Psaki on the path forward on infrastructure: "We expect there to be some significant ups and downs but we are ready for it. We're bracing for it, we're also ready for it." She also tells @justinsink that President Biden will meet with lawmakers this week on his economic agenda.
— Jennifer Epstein (@jeneps) July 12, 2021
Speaker Nancy Pelosi, appearing Monday at the National Association of Counties Conference, outside Washington, said that House Democrats will not stop insisting that a second, separate infrastructure bill be part of any deal. 1/2
— Billy House (@HouseInSession) July 12, 2021
On the plan before the Senate now, specifically, Pelosi said House Democrats want a much "greener" approach, and more money for broadband than the $65 billion contained in that proposal.
— Billy House (@HouseInSession) July 12, 2021
New Washington Post video:
Why Congress decided to bring back earmarks after a 10-year ban
With analysis from:@pkcapitol@mollyereynolds@PeterStevenson
Senior produced by:@jayneore
Graphics by:@SarahJHashemihttps://t.co/k1LI4ftFSK pic.twitter.com/HVZapA5anE
— JM Rieger (@RiegerReport) July 12, 2021
Opinion: Moderates want to cut the spending on Biden’s plan. They should remember 2010. https://t.co/d6tmfuaD1q
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) July 13, 2021
Analysis: What happens to the economy when $5.2 trillion in stimulus wears off? https://t.co/JrWbNnRdyq
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) July 12, 2021
Chief Oshkosh
I will never in a million years understand “moderates” and their persistent desire to fail.
Baud
@Chief Oshkosh:
Yeah. I get that some Dems come from more conservative areas, but some of their political calculations confound me.
Baud
Can’t click right now, but I would hope that the answer is that the economy is stimulated. That’s the whole point, right?
A Ghost to Most
@Baud: I felt the same way about “Defund the Police”. That worked out well.
OzarkHillbilly
@Chief Oshkosh: They are afraid of succeeding?
Baud
@A Ghost to Most:
That was never a Dem slogan except for a handful of progressives. It was an activist slogan.
p.a.
Who first said “They won’t vote for Dems who act like Republian-lite when there are real Republicans to vote for”? Usually, but I guess not always, true. Of course Manchin frustrates me, but he does win elections. And in truth given what little I know about WVa politics and demographics, I have no idea why he wins.
Baud
@p.a.:
Whoever first said that should have his own wing in the Museum of Fascism.
debbie
@Chief Oshkosh:
My mother was one of them. She wasn’t a fighter; she just wanted people to get along with each other. I doubt she’d still think this if she were alive today, not because she wanted people to get along, but because things/controversies/issues have become so extreme.
debbie
@Baud:
Paywall for me, but I see it was written by a former WSJ reporter, which probably indicates the article’s conclusions.
Baud
@debbie:
I do too. But I know who to blame when people don’t get along.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
Weird that we’re having all this stimulus spending, yet no millionaire or billionaire has given up a yacht, a fifth vacation home, or cut back on the number of hookers or amount of cocaine snorted from the asscracks of aforementioned hookers.
Its as if there is enough flexibility in the American economy for expansion of good things without sacrificing any aspects of the lifestyles of the well-off, save for the way that they can look down upon the hoi polloi and their underprivileged lifestyles.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: Their bust is probably front and canter in the Missouri Hall of Shame.
germy
@OzarkHillbilly:
Are we talking about conservative Democratic voters or conservative Democratic politicians?
The politicians have some of the same donors as Republicans. Sinema and Manchin (the two most famous examples) are part of ALEC, for example.
Conservative Democratic voters, lots of time it boils down to IGMFY.
Baud
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
Shows what you know. Bankrupties in the hookers and blow industry are on the rise.
OzarkHillbilly
Sure sure… I get blamed for everything else, why not that too?
New Deal democrat
@Baud: Harry S Truman.
Baud
Can’t click, but this seems like a dumb take. The economy is strong right now, not recovering like it was in 2010.
Baud
@New Deal democrat:
Was that when his approval rating was in the cellar?
Ugh. Shows how a simple quote can be misused.
Kay
@Chief Oshkosh:
They’re ideologically Right-leaning. It’s not that they’re forced to be Right leaning by their “political calculations”- they hold these beliefs about the economy and stimulus, hence they block or water down legislation.
Voting for 1.6 trillion in infrastructure rather than 3 trillion isn’t a political choice- no one who currently votes for Manchin will abandon him based on the difference between 3 and 1.6- it’s an ideological choice.
He doesn’t believe in federal subsidies for these things:
New Deal democrat
All of this legislative angst has been baked in the cake ever since D’s only picked up two Senate seats last November.
Senators like Manchin can’t be expected to vote progressive when they are elected from R+30 States.
My real fury is directed at the voters in Maine who voted for Joe Biden *and* Susan Collins. Just that one extra seat would have given us lots more breathing room.
Baud
@Kay:
But when the alternative is not passing anything, why do they cling do hard to their principles? I don’t like purity on either end of the political spectrum.
Baud
@New Deal democrat:
Agreed.
OzarkHillbilly
@New Deal democrat: Don’t furrowed brows deserve representation too?
Kay
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
Agreed. It is shocking how much room there actually was to raise wages. Will you look at that- a 5 dollar hourly bump and the world didn’t end. Turns out keeping them on subsistence wages for twenty fucking years wasn’t “markets” after all.
Puddinhead
@Baud: critical race theory
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone ???
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
rikyrah
Yess ????????
chris evans (@chris_notcapn) tweeted at 1:38 AM on Tue, Jul 13, 2021:
NEW: Shonda Rhimes has extended her overall deal with Netflix for five more years.
She initially signed a deal between 100-150M but now has bonuses built in that, in success, could elevate her to the $300 million to $400 million territory https://t.co/i0jGkgxKUj
(https://twitter.com/chris_notcapn/status/1414836561166880772?s=03)
Baud
@Baud:
Do = so
Baud
@Puddinhead:
Damn straight.
Kay
@Baud:
Because they know the liberals will move. They always do. I would too- 1.6 or nothing? I’ll take 1.6.
Sherrod was asked about the moderates blocking voting rights protections and he started to say he thought they would do an “exception” (the word he used) but then he stopped himself and smiled.
I’m making some assumptions but I think he was talking about a filibuster carve out for voting rights. It’s a top tier issue for D’s not just because the voters who will be suppressed are their voters, but also because it’s a top tier issue for African American Democrats. They gotta get it done.
Baud
@Kay:
True. It’s an easy call. I guess the problem with moderates is the same as the problem with Republicans: they don’t really want the government to do anything as much as liberals want the government to do things.
ETA: I’ll take voting rights over a larger infrastructure bill any day.
Dorothy A. Winsor
I see tweets that Trumpian attorney Jenna Ellis is leaving the R party. I tried to make out what was going on. As far as I can tell, she thinks the Rs didn’t support TFG enough? Do I have that right? What party is she planning to claim?
debbie
Filibusters need to end. There should be no trickery, period. Every bill voted up or down.
rikyrah
@Baud:
Yep ??
rikyrah
James E. Clyburn (@WhipClyburn) tweeted at 3:44 PM on Mon, Jul 12, 2021:
The filibuster is not a law. It’s not in the Constitution. It’s a tradition that’s been misused throughout history to deny civil and voting rights.
Our constitutional rights ought not be subject to the filibuster.
(https://twitter.com/WhipClyburn/status/1414687173048143872?s=03)
rikyrah
@Kay:
Yes
They gotta get it done
Kay
@New Deal democrat:
There are Manchin voters in West Virginia who will back him at 1.6 stimulus but abandon him at 3?
Seems a stretch.
He’s Right leaning. Ideologically. That’s why he does this.
Baud
@Kay:
They might abandon him based on who the extra money will help.
Geminid
What happens when the $5.2 trillion stimulus wears off? If these investments are made judiciously- and I believe that they will be- the stimulus won’t “wear off.” It will create a more prosperous, better educated working and middle class, and set the table for steady, sustainable growth.
rikyrah
John DiStaso (@jdistaso) tweeted at 6:03 AM on Tue, Jul 13, 2021:
NEW on @WMUR9 – Sen. @Maggie_Hassan sets more fundraising records with $3.25M raised, $6.5M on hand in Q2;
Democratic incumbent continues to ramp up 2022 campaign for reelection. Full report here #nhsen #nhpolitics #WMUR https://t.co/eYLDENkgyS https://t.co/wQs0Etjn4U
(https://twitter.com/jdistaso/status/1414903233684852743?s=03)
Kay
@rikyrah:
I agree. Have to get it done. Then the Roberts court will gut it, but that’s down the road.
Justice Roberts is fanatically devoted to his own dumb ideas about civil rights protections, in that he doesn’t believe they should exist. In theory.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: We watched about 10 minutes of Erin Burnett’s show on CNN yesterday evening before turning it off in disgust because of the “Dems want to defund the police” bullshit. If they’re going to insist that Ilhan Omar sets the agenda for Democrats, then it’s only fair to cover Republicans as if MTG speaks for them.
That comparison is insulting to Omar. I don’t agree with her on some issues and believe she has made some ill-considered remarks, but she’s not a raving kook like Greene; she’s a serious legislator. But the point is, if pundits are going to act like the left-most fringe of the Dems drives the Biden agenda, then they should do the same on the other side.
germy
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Kay:
Forcing other people to be miserable and to fix their own lives through making already wealthy people even wealthier is conservatism’s primary selling point.
