For some Joe Biden has already exceeded expectations. For others his economic program is nowhere near enough to address the climate crisis and American decline. While his Covid relief package has seen billions dispensed immediately, the Jobs Plan proposes to invest $35 billion in green R&D over eight years – less than Americans spend annually on pet food.
So how radical is President Biden? Is there such a thing as ‘Bidenomics’? And does the new President represent a break with the orthodoxy of Democrat predecessors such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama?
Discussing all those questions on the UK’s Downstream with Aaron Bastani is Adam Tooze, Professor at Columbia University.
The video interview runs about an hour, which is long to watch something on a computer screen, but I think it is worth taking the time. Tooze has a wide range of information, a powerful analytical mind and a sharp tongue. He takes a global view rather than an American view.
All this makes him interesting. He is, possibly, a little more inclined than I am to regard politics as a clash of opinions than a struggle for power or a conflict of interests.
The video below gives the story of “Convoy,” the 1975 country music anthem to the American trucker. It tells how the song came to be written, and how country music historically has spoken to American working men.
I’m old enough to have enjoyed “Convoy” when it first came out, and was glad to come across the video giving the background. If you’re of my generation (or not), maybe you will, too.
One encouraging thing is the growing bipartisan sentiment for breaking up giant corporations such as Amazon, Facebook, Google and Walmart.
Matt Stoller’s BIG Substack blog is good source of information on business monopoly and the anti-monopoly movement.
A guest poster, Sam Haselby, pointed out the other that the Ivy League universities are very like monopoly businesses.
They have positioned themselves the gatekeepers to the affluent life. Like the big retail chains and tech companies, they are able to thrive because of their financial strength, while their smaller competitors, with smaller margins of survival, go under.
Here are some highlights of his post:
Since the pandemic began, 650,000 jobs have disappeared in American academic institutions. More than 75% of college faculty in the U.S. are contingent workers or non tenure-track.
Meanwhile, as of 2020, the aggregate value of the endowments of the richest 20 U.S. schools rose to over $311 billion, all of which are subsidized by taxpayers through the tax-free treatment we offer nonprofit educational institutions.
The common joke, that Harvard is a hedge fund with an educational arm, is not so far off.
[snip]
In 1940, the acceptance rate at Harvard was eighty-five percent. In 1970, it was twenty percent. This year, for the class of 2025, it was 3.4 percent.
On the surface, a far more selective Ivy League seems to support the notion of meritocracy as something approximating what Jefferson characterized as the purpose of (unrealized plans for) free public schooling in 18th century Virginia: “the best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish annually.”
In practice though American meritocracy has become skewed to elite reproduction.
The economist Raj Chetty has found that nearly 40 of the country’s elite colleges and universities, including five in the Ivy League, accept more students from families in the top 1% of income earners than from the bottom 60%.
Computer scientist Alison Morgan recently released a study examining 7,218 professors in PhD granting departments in the United States across the arts and sciences. She found that the faculty come from families almost 34% richer than average and are twenty-five times more likely than average to have a parent with a PhD. Faculty at prestigious universities are fifty times more likely than average person to have a parent with a PhD.
American meritocracy has become a complex, inefficient, and rigged system conferring a series of “merits” on ambitious children of highly educated and prosperous families.
Bertrand Russell once wrote, “Most people would sooner die than think; in fact they do so.”
I thought of that when I read this Reddit thread of stories by physicians, nurses and other medical workers about treating (or trying to treat) Covid-19 patients who think Covid-19 in a hoax.
Human nature can be unbelievably perverse and irrational. Also, very noble. My hat goes off to medical practitioners who risk their own lives and health to treat people who think they are their enemies.
CRITICAL RACE THEORY: an introduction by Richard Delgado and Jean Strafancic (2017) is a college textbook about an idea that is transforming the USA.
Supporters of CRT—Crits for short—claim that the only thing holding back black citizens of the United States is the racism of white people, including unconscious racism and the legacy of past racism.
Their goal is to make us aware of how racism works so we whites will yield our privileged place in society to blacks.
CRT rejects the old liberal ideal of civil rights, which is to guarantee all individuals equal rights under impartial laws.
The claim is that this ideal only deals with obvious forms of racism and prevents rooting out racism in its deeper and more subtle forms.
In some parts of American life, CRT has become a creed to which you must swear allegiance if you care about your reputation or career.
Being an old-fashioned liberal myself, I am taken aback by how quickly CRT theory has taken hold in academia, journalism, the liberal churches, and government and corporate administration.
