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Political Rants

Getting the most out of your five minutes

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As anyone reading this blog knows, I come from a history of relative privilege. My parents weren’t rich; they were white working class during a time when being that meant a measure of disposable income that’s practically unheard of for working class people today. Dad worked, and his income was the only money we had coming in, whereas Mom ran the household and basically did all the menial work of cleaning, cooking, washing clothes, etc., etc.

One thing they always made time for was voting. And again, being white, working class in those days meant voting was relatively easy. I inherited that state of ease from them, apparently, because I seldom if ever have to spend more than five minutes on voting. I walk in, sign a paper, get my ballot, fill it out, and drop it in the machine. Easy as fuck, particularly since my employer is fine with me taking the time to do it. For lots of other folks, though, not so easy.

Calling all white people

Okay, so, if you’re like me, you’ve got even more of an obligation to vote in a way that counteracts rampant suppression of voters of color. Our congressional district has shifted significantly, as I’ve mentioned before, so my old classmate Claudia Tenney is moving on to a newly reddened 23rd district to avoid what would almost certainly be a crushing defeat in the 22nd, which she currently represents. She has been going through some wild political gesticulations, ensuring that she stays on Trump’s good side by underwriting his “stolen election” theory and various other bridges-too-far. Not pretty.

That’s not to say that the Republican contenders for the 22nd district aren’t as crazy as Claudia. There’s this dude Steven Wells, for instance, who’s been running about a million ads. Kevin McCarthy’s PAC dropped $300,000 in TV spending into his campaign at the last minute, according to Syracuse.com. He’s doing the full Trump Monty, crowing about Biden’s border crisis, the price of gas, inflation, crime, did I mention gas? He’s also trying to pull the businessman piece of it – only he can fix it. The dude is a tremendous waste of space.

Primary choices

I’ve wondered this year if people in the new 22nd district understand the character of this race. They settled on the lines very late in the game, and it’s more than possible that a lot of people don’t know what district they’re in let alone who’s vying for the House seat. Some Democrats may not know that there’s even an opportunity to win the 22nd. That opportunity existed before, of course – the two elections Claudia won even within the old district lines were real squeakers. That was when the district leaned Republican; now it leans more Democrat.

While there are more progressives in this district than before, like many other districts they were unable to settle on a single candidate. Sarah Klee Hood was a good candidate, but she was massively outspent by a more centrist Dem named Francis Conole, who took the race by about three or four points (less than a thousand votes). Trouble is, there were two other candidates who were more or less to the left of Conole, who between them took another 25 points. A similar thing happened downstate, in the 10th, where rich boy Dan Goldman very narrowly beat out Yuh-Line Niou, a sold progressive. It was another crowded field of leftists, including Mondaire Jones, Carlina Rivera, and freaking Liz Holtzman, all of whom took a substantial piece.

Organize, people

The only way to beat people like Goldman and Conole is for progressives to settle on a single candidate, if possible. That takes organizing, and that means spending more than five minutes on politics. Some have the bandwidth to do it, but at the very least, white people, take five to vote when it comes up. With margins this slim, it can really make a difference.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Knocking it out old-school in the fighting 22nd

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Unlike many past election years, I haven’t been keeping close track of the state of play in Democratic or Republican primary contests for my Congressional District. Part of the reason for this is the redistricting debacle that New York State recently put itself through. The short version goes like this: the Democratic majority tried to implement a kind of lopsided gerrymander that would likely have flipped three seats into the Democratic column. That map was struck down by a circuit court in Maryland, and New York went with a more “equitable” version.

I have made my opinion on redistricting clear in previous posts, but to summarize: I don’t believe in unilateral disarmament. Red states are gerrymandering the living hell out of their congressional and legislative maps, adding dozens of safe GOP seats nationwide, ignoring court orders that don’t suit them, etc. Democrat-led states, on the other hand, are acting like boy scouts, implementing non partisan redistricting commissions, deferring to the courts, etc. The result may very well be permanent Republican crazy-ass rule. But Democrats can take heart in having been good little girls and boys.

