Monthly Archives: June 2023

We need a fighter, not a healer

Posted by on 2023-06-30 No comments

In June 2022 the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that women no longer have a Constitutional right to abortion. While previously the personal privacy of women had been balanced by the State’s interest in the life of a viable fetus, a woman is now little more than a uterus without rights for the majority-Catholic court. Once Dobbs was decided, an emboldened Republican Party quickly announced it had other reproductive and civil rights in its crosshairs.

While the Democratic Party in general is now pushing to strengthen reproductive rights in Blue states, and claims it wants to make abortion a winning 2024 campaign issue, President Joe Biden told a group of wealthy donors recently that, while he supported the Roe v Wade compromise, “I’m a practicing Catholic. I’m not big on abortion…” This lack of urgency (or real commitment for that matter) coming from an 80 year-old male citing his religious reservations is guaranteed to take the air out of the Democratic Party’s support for the bodily autonomy of women.

Yesterday the majority white Supreme Court dismantled Affirmative Action programs and upheld the rights of Christians to refuse to work on Sundays. Today it handed down rulings barring student debt forgiveness and upholding the right of Christians to discriminate against gay people.

We seem to be well on our our way to the Christian theocracy the GOP has in mind for us.

Most Democrats recognize that we are right on the edge of irrevocably losing whatever shreds of democracy the Court’s Christian Nationalists have not already torched. Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer expressed outrage when the Dobbs decision was announced and lashed out with, “I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price.” Despite the tough guy impression, Schumer has done little to provide meaningful oversight of the Court and has resisted calls to expand it.

Other Democratic Senators led by Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey are calling for enlarging the number of Justices. In 2021 a group of progressive New York legislators called for enlarging it as well, appealing for Democrats to give up the ridiculous pretense that the Court is even-handed. “The Republican Party […] uses aggressive tactics to stack the courts with right-wing ideologues, cultivated in their own parallel legal ecosystem. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party has fought to preserve the myth of our apolitical judiciary,” stated an appeal organized by State Assembly member elect Zohran Kwame Mamdani of the 36th district (NY).

Regardless, President Biden remains firmly opposed to court expansion.

You might recall that Biden embraced the role of “healer in chief” when he won the Presidency. In retrospect, part of the healing was to reassure Republicans he wasn’t going to tinker with the Supreme Court. Biden created a 36-member commission to look at the Court and its final report infuriatingly cautioned that enlarging the court would call the Court’s legitimacy into question.

The scope of the SCOTUS Sugar Daddy problem might have been unknown at the time but the corruption and conflicts of interest of several of its justices (and one insurrectionist spouse) were well-known. Last year Democrats sponsored toothless performative legislation to impose term limits on Supreme Court Justices, but the Constitution is the only mechanism that can actually change a justice’s term of office.

Critics questioned the centrist composition of Biden’s commission, its objectivity, and an Atlantic article wrote it off with: “Biden wished to avoid weighing in on this politically explosive proposal. The commission was his attempt to avoid having to do so.”

Yesterday the President doubled down on his do-nothing strategy, telling an MSNBC reporter that, while the court “may do too much harm […] I think if we start the process of trying to expand the court, we are going to politicize it maybe forever, in a way that is not healthy.” Once again, the 80 year-old President seemed to dismiss the severity of the problem. And Biden’s given reason for refusing to expand the Court only made a mockery of how politicized it is already.

To find similar upheavals in legal systems elsewhere you need only travel to Central Asia, where Iran suffered similar rapid-fire decrees by religious courts as the Shah’s dictatorship became a religious dictatorship. Remember conservative Americans whining about “shariah law” and “Islamofascism” in the Muslim world? These same Americans are now all-too eager for a religious dictatorship here.