I read this book because I wanted to understand CRT from an authoritative source and engage with its arguments.
According to the textbook, there are two main schools of CRT.
“Idealists” hold that racism arises from “thinking, mental categorization, attitude and discourse.” The way to fight racism is to change “the system of images, words, attitudes, unconscious feelings, scripts and social teachings by which we convey to one another that certain people are less intelligent, reliable, hardworking, virtuous and American than others.” (p.11)
“Materialists” hold that what matters is that race—for whatever reason—determines who gets “tangible benefits, including the best jobs, the best schools and invitations to parties in people’s homes.” (p.11) The way to fight racism is to eliminate racial disparities in access to jobs, education, credit and the other good things of life.
By analogy, the same ideas apply to other oppressed groups (Hispanics, native Americans, women, LGBTQ people, the disabled and so on) in regard to their defined oppressors.
Obviously there is truth to all of this. Obviously racial prejudice—past and present, conscious and unconscious—has a big impact on American life. Obviously it is a valid topic of research and debate.
As a specialized social science research agenda, CRT could make a good contribution to human knowledge, in dialogue with other research agendas—for example, sociological and anthropological research into group differences, and how they contribute to success or failure.
The shape of society has multiple causes, and if you insist limiting yourself to one, you risk becoming a dangerous fanatic. This would be true whether your single explanation is economic self-interest, class struggle, religious heritage or something else. CRT is no exception.
I’m opposed to treating CRT as unquestioned dogma because I’m opposed to treating anything as unquestioned dogma. But I also have problems with CRT specifically, not so much because the theory is wrong as because of what it leaves out.
With the fall of Communism in Russia in 1991, the USA found itself an unrivaled global power. Two factions in the U.S. governing establishment—the deep state, the establishment, the power elite, call them what you will—decided to keep it that way.
They set policy all through the Clinton, G.W. Bush, Trump and Obama administrations, and they continue to set policy today.
Neoconservatives sought full spectrum military dominance for the United States in every region of the world. Aside from the love of power for its own sake, they thought this would forever secure the United States from any military threat.
Neoliberals sought to give U.S. banks and global corporations access to every region of the world as a source of customers, raw materials and cheap labor.
This meant suppression of socialist and nationalist regimes that opposed foreign domination of their economies, and, above all, any regime that refused to do business in U.S. dollars.
Other motives are loyalty to alliances with Saudi Arabia and Israel and avoidance of the humiliation of obvious defeat.
No doubt there were and are individuals in the U.S. power structure who sincerely believe in using U.S. power to promote democracy, human rights, a “rules-based international order” and the like. But they are not the decision-makers. They are only allowed to speak when their ideals happen to coincide with U.S. policy goals.
The sources of U.S. power.
The main source of U.S. power is the dominance of the U.S. dollar in conducting world trade.
This gives the U.S. government the power to borrow money to finance the world’s most expensive military establishment, and not worry about paying it back.
The U.S. Navy dominates the world’s sea lanes, and the U.S. Air Force dominates the air over poor countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. This allows bombing with impunity.
By using air power and flying killer drones, special operations forces and subsidized foreign fighters, the U.S. military can wage war without large-scale sacrifice of life.
The Central Intelligence Agency has a record of plotting the overthrow of left-wing governments and installing U.S.-friendly dictators. Latin Americans have a joke: There will never be a military coup in the United States because there is no U.S. embassy in Washington, D.C.
Another source of U.S. power is the thousands of weapons in its nuclear arsenal, the largest in the world. The only nation with a comparable arsenal is Russia. This means that no other nation except Russia can rule out the possibility of a nuclear attack.
The power of the dollar also gives the U.S. government control of the financial bottlenecks of world commerce, and impose sanctions and embargoes on foreign countries without having to worry about retaliation.
Much of the world’s commerce flows through the New York money center banks. This gives New York banks the authority to impound the funds of nations such as Iran and Venezuela. It also gives federal judges in New York jurisdiction over such things as Argentina’s settlement with his creditors or Ecuador’s fine of Chevron for environmental violations.
The SWIFT system—Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, based in Brussels—is a messaging system used by banks to transfer money and communicate information. Being cut off from the SWIFT system means being cut off from the bulk of the world financial system, and SWIFT enforces U.S. sanctions.
The World Bank and International Monetary Fund are dominated by Americans. They have a record of insisting that debtor countries impose “austerity”—higher taxes, fewer government services, higher prices and lower wages. The debtor countries have to sell national assets and open up to U.S. and other foreign investors.
