…son of a [DOT 22/2/24]

…so…I called it a bunfight yesterday…& that…undersells how much of an embarrassment parliament made of itself…by a substantial margin

This should have been the time for MPs to come together. They are always talking sanctimoniously about doing this. As if they had a monopoly on enlightenment. They alone can channel the nation’s higher power.

What we got was the exact opposite. An SNP opposition day debate designed to highlight splits in the Labour party. A Labour amendment created to prevent a split in its own ranks. One that bridged the gap between the SNP position and the Labour leadership. A Tory amendment whose only function was to knock out Labour’s, as there was hardly a cigarette paper between them, under the parliamentary precedent that government amendments kick out opposition ones on such occasions.

So there we had it. While more men, women and children were dying in Gaza, all UK parties were using the conflict for marginal, parochial gains. Just lip service to a higher calling. All claiming they cared only for bringing the war to an end. All so detached from reality they couldn’t even see they were lying to themselves. Just indulging in performative politics. Knowing there was no chance an IDF or Hamas commander was listening in. Nothing they said would make a difference. So they could say what they liked.
[…]
Finally, Hoyle returned to the chamber. He had made a decision. He would allow both the Labour and government amendments. The Tory and SNP benches went wild with outrage. And there were we all thinking that what they really wanted was for the hostages to be returned and an end to the fighting in Gaza. Silly us. There were shouts and jeers. The always pointless Desmond Swayne snarled: “Bring back Bercow.” Parliament was about to start its own civil war. So much more exciting than the one in the Middle East.
[…]
The speeches themselves were unremarkable. Except for the unusual hybrid of piety and bitterness. Everyone holier than thou. Sanctimony on their side. Everyone wanted a ceasefire. Only they wanted their own ceasefire, not anyone else’s ceasefire.

Unbelievably, it all got worse. Much worse. Just before the vote was about to be taken on the Labour amendment, Penny Mordaunt made a point of order. Having failed to get one over on Labour, the Tories were going to throw their toys out the pram and not vote on anything. Not even their own amendment. Astonishingly, Mordaunt thought she was grabbing the moral high ground. Pass the sick bag.

Cue total chaos. A vote to chuck everyone out of the public gallery and sit in private. The SNP not even getting to vote on their own motion. An emotional speaker apologising to the house.

None of this was good enough. Not nearly. And over a war. If only MPs were capable of self-reflection they would be in a downward shame spiral.

This was their finest hour.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/21/while-people-die-in-gaza-the-uk-parliament-goes-to-war-over-the-ceasefire

…I’m not about to try to tell anyone the difference between an immediate ceasefire & a humanitarian one…which…would be…more immediate…less…longer…shorter…sustainable…temporary…but everyone agreed that they didn’t agree on anything except that they all agreed it shouldn’t be allowed to continue the way it is…& this would apparently make an all-important difference…still…not everyone agrees that britain has that kind of juice to peddle that sort of influence…medhi hasan reckons joe does, though…with history as his guide

Picture the scene. An Israeli prime minister launches airstrikes on an Arab population. Civilians are killed in their thousands. An American president, stunned and shocked by the scenes of carnage on his TV screen, makes a call to his Israeli counterpart. And … within minutes … the bombing is over.

Sound crazy? Or maybe simplistic? Perhaps naive, even?

Yet, the year was 1982. What was supposed to have been a limited incursion into southern Lebanon by the Israeli military over the summer, under the leadership of Ariel Sharon, then defense minister (remember him?), morphed into a months-long siege of Beirut and an all-out assault on the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Between June and August, the Israelis cut off food, water and power to the Lebanese capital in a brutal attempt to destroy the PLO, whose fighters were holed up inside a tunnel network below Beirut. (Sound familiar?)

On 12 August, in what would later be dubbed “Black Thursday”, Israeli jets bombed Beirut for 11 consecutive hours, killing more than 100 people. That same day, a horrified Ronald Reagan placed a phone call to Menachem Begin, then Israeli prime minister, to “express his outrage” and condemn the “needless destruction and bloodshed”.

“Menachem, this is a holocaust,” Reagan told Begin.

Yes, an American leader used the H-word in conversation with an Israeli leader. Begin responded with sarcasm, telling the US president that “I think I know what a holocaust is.” Reagan, however, didn’t budge, insisting on the “imperative” for a ceasefire in Beirut.

