Bipartisanship must be relegated to the dustbin—forever

Yesterday I wrote about the nasty guy signing an executive order and three memoranda. The mainstream media called it four executive orders. But Daily Kos made the distinction, so I followed their example. Jessica Sutherland of Kos reinforced that point in a post late yesterday. The distinction: Memoranda aren’t orders. Which means they’re suggestions. And don’t do much.

Sutherland points out other little details of this slew of documents.

Those $400 supplemental unemployment benefits to replace the $600 Congress authorized and let expire don’t plug into the federal unemployment system at all. They look like a new program that could take months to set up. The money would come from federal disaster relief – which is supposed to have its own hugely important priorities in a year that might see a record number of hurricanes. The amount of money would last five weeks.

The order on evictions is really only a request to HUD to “consider” whether evictions should stop.

Those payroll taxes are deferred – they still eventually have to be paid.

My summary: The nasty guy won the news cycle for Doing Something, while doing very little and giving the GOP in the Senate an excuse to claim another relief bill is no longer needed. This was a campaign event.



Jenna Ellis, a senior legal advisor to the nasty guy and his campaign, gleefully tweeted:

This is actually the biggest news of the day:

President Trump said if he is re-elected, he will look into terminating the payroll tax permanently!

Neera Tandon responded:

3 months before the election they are announcing their plan to end Social Security after the election. Just so we are all clear.

Hunter of Kos wrote that what the nasty guy did was fascist, illegal, and incompetent. He also explains the whole mess.



Leah McElrath tweeted:

Trump installs a top donor to head up Postal Service. That donor immediately fires management below him. Postal Service then nearly triples rate for states to mail ballots to voters.

Trump is trying to steal the election.

I mean...c’mon. The fact that Trump is trying to steal the election couldn’t be any clearer.

McElrath then includes a tweet from Anita Kumar, a White House correspondent for Politico:

Last week, aides and advisers began pondering possible executive actions Trump could take to curb mail-in voting — everything from directing the postal service to not deliver certain ballots to stopping local officials from counting them

This is a good time to quote a thread by Sigrid Ellis

The fact that it is illegal.
The fact that there is no legal authority for this action.
The fact that there are checks and balances to prevent it.
The fact that there is no precedent.

None of that matters to the authoritarian making a grab for power.

He is ALREADY forcing federal troops into cities against the will of governors and mayors.
He is ALREADY approving the shutdown of the USPS so it can be sold.
He is ALREADY laundering money through his office into his pocket.
He is ALREADY colluding with hostile foreign powers.

The unthinkable has already happened.

Do not rely on norms, precedent, usual operations, or any other soft mode of social control.

The only thing that will stop him is a Secret Service escort out of the building after he loses the election while the Joint Chiefs stand by.

This month’s Hightower Lowdown is about Big Meat and its abuses. We’re down to three big meat companies and all three put profits over people. Serious accidents happen routinely and just as routinely are covered up. That was made more clear when these companies got the nasty guy to declare them an essential business. They did it by saying if the didn’t get that declaration the nation would run short of meat. Jim Hightower said that was a lie.

The last section of the main article uses different words to talk about supremacy:

It’s obvious that plain old greed is part of today’s corporate ethic, but we need to confront an even more repugnant enabler of avarice: Disdain for workers. Bosses harbor a deep-seated attitude that its almost 200,000 frontline meatpackers ... are lesser humans, unworthy of having their wellbeing interfere with the high calling of industrial money making. Hence, the executive-suite’s abject failure to respond to what clearly was, and still is, a fast-spreading health crisis, is exacerbated by intense, behind-the-scenes lobbying demands that the federal government force employees back into petri-dish plants. How ironic, that to justify federal intervention corporate execs deemed slaughterhouse workers “essential,” even while valuing their lives so little that they would sacrifice them to profit.

The companies blamed the virus outbreaks on the workers. The GOP took up the cry suggesting the workers were untidy and that they just weren’t “regular folks.”

What we face here is not just standard corporate minginess, but an evil mentality that reduces workers to inferior, disposable beings: It not only dehumanizes the workplace, but workers themselves. It’s bad enough that some elites have always held such beliefs, but far worse that in the case of the meat industry, this lethal dehumanization is now accepted as the guiding ethic of both corporate and governmental policy. We must call out and reject this raw immorality, because dehumanization is the key to exploitation–it opens the gates to let racism, sexism, classism, and all other isms of inequality walk in.

