The largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich

About a year ago I discussed the book Tyrant, Shakespeare on Politics by Stephen Greenblatt. One of the tyrants discussed by Greenblatt is the English King Richard III. But what if Shakespeare portrayed Richard III not as the man actually was, but how the following Tudor dynasty portrayed him? Richard III, the last of the Plantagenets (Wikipedia says he was the last of the Yorks) was followed by Henry the VII, the first of the Tudors. And the Tudor line, especially Henry VIII, is the fodder of a great number of novels, plays, TV series, and movies because of how bad they were. My Sunday movie was The Lost King, based on a true story. That story is that the bones of Richard, lost since his death in 1485, were found under a car park in Leicester in 2012 (so we know how the movie ends). The woman behind the excavation was Phillipa Langley, an amateur historian. She lives in Edinburgh and is inspired to do the search after seeing Shakespeare’s play. Phillipa gets help through the Richard III Society, those who believe that the king’s reputation was slandered by the Tudors. She also sees an apparition of Richard, who sometimes answers her questions, and sometimes not. The big one he doesn’t answer is: What happened to the two nephews in the Tower of London? (I’ve read a science fiction story about the boys, posing another answer to what happened to them.) Eventually she gets to the University of Leicester and the City of Leicester. She’s dismissed because she is an amateur, a woman, and claiming that Richard was not what historians and the royal family say he was. Eventually they help her – and then claim the credit. IMDb added that Langley was not the first to accurately conclude where Richard III was buried and how that land was now used. She was the one to act on her conclusion and dig up the car park. I enjoyed this one. Though Shakespeare may or may not have accurately portrayed Richard III, that play is accurate in portraying how a tyrant may rise to power, what happens when in power, and how the tyrant falls. Last evening I was in my car and listened to about ten minutes of the NPR show Fresh Air. The topic of this episode was the book Original Sin by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson. In this 44 minute segment Terry Gross talked to Tapper. This is the book discussing Biden’s mental decline and the cover-up by Jill Biden and senior staff at the White House in the last two years of his presidency. Tapper says that cover-up – insisting that Biden was mentally fine while covering for him on days when he obviously wasn’t then insisting he was healthy enough for another term – is why we have the nasty guy in the White House. In the part I heard Tapper lays out a pretty good case. That included an excerpt of Biden being interviewed by the Justice Department in October 2023 about what he knew about mishandling presidential documents found on his property. The deposition was the same day that Hamas attacked Israel. I remember the uproar when the interviewer said the DoJ would not bring charges because the jury would see Biden as a forgetful old man and would not convict him. In that excerpt Biden did indeed sound like a forgetful old man. During the last 18 months of Biden’s tenure, on days where he wasn’t good, the senior staff acted as a five-person presidential board. When Biden had to speak publicly on a not-so-good day he speech was prepared for him and he read it from a teleprompter. He could still do that. I didn’t listen to the whole episode, so maybe my question was answered. That question is: Why did Jill and senior staff cover up the decline? What were they trying to protect? Joe’s reputation? Sure. But his reputation would be better if he made a graceful exit before a decline. The chance to keep a Democrat in the White House? That didn’t work. The good of the country? That backfired. As I thought about it I became more disappointed in what the Bidens chose to do. First, of all, they should have prevented him from running for a second term. That was Tapper’s point. Even better, they should have convinced him to resign or used the 25th Amendment to have the Cabinet force him out, handing the presidency to Harris. That would have given her time to show she was presidential material. It would at least given challengers time to mount a campaign and go through the primary process. It would also shifted the “too old” meme onto the nasty guy. Even though what Tapper documented is likely accurate, showing the “too old” messages of the campaign were justified, the book still feels like a hit-job because there is no corresponding book on the nasty guy, detailing his own mental decline and his much more obvious poor mental health and dangerously fragile ego. Alas, too many people – billionaires, Republicans, white nationalists, and the MAGA faithful – like what the nasty guy is doing (at least until the faithful discover his agenda biting them in the ass) and don’t care about his mental state. Emily Singer of Daily Kos reported on the big bill (no, it’s not “beautiful”) being considered in the House. It hasn’t passed the House yet, and I’ve heard an important committee voted it down. It would also have a hard time in the Senate. But if it did pass... Singer begins her report:

