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I have run out of pejorative terms for the Republican Party. I'm tired.

Idiotic drivel from the mouth of the former president is to be expected; you can't say he's been inconsistent. To have his idiocy endorsed, even sanctified, and thus elevated to rationality in the minds of too many, by people in power who really do know better, every single day, has left me bone-weary, and stumbling into run-on sentences. (My god! Stop! Right now!)

I'm going to do lawn work today, and maybe take a walk on my favorite woods trail. I startled a black bear the other day. He fled from me on a dead run. I'm getting scary in my old age.

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It was difficult to hear Manchin lecture Liberals about having an “entitlement mentality”, while he had a fundraiser with the monopoly man (Koch). Did Koch get a lecture about his “entitlement mentality”? I think not. To top it off his hypocrisy on the subject, Manchin’s daughter, Heather Bresch, the former president and CEO of the drugmaker Mylan, used her “entitlement mentality” to inflate her resume with an unearned MBA. She also used that same “entitlement mentality” to work directly with the CEO of Pfizer to keep prices of the company's EpiPen product artificially high. Did Heather ever get a lecture about her “entitlement mentality”? I think not. By accusing Liberals of having an “entitlement mentality”, Manchin is victim blaming and projecting. While not illegal, it’s a disgusting display of hypocrisy.

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HCR, thank you for finally being the one to refer to the right-wing menaces Manchin and Sinema as "conservative Democrats." Every time I hear them referred to as "moderate" by the media I want to scream.

I am planning on writing to my congressperson today--Emmanuel Cleaver II, who is a lion in the House--to ask him to get the "progressives" in line with what the Dems need to win this damn thing. I am entirely sympathetic to their plans but their tactics--fighting within the party and playing games that, like Manchin and Sinema in the Senate, make it possible for the Would-Be Autocrats to vilify them and prevent reasonable legislation from progressing--are immature and unhelpful. As always, I must point out that perfection is the enemy of the good. As long as the Dems are eating themselves alive, we will not have any kind of power in Congress even when we have a majority.

In other news: [1] The three congresswomen (including MO's Cori Bush) who described their abortions in front of their colleagues are, to my mind, the bravest women in Congress. I have been in the same shoes as they; I have made the same decisions. I do not regret them for one second but I know how difficult the decisions women always have to weigh are. And I detest men who sit back in their complacence and smugness because they do not suffer the same kind of existential crisis when they impregnate women. We need to prosecute men who impregnate women against their will (and I am not just talking about rape here: I am talking about the inevitable power difference between men and women in sexual situations in which women are vulnerable to becoming pregnant when they do not want to be) because they are the real perpetrators of unwanted pregnancies.

[2] Most of you are not keeping track of a little news item that I and my medievalist colleagues have been following for quite a while, but which the NY Times finally reported on this morning: that Yale U's "Vinland Map" is a fake, dating probably from the late 1920s. There are much better articles on it than the one in the Times this morning, in large part because they buried the real meaning behind the forgery: it was designed to enhance the standing of northern European white people at the expense of both indigenous First Nations people and southern Europeans at a time when whiteness was being associated very significantly with people from northern Europe. Note the date of the forgery: the rise of fascism and Nazism, the re-invention of the KKK, the backlashes against suffrage all were contemporary to the invention of this fake map. And also, the all-too-typical misuse of the term "Viking" is super annoying to those of us who have been teaching our students for decades that it is actually a verb and a job description, not an ethnic identity. People of all kinds went "a-viking"; it is not exclusive to people of Scandinavian heritage. And is not gender-specific either.

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I wish that they hadn’t called it the $3.5 trillion infrastructure bill. I found the follow article from DCReport helpful in understanding the cost of the bill:

How $3 a Day Can Buy America a Rich Future

David Cay JohnstonBy DAVID CAY JOHNSTONSeptember 21, 20216 Mins Read

Making Sense of Big, Scary Budget Numbers

How much would you be willing to invest for a better future for yourself, today’s youngsters and beyond?

Would you be willing to invest $3 a day?

That’s more than the gross upfront cost of President Joe Biden’s human infrastructure bill.

Sadly, that’s not how news reports describe the American Families Plan. Across the board, our major news organizations cite a big, scary and ultimately meaningless number: $3.5 trillion.

To grasp what a huge and meaningless number that is, imagine putting matches to dollars bills. If you lit one greenback per second it would take 110,985 years to burn all that money.

Folks who make at least $100,000 per day would bear 86% of the cost of Biden’s human infrastructure plan.

But the Biden plan money won’t be consumed; it will be invested.