”Fix nothing, and whatever happens happens” is the motto. This sloth is how large, beautiful homes in city centers got abandoned to decay while the former residents ran to newer digs in the suburbs. This sloth is why our infrastructure fails, why manufacturing plants don’t get upgraded, and why our constitutional order doesn’t get adjusted, improved and modernized.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Betty Cracker: I had the same reaction to Burnett last night. She echoed the R talking point that Democrats want to defund the police as if it was party policy.
Kay
@Geminid:
The biggest change won’t be the government subsidies. It will be the market effects of the government subsidies. The lowest tier got a little leverage and wages blew up. It’s astonishing to watch if you’ve been subjected to what amounts to 30 years of Right wing propaganda about how giant mysterious forces were inexorably depressing wages and nothing, nothing could be done.
Turns out something can be done. First- fire Larry Summers. That alone might be enough :)
Gin & Tonic
@Baud: Dooby-dooby-do.
rikyrah
Rhea Boyd MD, MPH (@RheaBoydMD) tweeted at 8:14 PM on Mon, Jul 12, 2021:
This is a MUST READ thread on masking. Maybe the best one I’ve read.
Long story short: Mask Indoors, EVEN if you are vaccinated. ?
(https://twitter.com/RheaBoydMD/status/1414755066880217091?s=03)
JMG
Don’t watch cable news. 90 percent plus of voters don’t. More people read the Times and Post in a day than watch CNN. It’s just there to generate hate views and rage. Unfortunately, in Washington, everybody watches cable news all the time. If all our representatives could ever see was ESPN and HGTV, our country would be much better governed.
Gin & Tonic
@Kay: Pretty much everywhere I go these days in New England, I see “Help Wanted” signs for basically unskilled labor at $17, $18, $19/hr.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
It’s a media propaganda trick I see a lot. If two Dems support something, then the media feels it’s ok to say that “Dems” support it since that’s grammatically correct.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@germy: “Dealing with” is doing a lot of work there
SFAW
@New Deal democrat:
You just don’t understand. Sara Gideon wasn’t born in Maine, so only Collins would do the “right” things to help Mainers.
If’n you want to get more depressed: Paul LePage is likely going to run for a third term. My Maine friends tell me that Janet Mills is unpopular because of her COVID response, and how it destroyed Maine. [They’re Mills supporters and solid, liberal Dems, they’re just passing on what appears to be the sentiment currently.]
dave319
@A Ghost to Most: Who the f*ck was actually saying that? Oh, yeah, the right wing noise machine. And the “We Prefer To Fight Our Left Flank, Not Our GOP Comrades” Dem DINOs like Stanberger. Gullible, risible unprincipled self serving fools. Repeat the nonsense, be the fool.
germy
At some point we’ll learn she’s a balloon-juice regular…
germy
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
SFAW
@Betty Cracker:
I’m so old that I can remember when a proposed/submitted-to-MoveOn (I think) — but never run — ad comparing W to Hitler was portrayed by some as a mainstream Dem pearl-clutch-worthy attack ad.
DonnaK
raven
@Gin & Tonic: And a lobster roll is $45.
Chief Oshkosh
@Baud:
It’s not that I’m a super liberal or progressive or whatever name we want to use. And I certainly don’t want government doing more than is needed. And I get that there is an enormous range of opinion on what “is needed” from government. But if a representative government cannot even protect voting, then all bets are off. THAT is absolutely “needed.”
SFAW
@Baud:
“Dems”? Not the “Democrat Party”?
OzarkHillbilly
Sounds like a guessing game in the making.
Gin & Tonic
@raven: That’s because of the price of lobster, not the price of labor.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
It’s also Kabuki theater with the infrastructure bill since that has wide spread support on both sides. The GOP wants it both ways, vote against it as evil socialism and then claim credit after it passes. The Dems want the GOP to be seen opposing it to piss off the GOP’s own voters so this is a freebee for D senators from Purple states to show they are independent.
SFAW
@Chief Oshkosh:
Well, the “representative government” part of the government is trying to. Unfortunately, it’s only Democrats. Republican office holders are only “representative” with respect to “representing” the worst members of their party or society. Were they to adhere to the popular sentiment among Republican voters, things like the infrastructure bill(s) would sail through Congress.
JPL
@germy: Thank you for sharing this, and what a pleasure it was to hear Michelle’s voice.
Chief Oshkosh
@Baud:
Which is an excellent reason to bring back earmarks. Hand WVa an enormous bag of money. Even print a label on it saying “Just to shut you up. Enjoy!” Flood the hollers with payola and remind them that good ol’ Uncle Joe B filled the bag and good ol’ Uncle Joe M brought it on home.
rikyrah
Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) tweeted at 7:00 AM on Tue, Jul 13, 2021:
Texas Democratic Caucus: “We are living on borrowed time in Texas. We need Congress to act now to pass the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act to protect Texans — and all Americans — from the Trump Republicans’ nationwide war on democracy.”
(https://twitter.com/kylegriffin1/status/1414917528166543361?s=03)
The Dark Avenger
@Chief Oshkosh: That’s because your not beholden to Wall Street and the Koch gang, as Manchin is to the latter.
SFAW
@Gin & Tonic:
Which is so high because the Demon-craps, with their over-regulation, now make the lobstermen something something something mumble.
germy
germy
@SFAW:
Lobsters unionized. I blame AOC.
Frank Wilhoit
Lots of bad framing going on here.
“Too small” is not the right frame. The cheap old wheeze is that “politics is the art of the possible”. What that evades is that politics is a dialectic between the art of the possible and the art of the necessary. If you do not first lay down the marker of what is necessary, then it doesn’t even matter what is possible. It appears that the Administration is partly and vaguely aware of that, but only partly and only vaguely.
(Why does anyone praise the notion of “compromise” when the definition of compromise is that it leaves everyone dissatisfied and therefore determined to sabotage the outcome? In the real world, politics is the art of sabotage, full stop.)
Then Baud (all hail Baud) says “…I get that some Dems come from more conservative areas, but some of their political calculations confound me….”
They confound you because ideology is not predictive. It is an addiction and as such, it only cares about its own preservation: everything else is tactics and tactics are infinitely fungible. There is no such thing as “more (or less) conservative”. There is only advocacy for, or opposition to, specific reallocations of specific assets (tangible or intangible) from specific constituencies to other specific constituencies. Those things must be flushed into the open, if only because doing so typically makes them morph into something else as the addiction tries to protect itself.
Honus
@OzarkHillbilly: you mean Harry Truman of course. “In a race between a real republican and a fake republican, republicans will vote for the real republican every time”
Baud
@germy:
It’s worse across the pond.
It’s why there’s so much angst on the right with teaching Crustacean Rights Theory in schools.
Baud
@Honus:
Wait, that’s a completely different quote from the one that gets bandied about nowadays, which refers to “voters.”
Elizabelle
@Frank Wilhoit: Good comment.
Kay
@Chief Oshkosh:
They can do both things- remain Right leaning and bring a ton back for their states. They just take it from other states in the negotiations. West Virginia gets more, whole is less.
I looked at Sinema’s Twitter the other day- it’s all about the federal funds she brings to Arizona. She has no issues with being a big spending liberal as to her state- it’s just the other states she objects to.
Manchin will get the same big bag of money for West Virginia from 1.6 that he gets for 3.
Kathleen
@Kay:
Steeplejack (phone)
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
The Republican Party is no longer Trumpy enough for her. The RNC stabbed Trump in the back!
OzarkHillbilly
@Honus: I guessed the wrong hall, he’s in the one for famous miserians.
Kay
@Kathleen:
Thanks. Good news! I consider him reliable. He doesn’t overpromise.
Kathleen
Woodrow/asim
I look forward to your stern letter to the Black and Brown activists who developed that slogan, informing them of the wrongness of their words, and how your wisdom will keep Black bodies from not being shot down like dogs by choosing the right phrasing, ala Archer.
…ok, let me be a little less salty. Look, y’all — it’s more than a right wing noise machine. It’s a whole-assed multi-decade set of foundations and funders, the people who learned from folx like Roy Cohn, at play, here. Here’s a recent article on the effort around literally reshaping the term “critical race theory” into a weapon; this time, the assholes were explicit in intent:
Just like they did with the freaking ACLU in the Bush years, or demonizing the term “Liberal” as Reagan and his acolytes and hangers-on accumulated power. Among literally hundreds of Progressive ideas and concepts, shot down in their prime.
Please don’t let them win these fights, gang, at least when we’re talking to each other. We need to understand and recognize when we’re getting ideas and phrasing that’s been twisted out of context.
We’re not going to win these battles by having the “right words,” alone.
Kay
@Woodrow/asim:
100% agree. In addition. The CRT panic was preceded by the “anti-cancel culture” panic, which was also dumb and poorly thought out.
If you’re coming for defund the police I want to talk about “OMG, cancel culture, free speech at Yale!” and whether THAT got us anywhere we want to go. Talk about a fucking bad slogan. The Right weaponized it in about 30 seconds.
Honus
@dave319: yeah, because Dave Brat or Eric Cantor would be preferable in that Richmond seat. And it’s Spanberger, not Stanberger.
Baud
@Baud:
ok, google brought up this quote:
However, the quotation websites that came up aren’t one’s I’m familiar with, so I’m not sure if this is fully accurate.
Baud
@Baud: Ok, this seems to be the definite quote from the Truman library.