The 2014 coup in Ukraine came after the incumbent President decided to take a Russian loan instead of an IMF loan. The new government took the unpopular IMF loan.
Click to enlarge.
The threat to U.S. power.
The greatest threat to U.S. power is neither Islamic terrorism, nor Russian subversion, nor China’s growing industrial power.
It is the replacement of the U.S. dollar as the medium of exchange for doing world business. Without dollar supremacy, all other sources of U.S. power would collapse.
This is from a message by my e-mail pen pal Bill Harvey. It’s as good an analysis as I’ve seen lately. .
Whether my speculation on the continuing US presence in Afghan has much to do with their intransigence there, I can’t see the pressure-on-Iran angle as water under the bridge, whatever the status of the nuclear deal.
There are at least these factors: –
Long-time obsession, certainly 1979 on, with Iran for many of the people with a say in making the decisions. –
Iran’s role in MEast:
US fealty to Israel.
US- Saudi relationship, though not as firm as it used to be, remains in operational high gear.
Iran’s reach throughout the region- Hezbollah; the Houthis; the Palestinians; the Assad regime; the ascendant position of the Shias in Iraq, courtesy of the Bush II gang.
What am I missing?
Yes, there’s the pivot to Asia where I agree our greater focus should be, but these factors in MEast won’t be overlooked any time soon.
– Iran in US-Europe entanglements- finance capital and energy policy, where the US squeeze on Europe has all but slipped away. And NATO, which has taken a hit recently from Trump (even a broken clock is right twice a day), will continue to be a sore point, especially when the Afghanistan post-mortems begin and many European commentators will be asking “How did we ever get into THAT?”
– Iran itself has been and continues to be a big plum for imperial gazers. In addition to all the other factors I list here: oil; other resources? – natural gas in the field in the Gulf and co-administered with Quatar is the largest reserve in the world; 75 million relatively prosperous (or could be) souls- quite a market opportunity (The Burger King in Pristina, tennis shoes, movies, bank loans for mega-dams…); and quite a few hands to work the small assembly industry that once was growing in Iran; yet another “threat” for military producers and their flunkies to use to gas up Congress (as if they need it). … …
– Internal Iranian politics- properly speaking, not a factor for this list, but a factor: Who in Iran, of whatever political persuasion, could sensibly trust the US on anything?
– THE UPSHOT: The imperialists are between a rock and a hard place. Everywhere their options are limited by the will of others and most of those limited options have obvious unhappy downsides for them. Their stumble-bumbling is rooted in this predicament. It’s dangerous.
Willingness to donate to a political party is a measure of how strongly you support it. I came across a couple of graphs that show how the depth of support for Democrats (measured in donations) exceeds support for Republicans.
Double click to enlarge.
The top chart shows the number donors to the Trump and Biden campaigns from various occupations; the bottom chart shows the same thing from various institutions. The size of the circle indicates the number of donors; the intensity of the blue for Biden or red for Trump indicates how much of a majority they had with each group.
Sam Kriss is a British blogger, new to me, who wrote a hilarious but insightful takedown of the Trump administration, with a sideswipe at Joe Biden and the Black Lives Matter protests.
A detailed analysis of the vote shows only a little change from 2016. The election hinged on a narrow margin of victory in a few key states – less than 1 percent in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona and only 2.6 percent in Michigan.
Donald Trump, strangely enough, did best where COVID-19 was worst and unemployment was highest. He probably has a rock solid 40 percent of the electorate behind him, and he is still a kingmaker in the Republican Party.
Barring some unlikely great achievement by President Joe Biden that will make voters’ lives noticeably better, the coming elections are likely to be a continuation of the back and forth struggle of the past 20 or 30 years.
Joe Biden faces extraordinary problems, and he is not an extraordinary statesman. Ted Rall argues that he probably won’t complete his first term, for both health and political reasons.
The U.S. government announced a withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, but said assistance to Afghan national defense and security forces will continue. This likely means continued bombing and missile attacks launched from outside Afghanistan, plus secret Special Operations forces, Pentagon contract forces and CIA operatives.
So-called scientific racism is nonsense. On the other hand, the idea of identity based on common ancestry is powerful, unifying and non-falsifiable. It is the most common basis of nationalism.
The question is whether peace is possible in a world of nationalisms based on ancestry.
When nationalism is based on ancestry, a nation’s people are taught that they are like members of an extended family (usually a patriarchal family, headed by a father-figure) and that there is a bright line between members of the national family and all others.