When our Air Force planes and Navy ships burn kerosene and marine diesel fuel, tax dollars used to buy that fuel are shot out as exhaust. That’s tax dollars consumed.

Biden’s plan adds value, making each dollar invested today worth more dollars in the future by increasing incomes, creating private-sector jobs, increasing more business profits and raising more tax dollars as the economy grows.

Human Scale v. Big, Scary Numbers

At DCReport, we try to make numbers human scale. That means we start with the big, scary and incomprehensible $3.5 trillion gross cost and divide by 10 because the money would be spent over a decade.

Next, we divide the $350 billion per year by 332.8 million Americans as of this writing. Then we divide that by 365 days to get $2.88 per day per American ($11.52 for the iconic family of four).

And how much is $2.88? It was less than the average price of a cup of coffee in 2019. Gourmet coffee shops that year charged on average $4.24 per cup.

Most Would Pay Nothing

Now the best news: That $2.88 per day won’t cost you a penny if you make less than $165,600, analysis by the Tax Policy Center shows. Years of experience have demonstrated that its computer model reliably forecasts the costs and benefits of tax policy changes.

Biden’s plan would reduce federal taxes for eight out of 10 households. The poorest 48 million households would pay $620 less in taxes. That means the poorest Americans would enjoy a 4% increase in their after-tax income. That’s the equivalent of two extra weeks of pay each year.

Families making $91,800 to $165,600 would pay on average $120 less in federal taxes. It’s not much, but also it’s not a tax increase.

Now consider people on the 80th to 89th rungs of the income ladder, people who make $165,600 to $243,000 in total income. Their taxes would go up, but by just $420 on average, less than half the price of a cup of coffee per day.

The Richest Pay

The burden for the Biden human infrastructure plan would fall overwhelmingly on the 120,000 highest income households in America, people whose annual income ranges from $3.6 million to several billion dollars annually.

The folks who make at least $100,000 per day would bear 86% of the cost of Biden’s human infrastructure plan. They were also the primary beneficiaries of the Trump 2017 tax cuts, repeating a quarter of the tax savings. This is more like a take back of a tax favor financed with borrowed money than a tax increase.

Yes, we have Americans whose annual incomes are in the billions of dollars. One example: Larry Ellison collects almost $1.8 billion a year in dividends from Oracle, the company he launched in 1977 with a federal government contract. And that’s far from all of Ellison’s income.

How the Richest Benefit

The top one in a thousand households would also reap huge benefits from the Biden human infrastructure plan, making them even wealthier over time.

The richest among us would benefit because America will be investing in a better educated, more productive workforce not burdened by student debt, which holds back the formation of families, home buying and all the spending that goes with furnishing and setting up a family domicile.

A more productive workforce with more after-tax income means most would have more money to spend on the goods and services offered by the wealthiest families and the businesses they invest in, own control. Voila, government policy that helps the many also makes the already rich richer while making the creation of new riches more likely.

How Most Americans Benefit

My life is an example of how taxpayer investments in citizens more than pay for themselves. The $8,960 that federal taxpayers invested in my college and postgraduate education over seven years under the War Orphans Educational Assistance Act has been paid back many times over in federal income taxes. Indeed, the inflation-adjusted value of that taxpayer investment in me was paid back in full just from taxes on royalties from Perfectly Legal, the first book in my award-winning trilogy on the American economy.

More broadly, one of the smartest if not the smartest federal investment ever was the GI Bill, officially the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944. The GI Bill is what enabled a Seattle grocer’s son named Bill Gates to become a lawyer and, in turn, give his son the money that launched Microsoft with jobs that poured money into federal coffers.

The GI Bill doubled the number of college degree holders in 10 years and resulted in more education, higher incomes, and less poverty. And this was despite the racist and sexist details of the GI Bill that kept many Black Americans and women who served from participating. The Biden plan has no such barriers, though once enacted, DCReport will scrutinize the final legislation looking for any subtle discriminatory features that Congress may slip in.

When Republicans and a handful of Democrats declare that they will vote against the American Families Plan, here is what they are really saying, you should:

pay higher taxes

not get as much in benefits as you could for those taxes

pay higher prices for prescription drugs

endure more medical bills

have your pockets drained to pay for childcare and eldercare

Irrational Tax Hatred

And why? Because the ideological and irrational anti-tax crowd, which denounce all new taxes as bad, wants to ensure that the already best-off Americans can have more now instead of the more prosperous future we could all enjoy.

We would be a poor country today but for massive taxpayer investments in the future like the GI Bill and the related War Orphans Act. The way to think about human infrastructure is that it’s not spending, like lo those fossil fuels consumed by military planes and ships, but an investment in a better and all-around wealthier American future.