The Supreme Court’s rulings have enabled a dictatorship of sorts for a shrinking, desperate demographic — white Christians. They and their party have become oppressors of a long list of victims which include: women of childbearing age, LGBTQ+ individuals, migrants, people of color, Muslims, public school teachers, librarians, secular Americans, liberal Jews, academics, union workers, environmental scientists, civil rights activists, civil libertarians, police reformers, war resisters, historians, sociologists, child psychologists, reproductive rights physicians, and anyone even barely to the left of the John Birch Society.

With today’s ruling barring college debt forgiveness, the Supreme Court now adds young people to its hit list – young people who indebted themselves in order to play the American meritocracy game. The Court’s ruling should have been a surprise to no one. As savings and loan, stock market, auto industry, insurance industry, bank, and pandemic bailouts for corporations have repeatedly demonstrated, human capital is never of equal importance. When actual living, breathing humans experience real crises in their lives, we discover all too quickly that, in America, you are on your own.

The issues America faces require political leadership people can believe in. And secular America needs a fighter rather than a healer.

Given Biden’s poor polling, his age, his gaffes, his reckless foreign policy, his apparent lack of interest in tackling controversial problems, a dangerous primary opponent (RFK Jr.), a wildcard from the Left (Cornell West), and a stealth MAGA candidate who will probably run under the No Labels label, the Democratic Party is going to have a serious problem in 2024 if they stick with Biden.

It’s time for the DNC grownups to begin thinking of an alternative to Biden in 2024. If the Democratic nominee won’t fight the GOP like he really means it, a secular and diverse America is going to lose even more than we have already.

A criminal precedent

Posted by on 2023-06-28 No comments

As I feared, a misguided Democrat has suggested that Biden pardon Trump when and if he beats Trump at the polls (again). This misguided individual and a self-described Democrat is Bruce Ledewitz, a law professor at Duquesne University, who explicitly mentions Gerald Ford’s famous precedent of pardoning Nixon..

Ledewitz argues that democracy is dying from the downward spiral of violations of norms and laws. He even agrees with former Attorney General William Barr that prosecuting Trump is absolutely justified.

But — so argues the law professor — to hell with the rule of law.

Ledewitz argues that, despite every legal justification and the fact that ignoring crimes like Trump’s has brought us to this point, Democrats ought to pardon Trump — not for justice but out of a political calculus intended to mollify MAGA zealots.

For a little historical context, I don’t recall the Justice Department ever hesitating to prosecute Klan members in Mississippi because some substantial portion of the electorate there didn’t want it to happen. But conflict avoidance is at the heart of Ledewitz’s argument. And this is a despicable case for a law professor to be making.

Ledewitz employs such ridiculous and simplistic logic that he embarrasses himself. Although it’s hard to imagine that he never saw an innocent defendant accept a favorable plea deal (in a legal system where more than 90% of all defendants take pleas), Ledewitz’s argument is based on a simplistic logic: Biden will offer Trump a pardon and Trump will turn it down if he’s not actually guilty. But — so Ledewitz reasons — Trump is guilty, ergo accepting Biden’s pardon will be an admission of his crimes. Voila! Case closed. Perry Mason does it again!

But it’s not as if Trump doesn’t wolf down legal maneuvers along with his cheeseburgers every day. Or that he would never take anything given to him freely (by some accounts he was prepared to sell pardons). Or as if Trump’s supporters are actually moved by ethics, logic, facts, or respect for the rule of (secular) law. Despite all the damning proof of crimes provided, Trump survived two impeachments precisely because his many enablers just don’t care about facts, the rule of law. Or Perry Mason logic.

Let the rest of us — those who actually believe in justice — agree that if Donald Trump broke the law then he must suffer the same consequences as any other citizen. If especially a law professor is prepared to reject this basic premise of justice, then let’s just open the doors to all the jails and let out all the criminals.

Either we believe in the rule of law, or we don’t. I hope someone is still teaching that at Duquesne Law School.

Above the Law

Posted by on 2023-06-14 No comments

As Donald Trump fights the numerous criminal charges he earned while running the Presidency into the ground, I am reminded of Trump’s second impeachment trial in which he was exonerated by an all white jury – well, actually, Republican Senators. Same principle, though. Men who believe they are above the law.