Unfortunately, this was in May 1952, when Truman was at a low point near the end of his term and the GOP won big behind Ike.
Soprano2
I agree with this. OTOH, the words you use are important, and I think it’s not productive to use a phrase when you constantly have to explain to voters that it doesn’t really mean what it sounds like it means. In order to change things, you have to have a broad coalition onboard, which is going to have to include white people. I think the phrase “Defund the Police” makes it a lot harder to get some people onboard that coalition, is all. We want the same things – to get the police to quit shooting unarmed people, and to make policing better so that they have time to solve real crimes instead of constantly hassling people with “bullshit stops” in the hopes of finding drugs or weapons or huge piles of cash they can confiscate. I listened to an interview on Fresh Air with Dr. Phillip Atiba Goff. He says that it’s not as hard as you’d think to get the police to agree to a lot of these changes – you just have to learn how to approach them. I think people have to decide what they want more – for things to actually change, or to have a slogan to chant that makes them feel better about things. I can tell you, from my perch in SWMO where TFG got 65% of the vote, the slogan “Defund the Police” does not help with what you want to happen at all!
Elizabelle
@Honus: Thank you.
dave319’s was a particularly ignorant comment. Couldn’t even get her name right.
Last election, Abigail’s first defending the seat, was so close the results were not in for days. And her GOP challenger never formally conceded.
She won with 50.34 against Dave Brat, and 50.82 in 2020. Those are not landslides. She’s a marvelous representative, and it is still always a heavy lift.
Mother of 3 daughters, and votes to protect their future and all of ours; her own mother is a retired nurse and activist for the Equal Rights Amendment.
Soprano2
@Kay: I agree that the right will find a way to weaponize pretty much anything. My point is that the phrase “Defund the Police” makes it sounds like the activists want to get rid of the police completely. How do the people where you live react to that? Shoot, that’s not what black and brown people want – they want the police to take their problems seriously, quit shooting unarmed black and brown people for no reason, and quit hassling them for every little thing, not go away completely! When you’re constantly having to explain that that those words don’t really mean what it sounds like they mean, you aren’t winning.
I think they made a mistake with their demonization of Critical Race Theory, because it’s an actual thing that really exists, not a made up slogan that activists adopted. The R’s loved the sound of the phrase, but I don’t think people everywhere are going to agree with totally stopping discussions of race and racism in the U.S.
Elizabelle
@Soprano2: Excellent comment(s).
Kathleen
@Kay: I thought he’d be a good bellwether for the reason you cited.
Betty
@Baud: I guess the concept of investing in the country and its people is just too complicated for some folks.
Another Scott
@Baud: The economy generally cares more about rates of change than levels. It’s very bad for stimulus programs to end abruptly.
Biden and Team know this, and that’s why (among other reasons) why they want to make the monthly child credit permanent.
Cheers,
Scott.
Uncle Cosmo
Come on, Kay, you’re smarter than that. Manchin’s voting record in the Senate has been solidly Democratic for years – far more so than we have any right to expect from a Senator in an R+30 state. He ducks, he weaves, he dances all around, and it frustrates the hell out of people like you and me – well, you, ‘cuz I gots a coalcarload of cousins back in The Sticks to give me a sense of what JM has to contend with – but how about we see where he finally comes down before we pass out the torches and pitchforks, hm?
Frankensteinbeck
@Soprano2:
It does not help that a lot of the activists do mean getting rid of the police completely. Obviously that is not the mainstream sentiment, but it is easy to find whole crowds of people saying the police ‘cannot be reformed ‘and must be abolished, and many of them use ‘defund the police.’ That makes the slogan easy to demonize, because the nervous people can see someone with the extreme interpretation.
Betty Cracker
@Soprano2: After the last two elections, polling is dead to me, but it’s the only data we have. From what little polling I’ve seen on this topic, it looks like a lot of my fellow crackers ARE buying into the CRT panic.
The other day, Mx4 mentioned that there really was some egregious bullshit peddled under the corporate diversity training category (and others) that Republican operatives latched onto to gin up a new angle for their endless grievance mongering. I think he’s right about that. There’s often a tiny kernel of truth to these otherwise whiny bullshit complaints.
Anyhoo, I hope you’re right that it won’t work. I do believe if Republicans framed it as “we need to ban discussions of racism in the US,” the majority would sensibly reject that. But we’ve seen how effectively Republican operatives gin up and successfully sell grievance-based lies, so who knows?
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@germy:
But I can grill the Union leadership over hot coals, after bathing them in olive oil and a little salt and pepper….
sab
@Soprano2: I think your distinction between criticizimg a slogan (Defund the Police) amd criticizing an actual seriously researched and thought out and discussed theory (Critical Race Theory) is an important distinction.
jonas
@Chief Oshkosh:I will never in a million years understand “moderates” and their persistent desire
to failplease the NYT editorial board.FTFY, but, yeah, pretty much the same thing.
Omnes Omnibus
Are these people otherwise persuadable? If they were never going to vote for Dems anyway, they don’t matter very much.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
Agreed. The problem isn’t that there aren’t extremes on our side. The problem is that our side’s extremes are painted as a standard view, while the other side’s more pervasive and powerful extremists are treated as isolated incidences.
Jeffro
@JMG: seconded! We hardly ever turn on cable news – even MSNBC. I get far more info (and keep my blood pressure in check) just reading the Post and a few other sites.
Kay
@Soprano2:
I didn’t support “defund the police” because like you say I believe black people are due police protections like everyone else.
But to make it out to be the reason that swing district Dems have trouble winning? That’s too convenient an excuse for swing district Dems.
I am skeptical of police demands for funding for a really good reason- they already get a TON of funding.
Baud
@Kay:
I don’t know the reality, but I believe there have been studies done that suggest the issue hurt Dems in 2020. It’s not just random people articulating their worries.
Geminid
@Elizabelle: Abigail Spanberger will alwayds catch flak as a member of the notorious Canine Azul Caucus. But how much does Spanberger differ on policy from fellow Class of ’18 Representative Jennifer Wexton from Northern Virginia? Not much, I think.
Betty Cracker
@Omnes Omnibus: This poll from The Economist indicates persuadable people are being misled by the wingnut disinformation campaign. Example: something like 70% of independents have a negative view of CRT, but solid majorities also agree that racism is a big/broad problem in America.
Kay
@Soprano2:
I didn’t and don’t agree with kneejerk increases in police funding and police presence. I think they deliberately didn’t go after looters around BLM protests because they were pissed off and refused to do their jobs. That was a “blue flu”, except they technically came to work.
They have plenty of funding and God knows they have plenty of criminal laws to use. I don’t want to give them more. I want them to first do a proper job with the huge tranches of funding they already get.
SFAW
@Baud:
Or ignored completely, at least by the FTFTFNYT and their ilk.
And, of course, “more pervasive” translates to “almost the entire (elected) Republican Party.”
Woodrow/asim
I’m going to point out a thing.
I spent the bulk of my comment, pointing out how right wing think tanks twist words and phrases and ideas. They spend millions on this, and are backed by billionaires in these efforts.
Instead, people here are, once again, looking to re-litigate one phrase.
I will cope that I feel some kind of way, about this term. I’ve spilled enough digital ink, here and elsewhere, on this. I’m not without sin, here.
I’m trying to stop. And I’m asking y’all to join me, in that.
We need to look at the systemic issues around all the damn terms on the Left, and how, one by one, they get co-opted and twisted. And have been, for decades, no matter the term or how “solid” it is, word-smith wise.
I mean, I gave a quote where the dude said flat-out he’s just twisting terms without regard to their original meanings.
So, I’m trying hard not to play into that game, anymore. I’m trying to remember that we have huge issues to fight, and lives on the line. Given what I linked to, the evidence at hand: debates on what a phase “really” means tends to play right back into the hands of those who hate Progressive and Social Justice ideas, all too often.
That’s not to say we can’t have these debates. It is to say that we’ve done this specific Defunding topic to death and back, and maybe there’s a reason why — and why it’s time to let it go.
And that includes me.
Kay
@Baud:
Well, Baud, if “cancel culture” and the “anti-CRT” panic that followed hurts Dems in state races (which is where it will show up) will there be this huge piling on to the “centrists” who all promoted it as a huge threat facing the country? Or do we just reserve that for those on the Left?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Frankensteinbeck: Actually some police forces really need to be disbanded because the culture of corruption is so entrenched, The Portland PD for example.
Baud
@Kay:
I’m out of the loop I guess, but I’m not sure which centrists are supporting it. But I’m an equal opportunity pile-on-er.
Once again, almost no Dems adopted “Defund the Police” as their own view. To the extent the demonization of that slogan worked, it wasn’t because the Dems led with their chin on it.
Baud
@Woodrow/asim:
I agree with this. Whatever the merits of that particular slogan, it’s old news except for people who want to trash Dems. No reason for us to keep harping on it.
Kay
@Soprano2:
And, come on! Crime panics benefit police funding which is why they’re always right out front promoting them.
Crime was down and then it went up. A rational discussion would ask POLICE why crime is going up – that is, after all their supposed area of expertise and why we send them 1/4 of every budget. So crime doesn’t go up. Seems to me like they should get busy solving some crimes instead of parsing Lefty political slogans.
Omnes Omnibus
I am not sure that I would say that those people are buying into the CRT panic. And, as always with “independents,” I tend to doubt that most of them are actually independent; I would hazard a guess that they have established voting patterns. Given that GOP identification is apparently shrinking, I would not be surprised if many of those independents lean well to the right.