Japan and Korea are two nations in which this idea is strong. Japanese mythology tells how the Japanese islands were created by the gods and their Emperor is the descendant of the sun goddess; Korean mythology tells how the Korean people were specifically created by the gods.
President Kennedy called the United States a nation of immigrants. Nobody would ever say that of Japan or the two Koreas. Nobody would ever call these nations multi-cultural.
The Han Chinese, probably the world’s most successful ethnic group, also have a strong sense of national unity. Unlike the Japanese and Koreans, they have a history of being able to absorb foreigners, including conquerors such as the Mongols and Manchus, through intermarriage and cultural assimilation.
The assimilation process is now going on, in a brutal way, with Tibetans and Uighurs. I think the reason the Vietnamese fear the Chinese more than they ever feared the French or us Americans is because of the real possibility that assimilation by the Chinese could end their existence as a nation.
Major auto companies’ production in 2020 vs. total value of their stock
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One of the ancient Greek historians—I forget whether it was Thucydides or somebody else—wrote that the Athenians in the early days of their city chose leaders they thought were the wisest and most virtuous, but as they grew prosperous, powerful and complacent, they chose leaders that were the most entertaining.
My friend Bill Elwell sent me a link to a post about how, in American life today, your ability to get the public’s attention matters more than what you actually accomplish. Click on Red Bull, Elon Musk and Matt Gaetz to read it.
What do swaying bridges, flashing fireflies, clapping audiences, the far side of the Moon, and beating hearts have in common? Their behavior all has something to do with synchronization. In this video, Veritasium explains why and how spontaneous synchronization appears all the time in the physical world.
Business Insider India reported on how excavator operator Abdullah Abdul-Gawad risked his life and worked 21-hour days to free the Ever Given, the skyscraper-sized container ship stuck in the Suez Canal.
Then Abdul-Gawad was not only virtually ignored, but at the time of writing had not received his overtime pay..
Describing the scene that faced him at work [on March 23], Abdul-Gawad told Insider it was “really quite something.” “It was awe-inspiring,” he said.
The 28-year-old, who has been operating excavators since university, said he and his colleagues worked 21-hour days, barely sleeping – and still had not received their overtime pay.
Freeing the Ever Given was an international effort, with winches, dredgers, tugboats, and excavators all brought in.
But Abdul-Gawad was the man who was literally at the rock face of the problem. Once he got to the base of the ship, there was no choice but to start digging.
In his estimation, the Ever Given’s bow was lodged about six meters, or 20 feet, higher than where the ship ought to have been floating. Its stern was also sitting on the opposite bank, and the sideways ship was blocking all traffic.
To approach the base of the vessel, he built a makeshift “bridge” from rubble he dug up, allowing him to get closer.
The image of the little excavator gave the world unparalleled meme fodder, but for Abdul-Gawad the situation was far less funny – it was dangerous. Under the looming sides of the ship, he feared destabilizing the ship and having it topple onto him.
“The thing is, I was terrified that the ship might list too far to one side or the other,” he said. “Because if it fell onto its side on me, then it’s goodbye me, and goodbye excavator.
“If you see the size of the ship and you see the size of the excavator, it is absolutely terrifying.”
In 2005, some 170 Palestinian civil society organizations—labor unions, professional associations, women’s organizations, resistance committees and others—called upon the world to boycott Israel, divest from Israel and sanction Israel.
Their movement has given rise to a huge backlash. The British government, some 32 U.S. states and the German cities of Bonn, Frankfurt and Munich refuse to do business with anyone who supports BDS.
The BDS movement has been condemned by the parliaments of Canada, Germany, Austria, Spain, and the Czech Republic, as well as the U.S. House of Representatives. President Biden opposes BDS, although he says there is a First Amendment right to support it.
The United States is committed to giving Israel $38 billion in military aid over 10 years, starting Oct. 1, 2018. For decades, the U.S. has given more military aid to Israel than any other country. In the past few years, it has been second only to Afghanistan.
What does BDS call for? And why is it considered so dangerous? The BDS movement, in its own words, calls for:
1. Ending Israel’s occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall.
2.Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality.
3. Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN Resolution 194.
Until Israel accepts these demands, the BDS movement favors boycotts, divestment and sanctions:
BOYCOTTS involve withdrawing support from Israel’s apartheid regime, complicit Israeli sporting, cultural and academic institutions, and from all Israeli and international companies engaged in violations of Palestinian human rights.
DIVESTMENT campaigns urge banks, local councils, churches, pension funds and universities to withdraw investments from the State of Israel and all Israeli and international companies that sustain Israeli apartheid.