At a gross cost of $2.88 per day, the American Families Plan is a bargain. At a net cost of less than zero, only fools would say no.

David Cay Johnston

David Cay Johnston is the Editor-in-Chief of DCReport. He is an investigative journalist and author, a specialist in economics and tax issues, and winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Beat Reporting.

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"In contrast, though, Congress spends very little time discussing the defense budget, which, at its current rate, would cost $7.78 trillion over the next ten years. That amount is significantly higher than the defense spending of any other nation in the world. In 2020, the U.S. spent $778 billion on defense, making up 39% of our overall spending."

One of the most important sentences I have read in the last five years. In this sentence lies the "rub" so to speak.

7.78 Trillion dollars and no Republican OR Democrat is challenging that number or trying to reduce military spending to do infrastructure.

IF corruption were not driving American "Democracy" there would be loud cries to shrink that fantastical military budget and move the money to useful infrastructure projects. New schools. Roads that can actually be driven. High speed rail.

But, the truth is, corruption IS driving American "Democracy". All of the military contractors have paid off all of our congressional representatives so that they get their funding.

And guess what? Military spending is SOCIALISM. Companies on the welfare dole. Their employees all welfare recipients.

Last but not least: When was the last time you heard of or saw a military contractor employee was/is was Black? Hispanic?

Those companies are bastions of white segregation no matter what their career websites show as the header photograph.

It is time for America to stop funding welfare for useless planes that never fly, useless wars we never win, and lazy government paid employees who never deliver.

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I want to give a shout out for the Senate’s 51-50 confirmation of Robert Chopra as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which might otherwise be lost in media coverage of this Congressional meltdown. Chopra worked hand-in-glove with Senator Warren to create this unprecedented consumer protection agency which recovered nearly $12 billion for about 27 million consumers in its first five years.

Under Trump there was a concerned effort to emasculate, then abolish, CFPB. Now with President Biden’s strong support and the Republicans kicking and screaming, Senator Warren’s child is again full throat in protecting consumers’ rights.

As the street fight over two major infrastructure bills continues, personally I would trade one for a successful John Lewis voting law. Unless this Manchin-supported bill can be passed, perhaps with some finagling of the filibuster, at the state level Republicans will succeed in making the right to vote a Republican-granted privilege, putting a Republican thumb on the election results in 2022 and subsequently.

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“More progressive Democrats, led by Pramila Jayapal (WA), who chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus, believe the Democrats were elected to pass laws that help ordinary Americans who have felt unrepresented by Republicans.”

When I read this line, I can honestly say that I have never felt really felt represented in government until Progressives came along. That they’re fighting for plans to help working families - Men & Women, but which would primarily help women, just blows my mind.

My mother worked in & out of the home when my youngest sibling was in elementary school in the 1980’s. She worked so damned hard. Looking back, I think she did it because my parents marriage was on it’s last legs and with no work history to put on a resume (on top of no college degree), she knew she would have been in seriously big trouble as a single parent, likely working multiple jobs and feeling overwhelmed & guilty about her children, while my father would have been fine, but frustrated about having to clean his home & feed himself. She never had the opportunity to support herself because she died a few years later. I chose not to marry.

I look at what Republicans are doing, starting with ending a woman’s right to choose to continue a pregnancy and know it’s not going to end there. Ending access to abortion is a train wreck for women, especially low & middle income women, married or not. They didn’t even have the decency to put programs in place to mitigate the consequences before taking this action in Texas.

No, Republicans aren’t going to end there. They’re going to continue to push so that women are in their proper place, in the home and under men’s thumbs, without doing anything to protect the women just like before, which is why women preferred to have decent ways to support themselves outside the home in the first place. They’ll mess with birth control access, access to higher education & job training, and civil rights protections, etc., to push women out of the workforce.

I pose this task & question to all who think it is better for women to go back to being home with their parents until they’re married and then be housewives, staying out of the workforce:

For a whole month, look at all the men you know very carefully.

-Observe how they treat women (family members, friends, employers & women in authority, co-workers, female employees, neighbors, strangers, etc.).

-Observe how they treat people in general. Are they considerate of their neighbors, are they tolerant of others, do they listen to other people’s opinions, etc.

-Observe how they treat their pets. Are they cared for by others and just get the fun parts? Do they consider them pests to be ignored except when they feel like giving attention? Are they abusive? Do they treat animals/pets like beings deserving of consideration?

After you have done all this, I want you to ask yourself with all seriousness, whether or not you would willingly put yourself at their mercy for the rest of your life.