Kay
Since when can’t police arrest looters? They have AMPLE power and resources to arrest looters.
They decided not to because they were pissed off that they were being criticized – because that’s unacceptable to them, they must only be praised- and they (righfully) believed the looters would harm the perception of BLM.
No police funding has been cut in most of these urban areas where crime is rising and a LOT of the areas are in red states. So what’s the problem? Why can’t they fight crime, again? That slogan is somehow stopping them?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Omnes Omnibus: also, having a negative opinion of something doesn’t mean it’s a voting issue. What we (correctly, IMHO) call common sense gun safety usually polls comfortably north of 75%, but it seems few people vote on it, and it’s rare for a candidate to be hurt by being too pro-gun. Kelly Ayotte is sometimes offered as an example, but I don’t know the details.
OTOH, I saw a piece from a Colorado outlet– not the Denver Post, but I forget the name– that interviewed Lauren Boebert’s constituents. The overall response was, “Oh yeah, she’s nuts. But she’s strong on the Second Amendment”.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kay:
Wait a second, why would the public intellectuals who wrote the open letters decrying cancel culture come out against CRT?
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Agreed. I saw AOC on Morning Joe the other day talking about how progressive policies are popular. And she’s right! But people often vote against us based on the that one thing we do (real or imagined) that they don’t like.
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus: Oh, yeah, I remember that. That was risible. Can they still be considered public intellectuals after that? Weren’t they required to turn in their membership cards?
Another Scott
@Woodrow/asim: Excellent comment.
Another example of this is “fake news”.
Before TFG took office, “fake news” actually was a thing. There were bad actors out there pushing all kinds of lies.
TFG decided that it suited his needs perfectly to take the term and apply it to any criticism he didn’t like. And he pounded the term every single day.
“Liberal” is another such term.
It’s what they do – they work very hard to make a term mean its opposite. And you’re right that they’re blatant about it with respect to c-r-t.
We need to recognize that, but we don’t need to play their game. We can use our own language framing and don’t have to accept their framing. How? Well, that’s above my pay grade.
“Billy McBillionaire, III wants to talk about c-r-t and other things that don’t exist as a distraction. I want to talk about how our parents gave blood, sweat, and tears to make America a vibrant democracy in a thriving peaceful world where everyone has a chance but Billy and his compatriots have strangled that ideal for the past 40 years and it’s time we changed that…”
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Kay
@Omnes Omnibus:
Have you read the anti-CRT laws and objections? It isn’t “CRT” they object to. They admit as much. It’s the entire “cancel culture” list. Anti-CRT = anti-cancel culture. I know that’s not what the public intellectuals intended but that is in fact what happened.
One panic begat another. The public intellectuals put forth a bunch of poorly thought out and contradictory objections to “cancel culture” because some of their own were directly affected by it and the Right just fucking RAN with it. I knew they would.
Panics are bad. They never, ever help. “Cancel culture” would have tempered and modified all by itself. We really didn’t need the public intellectuals rushing in to police it.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Baud:
“Medicare For All” is a popular slogan. “We’re going to eliminate your existing insurance” is an unpopular policy. So take the slogan back to the way Ted Kennedy used it in the nineties, make Medicare available to all who want it.
The Green New Deal was popular, to my I’ll admit pleasant surprise. Maybe take that popularity and build on it, don’t “accidentally” release an internal memo showing you actually want to push way beyond was the GND laid out.
Biden won on a policy of forgiving $10K of student debt as part of a larger budget package approved by Congress. Maybe don’t call him a failure and a coward because he hasn’t adopted your (losing) policy of cancelling $50K with “the stroke of a pen!”
Shontel Brown is a consistent, normal progressive Democrat. Maybe go with her instead of her opponent, the one with a history of shape-shifting opportunism, anti-Democratic troll campaigning, and some very flexible opinions on campaign financing and lobbying, because she speaks the shibboleths of BernieWorld.
Kay
@Baud:
Well, that’s funny and all but now that 6th grade teachers are losing their jobs over saying “Black Lives Matter” it becomes less about the “public intellectuals” (who were always safe as houses) and more about their ridiculous freak out over “cancel culture” and who that might harm downstream, outside of the Oberlin student council.
Kay
@Baud:
“Cancel culture” was not a top tier threat. I question the “public intellectuals” who were fucking clueless enough and insulated enough to think it was. WHAT they panic over is revealing, I think. WHAT they chose to focus on.
I demand better elites. Not living up to the hype, IMO.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kay: Okay. I see where you are coming from. I would say that the real and dangerous anti-CRT measures deserve the same full-throated condemnation that the silliness of cancel culture got. If the same people don’t speak up now, it will be telling.
Kay
@Baud:
If you want to call yourself a “public intellectual” you have a duty to think about whether your ridiculous “cancel culture” panic will end with state laws targeting high school science teachers.
They didn’t think it through. It’s a contradictory mess. I expect better THOUGHT from “public intellectuals”.
Baud
@Kay: Sure. I think what happened is that “cancel culture” had a broader target that included the members of the public intellectual social group. CRTs targets are completely different.
Anyway, I agree with you that the freak out amongst some elites ostensibly on our side was overdone and quite unproductive.
Baud
@Kay:
The EMAILS! Syndrome.
Kay
@Omnes Omnibus:
Oh, Omes, how could it have ended anywhere else? It was a MESS. The “free speech defense” had at its heart an objection to certain SPEECH. It’s not just that I disagree with them. It’s that they’re supposedly great thinkers and it was and is utterly incoherent. It doesn’t make any sense. Of course it’s endlessly flexible and was instantly used by the Right. It was poorly thought out. It’s junk. They don’t even know what “cancel culture” is. It’s..when someone is mean to another person on Twitter and Bari Weiss has to go make 500k a year on substack? What?
Danielx
There were ten people shot in Indianapolis yesterday in a twenty four hour span, three of whom died. “Defund the police” is not a thing at the moment. Unfortunately neither is gun control. Too damn many guns in the hands of too damn many people who think (if that’s the word) that a bullet is the solution to every dispute, and do not care how many innocent bystanders get hurt or killed.
NotMax
@Baud
What would B-J be if not for threads wherein the same ground is trod and the same fat chewed for the n+1th time?
:)
Betty Cracker
@Omnes Omnibus: I agree many independents are partisans who don’t want the label, but even if only a third are truly unaffiliated, their opinions matter a great deal since close elections often swing on their votes. I don’t know how reliable the polling is or how many of the 70% with negative views of CRT could be fairly described as in a “panic” about it, i.e., will vote on that issue.
But if the polling is accurate, Rufo, Carlson and others who are busily propagating the wingnut disinformation campaign must be positively giddy with joy. Maybe it won’t matter in the long run. I hope not, but as the resident of a state that actually passed laws that affect education over this phony bullshit, it sure looks like something we shouldn’t just dismiss to me.
Kay
It may be ok because these people are completely insane so are (of course) WILDLY over-reaching.
The Righties on education Twitter are kind of frantically attempting to tamp down the CRT witch hunt, which probably means they see it as potentially backfiring :)
An exodus of AA teachers and principals won’t be good for them, especially because many red states have actual programs trying to recruit AA teachers.
Kay
It may be ok because these people are completely insane so are (of course) WILDLY over-reaching.
The Righties on education Twitter are kind of frantically attempting to tamp down the CRT witch hunt, which probably means they see it as potentially backfiring :)
An exodus of AA teachers and principals won’t be good for them, especially because many red states have actual programs trying to recruit AA teachers.
laura
@Chief Oshkosh: And I certainly don’t want government doing more than is needed.
I want government to work like a community chest for the citizenry, not like a vending machine for consumers.
Soprano2
According to Dr. Goff on that “Fresh Air” podcast I listened to, communities need to fund the other services that are needed that take the place of police doing them, like mental health people to deal with the homeless and traffic cameras to do the traffic enforcement, because these services have been starved of money. (I agree the generally the police don’t need more money.) It’s not always necessary to take money away from the police in order to do these other things. It makes sense that it causes a lot of unhappiness when people tell you that your services are unnecessary and you should just go away. During the Great Recession I saw a number of comments on our local paper’s message board that city employees should only be paid minimum wage so that other things could be restored (imagine trying to recruit IT people and heavy equipment operators paying minimum wage!). It made me feel angry and defensive, as if they thought we’re all mostly unnecessary. So I can have some sympathy for police officers who think they’re being unnecessarily demonized with a broad brush.
Glory b
@Baud: Yes, they are popular and have a good record as ballot measures. People then say, “Dems are soooo bad at messaging!”
But people know what we stand for. They like progressive stuff, but they don’t want to vote for the party with the black people in it.
(Insert the LBJ quote here.)
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
I’m interested in panics and I’ve read a lot about a couple of them and I don’t know that anyone has successfully put one out. It’s a cycle. We’re already on the down slope. The down slope always starts when the dumb state laws go in. They peter out, cooler heads prevail, but not before a lot of innocents get burned up in the fire.
We’ll know it’s burning out when they name a state law after a white child who was told “Black Lives Matter”. “Mason’s Law” :)
That’s always Peak Panic, the laws with names in the caption.
Steve in the ATL
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
Man, I wish I could get away with this in my job….
Betty Cracker
@Baud: I don’t think it’s just public intellectuals who sandbag the party on hot-button cultural and political issues like this. Centrist Dem politicians do too. Remember Manchin’s video shtick where he’d take unpopular (in W VA) Democratic bills and SHOOT them?