What’s my number?

Okay, so … for a while, my residence was in the 19th district. I was getting invited to meet and greets with Antonio Delgado, the incumbent in that district who has since been named Lieutenant Governor by Kathy Hochul. Then came the court decision, and now I’m back in the 22nd, currently represented by the inimitable Claudia Tenney, the only NY Republican in Congress to vote against the recent bill protecting marriage equality. As I believe I’ve mentioned before, Claudia has decided to run in another district, as the new 22nd is a bit bluer than the old one, now that it includes Syracuse.

With Tenney off trying to gain a seat in the new 23rd, a beet-red southern tier district that stretches to Lake Erie, I am not at all clear on who will be running for the 22nd on the Republican side. I mean, I can read Ballotopedia like anyone else, so I know that Brandon Williams and Steven Wells are vying for the GOP nod. What I don’t know is who the hell they are. Wells seems to be harping on immigration, the Biden Crisis at the border, etc., wheras Williams appears to be a COVID skeptic, anti-lockdown corporatist.

Party of Roosevelt, Jackson, Kennedy, and Wallace

The Democrats in the primary race have been shooting me postcards for a few weeks. I’ve heard from Francis Conole, a dude who looks to be seven feet tall, Sam Roberts, a guy who was particularly good at getting his picture taken with Democratic leadership, and Sarah Klee Hood, who actually stopped by my house when I wasn’t there. Hood may be the best organized one – she was going door-to-door, after all. I have no sense, though, that the party leadership has any preference between these three.

What about policy? Conole seems like one of those Dem party pragmatists, like Anthony Brindisi was – you know, “common sense” solutions, etc. He does pay lip service to universal healthcare, or “greater access” to healthcare – that’s more like what he’s claiming. Then there’s the campaign finance question – apparently a crypto billionaire is bankrolling Mr. Conole to some extent. Not a particularly encouraging sign. Roberts has some very thin details on his policy page – mostly generalities about jobs, conservation, supporting policing, and – yes – “access” to healthcare.

Sarah Klee Hood, on the other hand, appears to support single payer and has posted info-graphics to explain its merits. Not bad.

Divide and conquer

Primaries in New York State are always confusing. They break up some local races from federal and some state races, strangely. For instance, primaries for congressional seats and state senate seats are held on August 23; the gubernatorial primary was held in June. They probably do this to confuse voters, but whatever.

Make your voice heard … even when that means just voting.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

The hot air balloon we call the inflation debate

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I saw Larry Summers on television today. That says all you need to know about the corporate media’s state of discourse on the economy. The Democratic leadership in Congress is like a deer in the headlights – they are just effing doing nothing. Didn’t they have at least two shots at reconciliation? Has it occurred to any of them that they should pass something under the Byrd rule, seeing as they plan on leaving the filibuster intact?

I suspect the answer to these questions is a resounding no, and I suspect the reason for that answer may be, well, Larry Summers. The austerians appear to be winning the day in the Biden Administration and the Democratic-led Congress. They are afraid of spending money on anything apart from the military, which is the beneficiary of lavish amounts of public funds in excess of $800 billion per annum.

The notion that social spending is responsible for recent price rises is simply laughable. There are other, more likely causes.

Pumping profits straight from the ground

Gas prices are an obvious driver of inflation. The price at the pump is somewhere around $5, the highest they’ve been perhaps ever. The thing is, crude oil prices are not at a record high, not by any means. Oil peaked in 2008 above $140 a barrel, and yet gasoline in the U.S. was selling at about $4 a gallon. Right now oil’s around $108 a barrel. So …. what gives?

One big factor is refining. During the pandemic, oil refining capacity in the United States fell about 5%, from over 19 million barrels in 2019 to less than 18 million. This was because there was less domestic travel due to COVID, which meant less demand for oil. Now that demand has shot up like a rocket again, the oil refining capacity in the United States is simply not sufficient to meet the need.

Why not reopen some of that refining capacity? Well …. that would mean more supply, lower price, less profit. Get the grift … I mean, drift?