President Donald Trump's "One Big Beautiful Bill" that House Republicans are trying to ram through the chamber would be the "largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in a single law in U.S. history," according to a report published Wednesday by the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. The bill, if passed, would lead to at least 13.7 million people losing their health insurance. It would also impose massive cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program—better known as “food stamps”—that would put nearly 11 million people at risk of losing the ability to feed their families. And it will make college more expensive by eliminating subsidized federal student loans, meaning loans would start accruing interest as soon as students take them out rather than once they leave school. And Republicans are doing all of this only to partly pay for an extension of the tax cuts they passed in 2017, which have overwhelmingly benefited the richest taxpayers while giving the lowest-income Americans pennies.

The bill is in a bit of trouble because some Republicans say it cuts too much and other Republicans say it doesn’t cut enough. Lisa Needham of Kos reported that Republicans have found a group they can raise taxes on. Republicans don’t mind raising taxes. They “just hate to be perceived as raising taxes.” And one way to do that is to tax people whose complaints they can ignore. They propose to tax remittances. A remittance is sent by a person in the US to family in their home country. This is usually money the people back home desperately need. The money is usually sent through a financial institution set up to protect the transaction. Republicans propose to tax those remittances at the 5% rate, but only if sent by a noncitizen. This idea has been floating around for a while. It won’t raise much money for covering the huge budget deficit. But it will make immigrant lives harder – which is what Republicans really want. In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted tweets by Aaron Fritschner who quoted Brendan Duke who included a chart by the Center on Budget and Policy and Priorities. The chart shows the change in income both in percent and dollar amount for various income groups for year 2029. For the top 10% their income increases by 3.4% though for the top 1% that is $52,050 a year. Percentages drop from there. The second 20% (from the bottom) get an increase of 0.6% or $260 in a year. The bottom 20% would lose 0.5% or $100 a year. Duke:

The bill is even more regressive when you look at 2029 when tax cuts for families expire & tax increases resulting from cuts to ACA premium tax credits grow larger.

Fritschner added:

But here is the thing Per JCT, Congress’ official scorekeeper, the bottom 20% of households – tens of millions of Americans – will see a Tax Increase beginning in 2029. Republicans are cutting taxes for billionaires and raising taxes on working people. This isn’t a nit-picky point based on a technicality or an asterisk. It isn’t analysis from a far left group, the White House sent these tables out and posted them on their website.

In the comments exlrrp posted a meme from Occupy Democrats:

A tiny Chinese company owned by the same people that own TikTok just bought $300,000,000 of $Trump Coin. Now why do you think they did that? Foreigners are literally bribing Trump with hundreds of millions to get favors!

Also, paulpro posted a cartoon by Christopher Weyant. Two girls are talking. The girl of color says, “My first choice college is the one with an endowment big enough to protect me from the government.” In today’s news was a story about South African president Cyril Ramaphosa visiting the White House. The nasty guy lectured him about “white genocide” which Ramaphosa tried to refute. But like the infamous visit by Ukraine’s Zelenskyy it didn’t go well for the visitor. Last Saturday Oliver Willis of Kos wrote about the Republican fixation on white genocide. This fixation includes the nasty guy admitting fifty white South African refugees not long ago while refusing refugees from other countries. The SA refugees were welcomed because of this false white genocide. Willis explained:

The “white genocide” myth is being invoked in U.S. politics because conservatives long ago embraced the politics of victimhood. Even when the right is in majority control of U.S. political institutions, like right now, it still claims that it’s a persecuted minority. ... This mentality perfectly combines with the conservative embrace of white supremacy. Claiming that a “white genocide” is underway, even when the data disproves it, becomes a way of being racist while simultaneously laying hands on the mantle of victimhood.