I guess that works in W VA, but if we’re going to blame people like AOC for giving the Repubs ammunition to use against the party, centrist Dems who further wingnut tropes about universal healthcare, cap and trade, the GND, etc., should come in for their share of blame too. Or else we’ll have to alter our “only Dems have agency” saying to “only progressive Dems” have agency. ;-)
Edmund Dantes
@SFAW: and the Dem establishment rushed to slit their own throats on that. Just like with Acorn.
You still see vestiges of that reaction bias
Omnes Omnibus
@Betty Cracker: @Kay: I think Kay’s comment here is on point. Some of you are right in the middle of the shit storm right now. It is not affecting all parts of the country equally, and, where it is prevalent, it is so intensely nutzoid that it is quite likely to overreach and burn itself out. This is not to say that people are not going to get hurt in the short term, but I doubt that this is an existential threat.
ETA: Noting also that I am commenting from a comfortable perch where I am extremely unlikely to be one of those harmed while it is burning itself out.
Kay
@Soprano2:
Absolutely. First you have to train some. We can’t get “mental health people” in rural areas. The pay is too low and they don’t want to live here.
I DO think police can be retrained though. I know this because some of them are quite good with mentally ill people. Partly it’s temperament but the good ones can model the behavior. We have one local police officer who is so good I look for his name on the police reports. It goes better if Jeremy responded. It’s possible. Everyone in the justice system knows who the good ones are, just like they know who the liars or bullies are.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
I hesitate to even mention it here (cancel culture of Balloon Juice!) but BERNIE has been a full on Biden cheerleader these days. Maureen Down has a Bernie interview that is basically an ad for Joe Biden.
That’s an interesting relationship, those two. It’s personal. You can tell. They like and trust each other.
Soprano2
Oh, I completely agree with this. They knew it would create visuals politicians on their side could use to great effect. A significant amount of people I live around still think that the downtowns of several cities are nothing more than a smoking ruin because they saw and heard about it over and over again. It’s easy on TV to exaggerate what’s actually happening, or how widespread it actually is.
Brachiator
Good article, but also somewhat wrongheaded. Smarter economists don’t refer to Covid-19 related spending as a stimulus. It was maintenance spending. We were not dealing with a recession or depression and trying to jump start the economy, but trying to provide income support for an economy that had been deliberately shut down as the world tried to deal with the pandemic.
One side effect is that there was a disproportionate impact on some industry segments. Some businesses may never fully recover or be transformed. Some jobs may be lost forever. Consequently, some speculation about whether the economy will recover is missing a bigger picture.
Biden took advantage of an opportunity provided by the pandemic to expand the child tax credit to try to fight poverty. I think the expanded payments are set to expire after this tax year. There will be a fight to try to make them permanent or at least extend them through 2025.
Biden also expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit and the child and dependent care credit. These credits especially help lower income individuals and families, but should be modified further and expended. These credits also help offset a lower minimum wage and so are a kind of stealth income support stimulus.
For tax year 2020, the Biden administration enacted a tax change to allow the exclusion of up to $10,200 in unemployment benefits. He should fight to extend this for the 2021 tax year and get the change enacted by the end of this year. The 2020 change happened in the middle of tax season and caused needless confusion.
But these and other pandemic-related benefits are not economic “training wheels.” More consideration should be given to what true economic stimulus might be necessary and what other income support might be helpful.
Steve in the ATL
@Omnes Omnibus: not sure ok comfortable with reasonable, polite Omnes.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: They don’t want to pass anything. Their constituents are conservatives and if they abet anything passing, they’re out.
Omnes Omnibus
@Steve in the ATL: Fuck off, shit bag.
Soprano2
I do point this out to people around here – that homicides in this city have gone up and they certainly know there has been no police defunding in this city. They usually babble something about how it’s hurt the perception of the police, so I ask them if feeling sorry for themselves is a reason for the police not to do their job. I never get an answer to that, because they have none.
Edmund Dantes
@Soprano2: it’s not hard to get the police to agree to thee changes? What are you fucking smoking to believe that bullshit? Please share it with the rest of us.
Do you think the police reform movement only started with the George Floyd protests? They’ve been doing police reform for nearly 40 years. There’s a reason why defund the police became such a big hit with the activists. It wasn’t because the better “terms” were getting any results.
Jeffro
@Kay: y’all should take a look at Rich Lowry’s piece in NR yesterday…”The Point of the Anti-CRT Movement Should Be To Take Over the Schools”
(subhead: Education is Too Important to be left to the Educators)
seriously! see how many lies you can spot!!
yeah, they’re over-reaching all right
Betty Cracker
@Omnes Omnibus: Great point about perspective being informed by where a person sits, both geographically and in the potential path of harm. Here’s hoping we’re past peak panic.
rikyrah
@Baud:
They don’t have a lot of Black people in West Virginia.
NotMax
@Omnes Omnibus
Meanwhile, behind door number three, your state is begging to be spanked again.
Brachiator
@Kay:
Excellent point. The strange thing is that some Bernie acolytes didn’t get the memo and insist on attacking Biden and other Democrats for their lack of progressive purity.
Omnes Omnibus
@NotMax: One hopes for a different result without Scottie Walker in charge.
rikyrah
@Kay:
They object to actual American History being taught.
You know, the truth about this country.
Omnes Omnibus
@Brachiator: They aren’t Bernie acolytes. Bernie merely became the standard bearer for a while. Democrats will always disappoint them because they more interested in purity than power.
rikyrah
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Vote for the REAL Democrat, who hasn’t spent the majority of her time since 2015, shytting on the Democratic Party.
Ohio 11 has a good choice in Shontel Brown.
All Nina Turner will do is get her azz on tv to talk shyt about what’s wrong with the Democratic Party. And, of course, she’ll get on the air. All the while, she won’t actually do shyt.
Elizabelle
@Edmund Dantes: No one is proposing “Reform the Police.” That is as meaningless as “thoughts and prayers” in the wake of another gun massacre.
BUT: “Defund” is a bad slogan. Period. I don’t care if the activists came up with it. If it can be weaponized against those who are more likely to want to help you change the status quo, and is not even informative, it’s a bad slogan.
Soprano’s comments were quite nuanced. But don’t let me stop you from the hair on fire performance.
Not every activist is a marketing genius. And a slogan that is comprehensible in a small, relatively controlled environment may not do as well out in the wild.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
I agree. But I’m confused by the idea that we don’t criticize centrists when they do harmful things. The only real “controversy” within the Dem party right now involves centrists and their love for the filibuster. Back in the day, we forced poor old Joe Lieberman to form his own political party. No one likes the centrists, even though we recognize they give us our majority.
The only two accommodations I can think of that we give to centrists is that we understand they often have tougher elections than a lot of progressives, and (somewhat more unfairly to progressives) we have different expectations of centrists and progressives in terms of their willingness to engage in destructive behavior.
Baud
@Kay:
I’ll never warm to him, but if he’s now doing what he’s supposed to be doing (which is mostly staying out of my news feed), I’m going to look forward, not back.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: “Centrist” is a relative term–when we complain about them we’re talking about Manchin and Sinema, but for others, “centrist” means Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, or any liberal who doesn’t identify as a socialist. So people can talk past each other on this.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
That’s true. Political labels make my head hurt.
Soprano2
It’s when Bill Maher can’t get laughs from college kids with his somewhat racist, religiously bigoted and misogynistic jokes, and he’s too lazy to write new ones, so instead he complains about how hard it is to play college campuses because they get offended at anything now. *rolleyes* It’s when their feelings get hurt because someone criticizes them (of course, they’re always free to criticize others). I cringe now at some of the stuff I used to laugh at back in the ’80’s and ’90’s, but he’s too lazy and stubborn to change, and we’re the same age! I agree, those people are nothing but useful idiots for the right, but they can’t understand that. They’re just like the people on the right that they pretend to decry – what’s acceptable in the world now has changed, but they aren’t willing to change with it. They want what they used to be comfortable with, which is stuff that they don’t really see as problematic – “what do you mean I can’t tell jokes/write articles that demonize all Muslims anymore? Cancel culture!”.
Kay
@rikyrah:
It’s such a weird race. The Cleveland paper endorsed Turner based on her bipartisan outreach. Not kidding. It’s true too. She backed a school measure in Cleveland that was downright “corporate”, as in, “completely drafted by a billionaire” :)
They had her as the Righty in the race. Local is always funnier than national.
schrodingers_cat
@Matt McIrvin: According to the media, if you don’t worship at the altar of socialist Jesus you are a centrist. So Nancy Pelosi and Kamala Harris who are liberal if you look at their voting records get labeled centrist.
schrodingers_cat
@rikyrah: Agreed. Nina Turner wants to go to the Congress to sandbag Biden’s agenda.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Omnes Omnibus:
THAT escalated quickly. Glad I’m here for it.
Soprano2
Our new school superintendent is a black woman whose last job was in Houston. I fully expect the CRT crazies here to do a full-court press on our school board when school starts up this fall. I’m sure they’re convinced that because our new superintendent is black all the white kids are going to be taught to hate themselves, blah blah blah. Or at least that’s what they’re going to tell everyone will happen regardless of the facts. I hope this whole thing backfires and burns itself out before our state legislature can pass any laws around it, because if it’s still going next year I guarantee you the MO lege will pass one of the worst kinds of laws around this, all in the name of “protecting the kids”. It’s funny how free speech and “cancel culture” never comes up when it’s concepts they want to suppress, huh?