From every misfortune a fortune is made

Why are prices rising? Over the course of 2021, corporate profits were up by more than 25%. There’s some serious profit-taking going on here, obviously. While everyone else was struggling to get through the pandemic, these fuckers have been cleaning up. Jim Hightower talks about Proctor and Gamble’s diaper business, an industry they and maybe one other mega corporation have a corner on:

Procter & Gamble Co. announced a year ago that COVID-19-driven production costs were forcing it to raise the price for its Pampers brand. At the time, it had just posted a quarterly profit of $3.8 billion, so P&G could easily have absorbed a temporary rise in its costs. But instead of holding the price to ease their customers’ economic pain, the conglomerate used a global health crisis to justify upping diaper prices. Six months later, P&G’s quarterly profit topped $5 billion. And—in that same quarter—P&G spent $3 billion to buy back shares of its own stock.

Just one of many examples. Bottom line is, as working families are stripped of the modest benefits they received from the Child Tax Credit, they must now contend with rising prices driven by the greed of monopolistic companies that contribute heavily to our leaders’ campaign coffers.

Asleep at the wheel

Why isn’t the mainstream press reporting on this? Too busy reporting on the many challenges of air travel – Turmoil at the Terminal! As I’ve mentioned previously, corporate journalists are disproportionately focused on the airline industry. That’s because they make up the seven percent of Americans who fly regularly (once a month or more). Maybe Jim Hightower should hang out in airports and talk to the correspondents as they wait impatiently for their flights.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Shouting down the barrel of a gun

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As often happens, I’ve taken at least a week to think about a major event before commenting on it. I resisted writing about this last time around because so many voices were weighing in and I felt I had nothing useful to add. The nation is cycling through the iterative process of absorbing yet another mass shooting and ultimately choosing to do nothing about it. What can I say to make sense of this?

After the Sandy Hook atrocity, when Congress did nothing to restrict the sale and ownership of assault weapons, I felt certain that they never would. Slaughtering young school children with a weapon of war felt like a bridge too far, but it turned out not to be. Now it has happened again, in Uvalde, Texas, right on the heals of a racist massacre in Buffalo, NY, and the Senate has gone on break. Schumer may attempt a demonstration vote in a couple of weeks – that’s their response. What the burning fuck?

Gun-shy good guys

The debate about whether or not we should restrict gun ownership is over, frankly. If this massacre in Texas proves nothing else, it has certainly demonstrated this much. The Uvalde school district had all the resources it was supposed to have to prevent this sort of thing. It did active shooter drills, created its own police force, established a SWAT team that practiced at the school – none of this amounted to shit. The model the right and the NRA has been advancing for the last thirty years is an abject failure.

This is true even at the level of “good guy with a gun” vs. “bad guy with a gun”. In this case, at least nineteen good guys with guns stood in the hallway while the shooter did his work. Hard to criticize their reluctance – who wants to be the first to walk through that door? Let’s face it – consumer fire arms are now so powerful that even the cops are afraid of them to the point of inaction. If you’re a law-and-order Republican, why the hell doesn’t this bother you?

Prohibitive cost as an accessory

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the Second Amendment and some possible ways around its application. That was in response to Buffalo. Now, with this latest school shooting, I’m convinced that we need to push for positive change wherever and however government will accommodate it. If we don’t have the votes to pass an assault weapons ban / buy-back program at the federal level, we need to do two things: (1) get more votes in Congress, and (2) experiment at the state and local levels, where possible.

One thing that might be worth trying is the application of legal liability. It’s possible that something like this could pass in states like New York or California. Senator Kevin Parker introduced a piece of legislation to this effect in the NY State Senate about five years ago. This law would require any gun owner in New York state to carry $1 million in liability coverage. That sounds like a splendid idea, particularly with respect to AR-15s and other high-powered killer rifles. My vote would be to raise the coverage required in accordance with the deadliness of the weapon.