The House’s Articles of Impeachment had already been watered-down and consisted only of Trump’s most recent attempts to extort Ukraine to intervene in the 2020 presidential election. Those charges did not include anything from the Mueller report, Trump’s numerous emoluments clause violations, lying about illegal payments to porn stars or mistresses, or any of the many obstructions of justice to come. Prosecution by the Senate should have been a slam dunk but we all know what happened.

If all that winking and looking away at crime, and the kid-glove treatment, was not bad enough, then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell fast-tracked the Senate trial down to two weeks — three times shorter than Nixon’s. For sake of comparison, in 2016, when South Korea impeached president Park Geun-hye for corruption and influence-peddling, prosecutors charged her with 13 counts remarkably similar to Trump’s, and her trial in South Korea’s Constitutional Court lasted 10 weeks. Gun-hye’s refusal to appear before the court was never an impediment to her conviction.

But with Trump, well, kid gloves.

The travesty of justice Americans witnessed in the Senate that year was reminiscent of special treatment numerous white criminals have received in other sham trials:

  • In 1955, when Emmett Till was murdered and his body thrown into the Tallahatchie River, his killers were acquitted by an all-white jury after one hour of deliberation.
  • In 1963, after Medgar Evers was gunned down in Mississippi, two all-white juries acquitted his killers in separate trials.
  • In 1998, when 13 white supremacists were charged with attempting to murder a federal judge and FBI agent, they were acquitted by an all-white jury.
  • In 2013, George Zimmerman was found not guilty of the murder of Trayvon Martin by a jury with only one juror of color.
  • In 2016, a group of armed sovereign citizens who occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge were acquitted by an all-white jury — while on the same day unarmed Native Americans protesting a pipeline on their own land were maced and beaten by police.
  • It’s not even possible to list the thousands of times that white police officers have murdered unarmed black men and been acquitted or simply not charged.

Yesterday, after only a brief pause from its election denial propaganda, FOX News was back at it, calling Biden a “wannabe dictator” and portraying the real wannabe dictator, Trump, as the victim of – well – prosecution for crimes anybody else would be prosecuted for. To hear just about every Republican tell it, not one of the standard rules of justice applies to a white supremacist criminal like Trump. Apparently only [non-white] “banana republics” prosecute their corrupt politicians.

But let’s not forget the many other get-out-of-jail cards available for white men. Stand Your Ground laws, statutes encouraging vigilantism, and the doctrine of Qualified immunity — a magic wand to wave away police murders. Add to this the increasing abuse of presidential and gubernatorial pardons for MAGA criminals and insurrectionists. Criminals who believe they’re above the law.

For the moment it’s not looking so good for Trump in 2024. If Biden does win this election, I am troubled by the nagging concern that Biden – in pursuing some sort of misguided national unity objective – might end up pardoning Trump’s federal crimes, just as Gerald Ford wiped the slate clean for Richard Nixon. This would be a huge mistake.

Rubbing the average citizen’s nose in impunity for serious criminality will do nothing to alter the perception that American justice is a cruel joke. If the most corrupt man in America is not subject to the same laws as the rest of us, we might as well open the prison doors and let all the criminals walk free.

Goodbye, Columbus

Posted by on 2023-06-11 No comments

Since 1977 Native Americans have been trying to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous People’s Day. The text of a bill in the Massachusetts legislature is short, sweet, and uncomplicated:

Chapter 6 of the General Laws is hereby amended by striking out section 12V and inserting in place thereof the following section:– Section 12V. The governor shall annually issue a proclamation setting apart the second Monday in October as Indigenous Peoples Day and recommending that it be observed by the people, with appropriate exercises in the schools and otherwise, to acknowledge the history of genocide and discrimination against Indigenous peoples, and to recognize and celebrate the thriving cultures and continued resistance and resilience of Indigenous peoples and their tribal nations.