Also, the whites of South Africa (and no doubt in America) felt the law that distributed land from white to black owners (as in back to the original owners) was an “attack.” And an attack on their land was equivalent to an attack on their body. I thought of the claim of victimhood this way: When those at the top of the hierarchy (and Republicans declare they are) feel challenged in any way they will claim they are the victim, even if their position in the hierarchy is still quite secure. An attack on their position in the hierarchy is to them equivalent to an attack on their body. They feel they are the victim because in their position in the hierarchy no one is supposed to be able or allowed to challenge them. No one is supposed to be able to make them feel uncomfortable. This article in Kos linked to one in Salon by Michael Bader from January 2024 discussing claims of victimhood. Some of Bader’s points: Those claiming to be victims use it as a rationale for striking out at others without guilt. These acts of violence are reframed as revenge or a twisted form of self-care. Conservatives can use fear to claim liberals are trying to replace them. That makes their listeners feel they are victims. That, in their minds, justifies violence. The “victims” become victimizers. For example, if an election was “stolen” stealing it back makes moral sense. They don’t need to feel guilty about hurting others because they quickly come up with a story on how those “others” were first hurting them. Bader also compared the use of “victim” by liberals and conservatives. Liberals identify actual victims, people actually injured by racism, war, or other form of oppression. They try to defend these victims and care for them. Conservatives use victimhood as propaganda, to stir up a mob. They then use the mob to get rid of the democratic norms that restrain the political aims of the conservatives. Those political aims are always to oppress some other group. Because of that incitement to violence claiming to be a victim is dangerous. Denise Oliver Velez of Kos, in her Caribbean Matters series, reported that Pope Leo has Louisiana Creole ancestry through his mother, Mildred Martínez. Her parents were described as black or “mulatto” in historical records. They lived in New Orleans Seventh Ward, a Catholic area and melting pot of people with African, Caribbean, and European roots. The pope’s brother John Prevost said that while growing up in Chicago he and his brothers always considered themselves to be white. Passing for white has a long history in the US. But his ancestry would have marked him as “colored” in Louisiana as recently as 1982.

It is more Alito’s court than Roberts’

A couple days ago I wrote about Speaker Mike Johnson claiming to be a modern Moses ready for a Red Sea moment in which his adversaries are swallowed up by the sea – a lot of non-believers suffer before the believers get to the Promised Land. My friend and debate partner replied privately, describing what happened to Moses after the Red Sea incident. Before Moses and the Israelites reached the Promised Land Moses did something to displease God and he died before entering. Does that imply that if Johnson is claiming to be a modern Moses he won’t live to see the Republican Promised Land? Or maybe he’ll just lose the Speakership? I’ve long known that conservatives can be very selective in what parts of the Bible they read. My friend and debate partner gave me a copy of the latest Consumers Report with its latest car ratings. He said I might be interested because of the number of electric vehicles CR has declared as unreliable. Many auto companies don’t yet know how to reliably make EVs. Two days later – this morning – NPR aired a story of reporter Camila Domonoske visiting the Consumers Report garage for testing cars. Part of the report was how CR has had to change how they evaluate EVs, now different from how they evaluate gasoline cars. For example the testers test the range of an EV by driving it until it dies and needs to be towed back to the shop. The segment ends with Domonoske talking to Jake Fisher, who runs the CR auto testing program, about the reliability problems. Fisher says they’re growing pains. All the technology is new. It will get worked out. And once EVs more reliable people will love them for their speed, low effort in driving, and how quiet they are. And this evening NPR’s Scott Detrow talked to Consumers Reports autos reporter Keith Barry and to White House infrastructure advisor Mitch Landrieu. The other big concern about EVs is will the driver find a charging station in time? This is a big question now because building out charging stations is part of the infrastructure bill passed a couple years ago and only now are the first chargers being installed. Landrieu said don’t worry. Starting up takes time. The build out should progress quickly now. Joan McCarter of Daily Kos discussed a report by Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak of the New York Times on how much the overturning of abortion rights was orchestrated by Justice Samuel Alito, and by extension Leonard Leo and his dark money empire that got several conservative justices on the Supreme Court. First, Alito kept rescheduling the case, an unusual nine times, until after Ruth Bader Ginsberg died and her replacement Amy Coney Barrett was nominated, confirmed, and had time to settle into the job. When Alito wrote the decision he lifted whole passages from the amicus briefs from people in Leo’s dark money network. Then Alito (well, someone) released the draft of the ruling which froze the text. Justice Gorsuch signed on without requesting changes. Within days so had Thomas, Barrett, and Kavanaugh, again without requesting changes. That prevented Roberts from attempting a less sweeping decision. That means this is more Alito’s court than Roberts’. And the public sees it as such. Or maybe it’s Leo’s court. In a post from ten days ago Charles Jay of the Kos community reported that Sen. Angus King of Maine has changed his stance on gun control. That was prompted by the mass shooting in Lewiston, Maine back on October 25. He is joined by Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico to introduce a new bill to prevent rifles from being automatically reloaded. Instead of restricting guns the new bill is about making guns less deadly. In this case it limits “large-capacity ammunition feeding devices” to ten rounds or fewer. Rep. Jared Golden of Maine has also changed his position. He no longer opposes an assault weapons ban. Alas, the King-Heinrich bill doesn’t go as far as banning assault weapons. Even so, it is a good step in that it will reduce gun violence. Any bill that does that is good. Getting it passed is doubtful. EJ Dionne of the Washington Post wrote a column about the King-Heinrich bill. It is not behind a paywall. A few things he wrote: Yes, Republicans routinely oppose gun-safety measures.