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Especially political labels made up by those who hate Democrats.
Omnes Omnibus
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: Steve in the WTF knows what he did.
Kay
@Soprano2:
It WAS a cultural shift, mostly for white men of a certain age but also for everyone.
I had real problems with the lack of due process in the campus sex assault cases. You’re going to accuse someone of rape you better give them a real process. I thought the colleges acting as judge and jury was outrageous and a violation of the rights of the accused. If it’s assault call the police, bring charges, have a trial. If it’s not assault – per the criminal code- stop using that language.
It was a cultural lurch and those happen. They moderate. They even out. This would have moderated without the public intellectual hall monitors rushing in.
Baud
@Soprano2:
That’s nuts. What those kids need is to be taught to hate their parents.
Jeffro
The name Nino Greasemanelli comes to mind here – you too? =)
Sure Lurkalot
@Kay: It seems we can never fund police or the military enough or even bring it up. We just ignore that military spending has never been audited and Ike’s wise observations about a ever growing MIC.
But, we surely can talk about privatizing Social Security, slashing food stamps, cutting taxes, gutting Medicare.
The GOP is trying out painting a Q addled traitor a martyr and an insurrection a picnic to gain votes. But we can’t even whisper about the evident problems with policing in America.
Soprano2
If things continue the way they are now in the bar/restaurant industry, I fully expect those tabletop order thingies (don’t know the name for them) to come back stronger than before, so that they can automate a lot of the experience and thus need fewer wait staff. If a table can order everything with one of those things and just have it brought to their table, you need less wait staff. Older people will hate it, but I bet those under 40 will be fine with it.
Miss Bianca
@Kay: You know, I have no problem with Bernie if he gets with the program. Which he seems to have done, so kudos to him.
What bugs me (and yeah, I’m an old broad who bears grudges) is that apparently it *has* to be personal for Bernie to get with the program. He didn’t like HRC personally, so he attacked her from the left while the GOP attacked from the right. And we got Trump as a result.
Kay
@Soprano2:
Some of it was hard for me. I don’t actually find some of the work issues w/men offensive. I’m sure this is because of my age and my general experience (time and place) but some of it was…puzzling. I’m just not that offended. My daughter has been good as a kind of translator. Younger women think about it differently. I put things in kind of “tiers” and “sexist language at work” just wasn’t at the top. She knows I don’t get it, which makes her impatient. If it’s pay or promotions I get that, but the whole analysis of language just doesn’t hit me in a profound way. I can be obtuse so maybe it’s me.
SFAW
@Omnes Omnibus:
Scottie will run against Evers on a platform of bringing Foxconn back to WI “because Big Government, Tax-Loving Tony Evers forced Foxconn to abandon their plans, which caused massive unemployment and humongous job loss for freedom-loving Wisconsonianites. The Legislature had to protect Wisconsin by stripping Evers of his powers before he could completely destroy the state’s economy!”
You probably thinking I’m joking. [I am, but it would surprise me not one iota if Scottie were to run on a similar platform.]
Omnes Omnibus
Yes, we can. And we are. Not as much as we should, but it’s happening. Hence the freakout on the right. They’re not panicking because they are winning.
Brachiator
@Elizabelle:
I remember when one popular slogan was “Off the Pigs!”
So yeah, some folks keep arguing about how “Defund the police” is off-putting.
If someone comes up with something better, cool. Also please come up with a way to get the boots of cops off the necks of black and brown people.
Omnes Omnibus
@SFAW:
Walker is a spent force. Someone else may run on that platform, but not Walker.
Soprano2
@Edmund Dantes: I’m quoting Dr. Goff from Yale, who co-founded the Center for Policing Equity, which works with law enforcement agencies across the country on these issues. He said if you aren’t demonizing the police, and aren’t talking about taking all their money away and firing a bunch of them, they’re surprisingly amenable to things like not having to do traffic stops or deal with the homeless population anymore. So your quarrel is with him, not with me.
Kay
@Miss Bianca:
I do think Bernie hurt Clinton – absolutely- I watched it happen here- but I’m wary of single explanations for Trump. I think it’s more complicated than that. Bernies single explanation is bullshit too- he still says it was lunch bucketers left behind. They fucking hated her. Had nothing to do with paychecks. Just the vitriol directed at her femaleness was impossible to miss and that was from blue collar male Democrats. It wasn’t subtle.
Soprano2
I have come to always, always, always believe that a room full of people with the same viewpoints and experiences makes worse decisions than a room full of people with different viewpoints and experiences. I have to wonder if there was even one white “ally” in the room to say “maybe you should think about how the word ‘defund’ will come across differently in the community I live in than in your community” (and the truth is a lot of older black and brown people don’t like that slogan either!). But I wasn’t an activist in the room, I’m just a person who would like to see actual changes happen, so I’m supposed to shut up about it.
Geminid
@Betty Cracker: When the New York City mayoral primary race was happening, I was interested to see that in a poll of city residents, 56% picked increased crime as their number one concern. I think that in Virginia, that concern would be ranked lower. But New Yorkers are as informed and aware about their own community as any of us, and I believe them.
Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams made public safety a centerpiece of his campaign, and he won. Former Sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia ran more or less as a technocrat, and came in a close second. Attorney Maya Wiley had more of a social justice emphasis, and finished not far behind. I was interested to see that, at least according to an analysis in Gothamist magazine,* Adams ran strongest in more working class Black and Latino neighborhoods.
It will be interesting to follow Adams’ tenure, especially in the area of policing and public safety. For Adams, this will no longer be a matter of slogans or campaign themes, but applications. His constituents are well placed to evaluate the results.
*Gothamist magazine, ” A Tale of Three Cities,” June 27(?), 2021. A good overview of NYC primary voting patterns.
Chris Johnson
Critical theory is actually really good, and it works. That’s why the rightwingers were using it when they went around putting up Confederate statues just after ‘Birth of a Nation’ came out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_theory
“One of the distinguishing characteristics of critical theory, as Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer elaborated in their Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), is an ambivalence about the ultimate source or foundation of social domination”. If you lost a Civil War, and aren’t happy about the ultimate source of social domination being the law and the government, you go for the media and the statues and you continue your war on alternate foundations.
Just as, in critical race theory, you don’t go only for police reform to address outstanding crimes of racism, but you also address the context of society and establish expectations about what is and is not moral. In so doing, even if you can’t directly control the police yet, or if you lose control of the government, you establish a base in popular thought that can overthrow injustice.
John Brown and Abolition was critical race theory… and so was Birth of a Nation and the Confederate statues. When the battle is so big and significant, we never leave it entirely to law and governance. It’s more ambiguous. And the right-wingers use this full force… which of course is why they don’t want US using it.
It is always, always, always projection.
Also,
Oh hell yeah. This is great, great news. It’s leverage, and allowing politicians to politick. Might not make lots of news feeds, but it seems to me this is really great news. I think our Dems are as smart as I’ve ever seen them. They have to be. I’m very proud :)
Brachiator
@Soprano2:
Good point. Also, during the lockdown, more people got used to ordering takeout and so got used to not having to deal with wait staff.
Also some restaurants continue to have problems hiring staff. This is not just about wages. The pool of potential applicants is changing. I know people who worked at restaurants as a job between their main gigs (e.g. musicians) who had to move on to other work because the lockdown eliminated their main jobs.
I have been reading about more automation and other changes in the kitchen of restaurants as well.
Also, some of my favorite restaurants went out of business during the pandemic. A lot of jobs were lost along the way. Very sad.
Soprano2
@Jeffro: I didn’t even know who that was – I had to Google it. No, I’m thinking of things like I thought “Revenge of the Nerds” was really funny, but now I cringe at some of the plot points, stuff like that. I used to watch “Two and a half Men”, but even then I cringed at some of that comedy – I cringe even more now.
Soprano2
It’s not sexy, but the first thing I thought of was “Reimagine Policing”. My way to “get the boots of cops off the necks of black and brown people” is to do things that will actually help change policing, and for that you do need some cooperation from the police. I’d rather do things that actually make things change, rather than chant slogans that make me feel better but make it harder for that change to happen. I think the thing it’s hardest for a lot of people to deal with is that lasting change usually happens gradually, not all at once. It’s like the Bernie people screaming that Biden is a sellout because he didn’t immediately on the first day sign an executive order excusing $50,000 of student loan debt for everyone. They don’t even notice that he has been excusing student debt, but in a targeted way that helps the people who have been hurt the worst and that won’t cause a huge backlash. My biggest quarrel with them (besides the way they shivved Hillary in 2016) is how much they’re all or nothing – excuse $50,000 student loan debt or you didn’t do anything. It’s a dumb, counter-productive attitude.
You should listen to that “Fresh Air” interview with Dr. Goff – April 22, 2021. He’s actually doing the hard work of trying to change things.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Kay: I think one of the things that Trump had going for him in 2016 was the Right saw how the Left got it’s dream of a black president so the Right saw it as their time to realize their dream of a businessman president.
Another Scott
@Soprano2: I blame NextDoor.
I’ve never looked at it, but the stories are horrifying.
Yesterday evening I was walking Ellie and walked by a guy’s yard that I’ve said “hi” to a couple of times. Nice yard, he likes Mustangs, seems to be military (always calls me “Sir” for no reason). He was in his driveway yelling into his cell phone to a friend about the “$!#*!! #@#_!%!!” across the street that apparently said something bad about him on NextDoor. He’s not on it but somehow heard about it. He was absolutely enraged.