Columbus’s First Encounter with the Indians, Senate Doors, Washington DC

The image above is not just any piece of federal artwork. The “Rogers Doors” (seen in videos of the Capitol insurrection of January 6th) are a set of 17-foot high, 10 ton bronze doors in the Center Building East Portico of the U.S. Capitol building which open into the Rotunda. The panel on the left (top right square on the door) depicts Columbus arriving in the Americas to claim the land and its people; one of Columbus’ sailors is shown carrying off an indigenous woman as his slave. Rape and pillage of Native Americans are a matter of public record and, unfortunately, even official memorialization.

The culture wars have put many Democrats on the defensive, especially when Republicans accuse them of “wokeism” or “political correctness.” But Democrats ought to first consider from what noxious pit of white supremacy these accusations are coming — and should also be less concerned about so-called “cancel culture” and “erasure” than the actual historical erasure of Native people.

Yet while Massachusetts legislators dither and squirm, other states have ratified some form of an Indigenous People’s Day that either replaces* Columbus Day outright or (the coward’s choice) coexists with it: Alabama (2019); Alaska* (2015); Arizona (2020); California (2019); District of Columbia* (2019); Hawaii* (1988); Iowa* (2018); Louisiana* (2019); Maine* (2019); Michigan (2019); Minnesota* (2016); Nebraska (2021); Nevada (2020); New Mexico (2019); North Carolina* (2018); Oklahoma (2019); Oregon (2021); South Dakota* (1989); Texas (2021); Vermont* (2016); Virginia (2020); Wisconsin (2019).

Indigenous People’s Day is also celebrated in over 130 American cities.

In 2021 President Biden signed a proclamation making Indigenous People’s Day a federal holiday, although Columbus Day remains.

And, internationally, the United Nations honors Indigenous people on August 9th.

Despite all this, some Massachusetts state legislators still regard indigenous people as a trivial issue that will go away if they ignore them long enough. But they are mistaken. If Indigenous People’s Day doesn’t move out of committee (again) this year, legislators can expect to see it on their desks once again in 2024. This has been the sad reality with Massachusetts legislators for 47 years now.

Replacing Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day is one of five legislative priorities of the Massachusetts Indigenous Legislative Agenda which include: native education, protection of indigenous heritage, replacing the flag and seal, and retiring the 20+ Massachusetts school mascots that still dishonor Native Americans.

To support the Agenda, come to the state house in Boston on Thursday, June 15th, for the 11:30 am to 1:30 pm rally and Advocacy Day. For more information, or to participate even if you are not able to attend in person, RSVP to: www.facebook.com/MAIndigenousAgenda.org/

Going after the unicorn vote

Posted by on 2023-06-08 No comments

I realize that some of us are vastly outnumbered by folks who think that Democrats should move to the right to accommodate the swing voter, whoever he may be. Many sins emanate from this strange dogma, not confined to discounting gay, black or women candidates in 2024, a willingness to soften demands so as to appeal to the swing voter, or a failure to defend marginalized Americans — as we saw play out during the budget ceiling negotiations last week.

In fact, most Democrats probably saw last week’s fight as a win for pragmatism and centrism. But I see their conclusion as a gross miscalculation.

Rather than being the party of ideas and principles, the Democratic Party is mainly, as Robert Reich once characterized it, a vast “fund-raising machine” that has lost its way if not its soul. The comedian Lewis Black once quipped that the Democratic Party is the party of “no ideas” while Republicans are the party of “bad ideas.” Black’s joke was only funny because it was true.

Unlike the GOP, which operates on an uncompromising and visceral level (and, it must be conceded, very successfully), Democrats operate like a house thermostat, adjusting a blast of cold here or a jet of hot air there to maintain some abstract perfect “middle” temperature that pleases no one. Ask your spouse if you don’t believe me.