But it’s also true that a fair share of Democrats representing rural areas are reluctant to join their big-city colleagues in support of laws too often cast as expressions of disrespect for traditions of gun ownership. The price of culture war politics is steep when it comes to gun regulation.

A provision in the bill says that if an existing gun violates the new magazine limits the owner can give it to a family member or sell it to the government. They can’t sell or give it to anyone else.

King and Heinrich have yet to find Republican co-sponsors, and — no surprise — the National Rifle Association wasted no time in coming out against the proposal. But the gun lobby’s power is slipping, and pollsters have found that parents’ worries about the safety of their children in school are increasingly driving the gun debate. One sign of change was passage last year of modest reforms in the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the first gun-safety measure enacted in nearly 30 years. Yes, it’s astonishing that so many politicians who tout how tough they are on crime are eager to declare their loyalty to guns and those who manufacture them rather than to the people whose lives they threaten. But winning this fight requires pragmatism and persistence. Here’s hoping that some practical senators from gun-friendly states can turn the tide.

Drew Sherman tweeted a cartoon showing an elephant saying:

We don’t have a gun crisis, we have a mental health crisis! I’m not gonna do anything about either of them, I just wanted to clarify.

This is fun! The White House posted a video of members of Dorrance Dance tap dancing through various rooms of the White House to the sounds of Duke Ellington’s jazz interpretation of a movement from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker. It’s quite good and enjoyable. Better yet conservatives are pissed over it, though their reasoning doesn’t make any more sense than it usually does. The dance and decorations certainly look a whole lot better and more festive than when the nasty guy’s wife was in charge. Maybe they yearn for her strange décor?

Cruelty as a part of American politics

Greg Dworkin, in his pundit roundup for Daily Kos, quoted Adam Serwer in the New York Times. Serwer wrote that the Republican politics of cruelty and exclusion started long before the nasty guy and will continue long after. There has always been a drive for some leaders to restrict blessings to a select few. What the nasty guy accomplished was to show Republicans how much they could get away with. Serwer names quite a few cases where he and they got away with a lot and still do. And the voter suppression laws they push are to make sure they can keep getting away with it. The word “cruelty” above was intentional. Sarah McCammon of NPR spoke to Adam Serwer about his new book The Cruelty is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump’s America. I’ve heard that phrase many times over the last few years and didn’t know it came from an essay Serwer wrote in 2018. This is some of what Serwer said in that interview:

Most people think of cruelty as an individual problem. And it is that, but what I'm focused on in the book is cruelty as a part of American politics, specifically the way that it is used to demonize certain groups so you can justify denying people their basic rights under the Constitution and exclude them from the political process.

Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy, gave a speech in office declaring the black man is not equal to the white man and deserves to be a slave. But after the Civil War he wrote in his journal that slavery had nothing to do with the war. The most racist people tell themselves that their views aren’t racist. People still do that.