We walked away carefully.
:-(
It’s far too easy for people to talk trash online about others, see the worst in others, assume everyone else is operating in bad faith, and the GQP continues to weaponize it and divide us.
I see from AL’s COVID thread this morning that Biden-Harris are more actively pushing back against the monsters fighting vaccinations and public health measures. It looks like we need to do the same to protect the schools and the rest of the commonweal.
Cheers,
Scott.
Kay
@Chris Johnson:
I was on a public school council for 6 years so I was ideally situated for the CRT panic. They’ve rolled their entire list of public school grievances into this theory. It’s a long list. But it’s a familiar list to me because I live in a 65% Trump county and I have heard ALL of these things before.
For example. There is a belief on the Right that anything that girl children get in school is something that has been taken away from boys. In a real way, this is true! If it’s X amount and we’re giving some to girls and boys always got all of it, that’s less for boys!
What that turns into is “liberals hate boys”. I love boys! I just also want girls to have…math.
That’s in the ever–widening “CRT debate”. Every fucking Right wing cultural grievance of the last 30 years.
NotMax
@Soprano2
Maher’s career peak was achieving top co-billing in Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death.
//
Soprano2
Yeah, come help us hire people. We thought we had a cook hired who actually turned down a job at Amazon, but then he flaked out on us and didn’t show up for work when he was supposed to. Come and help me hire a new manager, because our manger decided she needed to almost double her salary (and claims she has an offer for $20,000 more than that, which would mean someone in my area is willing to pay her $80,000, which is extremely hard for me to believe) and there is no way our sales and the size of our establishment justify that. I researched it, the only people making that much money in my area for that kind of job are general mangers who are over several stores. I have fewer than 15 employees and one establishment. If I had agreed to pay her what she wants, it would have sucked up almost all of my profits! How would I hire any other staff? But the job market is tight, so she’s taking advantage of it to get a better-paying gig. I can’t do anything about that except hope she’s happy and not taking on something she can’t handle. My place is the first job she had managing a restaurant/bar, and she’s pretty good, but not that good!
You’re right that it’s about a lot of things. People want things to go back to the way they were pre-Covid, but that might not be possible anymore.
germy
@Geminid:
Jeffro
@Soprano2: he (Grease) was kinda a DC-area thing back then. I have a high school friend who still does his bits and phrases and mannerisms – heck of a thing to pick up as a lifelong ‘tic’ =)
Anyway, yeah, some of those 80s movies – whew
Progress is a good thing!
Kay
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
If I could say one thing that was a legit grievance after Obama was the lack of accountability for the people who tanked the economy. I’ve hear all the legal arguments for why there was none, but people were pissed that they were pitched into poverty by these Wall Street asshole gamblers and NOT ONE of the engineers of that crash paid a price. I don’t know that Obama could have done more but that to me is a legitimate beef. They wanted perp walks. They didn’t get them.
I will never forget how bad it was. 16% unemployment. Foreclosures as far as the eye could see. People crying in our office because they could not get even a fast food job. Just besides themselves with worry. Feeding kids at the public library. It changed how I think. It radicalized me.
When the evictions started they would pile the shit from the houses at the curb. The children’s toys in piles at the curb just gutted me. I could see becoming a Marxist with that kind of ABUSE of capitalism. They’re not capitalists. They’re arsonists. They should have gone to prison.
schrodingers_cat
@Miss Bianca: I am not so forgiving. He is our version of the Orange Clown. To him the only people that matter are white men and their grievances. The rest of us can die in a fire.
NotMax
@Jeffro
Sadly, there was never a Porky’s/Children of the Corn crossover.
:)
Soprano2
The way they handled the mortgage problem was awful. Banks got bailed out and made whole, while average people had their houses foreclosed on because the Obama people were afraid of the “moral hazard” argument, and weren’t willing to push back on it. That was a huge own goal on their part.
Chris Johnson
@Kay: Absolutely. This is a fundamental difference between liberalism and conservatism, Left and Right.
I completely understand if right-wingers think that only the best people get, or deserve, money or education or opportunity or ANYTHING, and I understand if they look at ‘bad’ people getting stuff and freak out.
I don’t expect everybody to become billionaires or Olympians, and I’m not fixing to hobble everybody until they are all equal in misery and failure (and this is what the righties would think that I want).
But I am damn sure the Bezos and Jobs and Edisons and Usain Bolts will emerge from a HEALTHY soil nurtured through justice and GOOD social welfare, and not a damned bare tile floor.
Flowers don’t grow out of other flowers. Flowers grow out of dirt. By all means celebrate the flowers but have some care for the context. Flowers started out AS dirt and to dirt they shall return. The right wingers aren’t practical.
Kay
Florida. Again :)
schrodingers_cat
@Soprano2: What doesn’t get mentioned in these tirades is that the banks paid back the loans with interest.
Chris Johnson
@Kay: Obama really couldn’t have done anything: he is black.
Biden’s super old, white, and male. That’s why HE is now able to do a lot of this. I’m very interested to see if the media in general tries hard to bury what he’s doing. A lot of it would play well as crazy radical leftiness on right wing media, but the thing is it doesn’t automatically turn off the viewership for obvious reasons: righties hate bankers just as much, hate rich criminals just as much, so they have to be constantly propagandized to keep ’em in line and it doesn’t always work when it’s too much of a stretch.
Left media’s audience would be more amenable to all that’s going on, but the problem is whether it attacks the ownership of left media: everybody running the show, is deeply invested in a lot of plutocracy that’s not going well. So the concern is that Biden can be doing good things, Dems can be doing good things, but media can freeze them out.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Kay:
What I knew at the time was awful – I’d learned that a problem was looming mid-2007, when a mortgage broker told me that they’d been advised by one of the senior state mortgage regulators that there was a gigantic spike in delinquencies and defaults in a really toney neighborhood, primarily among NINJA loans for self-employed and commissioned sales people. I’d also been approached by a person working independent contract underwriter who’d been terminated for being too strict on requirements. She advised that they were under enormous pressure from underwriters to fund dodgy loans.
There was clear fraud at the broker level.
Miss Bianca
@Kay: I’m not saying there’s a single cause for Trump, either. But the misogyny you point out among the “lunch bucket” brigade was also, arguably, on display in Sanders’s attitude, and certainly among the Sanders-istas as well. He didn’t combat it, didn’t examine it, and got defensive when called on it. Like I said, I bear a grudge. That said, I’m glad he’s embraced a Democratic President and that President’s priorities. Really, sincerely, glad. I just find it depressing that it apparently takes that President being a genial older white guy whom nobody who actually knows him could *possibly* dislike in order for that to be true.
@Another Scott: Meanwhile, a young woman I taught in high school (who’s mixed-race, if that makes any difference) is spouting anti-CDC stuff on FB and seems to have swallowed the anti-vax agenda hook, line, and sinker. She talks about the door-to-door campaign is the height of government coercion. I don’t know how the hell you reason with somebody like that.
Soprano2
I know that; my problem was with how they didn’t really use the money they had to help homeowners with mortgages. The perception “the banks were helped but I was left to rot even though the bank ripped me off and lied to me” wasn’t wrong.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Soprano2:
Never ignore the capacity of the American people to pursue Calvinism for the sheer cruelty of it.
Kay
@Chris Johnson:
I agree but I also think federal prosecutors are not aggressive enough on white collar crime. It’s difficult to prosecute but that doesn’t mean they get to just run off the field. They have to bring cases. They can’t keep making deals. They just did another one, with the Sachler/opiate cases. They have to stop settling. It’s not good for society. Trials aren’t just about convictions. They’re a public airing of facts in an orderly, controlled way that probably prevents ILLEGAL remedies. They help people with “what happened? Why did I lose my job and house?”
Just go to trial. Take a risk. FIGHT. It’s an adversarial system. They’re not mediators.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Soprano2:
There never were teeth built in.
Soprano2
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: My husband and I thought in 2006 that there was a big problem; what we were hearing from people buying homes was crazy. I can’t tell you how many people told me a version of “The bank told me I could afford “x”, but I thought that was way too much so we bought “y” instead”. We marveled at the ads telling people they could get home loans where they never had to pay interest, or could choose their payment every month. We thought anyone with a brain should be able to see how bad that was, but evidently we were wrong about that. This American Life’s “The Giant Pool of Money” is still the best explainer of what happened. I still remember the banker who held out as long as he could against those bad mortgages, but in the end they had to start writing them because they were losing so much business to others who would.
Geminid
@Kay: The way Turner has pulled in her horns and tried to present as a nice loyal Democrat has been funny. But this metamorphosis occurred after Turner realized she had a shot in the special election, and district voters now are being bombarded with several years of Turner’s toxic rhetoric reminding them that this new butterfly is actually the same old nasty caterpiller.
The OH 11 primary was nationalized early on, and has been a twitter brawl fom the start. I have been impressed by the pushback on Turner from Black Democrats. People like the earnest @SashaBeauloux have been “throwing hands” without reservation.
Kay
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
I knew it was irrational too and you know this- in a small town all the lawyers knew. We know a lot about everyone. I know what they make and I know how much debt they hold and can carry and I know they can’t afford “that” house. It had this insane sense, like people were ignoring gravity. It slowed in the midwest before the rest of the country, too. It was deflating as early as 2006.
Up until then I believed finance people knew what they doing. I did. They handle my money too. I no longer trust them. I don’t think they’ve earned trust. They pissed it away.
