Subsidizing small, rural states is not efficient

My Sunday movie was The Fabelmans, directed by Steven Spielberg. This is Spielberg’s origin story, how he became interested in making movies. It is based on real events, though enhanced for dramatic purposes. Sam Fabelman represents Spielberg as a child. As a boy he uses his dad’s camera. By the time he’s a teen he has his own camera and editor and he’s creating his own films. Some are stories he created with his buddies as actors, some adapted from family events. And through editing those films he begins to understand his family dynamics. There are also scenes of high school where he seems to be the only Jewish kid around. Of course it’s a very good movie. All the lead actors did an excellent job. I enjoyed it. I finished the book Arthur and Teddy are Coming Out by Ryan Love. In the opening chapter Arthur is 79 and he and his wife Madeleine have just celebrated 50 years of marriage. They invite their children Patrick and Elizabeth over for dinner and at the end of the meal Arthur announces he is gay. Elizabeth does not take it well. When her son Teddy hears why his mother is so upset he realizes he can’t yet tell her he is also gay. He must wait until Elizabeth is more accepting of her father. We know that the marriage of Arthur and Madeleine has been happy and they continue to be friends. Eventually we learn they saved each other from difficult situations. After coming out Arthur faces the question: Now what? He came out to be more authentic, but what does that mean to someone his age? Teddy gets an internship at a newspaper, good for his goal to be a journalist. But his mom was a well known columnist at the paper and got him the internship. So he can’t be out at work because word would get back to Mom. Ben is a fellow intern, desperate for the full time job Teddy appears to be gliding into. When Teddy hears Ben is gay we know where this is heading, though it seems to get there way too quickly. Also in the story are Teddy’s besties Shakeel, also gay, and Lexie. Teddy is out to them. It’s a warm story, with more complications than one might expect, though with happy endings. I enjoyed it. I heard in the news over the weekend a quote from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick (billionaire):

Let's say Social Security didn't send out their checks this month. My mother-in-law, who's 94, she wouldn't call and complain. She just wouldn't. She thinks something got messed up and she'll get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise screaming, yelling, and complaining. And all the guys who did PayPal, like Elon knows this by heart, right? Anybody who's been in the payment system and the process system knows the easiest way to find the fraudster is to stop payments and listen.

I knew immediately that he had just called every one of the millions of Americans who wouldn't get through the month without their Social Security check a fraudster. That claim would set up an excuse for shutting down Social Security. Emily Singer of Daily Kos has details. Since Lutnick is a billionaire his mother-in-law probably isn’t depending on her SS check and would be able to live quite well for a long time without it.

Approximately half of the population aged 65 or older living in households that receive at least 50% of their family income from Social Security benefits, and about 25% rely on Social Security benefits for at least 90% of their family income, according to a 2017 report from the Social Security Office of Research, Evaluation, and Statistics. For those Americans, missing a Social Security payment could be the difference in affording rent, food, or medical expenses. ... Lutnick’s comments raise the question about whether the Trump administration will target people who have issues with their Social Security payments, accusing them of fraud if they reach out for help and shutting off their earned benefits for good.

Over the last few days the news has been full of the story of military and intelligence officials doing a group chat on the app Signal as they work out details for attacking the Houthi rebels of Yemen. They mistakenly included Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic in the group. Of course the pundit roundups on Kos include several quotes of opinions about the mess. I’ll let you read most of them on your own. One of interest is in a roundup by Chitown Kev quoting Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo:

Especially in the national security domain many things the government does have to remain secret. Sometimes those things remain secret for years or decades. But they’re not secrets from the US government. The US government owns all those communications, all those facts of its own history. Using a Signal app like this is hiding what’s happening from the government itself. And that is almost certainly not an unintended byproduct but the very reason for the use. These are disappearing communications. They won’t be in the national archives. Future administrations won’t know what happened. There also won’t be any records to determine whether crimes were committed. This all goes to the fundamental point Trump has never been able to accept: that the US government is the property of the American people and it persists over time with individual officeholders merely temporary occupants charged with administering an entity they don’t own or possess.

The roundup by Greg Dworkin has quotes that are more about the participants responding to the scandal. Kos of Kos wrote that West Virginia voted hard for the nasty guy. Yet he’s screwing them over. Examples: Charging high fees for Chinese ships visiting US ports is making agriculture exports more difficult. Most of of WV is rural and agricultural. Also, these ships are hauling less coal, hurting the state’s coal industry. A program to help schools buy from local farmers was cut. The state would be hard hit if cuts to programs to feed the poor were enacted. Medicaid keeps their rural hospitals afloat.

Common sense should dictate that if your state is the third most dependent on federal dollars you should maybe vote for the party that supports federal funding. I know, I know, trans this and trans that. But is destroying your entire economy worth the sacrifice for that bigotry? ... It’s called the “Department of Government Efficiency,” and it turns out that subsidizing small, rural states is not efficient. Those farmers aren’t paying enough in property taxes to cover expenses, which is why urban and blue-state folks are subsidizing it. But we liberal voters were fine with paying those subsidies because we’re all American, and we’re all in this together! But if West Virginians thought the federal safety net would have their backs, boy they’re in for some disappointment.