Texas v. Texas

Then there’s that other kind of legal liability – the kind envisioned by Texas lawmakers when they passed Senate Bill 8 last year restricting abortion. Empowering citizens to sue gun owners sounds like a ripping idea, particularly since the Supreme Court seems unwilling to touch this legal vigilante brand of legislation with a ten foot pole. Can we pass a bill that would empower citizens of New York to sue anyone who owns an AR-15? How about suing the manufacturers of AR-15s?

Hey …. when the right hands you the tools to blow them to hell, you may as well use them.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Taking a chance on the twenty third

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My mind has been a piece of shit all week, so I apologize in advance for this column. About all I can manage is a trash-talk session about my member of the House of Representatives, the honorable Claudia Tenney, who announced her re-election bid this week.

It’s not surprising that she wants to return to Congress. After all, it’s the best way she can serve vol … I mean, her liege lord Trump, king-in-waiting of the future imperial autocracy formerly known as America. The twist is that she has just been gerrymandered out of her district (NY-22) by the New York State legislature, run by majority Democrats who apparently recall Claudia’s tenure as a state senator.

We go way back

I mentioned at one point that Claudia and I are from the same small town (New Hartford) in upstate New York and that we went to high school together for about 4 months. I graduated in January, and was two years ahead of her, so I remember her not at all, though as I said in that previous column, I knew her brother fairly well.

Well, when she serves in Congress, Claudia of course represents the whole sprawling 22nd House district, and as per custom, her home town appears next to her name. However, the NY legislature saw fit to sever her town from the rump of the 22nd district, which will now encompass Syracuse and will be a hard win for any republican, particularly an autocrat like Claudia. Revenge is a bitch.

Finding a new home

So Claudia’s district no longer exists, in essence. Strangely, Nate Silver lists her as an incumbent in the new 23rd district, which covers the southern tier all the way to freaking Ohio, but that just includes a corner of her current 22nd district. Nevertheless, she has just announced her intention to run for the nomination to win that seat, which Silver calls an R+26 district – literally the reddest district in New York.

I’d say she stands a fair chance against Tom Reed, who currently holds the 23rd. Claudia is about as right-wing as a New York House member can get. She’s a full-on Trump acolyte, constantly obsessing over immigration, enthusiastic second amendment absolutist, and so on. On the other hand, she doesn’t live in the new 23rd district, so people might hold that against her. (Fellow New Hartford native Luke Radel has some thoughts on this – check out his latest installment of Elected News.)

Either way works

There are those who deplore the practice of gerrymandering, and who accuse people on the left of hypocrisy when they applaud partisan redistricting in blue states. I’m of the opinion that representation is a national problem, and until it’s handled on a national basis, the opposition to the autocratic party shouldn’t unilaterally disarm.

I say this, even though nonpartisan redistricting commissions often come up with positive results from a Democratic standpoint largely because the maps end up reflecting demographic shifts that generally favor the left. In all honesty, though, as much as I can’t stand Claudia and think she’s an embarrassment at best, I honestly don’t care whether or not she’s in Congress, so long as the autocratic party she belongs to loses two or three seats in New York. That’s my bottom line.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Fire one.

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Last Friday, I thought there had been two mass shootings in a single week. Michael Moore’s podcast Rumble set me straight on this. Based on law enforcement’s definition of a mass shooting – four or more victims – there were seven that week. As I said in my last post, this is nuts. We’ve become a nation of people waiting to be shot. For the more than 80 percent of us who do not own firearms of any sort, that’s a pretty nerve-wracking place to be. It’s not like there’s a safe place. Shootings happen in schools, movie theaters, grocery stores, outdoor concerts, restaurants, you name it. Anyplace a gunman can enter, so too can the gun, and like that Chekhovian cliche, if there’s a gun in the first act, you know that someone will be shot by the end of the play. So the operative question is, how do we get the gun out of the first act? If we’re depending on Congress to answer that question, it’s going to be a long play.