A 2019 study by the Pew Research Center actually looked at this mythological being, the swing voter. It turns out that the 40% of voters who identify as so-called “independents” are not really all that independent. 13%, in fact, are pretty much reliable Republicans while 17% are fairly reliable Democrats. This leaves 7% — mostly young and male — who are politically unmoored.

This should be no great revelation in a polarized political landscape in which the “middle” has largely eroded. And yet it is an article of faith of centrist Democrats.

What’s especially significant, however, is that, of these 7% only a third actually vote, which reduces the actual percentage of “independents” to about 2.3% of the American electorate. Democrats might actually appeal to some of these disaffected young voters if they chose a progressive candidate under 70, but in the last election most of the Democratic Presidential candidates thought they could appeal to the unicorn by bashing the social safety net, going weak on abortion, or alienating minority voters by slamming “identity politics.” Last week the same Democratic centrists alienated minority voters even further, not to mention the left wing of the party.

Steve Phillips is the author of How We Win the Civil War and Brown is the New White. In the latter book he argues, and I agree with him, that it would be a much smarter move to woo reliable Black and Brown voters and progressives than a mythological creature. The numbers are simply better.

Rather than trying to lower themselves to GOP standards, Democrats ought to be doubling-down on issues that distinguish them from Republicans. And redoubling fierce opposition to the fascist train barreling down upon us. Instead, while the Democratic Party insists on poll-testing and calibrating a perfect room temperature, its right wing will likely flirt with RFK Jr. and then end up voting for a GOP candidate.

And — let’s not blame them when they do — some percentage of the Democratic left wing will end up voting for Cornel West out of disgust — a disgust borne out of the Democratic Party’s limp and vacillating policies and neglect. And because West will raise many of the festering issues that Democrats are simply too frightened to deal with.

The Sins of Bipartisanship

Posted by on 2023-06-04 No comments

In our economic system, to make money investors rely on the stability of the dollar as well as the fiscal duty of the U.S. government to back up all debts. But profitability requires even more of government. The gears of commerce must be greased by the Fed, the Treasury, by Congress, by the President, by financial institutions, by legions of business groups and lobbyists, by laws and tax codes that privilege investors and “job creators” – all cheered on by a mainstream press almost exclusively owned by billionaires.

Our complex, fragile Capitalist economy has failed several times in recent memory, requiring extraordinary levels of governmental support and bailouts. For something so precarious, the system requires faith and superstition as much as technocratic know-how and can only survive when all the previously-named actors play their parts in theatrical rituals designed to keep the whole rickety house of cards from toppling. The debt ceiling crisis illustrates this perfectly.

CNN warned us of economic “armaggedon” while the New York Times claimed that a failure to reach an accord would unleash a “horror scenario,” the total collapse of the world economy. It was widely reported that the U.S. had never in its history defaulted – except for all the times it had. In 1933 the U.S. refused to honor the gold standard, instead opting to pay its debt off in devalued currency. And in 1971 the U.S. refused to honor the Bretton Woods Agreement, which had pegged the dollar to a value of gold, again opting to pay off debts in devalued currency. In both cases creditors got stiffed.

Running low? Just print more.

The U.S. national debt is now almost $32 TRILLION. This is a number so staggering that, in practical terms, it can never be repaid. Nor does the U.S. government ever need (or intend) to. Unlike you, the U.S. Treasury can simply print more money. If “trust me” is all that is required for the economy to work, and skepticism is severely discouraged, then government doesn’t even need to raise sufficient taxes to pay for its programs. In this way the super-rich aren’t required to pay their fair share.

Add to this the fact that the largest government programs – especially “defense” outlays – are bloated beyond imagination and can’t even pass an audit. Despite this there is little effort by either political party to slow down military spending. Of all the expenditures responsible for our massive accumulating national debt, military spending is #2 and interest on that debt is #1. In short, the national debt is bipartisan in origin and the failure to deal with it equally bipartisan. And where there is “debate” without actual disagreement you find only staged theatre and spectacle.