If the answer is no, then please protect women’s rights to control their own bodies and their destinies. Perhaps join #WomensMarch2021 Saturday October 2, 2021 in your area.

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At least now that the real split in the Democratic Party has been once again revealed for all to see in the delayed votes on the infrastructure packages, they have at least the time to hunker down and ensure passage into law of the essential Voting Rights Bills on which the two parts have formally agreed. It would seem to me to be a little more strategically important at this time. When death is staring you in the face, have courage...first ensure survival and then deal with the issues of "succour" afterwards rather that being suckered into your own suicide by nicety and overwheaning respect for outdated, undemocratic rules.

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On the split within the DEMS, supplementing Stuart Attwell's comment: it's all very well to characterize broadly what "progressive" and "moderates" claim to stand for, but we need ALSO to consider which states or districts the respective folks represent. The vast majority of "progressives" come from safe DEM seats, and are not willing to consider that such seats alone do not constitute a majority of the House OR the Senate. Many "progessives" appear to think, mistakenly, that their (clear) majorities are the majority, period. The loss of 13 House seats in 2020 should have been a signal to them that this is not the case. Blame it on gerrymandering if you want, or - perhaps more correctly, on mixed-loyalty suburban districts that have been tossups for decades: the "moderates" who represent those districts are not wrong to fear that their seats will go to the REPS in 2022 if the REPS get away with their current "socialism!" messaging, which claims (wrongly) that the 3,5 trillion dollar "soft infrastructure" package will be financed by still more borrowing, when in fact it will be financed by taking back some of the tax gifts DT awarded to REP doners. The best way to get both "wings" of the DEMS to sing from the same page might be to get the right messaging clear, simple, and out there - to tell folks straight up what the bill is designed to do and how it will benefit them, individually.

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Thank you Heather.

Why does everything have to come down to threats and adverse fighting?

I'm so incredibly sick of all of this bullshit.

When I was in the grocery store last night, I walked past a woman who was still wearing her hospital uniform. We are having a classic pissing match between the unvaccinated Heathcare workers and the hospitals. It's sickening the number of nurses and hospital workers who refuse to be vaccinated. Those that refuse will be terminated and denied unemployment. I wholeheartedly agree with this action.

To the point, I asked this nurse if she was vaccinated. She faintly smiled and said "yes, I am" and looked down to the floor. I patted her shoulder and thanked her for her commitment to her profession. She looked up at me with tears streaming down her face and said, " thank you, you have no idea how much that means to me." Here in Syracuse NY we are demeaning the Healthcare workers who are vaccinated. It's a pretty f*cked up City, isn't it.

I don't ever remember feeling so bad for someone who did the right thing.

What have we become?

Be safe. Be well.

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So let this sink in: Republicans are opposed to helping the Afghans who they complained we were not being removed from Afghanistan fast enough. Republicans don't support fighting the pandemic through vaccinations. And Republicans don't support vigorous consumer protection.

But wasn't it exciting to read that they failed on those three issues?

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Sickening what 45 spews forth to his followers, and disheartening that running this country falls along party lines rather than what's most helpful for this country and its people. Still I will continue trying to make a difference locally, and if enough individuals can also find the time to take action, there's still a chance we could save our democracy.

Ngl though, tonight's Letter makes me fear we might not succeed.

We must persist.

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If "spending $3.5 trillion on human infrastructure" provides people with hope to pursue life, liberty, and happiness, then bring on the "entitlements."

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Time to ignore that bastard and focus on the dark money train funding him....somehow all his years as the great businessman (who specialized in bankruptcies and jilting the workers who contracted with him) has gilded his gray matter with expertise about

"horrible assaults, and sex crimes", and the ins and outs of immigration. Whaaaa? Why - ever -

use his name in print?

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“The first is about how the Democrats should interpret their victory in 2020. “

Two races. President and Congress.

Biden won by just over 7 million votes because he was not Trump. Any candidate, other than Sanders, could have beaten Trump.

Democrats lost 13 seats in the House.

Perhaps a rejection of the policies of the Democratic Party. Perhaps some Republicans were so disgusted with Trump that they voted for Biden but couldn’t bring themselves to vote for the policies of the Democratic Party. Lots of speculation on that one.

Stacy Abrams personally delivered the Senate. 👏🏻👏🏻

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I am glad that Cotton was unsuccessful in his bid to amend the bull to stop aid for Afghan refugees. The Dems won that hand. Now, we wait and see if Manchin’s revised bill persuades any Repubs to come over to the “lighter side”. I have many doubts.

How TFG still gets any mention or airtime is beyond me. The least we hear about him, the better. Quite frankly, I only want to read his obituary.

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