SANCTIONS campaigns pressure governments to fulfill their legal obligations to end Israeli apartheid, and not aid or assist its maintenance, by banning business with illegal Israeli settlements, ending military trade and free-trade agreements, as well as suspending Israel’s membership in international forums such as UN bodies and FIFA (internatiional footfall)
The Palestinian Authority, which controls the West Bank, does not support the BDS movement. It instead favors boycotts of businesses that actually operate on the West Bank. Its leaders hope for a two-state solution, in which Israel continues to exist, but Palestinians have genuine sovereignty in their own land.
Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, does not officially recognize Israel’s right to exist.
∞∞
Israel’s barrier wall as of 2011. Click to enlarge.
Let me look into this in more detail
‘Israel’s occupation and colonization of all Arab lands”
When Britain in 1948 decided to end its rule of Palestine, the United Nations proposed a partition plan between Jewish and Arab areas.
The Arab League refused to accept the plan, and troops from Egypt, Jordan (then called Transjordan), Syria and Iraq invaded.
When fighting ended, Israel controlled all the areas awarded by the UN and much of the Arab areas. Jordan controlled the West Bank and Egypt controlled the Gaza Strip. About 700,000 Palestinian Arabs were driven out of Israel into the West Bank and Gaza Strip, where most of them and their descendants have remained ever since.
In 1967, after several more wars, Israel wound up in control of these territories. There was talk of a “two-state” solution – that the Palestinians would give up fighting against Israel in return for a greater or lesser degree of self-government on the West Bank and Gaza.
“dismantling the Wall”
The Wall refers to some 300-plus miles of security fence through the West Bank, cutting off Palestinians from some of their land near the border and from access to other land occupied by Jewish settlers. The International Court of Justice has ruled the fence illegal.
Over the years, some 400,000 Jewish settlers have moved into the West Bank. They are mostly ultra-Orthodox Jews who believe God has granted them the right to the land.
It isn’t possible to understand Zionism without understanding that Jews have a basic, understandable fear of being wiped out.
In medieval times, Christians regarded Jews as Christ-killers.
In modern times, blood-and-soil nationalists regarded Jews as disloyal foreigners.
Both forms of antisemitism were existential threats.
One of the doctrines of Christianity is that Jesus is the prophesied Jewish messiah. The question arises: Why don’t the Jews recognize their own messiah?
One easy answer is that Jews must be an exceptionally wicked people. And from there, it is an easy to to saying they must be persecuted, killed or expelled.
In modern times, Jews were allowed out of their ghettos to participate in civic life. But a new question arose. The basis of nationhood was blood and soil—a group of people of the same lineage occupying the same territory.
But Jews are of different lineage, and they have no territory. How do they fit in with modern nationalism? They don’t. And from there, it is an easy step to regard all Jews as potential or actual traitors.
This form of antisemitism inspired the Dreyfus case., in which a French Jewish artillery officer was falsely accused of treason. The older form of antisemitism inspired the Beilis case, in which a Russian factory manager was falsely accused of the ritual murder of a Christian child.
Justice eventually prevailed in both cases, but the founders of the Zionist movement believed that Jews needed a homeland of their own—not just as a refuge from antisemitism, but because they were a nation with the same right to a homeland in which they were in the majority..
That was one of the roots of Zionism. The other was a fundamentalist religious nationalism, inspired by Biblical prophecies, that links the Jewish people to their ancient homeland. There are fundamentalist Christian Zionists, based on the same prophecies.
Zionism in its early years was a controversial movement among Jewish people. Jews in western Europe and North America mostly regarded themselves primarily as Americans, Britons, French, Germans and so on who happened to be a different religion than their fellow citizens.
This changed during the Second World War. Hitler’s attempted genocide of the Jews was matched by an unwillingness of Allied nations, including the USA, to accept more than a token number of Jewish refugees. The British government did its best to prevent Jewish immigration to Palestine, lest they provoke the Arabs into revolt.
I am old enough to remember the Allied war propaganda during the Second World War. Hitler’s antisemitism was not emphasized. Knowledge of the Holocaust was suppressed. I think now that Roosevelt, Churchill and other Allied leaders feared to give credence to Hitler’s claim that the war was being fought on behalf of the Jews.
After the war, Europe was filled with “displaced persons” camps. All the DPs had homelands to which they could return, except for the Jews. So a lot of them headed for Israel.
Invading a country and driving out the inhabitants is now regarded as a crime against humanity. But if I had been one of those Jewish DPs, I wouldn’t have cared. All I would have cared about was having a place I could call my own.