Yes, dehumanization is the core of what is going on and the core to all the other isms. And that is a lot more than simple “disdain.” This is supremacy at its height. The corporate execs are saying compare my life to that of my workers to see how wonderful I am. Just don’t pay any attention that I make their lives miserable so that my life will look so much better.



Dartagnan of the Kos community discusses an essay by Joseph O’Neill written for the New York Review of Books. O’Neill is a professor at Bard College. The subject is a proposal for how Democrats should govern if they win it all in November.

Start with this: Noam Chomsky described the GOP as “the most dangerous organization in human history.” O’Neill added, “Republicans cannot be trusted with meaningful power precisely because they form one of the world-historical dangers that must be overcome.”

It isn’t just what the nasty guy is doing to wreck everything. It’s also that the GOP refuses to exert any control over him. And spent at least 30 years getting ready for him.

So the Democrats, once in power, should by highly partisan. Dartagnan explains:

To be clear, by “partisan,” O’Neill is not simply recommending being “anti” any individual Republican officeholders but rather wholly embracing a clear, straightforward Democratic agenda, with an enemy clearly and broadly defined as the Republican Party. The idea of “bipartisanship” must be relegated to the dustbin—forever. This is a Democratic world O’Neill foresees, one in which there is no longer any room for Republican ideology, policy, or philosophy of any sort.

To that end, as O’Neill states, “if Democrats want to win elections repeatedly, they must enact policies that are both effective and popular with Democrats.” This, he believes, is the only way the energy of the Democratic grassroots organizations that form the Party’s base of support will stay engaged, and continue to vigorously vote and re-vote the Democrats back into power.
…
Yet O’Neill also recognizes that for this to occur, so-called “moderate” Democrats must acknowledge that the energy of the Party is now centered among its most progressive members, and specifically that “moderates must accept that their conservative assumptions have been overtaken by events.”

I’m well aware that the GOP has been refusing bipartisanship since 1994 and Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America. That was to foster selfishness. Now refusing bipartisanship would promote the community.

To make O’Neill’s proposal happen Democrats need to foster both trust and dignity. O’Neill suggests tactics and measures. Here are some of them:

* Implement progressive policies without watering them down. Include taxes on the wealthy, Green New Deal, and improved health care. And don’t apologize.

* End the filibuster [which I learned was created so that Southern politicians to maintain Jim Crow].

* Continually brand the GOP as a disaster Americans can’t afford to ever let happen again. They can’t be trusted with power.

Being the party that isn’t the nasty guy might get Democrats elected in 2020. But that won’t do any good in 2022.



Anoa Changa of Kos Prism reports on a few initiatives to get youth to serve as poll workers for the November election. It’s a job critical to democracy. Up to this year a majority poll workers were 60 and older. That was because they had the time and the sense of civic responsibility. But this year with a virus raging many of the older workers resigned. So youth are being recruited for the jobs. Perhaps it will give them a sense of civic responsibility.



A campaign group in Arkansas has submitted signatures to get a proposal for an independent citizens redistricting commission on the ballot. Of course, the GOP in the state is doing all it can to declare the signatures invalid. From the description the proposal is similar to what Michigan citizens passed two years ago.

As for the effort in Michigan the selection process is in motion and the members of the commission should be selected by the end of the month.



Some schools have already reopened. It is going about as well as one would expect – not well. One superintendent of a Georgia school district was quoted in a New York Times tweet as saying:

Wearing a mask is a personal choice, and there is no practical way to enforce a mandate to wear them.

Which prompted lots of responses, such as this one from McElrath:

Mothers who’ve had their daughters sent home because their skirts were “too short” or their shoulder straps weren’t “wide enough” would like to have a word.

D. Carlisle responded to McElrath:

Yuuup! This is nuts. They can dictate every detail of a dress code including hairstyle and color, but they can't mandate a mask? They can mandate UNIFORMS but they can't mandate masks? Come. On.

And burkinator added:

Ah well you see the actual problem is they can't practically enforce a policy they don't care about.

North Paulding High School in Dallas, Georgia, not far from Atlanta is one that opened early with insufficient virus protections. Student Hanna Watters videoed the packed hallways with few students wearing masks. She was suspended for her efforts. She has no regrets and quoted John Lewis, saying it was “good and necessary trouble.” Suspension freed her up for three days of appearing on CNN and other media outlets.