I will admit, I thought for certain that Sandy Hook would have been sufficient to put gun control over the edge. A hideous massacre of young school children – that had to be enough to shock the conscience of a nation. Perhaps …. only not this nation. Of course, Obama was president, the House was in Republican hands, and the Senate – while still run by a significant Democratic majority – was tied up in knots by its fealty to the modern version of the filibuster. Even the small-bore gun law they proposed could not make it through, and ultimately it was dropped. Now we live in a post-Heller gun-owners paradise, in which a particularly expansive interpretation of the Second Amendment – one that implies a personal right to gun ownership – rules the day. I have to think that even if we were to get meaningful gun measures through Congress and signed by the president, the reactionary U.S. Supreme Court might well knock them down.

There are some who defend this notion of the Second Amendment. People like Joe Scarborough are fond of saying that the amendment “says what it says” – a kind of shorthand textualist approach. The trouble is, they don’t seem to know what the amendment says. (Scarborough in fact affected to read it from memory on his show last week, and added in a few terms not found in the original.) For one thing, they all seem to ignore the dependent clause at the beginning of the text; the part about the well-regulated militia. If you’re a strict textualist, shouldn’t that, too, be considered sacrosanct? But setting that aside for a moment, the fact is that this is clearly not an unlimited right – we do, in fact, limit our interpretation of the Second Amendment, like we do with every other text. The word “gun” appears nowhere in the document. It uses the term “arms”, which we interpret narrowly as meaning “guns”. I think most people agree that there is no constitutional right to own chemical or nuclear weapons, even though those are “arms”. I suppose a bazooka could be considered a kind of “gun”, and yet we disallow ownership of those under the Second Amendment. (At least, as of now.)

I guess what I’m getting at is that we are all potential victims of semantics. If we could limit our interpretation of “arms” to our Founding Fathers’ use of the term, Americans might have a limited right to own flintlocks and other muzzle-loaders. I think I could live with that kind of originalism. How about you?

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

To the rescue.

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Congress approved the 1.9 trillion-dollar COVID rescue package this week, and while the final version didn’t include everything I would liked to have seen in the bill, there’s some decent stuff in there. What’s more, it is generally on a scale that approaches that of the problems we face. This is a departure, and one would hope a trend, away from the post-Reagan neoliberal consensus and towards a broader notion of what government may be called upon to accomplish on behalf of ordinary people. We have often heard pundits spin a false dichotomy between “big government liberalism” and “small government conservatism” – the fact is, conservatives and the right more generally are all in favor of big government, so long as it serves the interests of the powerful. The fact that the rescue package turns this on its head is an indication of how far we’ve come in recent years, despite all the resistance.

We’re overdue for that sort of turn, frankly. We’ve been living in the Reagan economic universe for forty years – essentially my entire adult life – with labor under siege, bloated military budgets, corporate-friendly multilateral investor rights agreements (popularly known as “free trade agreements”), and imperial swagger on the world stage. Obviously one bill is not going to change all of that, but it’s a step in the right direction, and a relatively bold one at that, compared to what we’re used to. Sure, the COBRA subsidies are kind of stupid and a massively inefficient way to extend health insurance to unemployed people. Sure, the checks should have been $2000 because that’s what everyone – including Trump – was calling for just after the election. Sure, they should have kept the $15 minimum wage because it was a solid provision that would have pegged the rate to inflation instead of giving employers a gradually increasing discount on the cost of labor. But what’s there is mostly good.

Biden and others have said that provisions in this bill will cut child poverty in half. I think that’s great, but it’s kind of like dividing the baby. If we can cut it in half, how about spending more and eliminating it entirely? So much of what’s in the legislation addresses inequality in a substantive way, but the solutions are almost all temporary ones. It’s incumbent on progressives to push the administration and Congress to build these initiatives out into more permanent benefits. We will see what kind of an effect this bill will have on families and individuals. If it’s dramatic enough, that could create the kind of popular momentum needed to push a broader agenda forward. We know what some of that will look like – the minimum wage, labor reforms, etc. We need a wealth tax, not so much to generate revenue (it will do that) but to reduce inequality and lessen the power and influence of the ultra wealthy. I’m talking about an upper limit on assets – something well south of a billion dollars. That’s the kind of tax system we need.

