There is something better happening at the moment than in the Clinton (certainly) or Obama (probably) presidencies. Though Biden is officially to the "right" of Obama (certainly) or Clinton (possibly—way to the right of Hillary Clinton, anyhow), he seems to find himself leaping into things that are "left". Why would that be?
One possibility is that there's some kind of disconnect between the "left"-ness of the president's personal identity and the "left"-ness of the things she or he does. Is that possible?
In "Joe Did What?" news, President Biden posted a video reaction to the
upcoming vote of the 6,000 workers at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama
as to whether they should become the
first workers in Amazon history to be represented by a union
(the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union):
“Workers in Alabama, and all across America, are voting on whether to organize
a union in their workplace,” Mr. Biden said in a direct-to-camera address
posted on the White House Twitter page, after a recent pressure campaign by pro-union groups pushing him to weigh in on the drive.
“Let me be really clear: It’s not up to me to decide whether anyone should
join a union,” he said. “But let me be even more clear: It’s not up to an
employer to decide that either.”
Yes, sir, the second sentence was more clear than the first. Thank you.
Amazon's inveterate opposition to unions is well known (that's what torpedoed
their plan for a Long Island City headquarters, more than anything else,
making it impossible for Mayor de Blasio to keep supporting the deal), and the
company has been willing to descend to a near–Roger Stone level of dirty
trickery to stop them, as in this Alabama case, as Sarah Jones reports at New
York:
Country club crowd lining up for a Biden speech in Detroit, 9 March 2020. Photo by Jeff Kowalski, AFP/Getty, via Wall Street Journal.
I Hear America Kvetching
by Senator Rafael Edward Cruz, Esquire, BA (Princeton), JD (Harvard)
They look at Donald Trump and the millions of people who went to battle
fighting alongside him and they’re terrified.
They want him to go away. Let me tell you this right now:
Donald J. Trump ain’t going anywhere,
The Republican Party is not the party of the country clubs,
it’s the party of steel workers and construction workers and taxi drivers and
cops and firefighters and waitresses. That is our party!
these deplorables are here to stay!
Every one of you has a platform.
Every one of you has a voice.
The corporate media wants to silence these voices.
David Brooks outraged by the decadence of the times, in which the career advice you got from Econ 101 isn't even true ("How to Get Really Rich!"):
My main message is that if you want to get rich, don’t invent a new and useful product, start a company and try to sell it. That seems risky. Put the effort into entering a clubby line of work in which legislators and professional associations are working to make you rich. It’s easier!
Instead of becoming a risk-taking entrepreneur, you should take the soft option of going to med school so you'll never have to worry about competition—
Or, as Driftglass hints, maybe you should become a columnist for The New York Times! According to Jonathan Rothwell's A Republic of Equals: A Manifesto For a Just Society (2019), "writers and authors" come 11th on the list of the 20 professions dominating the 1%, as measured by their home values.
I know I shouldn't bother at a time like this, but no. None of these things should be called "socialism". This probably came from a kind-hearted and justice-loving person, but it uses a worthless, nonsensical rightwing pollution of the word "socialism", according to which the word means or probably means "giving cash for nothing to people who probably don't deserve it". That is not what it is supposed to mean.
At its narrowest, in the definition you probably learned in middle school, socialism is the name of a concept in political economy, of a kind of developmental midpoint between ideals of "capitalism" and "communism",
Carrizo Springs after the Trump administration set it up for children in October 2019—nobody explains why they closed it after a month, perhaps it's because they'd succeeded in making all the children "Remain in Mexico" by that point. Via NBC News.
There's a lot of frothing going on on the aspirational left over today's report by Sylvia Foster-Frau/Washington Post of the reopening of a facility for unaccompanied teenage asylum seekers at Carrizo Springs, TX, the first such place to be opened under the Biden administration, being regarded by everybody from Mehdi Hasan to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as the return of the cages, which it isn't, let alone the return of Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III and his concentration camps.
It's in fact a pretty good thing, and a sign of much better to come: a serious effort to not get overwhelmed the way the Obama administration did in 2014 by a surge in the number of kids struggling without their parents through Mexico to the border, and make sure that every kid gets as quickly as possible to the sponsors awaiting them, mostly family members already established in the US, and that their cases get heard while they're in a safe place.
Much respect and warm feelings toward attorney general nominee Merrick
Garland, but I also enjoyed what looked to me like subtweeting skill in the
written version of his opening statement for today's confirmation hearing:
Ted Cruz may have thought so too, because in his "questioning" at the hearing
he brought in what you might call an argument by Preemptive Whatabout, where
you don't wait for your opponent to give you a name before you respond with
your whatabout, but rather trot it out in advance—in this case forestalling
the Barr with a dig at Obama's first attorney general, Eric Holder.
We don't all love Holder a hundred percent, I realize. I personally think it's
a divided legacy, with very good work in the civil rights area (including,
I'll say this to the end, in his handling of the 2014-15 unaccompanied minor
migrant crisis, "cages" and all, as comes clear when you compare it with
Sessions and his crimes against humanity in 2017) and his very inadequate
response to the crimes committed by bankers and insurers in the 2007-08
financial crisis. And I'm fond of the idea of Holder as Obama's anti-racism
translator, if you know what I mean, expressing thoughts Obama didn't feel he
could afford to express for himself.
But Cruz's remarks pushed me into one of those rants:
Called a "Tomahawk" because it can be used as a weapon. No longer on the menu at Trump's
BLT Prime in Washington, where the largest steak is now the
36-ounce Porterhouse
at $102 and advertised as shareable.
Can't understand why this nutty algorithm keeps delivering your coke-addled
video rants to my TL. Most incompetent censorship I've ever seen.
pic.twitter.com/d3xIwQf6JK
