traditionally marginalized, like Black Americans, is punitive against White people.

The idea that righting historical wrongs for Black Americans “takes away” from white Americans is as old as Reconstruction. But it found new oxygen in our contemporary politics with the fight over affirmative action and the framing that universities “took away” spots from white students by acknowledging historical barriers to admission for diverse students. That democratic progress is a blow to white Americans is the corrosive lie that animates nearly every fight we see, from the attack on the Capitol in 2021 to the nascent 2024 presidential election.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/06/30/anita-hill-clarence-
thomas-supreme-court-affirmative-action-00104387

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, July 3, 2023 9:46 AM

Keep crying about it bitch. It's done.

Meritocracy might just be saved after all.

--------------------------------------------------

How you do anything is how you do everything.

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Saturday, July 8, 2023 8:08 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

The Court’s GOP-appointed majority is settling old grudges

Until very recently — as in, less than 10 days ago — the right of universities to pay limited attention to race when admitting students was grounded in well-settled law. The Court first ruled that affirmative action is legal, albeit subject to significant constraints, in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978).

The Court, moreover, reaffirmed Bakke in its 2003 decision in Grutter v. Bollinger. It did so again in 2013. And again in 2016.

And yet, despite the fact that the Court had time and time again rejected efforts by racial conservatives like Edward Blum — the white activist behind many lawsuits challenging affirmative action — Blum and similarly minded advocates continued to hold a grudge. They were joined in holding onto that grudge by many of the justices themselves, and by powerful groups like the Federalist Society, which played an outsize role in selecting former President Donald Trump’s judicial nominees.

The briefs in Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, the case that the Court’s GOP-appointed majority used to end affirmative action at nearly all universities last month, raised few, if any, new legal arguments that weren’t heard before by the Court in Bakke.

Nor has there been some triumphant victory over racism in the United States that eradicates the case for affirmative action. Though incomes and college graduation rates have risen for all racial groups within the United States since Bakke, the median Black household still earns at least $33,000 less in annual income than the median white household.

No, the Supreme Court did not strike down affirmative action because of any change in the law. It struck it down because racial conservatives organized. They recruited powerful institutions like the Republican Party and the Federalist Society to their cause. And then they made a deal with the devil, as Trump-skeptical legal conservatives agreed to back his bid for the presidency in return for a small army of Federalist Society judges.

Men like Ed Blum held a grudge. And they held onto it for decades. Until they won.

This is, of course, the same story that played out in the last Supreme Court term, when the Court eliminated the constitutional right to abortion, and when it drastically expanded the rights of gun owners. Again, there were no important new insights in any of the briefs filed in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022) or in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022).

Those cases were decided the way they were because abortion foes and gun rights advocates organized, took over the Republican Party, and held onto their grudges. They have nothing whatsoever to do with “the law.”

Much more at https://www.vox.com/scotus/2023/7/8/23784320/supreme-court-2022-term-a
ffirmative-action-religion-voting-rights-abortion

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Thursday, July 13, 2023 9:46 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Is the ERA already the law of the land?

Here is the full text of the ill-fated Equal Rights Amendment:

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled (two-thirds of each House concurring therein), That the following article is proposed as an amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which shall be valid to all intents and purposes as part of the Constitution when ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States within seven ten years from the date of its submission by the Congress:

"ARTICLE —

"Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

"Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

"Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification."

The ERA was passed in 1972 and needed ratification from 38 states before its 10-year deadline expired. It got only 35. However, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Representative Cori Bush of Missouri have proposed a three-step strategy to declare that the ERA has, in fact, passed already and only needs to be recognized. It goes like this:

The 10-year deadline is part of the preamble, not the actual text of the Amendment, so it doesn't count.

During the Trump administration three more states ratified the ERA: Illinois, Nevada, and Virginia. That brings the tally to 38.

Six states have repealed their ratification, but there's no constitutional mechanism for doing that. Once ratified, always ratified.

This means that the required 38 states have legally ratified the ERA and the national archivist merely needs to announce it. Done and done.

But can it work? Gillibrand plans to introduce a joint resolution that codifies her theory, but Republicans will never support it:

Ms. Gillibrand conceded that she did not think Republicans would ever support the amendment, “largely because the pro-life movement has co-opted this argument,” she said. She said her hope was to compel Mr. Biden to call on the archivist to take action, or to change the filibuster rules in the Senate so that civil rights measures like the amendment would need only a simple majority — not 60 votes — to move forward.

This is doomed. Biden won't act unilaterally; the Senate won't pass an enabling resolution; and no court would back Gillibrand's plan.

“This is a political rather than a legal struggle,” said Laurence Tribe, the constitutional scholar and professor emeritus at Harvard Law School. “It would succeed only in a different environment than we have. It’s not going to pass. The real question is what political message is being sent. In a political environment like this, you throw at the wall whatever you can.”

If Gillibrand were a Republican making a weird new legal argument for something like, say, overturning the 25th Amendment** as a Deep State coup, there's a tolerable chance the Supreme Court would stroke its collective chin, make up some shiny new doctrine, and rule in favor. But a Democrat with a weird new legal theory for a liberal cause? Fuhgeddaboudit.

https://jabberwocking.com/is-the-era-already-the-law-of-the-land/

** 25th Amendment
https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/amendments/amendment-x
xv

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Thursday, July 13, 2023 10:25 AM

and Commiefornia?

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Sunday, July 23, 2023 6:03 PM