White House OMB 2023

Thus, the debt ceiling “crisis” we just witnessed was another semi-annual performance completely divorced from reality. No other nation on earth has a debt ceiling – with the exception of Denmark, where the average citizen has never even heard of it. There is no intention of ever paying off the U.S. national debt. There is no intention of ever reaching a balanced budget. And staging such congressional theatre is completely unnecessary in the first place – because the U.S Constitution says that, no matter what, the bills must always be paid:

“The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”

But assuming creditors would come banging on the door, demanding their money, who are they and how much leverage do they have?

Contrary to a common notion of China holding an exaggerated quantity of the national debt, it turns out that roughly 40% of the debt is held by the U.S. government itself. The Federal Reserve is the largest single creditor, followed by Social Security, the U.S. military, Civil Service retirement funds, and other intragovernmental accounts. The remaining 60% is held by millions of public investors, sometimes nations, sometimes huge bond holders, sometimes a teenager who has forgotten about the treasury bond his nana bought him at birth.

Foreign nations account for less than a quarter of our creditors and include: Japan ($1.08T); China ($870B); United Kingdom ($645.8B); Belgium ($332.9B); Luxembourg ($312.9B); Cayman Islands ($283.3B); Switzerland ($266.7B); Ireland ($250B); Canada ($229B); Brazil ($225.9B). Nations like Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, and the Cayman Islands do not even necessarily hold all these U.S. treasury notes themselves; instead much of those portfolios represent tax-shelters parked offshore for oligarchs, mobsters, and multinationals.

According to the conventional wisdom, “In a default, interest rates on U.S. Treasurys would skyrocket (because investors would demand a higher rate in exchange for taking the risk that they might not be paid back), and Treasurys might no longer be usable as collateral (because their underlying value would not be clear). The entire world financial system could simply freeze.”

That is, a world financial system frozen not because Treasurys became worthless overnight or debts cannot be repaid, but because momentarily the value of Treasurys cannot be quantified. It’s hard to sympathize with the financial markets. Most working Americans deal with much more urgent uncertainty than this every day.

Given the constitutional obligation to back debt, the debt crisis means only that the process of repaying bills might be delayed. Barring the dissolution of the United States of America and the abolition of the Constitution, debts will be paid – eventually. Thus, a “world financial crisis” would not result from an actual default but because of uncertainties regarding the possibility that the U.S. might not pay off its bills immediately.

It is shockingly of lesser importance that the debt itself has become so large that no one actually expects it to ever be paid off or intends to ever tax the rich sufficiently to pay for a government whose machinery guarantees their own profits. Or that neither party insists on the primacy of spending the national treasure on actual people with real needs. Instead, the whole machinery of government seems designed to mainly service financial markets and gun runners.

The real object of this week’s high theater seems to have been to propitiate the gods of investment. And these old scoundrels require human sacrifice. Since the debt ceiling was invented in 1917, the main object of such “negotiations” has been to demand austerity and deregulation. Inasmuch as some government programs address poverty, starvation, healthcare, the environment, and joblessness, the destruction of these programs through so-called bipartisan “fiscal responsibility” makes the former beneficiaries of the hobbled social safety net more vulnerable than ever.

When the debt ceiling deal was first announced, the Business Roundtable (Josh Bolton), the National Association of Manufacturers (Jay Timmons), the Chamber of Commerce (Suzanne Clark), and various securities markets groups like the Financial Services Forum (Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, etc.) all congratulated the political performers for their “bipartisanship” — and then demanded even more austerity and deregulation.

The press stepped up as well to play their assigned role, sticking to the narrative that the manufactured and unique-in-all-the-world political ritual was a real “crisis.” Politicians who supported the deal were lauded by the press for their bipartisan pragmatism and sensibility while those who opposed it were labelled “fringe” and excoriated for their recklessness. Democrats reluctant to inflict suffering on Americans relying on SNAP and TANF programs were lumped together as “extremist” with sadists from the GOP for whom no measure of suffering inflicted on the poor is sufficient.