Oliver Willis of Kos talked about the conservative obsession with erasing history – except for Confederate history. I’ve already talked about the Defense Department removing several photos of female and black heroes and removing photos of the Enola Gay, the plane that carried the first atomic bomb to Japan, because of “gay” in the name. As for the second half of the opening statement, Willis mentions several military bases that Biden renamed because the original names celebrated Confederates. The nasty guy is changing them back. Willis traces this desire for erasure to the Confederate mythology of the “Lost Cause” that tried to rewrite the causes of the Civil War. There was also President Lyndon Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That was the impetus for the South shifting from Democrat to Republican.

The right is in a quandary. It has political power, but it still cannot force millions of Americans to concede to the white supremacy that motivates much of conservative politics. That’s why it’s so driven to erase history. When Trump and his administration push for the Confederacy and try to disappear the diverse past, they are delivering on the political primal scream that the right emitted after Obama won. It’s doubtful that Trump will succeed in erasing the country’s collective memory, but like the men who tried to keep chattel slavery legal, Republicans are willing to give their crusade one last Confederate try.

Last Friday Walter Einenkel of Kos reported Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders started on a Fighting Oligarchy tour in Nevada and Arizona. They’re contrasting what Americans want the government to do with what the nasty guy, Musk, and Republicans are doing. AOC talked about Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security.

Sanders kept the focus on growing wealth inequality and the paradoxes of GOP politicians pleading poverty when it comes to social safety net programs. “We are not a poor country! There is no excuse in God's earth that people have to make a choice between food and the medicine they need to stay alive,” he said in Arizona.

On Monday Einenkel posted an update. Their rally in Denver attracted 34,000 people, the largest rally in Sanders’ career, and an estimated 86,000 showing up for the five events with another 1.5 million watching on livestream.

“When I talked about oligarchy over the years, I think for some people it was an abstraction,” Sanders told NPR on the success of the tour. Sanders explained that with the rise of Musk and President Donald Trump’s billionaire-rich Cabinet, “people understand you have to be blind not to see that what we have today is a government of the billionaires, by the billionaires and for the billionaires."

The tour caught Musk’s attention. He claimed: “The Dems just move around the same group of paid ‘protesters.’” Hmm. What would it take to haul 34,000 people to five different venues? I figure that would be close to 700 buses. Sheesh, just the logistics! Last Wednesday Singer reported:

A Republican senator on Tuesday admitted that Republicans are not standing up to President Donald Trump or co-President Elon Musk because they are scared that the richest man on the planet will spend his fortune to kill their electoral prospects.

One who is standing up is Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski. She called out the timidity of her fellow Republicans, noting their silence is because they fear being taken down. She said she would not compromise her integrity by staying quiet. And Musk may target her. After comments like that I wonder if it is all fear of Musk. I suspect many of those Republicans like what Musk is doing to the government. They’ve been searching for ways to do the same thing while surviving voter disapproval. Now that Musk is doing it for them they just have to separate themselves from his actions. Though that isn’t going all that well – Singer documents several Republicans praising Musk (or at least Tesla) and demanding Americans praise him too. A week ago Singer reported that on Fox News Musk whined about the hatred and violence from Democrats, supposedly the party of empathy. Then he said, “I’ve never done anything harmful, I’ve only done productive things.” How completely clueless can one guy be? Singer documented several of Musk’s actions and how harmful they have been. Shutting down USAID meant people in impoverished countries have died because their HIV treatments were interrupted and others have died from hunger or disease. His tightening of requirements for Social Security is harming seniors. People he claimed were getting benefits even though they were dead are harmed as they try to prove they’re still living. He has cut medical research, including treatments for cancer. He’s fired tens of thousands of federal workers and many struggle to obtain unemployment benefits because he falsely claimed they were fired for poor performance. His actions could trigger a recession. He’s at least completely clueless. This is a time to ask the questions: Harmed who? Productive for whom? From his thinking if it benefits billionaires like himself it can’t be harmful. Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, has cheers (amazingly) for Andrew Forrest, CEO of Australian iron ore mining company Fortescue.

“I’ve always found that the customer is always right, which is why we’re going renewable and moving away from oil and gas because our customers are saying, ‘we want energy but not at any cost, and if you can give us green energy at the same price as dirty [energy] then we are going to buy green every day.’ That’s my job, and that’s Fortescue’s job,” Forrest told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” on Monday. “You’ve got data centers popping up all over Europe and they want green energy if they can get it. They’ll take dirty if they can’t, sure. That’s Exxon Mobil’s and Total’s argument: ‘Well, we’re just doing what the customers want.’ Actually, you’re not. Your customers want green energy. [If the] oil and gas [industry] doesn’t want to supply green energy, guess what? Fortescue will.”