Of course, if I had been a Palestinian Arab at the time, I wouldn’t have cared about the plight of the Jewish refugees. I wouldn’t have seen any reason why I should lose everything because of events in Europe.
There are certain resemblances between the present-day USA and Germany in the last days of the Weimar Republic.
We have an ineffective government that’s unable to deal with major problems or rein in its military.
We have increasing numbers of Americans who’ve given up on trying to change things by means of politics.
Many see no point in voting or following politics. Others think the only hope for change is in street protests.
Along with this is a loss of confidence in all sources of authority—government, religion, science, academia and journalism—and a hunger for something new.
Ross Douthat wrote a column in the New York Times wondering whether the history of the Weimar Republic could repeat. I think there are other, more likely ways that American democracy could break down, which I will get to. But let me examine the Weimar script first.
While there are similarities, there also are big differences between Germany 90 years ago and the USA today.
American political parties don’t have paramilitary auxiliaries. Neo-Nazis and avowed racists are few. Compare the turnout for the “unite the right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 with the massive Black Lives Matter demonstrations last year.
But all this could change if there was a repeat of the Great Depression of the 1930s, particularly if it was accompanied by a humiliating military defeat.
Here’s how things could play out. This isn’t a prediction, just a possibility.
In the wake of economic collapse, the streets of American citizens are filled with rioters, including extreme radicals and extreme nationalists. A nationalist demagogue is elected President, and industrialists and the military look to him to restore order. Congress votes him the power to impose martial law, which he does. Martial law is never revoked.
The fascist movements in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s arose from a breakdown of social order and a fear of Communist revolution. The same conditions could arise in the United States, except that revolutionaries wouldn’t necessarily be Communists and the President who imposes permanent martial law wouldn’t necessarily be a nationalist or a right-winger.
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The conservative Christian blogger Rod Dreher sees another path to totalitarianism—a kind of low-level bloodless Stalinism in the name of what’s called identity politics or “anti-oppression” or “wokeness.”
Individuals have every right to define themselves on the basis of race, sex, gender or any other attribute, and band together with others to defend their rights and advance their interests. I would never deny that people are held back by prejudice, and have a right to organize to overcome discrimination.
The problem is that believers in wokeness have embedded themselves in institutions, and demand not only that people subject to those institutions passively accept their ideas, but actively endorse them.
They also demand a certain kind of way of saying things, so you can get in trouble by saying “all lives matter” instead of “black lives matter.”
That’s how the new ideology resembles Stalinism and Maoism. They, too, demanded not only passive acceptance, but enthusiastic support expressed in a prescribed vocabulary and a required show of penitence for not measuring up.
A recent public opinion poll showed that six in 10 Americans have political opinions they’re afraid to share and three in 10 fear that their political views could harm their job prospects. Half of all strong liberals would fire a business executive known to have donated to the Trump campaign; three in 10 strong conservatives would do the same to a Biden donor.
I don’t equate this to Stalin’s mass executions or the Gulag. But I do think there’s a widespread and well-founded fear of getting into trouble by inadvertently saying the wrong thing or offending the wrong people, and I do see people afraid to speak their minds as I think free Americans ought.
Some people make a practice of searching social media to find things that people have said that could be considered objectionable, and then using this information to attack their reputations and careers.
Dreher fears the emergence of a social credit system like the one in China, where everyone’s every move is tracked through surveillance technology and social media, and people are rewarded or punished according to the acceptability of their behavior.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pointed out that Joe Biden’s $2.25 trillion-dollar infrastructure plan isn’t all that big, when you consider that it’s going to be spread out over 10 years.
Biden himself proposed a $7 trillion-dollar plan while campaigning, as Krystal Ball noted on her TV show. Bernie Sanders proposed $11 trillion.
The Congressional Progressive Caucus has proposed $10 trillion. Even Joe Manchin of West Virginia, possibly the most conservative Democrat in the Senate, suggested $4 trillion.
The President has limited himself by proposing to finance it on a pay-as-you-go basis. Since infrastructure contributes to future economic growth, it makes sense to finance it by borrowing, the same as taking out a mortgage on a house or any other long-term investment.
Politically, there is little to gain by holding back. Senator Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce would be just as opposed to it if it were $2.25 billion or $2.25 million.
There are a lot of good things in Biden’s plan. It’s bigger and better than anything Presidents Trump or Obama tried to do. But is it enough? Is it a first step, or is it all there’s going to be?
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