Why, then, did more House Democrats than Republicans vote for the Financial Responsibility Act? First, there are two wings of the Democratic Party. One, relatively tiny, includes Democrats who believe in social and economic justice. The other, the overwhelming majority, numbers those eager to be recognized for their bipartisanship.

Happily, both Massachusetts Senators (Warren and Markey) and two members of the Massachusetts House delegation (Pressley and McGovern) voted against the FRA for moral and ethical reasons. But it was troubling that a majority of Democrats, including the President, were all too willing to sacrifice America’s most vulnerable citizens on the altars of bipartisanship and market stability.

Centrist Democrats, who comprise the majority of their party, embrace bipartisanship while Republicans thumb their noses (or flip their fingers) at it. The debt ceiling vote reflected this. The centrists are not really enemies of austerity, militarism, or neoliberalism, and many of them give only lip service to social and racial justice. There’s simply not enough distance between these creatures and Romney Republicans to make them enemies. hence, “bipartisanship” becomes an excuse for accommodation and outright agreement. A virtue.

Jon Schwartz has a great article in the Intercept about Democrats hiding behind bipartisanship. And a lot of sins have been committed in its name:

  • The Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, passed during the Clinton administration overwhelmingly by Democrats, exempted a boatload of financial instruments from regulation
  • The 2001 Authorization for Use of Force, which unleashed America’s most costly war (which today accounts for 25% of our national debt) and which all but one Democrats voted for is still in effect and has expanded military strikes, drone attacks, and assassinations to 12 countries.
  • The AUMF of 2002 was used to authorize the invasion of Iraq.
  • The American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 gave tax breaks to corporations repatriating to U.S. shores. It didn’t create many jobs but it sure padded corporate pay.
  • The Budget Control Act of 2011 was the daddy of this week’s “fiscal responsibility act.” It imposed $1 TRILLION worth of cuts on social programs and made millions of Americans financially more vulnerable.

At some point Americans are going to have to confront a couple of very simple questions: Why do we live together in a society? And: What is the purpose of government?

If we live together in a society to undermine and ignore each other’s needs, this is no kind of society at all. If the purpose of government is only to enable the exploitation of citizens for the benefit of the wealthy, this isn’t going to work either. At some point those being duped are going to get wise to being unfairly treated.

This week the debt crisis again raised these questions. And for the most part neither Republicans nor Democrats could come up with satisfactory answers.

Join your local Dems

Posted by on 2023-06-02 No comments

While I am especially interested in national political and social issues, I also post things of interest to hometown progressives. And I have no plans to stop doing this. But I hope readers will seek out your local Democratic Party town or city committee for opportunities for engagement. You might be surprised. Or even pleasantly shocked.

It was once the case that up to 60% of all Massachusetts Democratic Town committees were either on life support or had passed away in their beds, leaving only a foul odor where they had once slumbered. Well, Trump changed all that.

If you are a New Bedford Democrat, or even an unenrolled liberal or progressive, get on Richard Drolet’s mailing list. Richard is the co-chair of the NB Dems and is known for both his tireless enthusiasm and his cookies.

If you live in Dartmouth, hats off to the Dartmouth Dems, who worked to get a new sheriff elected, fended off a rightwing crackpot in the School Committee elections, and have a new sense of mission. You can say “hi” tomorrow at the Dartmouth Dems table at NB Pride in Buttonwood Park. Or subscribe to their new online newsletter.

Speaking of which: Democrats across the state are signing up delegates NOW for the September Platform Convention in Lowell. Again, if you live in New Bedford, contact Richard Drolet.. If you live in Dartmouth, contact Jim Griffith or Susan LeClair at links found here.

*Long-time readers know I have many criticisms of both the national and state Democratic Party. Yesterday I voiced my displeasure that so few Democrats rejected negotiating with terrorists over the debt ceiling. But for the time being Democrats are about the only thing standing between us and the neo-fascism taking root in places like Florida.