Montanareddog
@Soprano2: I am well north of 40 and I love the table top ordering QR codes. Because of I have the charisma of a paper clip and can never catch the wait staff’s eye. (Except for the time I was competing for a server’s attention at a crowded bar against a 6′ 3″ former England Rugby captain and I won – Omnes will know who I am talking about – Bill Beaumont)
Brachiator
@Soprano2:
This is interesting. I know that good cooks continue to be in high demand. But it is noteworthy that someone with those skills would even consider throwing them away to go to work at Amazon. It is also noteworthy that Amazon continues to attract workers despite their bad reputation as an employer.
Obviously I don’t know the people involved here, but sometimes people find that skills they have developed in one business are applicable in an entirely new field. Early in his career one of my brothers was a manager of a fast food joint. He learned that he had a knack for managing people and also a deep understanding of logistics.
Kay
@Geminid:
I think she’s bad too but keep in mind that there’s always a gulf between local coverage and local views and national coverage. People are not as plugged in as we are. You could be an ordinary engaged Democrat in Ohio and see her differently. The Cleveland endorsement is an example of that. They portray her as on the Right. In that narrow view on that one issue she is.
Soprano2
He was going to work for us, but told my manger he was taking the job at Amazon for $17/hr instead (no way we can pay that much). Then, a couple of weeks later, he called our manager and said he reconsidered Amazon and wanted to work for us. So she scheduled him to start the next Monday. He was a no-show, and his friend who is also our cook said he was having “personal problems” which is why he didn’t show up. If he’s starting off like that, I don’t want him, because we’ll just end up firing him. Dependability is a big problem in this industry, because most places don’t drug test so we attract a not surprising amount of people who are heavy drinkers and drug users. It causes problems in a small place like ours when people aren’t dependable. “I can’t come to work I’m hung over” is a problem when you only have 3 cooks to begin with.
Soprano2
That’s possible, but in my area I highly doubt someone with her experience can really make $80,000 without having a lot more expected of them than what she does now. In Springfield, MO that’s a hellacious salary.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Soprano2:
*sigh*
Musicians….
Soprano2
@Montanareddog: I’m judging by my 74-year-old husband – he hates those things. He hates the self-checkouts because he says they take jobs away from people (even when I point out that the people doing those jobs say they’ll just be doing something else for the same store).
Brachiator
@schrodingers_cat:
But a lot of individuals got wiped out having to include cancelation of debt income as taxable income on their tax returns. It got so bad that Congress had to come up with laws to forgive some home acquisition debt.
And it was clear that some lenders preyed on people.
ETA. I had some neighbors who worked for Countrywide. They all lost their jobs when the lender went under for bad practices.
Montanareddog
@Soprano2: Funnily enough, I hate self-checkouts too. For the same reason, takes away people’s jobs. But the convenience of bar ordering via an app I find different
Soprano2
@Montanareddog: I’ve asked more than one person at WalMart what will happen to their job if their store goes to all self-checkouts. They say they’ll be doing other things, and that what WalMart actually wants everyone to do is the on-your-phone scanning items into their app as you put them in your cart, so you won’t even need to use the self-checkouts when you leave. I don’t know how they’re going to control shoplifting with the app, but I’m sure they have some kind of plan. I have had one person say on FB that one WalMart that went to all self-checkouts is going to go back, because of how much theft they’ve had since the conversion, but I have doubts about that. It would be pretty expensive to reverse that change right after you made it. It’s more likely that they put in more people to check carts and watch people as they check out.
Brachiator
@Soprano2:
RE: Obviously I don’t know the people involved here, but sometimes people find that skills they have developed in one business are applicable in an entirely new field.
So, she might rise to the occasion. Even if she fails, she might learn from the experience and put what she learned to good use. Why not take the risk if people are willing to hire her and pay her good money?
schrodingers_cat
@Brachiator:@Soprano2: I do agree that the bail out was heavily tilted towards the banks and could have been structured differently. We do need to put back in place many of the Depression era safe guards that were removed by subsequent administrations.
Ruckus
@Uncle Cosmo:
I think that for many people what politicians say is more important than what they do in congress because what they say is up front, and how they vote is rarely noticed and can often be waved away as that’s the best I could get, that’s how the sausage is made. And the result is that people often get something, where otherwise they’d get nothing. But the news industry, especially the loud part is owned by whom? Right now, and pretty much most of my life it’s been a more conservative business. Conservatives know that you have to sell the idea that taking away is best, because people like the things that dems want people to have, a better life, a more equitable life, a less worrisome life, a more fair life, which is the polar opposite of what conservatives care about.
schrodingers_cat
@schrodingers_cat: * subsequent administrations starting with Reagan and beyond.
Brachiator
@Soprano2:
A lot of people were in homes that they could not afford even if the mortgage was restructured in the most advantageous way possible. And as a tax guy I saw all kinds of crazy stuff on the part of lenders and customers. It was a lending circus. I knew of some people who got loans that they should not have been able to qualify for. Then they refinanced and used the proceeds to buy houses for their adult children. Who also could not afford it.
But the Mortgage Relief Act did much to reduce some of the pain of individuals.
Chris Johnson
Oh, I see what happened. He DID work for Amazon at $17/hr, and they kicked his ass in a totally brutal fashion. He got broken by this real quick, realized everybody else there bought into it and weren’t going to help him, and he bailed the hell out of there… AFTER being broken.
I wonder in which ways was he broken. He might be just fucked at this point or he might be trying to recover. If he’s starting off like that there’s a good chance he’s now no use to you, but there is the possibility that if you’re not as brutal as literal Amazon, he’d come crawling back and become a loyal guy. But he has to be able to perform to some extent.
I wonder if he just flamed out at Amazon, and got kicked out with extreme prejudice? Either he’s just bad, or he thought he was amazing and then learned he wasn’t nearly crazy enough to perform at Amazon, land of the piss-in-a-bottle-while-moving go-getter. They’re not nice people at Amazon. The elevated pay is for a reason: it’s part of the culture, and for $17 they will have you work like you’re getting $50. (while putting out of business all the businesses that pay $15)
Geminid
@Kay: Yes, and I keep in mind that there are three other candidates with public service experience in the race besides Brown and Turner, plus some more marginal contestants. And next year the district will be redrawn under Ohio’s new redistricting process. This primary may just be round one.
frosty
@Soprano2:
I’m with your husband. My response to a self-checkout is that they don’t pay me to do the work, they pay the cashier, so I’m not going to do it.
SFAW
@Omnes Omnibus:
“You won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore” (1962)
Paul LePage moves from Maine to Florida. (2019)
… and so on.
Soprano2
Oh yeah, I’ll never hold anyone back from an opportunity. I hate like hell to lose her, but I cannot afford to pay what she says is her bottom line. I literally don’t have the money to do it, no matter how much I want to be able to do it.
Soprano2
@Brachiator: I know that everyone couldn’t have been helped, but I think they could have done a lot more than they did. They were scared of the moral hazard argument, which somehow didn’t apply to banks and mortgage lenders, only individuals.
Geminid
@Kay: I was making decent working wages until 2008 when the bottom dropped out of homebuilding. I do ok now, but I have not made up the ground I lost during that recession. And I did not have dependents, or a mortgage, and I know that many Americans lost far more than me. If I had been one of them, I wouldn’t have had “economic anxiety.” I would have had economic rage.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Soprano2:
Which was, of course, fueled by right wing Republicans.
Brachiator
@Soprano2:
I am not sure what more could have been done, short of giving people their houses and canceling the mortgages outright.
Otherwise, there could have been more mortgage relief. But the fundamental problem is that a lot of people got suckered into buying houses that they were going to lose. The lenders made money on fees so they didn’t care and the most venal figured that there would br a bank rescue if they totally screwed up.
Yeah I wish more people had gone to jail. I know people who kicked banker ass during the Savings and Loan crisis and noted that Congress soon after passed laws that would keep bankers out of jail if they pulled similar stunts in the future. The power of bags of money delivered to the right politicians.
J R in WV
@Kay:
True, and they waste much of it on giant armoured vehicles, SWAT team training, helicopters to chase the cars of speeders, OT policies that result in cops making way up in the 6 figures / year, etc.
J R in WV
@Kay: Some years ago we rolled and totaled our PU truck on I-25 in northern rural New Mexico, on our way from our SE AZ winter home (that we don’t spend winters in any more,.,.) to visit friends in Pueblo CO.
So in Pueblo we bought a new used PU truck to take the remaining stuff back to WV. Didn’t remember to get a WV inspection sticker on the nearly new truck. So the blue lights went on one day not long after we got home.Was a senior State Trooper, very professional black guy, polite, helpful, gave us a fix it and forget it ticket, just show the receipt for the inspection to the magistrate.
So when I visited the magistrate in the rural county seat, I told her the trooper was V professional and pleasant. She said, “Oh yes! He’s one of the good ones!”Which speaks exactly to your point about cops — some are professional, helpful, courteous and kind — and some are NOT. Those who are not need badly to be separated from those jobs — they carry the power of life and death, and those who are not professional and helpful so do not deserve that power!!
J R in WV
@Soprano2:
I highly recommend the movie “The Big Short” about the criminal events leading up to the 2008 crash.
The people who made millions by shorting the soon-to-fail banking sector could barely believe what they were learning as they investigated the mortgage sector prior to shorting the industry and making a shot-ton of profits off the crash.