What I mean by cruelty is specifically the demonization of particular groups in order to deny them rights or exclude them from the polity. It's one thing to say that we're not going to allow in people on the basis of religion. It's another thing entirely to say that we are going to shatter families deliberately because we want to dissuade people from trying to come to the United States for a better life. We're always going to have disagreements in a democracy. That's what democracy is for. It's for reconciling disagreements. But what is not necessary is a politics where one side is trying to disenfranchise or exclude the other party's voters in order to maintain a grip on power. And that's what I mean when I talk about cruelty on a political level. ... The politics of cruelty that Trump's employed are a product of a system that encourages a minority of the country to engineer the government so that they are no longer accountable to the public. And Trump's real innovation was showing how much of that the Republican Party can get away with.

Jeff Singer of Kos Elections reviewed the results of the November election through the legislative districts in Michigan. My state is currently highly gerrymandered. Singer showed the GOP advantage by rating all the state House districts by the ratio of the vote for Biden and the nasty guy in the district and comparing that to their ratio in the state overall. Then he looked at the district in the middle. Biden won the state 51% to 48%, yet this middle district went to Biden 47-51. In the much smaller Senate Biden took the median district 44-54. That’s 13 points to the right from the statewide vote. Thankfully, a citizen’s redistricting commission is hard at work to keep this from happening again. I mentioned this next Michigan news briefly in a previous post. Kerry Eleveld of Kos reported the Senate Oversight Committee, led by Republicans, issued a report on the 2020 election. Every Republican on the committee supported the report. The key sentence:

There is no evidence presented at this time to prove either significant acts of fraud or that an organized, wide-scale effort to commit fraudulent activity was perpetrated in order to subvert the will of Michigan voters.

Eleveld wrote:

No mass contingent of dead voters, no suspicious 100% precinct turnouts, no supposed ballot dump in Detroit that propelled Joe Biden to victory in the state, which he won by some 150,000 votes or three percentage points. In a separate statement, Oversight Committee Chair state Sen. Ed McBroom said, "We must all remember: 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof' and 'claiming to find something extraordinary requires first eliminating the ordinary.'" McBroom also called Trump's claims "ludicrous" in an interview with Bridge Michigan and said there's "good reason" to believe the conspiracy pushers were "purposely defrauding people."

Some party member are still pushing for a fraudit in Michigan. Others are concerned that obsessing over the 2020 election will alienate suburban voters in 2022 and 2024. Even with this report – supported by Republicans – the party is still pushing for new voter suppression laws. There are photos defining the character of Mrs. Nasty Guy. I don’t need to share them. SemDem of the Kos community believes a photo from a tweet by Kate Bennett defines the character of the current First Lady Dr. Jill Biden. A middle school student is nervous about getting a vaccination and Dr. Biden is there to hold his hands and shield his eyes from the jab. I’ve missed having a compassionate First Lady. A few weeks ago I heard on Canadian radio about a piece of music titled Considering Matthew Shepard. Yeah, this is about the young man, back in 1998, who was badly beaten and tied to a fence in Laramie, Wyoming. His murder caught national and world wide attention. The latest issue of Between the Lines, Michigan’s LGBTQ newspaper, had a list of five queer things one can do. The University Musical Society in Ann Arbor would stream their Pride offerings into July. This piece of music was one of them. Today I got onto the UMS site and saw this work would only be streamed through tomorrow. Glad I checked. I guess I’m watching this evening. Considering Matthew Shepard was written by Craig Hella Johnson for his thirty member vocal ensemble Conspirare. He played the piano and there were another eight or so instruments. The piece was first performed in 2018. It is about 90 minutes. Through the piece we hear from Matt (excerpts from his journal) and his parents, from the fence that held him up, from the killers, from Fred Phelps (remember him?) and his Westboro Baptist Church, and from the community. The performance included images projected behind the singers. What I saw this evening was, alas, not the whole piece. This video is an hour. In addition to the performance there were scenes of early rehearsals and performances, discussions by the composer, Judy Shepard, and others, and news clips of the events of the time and of related events since then, such as Obama signing the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Act, and the Pulse massacre in Orlando. I now wonder if I can see a video of the whole piece without the commentary. I would like to see and hear more than what was a part of this documentary. I hope I don’t have to wait for a local choir to take it on.