Special Saturday Edition

Just Because…

Democracy actually worked this week: the addition of 528,000 new jobs, restoring the U.S. job numbers to where they were before the pandemic and putting unemployment at 3.5%, the lowest rate in 50 years, the United States Chips and Science Act (CHIPS) and the Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics Act (PACT) passed Congress, gas prices have hit a 50-day low, al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri ‘passed away,’ and the Inflation Reduction Act looks to be passed as both Sinema and Manchin are now on board. And, as I wrote about on Friday, Kansans stepped up to defeat the anti-abortion measure proposed by the Republican legislature in that state.

Heather Cox Richardson wrote This new bill, announced by Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) on July 27, will invest $386 billion into addressing climate change and new energy development, and $100 billion in new health care spending, including extending subsidies for the Affordable Care Act. The measure will raise about $790 billion in savings and revenue over a decade. It will save money by enabling Medicare to negotiate the prices for certain prescription drugs and by beefing up funding for the IRS to enforce existing tax laws. It also will raise revenue by requiring corporations to pay a minimum tax of 15%. The measure is projected to raise about $50 billion a year for 9 years, which will be used to reduce the federal deficit by $300 billion.

She also writes that Today’s Republicans reject the idea. Instead, echoing Republican rhetoric since the 1980s, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has taken the position that taxes do not build the country, but destroy it. He says that Democrats “want to pile on giant tax hikes that will hammer workers and kill many thousands of American jobs.”

As she says above, it is the same rhetoric Republicans have been yammering about since the days of Reagan. They have since made a one-eighty from the party of Lincoln and don’t stand FOR anything anymore, with the exception of tax cuts for the extremely wealthy, guns for all, and obstructionism of anything that smacks of Socialism. As Mike Finnigan so eloquently put it several years ago, 45 years of Republicans quite deliberately propagating the monstrous lie that scientists, economists, doctors, lawyers, and all professionals with a level of expertise in certain disciplines, people who know WTF they're talking about, are to be mocked as "elites" - the enemies of their fellow citizens and their knowledge ignored by morons who couldn't find their asses in a hall of mirrors.

I just finished reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry For the Future, and so should you. The protagonists in the novel make a valid and important social argument that human kind’s necessities should not be privatized but publicly owned. A pipe dream, no?

What was it? Big parts of it have been there all along: it’s called socialism. Or, for those who freak out at the word, like Americans or international capitalist success stories reacting allergically to that word, call is public utility districts. They are almost the same thing. Public ownership of the necessities, so that these are provided as human rights and as public goods, in a not-for-profit way. The necessities are food, water, shelter, all are public goods, all are never to be subjected to appropriation, exploitation, and profit. It’s as simple as that.
Democracy is also good, but again, for those who think this word is just a cover for oligarchy and Western imperialism, let’s call is real political representation. Do you feel you have real political representation? Probably not, but even if you feel you have some, it’s probably feeling pretty compromised at best. So: public ownership of the necessities, and real political representation.

And on Climate Change and Global Warming:

What we do now creates damage that hits decades later, so we don’t charge ourselves for it, and the standard approach has been that future generations will be richer and stronger than us, and they’ll find solutions to their problems. But by the time they get here, these problems will have become too big to solve.That’s the tragedy of the time horizon, that we don’t look more than a few years ahead, or even in many cases, as with high-speed trading, a few micro-seconds ahead. And the tragedy of the time horizon is a true tragedy, because many of the worst climate impacts will be irreversible. Extinctions and ocean warming can’t be fixed no matter how much money future people have, so economics as practice misses a fundamental aspect of reality.

We have to celebrate the human victories we get…and Just. Vote. Blue.

Just an update from Friday’s post where I wrote that Alex Jones was only on the hook for $4m to the parents of Jesse Lewis…that same day the judge ordered that he pay $45.2m in punitive damages for spreading the lie that they helped stage the massacre. Bwwwaaahaaahaaaaa…

And now…