This could have come out much worse, and I think a lot of credit is due progressives like Bernie Sanders and some of the great people in the House. Their fingerprints are all over the more progressive pieces of this, and that’s cause for celebration.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

No shortcut.

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There’s been a lot of push back from the left this week on the Biden Town Hall, and with good reason. While he presents as an affable old grandpa, his conception of policy is locked into the 1990s in a lot of ways. When he thinks he’s leaning to the left, he means the “left” of three decades ago – the liberal cohort that thinks in terms of community policing, mild reforms, drug rehabilitation programs, etc. Whereas even the mainstream Democratic party has moved on from many of these centrist notions of change, the leftward movement appears to have escaped the notice of President Biden. For the time being, he is riding on a wave of relief that Donald Trump is no longer (a) President, (b) in our faces every single day, or (c) on Twitter. I’m sure millions of people are happy that the current president is not ordering an angry racist mob into the Capitol building. But that, while necessary, is of course far from sufficient.

His position on student debt illustrates this insufficiency to a tee. Biden keeps confusing, probably deliberately, the temporary suspension of interest payments (which he has ordered) with elimination of interest on student debt (which he has not ordered). He vaguely promises $10K in debt relief, but both he and his spokesperson keep suggesting that this is something Congress should take up. To be clear, he has the authority to do this himself. And if he can do $10K, he can do more. But Biden seems to think that there’s a fairness issue involved here. He tends to couch it in terms of not wanting rich people to get the benefit, which brings us back to Biden’s (and most centrist Democrats’) preference for “targeted” programs. In other words, we need a new, overly complicated, dedicated administrative infrastructure to achieve the recapture of funds that our already-existing tax system could accomplish with very little adjustment.

Of course, this problem is more about us than it is about Biden. We’ve got Biden as president – and lackluster officeholders all the way down the line – because we didn’t organize enough people and ultimately bring them around to supporting progressive, even radical, change. In a very real sense, we get the politicians we deserve, and we shouldn’t expect better if we’re not doing the hard, long-term work of building change from below. Organizing is about more than electing people, obviously, but one of the by-products of successful organizing is a better grade of politician. I think we’ve seen that in some of the more progressive Congressional candidates, like Rashida Talib, Cory Bush, AOC, and others. I’m pleasantly surprised when candidates of their stripe are successful, largely because I know that in my own area of the country very little organizing is taking place – that’s why we now have the return of our erstwhile Republican Congressmember, Claudia Tenney, who beat out Anthony Brindisi by a mere 109 votes. Brindisi was part of the “problem-solver” conference and there were few Democratic members farther to the right, but in the end it wasn’t enough.

You see, a little more organizing would have given us those 110 votes to return a centrist to Congress. And a lot more organizing might have resulted in sending an actual progressive to Congress, to say nothing of actual mutual aid benefits for the people in our district. So, what are we waiting for?

luv u,

jp

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Political Rants

Rematch.

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Not all politics is local, but a lot of what people actually experience about politics is. I say this as someone who has spent much of my life being represented in city hall, Albany, and Washington by people who do not even remotely reflect my views. Such is the lot of a leftist in upstate New York, right? Still, when it came to some major issues, like acid rain or aid to the Nicaraguan “Contra” terror army, there was some alignment between myself and our longtime Congressmember, Sherwood Boehlert, an old-style Republican who represented our district for about 24 years. Boehlert was perhaps the most liberal member of the GOP caucus in the House towards the end of his tenure, and he was replaced by a Democrat who was almost indistinguishable from him ideologically.

I had come by that point to think of my hometown as Centerville – the town in the middle. And that held true for a short while thereafter – Democrat Michael Arcuri was replaced by Republican Richard Hanna in 2010, and Hanna proved to be a centrist as well, by the standard of his day. A deficit hawk, yes, and a little more circumspect than Boehlert; still, far from the worst in his tea party-driven GOP House caucus, and really about as far to the center as they got. He was primaried from the right by Claudia Tenney back in 2014, I believe, and survived that. I think at the time we all thought that the district was too centrist for someone like Tenney. Of course, two years later, that turned out to be wrong, as Tenney took the Congressional seat in a three-way race between her, a Binghamton-area Democrat, and a tech millionaire Independent who disappeared as soon as he lost.

Claudia got washed out by the Democratic blue wave in 2018, replaced by our current Congressmember Anthony Brindisi, who has restored the seat to being a bastion of centrism. I think he won mainly because Tenney was such a massive embarrassment to the region, earning national media fame as a crackpot Trump worshipper. Trump took a shine to her, campaigned for her in Utica, and boosted her in a number of different ways, as she dutifully supported Trump’s massive tax cut, bogus health care repeal plan, and so on. Well, now Claudia is back, running for her old seat against Brindisi, the GOP footing the bill for ads depicting the current Congressman as a puppet of Pelosi, to the left of AOC, best friend of the radical Joe Biden, etc., etc. Like her mentor Trump, she’s kind of playing the crazy card – not sure it works when you yourself are a crazy-ass mofo. We shall see. Upstate New York, as I’ve said many times, is a bit like Alabama, Confederate battle flags and all.

I’m encouraging people to vote for Brindisi, as lackluster as his stint in Congress has been, just because Claudia is truly a right-wing nut job, spawned in a toxic, stagnant backwater that is very, very familiar to me. Trust me … you don’t want that one back in Congress.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
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Donnie’s hour.

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Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.

The COVID-19 crisis is a major disaster in several respects. First, it’s a health disaster of the first order, one that is going to cost many thousands of people their lives over the coming weeks and months. That would be more than bad enough on its own. But it’s also an economic catastrophe for individuals, families, businesses, and organizations all over the country. This aspect, too, will be the undoing of many of its victims. It’s hard to imagine how people on the edge are going to get through these next few months. It’s just as hard to imagine that small businesses won’t fold by the million as the economic shutdown, by necessity, continues. This crisis has the potential, as many have said, to reshape our economy and our society in fundamental ways, and not clearly for the better.

Take the response (or “CARES”) package passed by Congress and signed into law by the moron-in-chief. David Dayen has laid this out in detail in the American Prospect. Simply put, the funds being directed to poor and working people are going to be way too slow in coming. If you aren’t set up to receive tax refunds via EFT, you could be waiting a long time for that check to arrive. People in the informal economy (including many working musicians, as it happens) may not get any help at all. Small businesses can apply to get loans through the SBA that would become grants if they retain their workforce, but the SBA is a slow-moving entity and not resourced to handle the national crush of requests that will be coming its way. On the other hand, major corporations will benefit from a $500 billion bailout, $425 billion of which will be vested in the Federal Reserve to provide base capital for up to ten times that amount in low-interest loans to big business, financial institutions, etc. That money does not require workforce retention – companies can use it for downsizing, mergers and acquisitions – everything short of stock buybacks, which are barred for the term of the loan.

That combination of factors will greatly advantage larger players over smaller ones in this economy. That auto shop on the corner? He’s history. Bring your car to the dealership. That’s what this could look like. Meanwhile, the president is having the time of his life. He’s bragged about the ratings his 5pm daily Coronavirus update is drawing, and he’s treating these press events like it’s a reality show, bringing on the My Pillow nutcase, picking fights with journalists, spewing garbage like a leaky barge. Two weeks ago, he was talking about ending the social distancing measures, but now he’s seen the advantage of just riding with it. And to some extent, the American people, in their infinite wisdom, are rewarding him with marginally higher poll numbers, despite the fact that Trump’s inaction over the last three months has blown this pandemic threat into a full-fledged national emergency that, at best, will kill well more than 100,000 Americans, and likely multiples of that number.

Trump thinks 100k deaths would be evidence of his competence. It’s anything but. He needs accountability, and we need to keep this country from slipping into the oligarch’s paradise he’s always dreamed of.

luv u,

jp