Twenty minutes. That’s all the time it took for Begin to call back and tell the president he had ordered Sharon to stop the bombing. It was over. “I didn’t know I had that kind of power,” a surprised Reagan told an aide, upon putting down the phone.

…honestly…I’m not as convinced that biden does…when ron pulled that off russia wasn’t mid-war of attrition & less places had nuke-based stroppiness in their inventory…but…this sort of thing is harder to explain

US blocks ceasefire call with third UN veto in Israel-Hamas war [Reuters]

The truth is that the commander-in-chief of the richest country in the history of the world is far from powerless and, like every commander-in-chief before him, possesses plenty of leverage.

How do we know? First, because members of the US defense establishment say so. Take Bruce Riedel, who spent three decades in the CIA and at the national security council, advising four different presidents. “The US has immense leverage,” Riedel pointed out in a recent interview. “Everyday we provide Israel with the missiles, with the drones, with the ammunition, that it needs to sustain a major military campaign like the campaign in Gaza.”

…I mean…I don’t think if he cut them off the guns would fall silent before the day was out necessarily…but we know how obstructive bullshit in congress over ukraine has directly impacted their capabilities…so…it’s a fairly logical assumption there’s a not-entirely-crude lever there

Second, we know Biden has major leverage because members of the Israeli defense establishment – as plenty of observers have pointed out – say so, too. In late October 2023, Israeli lawmakers challenged Yoav Gallant, the defense minister, over the decision to allow (a little) humanitarian aid into Gaza, before the release of any hostages. How did Gallant respond? “The Americans insisted and we are not in a place where we can refuse them. We rely on them for planes and military equipment. What are we supposed to do? Tell them no?”

The following month, retired Israeli Maj Gen Yitzhak Brick went even further than Gallant. “All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the US,” Brick said in an interview in November. “The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability … Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”

…that’s the thing about mehdi…I for one am wary of anyone who claims certainty or clarity about a situation I can’t make sense of…but the man seldom shows any sign of having skimped on his homework…& often comes with a surfeit of receipts…sort of the way they told me certain people made a habit of in the before-times…what did they call them…oh, yeah…journalists…that was it

Third, we know Biden has the power to stop Netanyahu from killing Palestinians en masse in Gaza because … he has done it before. In May 2021, Israel bombed the strip for 11 straight days, killing more than 100 Palestinians, including 66 children. Over that same period, Hamas and other armed Palestinian groups in Gaza fired more than 4,000 rockets at Israel, killing 14 civilians. Then as now, Netanyahu rejected calls for a ceasefire – from Hamas, as well as from France, Egypt and Jordan.

But guess who he couldn’t reject? Yes, the president of the United States. “We need to accomplish more,” pleaded Netanyahu when Biden called him on 19 May, according to the journalist Franklin Foer. The president’s response? “Hey, man, we are out of runway here. It’s over.”

Two days later, a ceasefire was announced. And, less than a month later, the Israeli prime minister had been ejected from office.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/feb/21/biden-stop-gaza-bombing-genocide-israel

…that was then, I guess…but this is now…& the palestinians aren’t the only people who would still be better off with joe’s lesser evil than letting them re-instate the chaos-gibbon shitshow in his place…so it is more than a little confounding that he’s not adjusting that trajectory more noticeably…it’s not like he can’t be clear about a thing

Biden was talking about climate change when he said, “We have a crazy SOB like Putin and others, and we always have to worry about nuclear conflict, but the existential threat to humanity is climate.”

Biden has previously called others a “son of a bitch”. In January 2022, he was caught on a hot mic using the same term of abuse about a Fox News White House reporter.

Speaking to donors at a private San Francisco home on Wednesday as part of a three-day swing through California to raise money for his 2024 reelection campaign, Biden also said he was astounded by recent comments made by his likely Republican challenger.
[…]
“Some of the things that this fellow’s been saying, like he’s comparing himself to Navalny and saying that – because our country’s become a communist country, he was persecuted, just like Navalny was persecuted. I don’t know where the hell this comes from,” Biden said.

“I mean, if I stood here 10, 15 years ago and said any of this, you’d all think I should be committed,” he said. “It astounds me.”
[…]
“We don’t know exactly what happened, but there is no doubt that the death of Nalvany was a consequence of something that Putin and his thugs did,” Biden said at the White House after Russian prison officials announced that Navalny had died.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/22/joe-biden-vladimir-putin-crazy-sob-donald-trump-alexei-navalny

…shame there never seems to be a hot mic about when he calls bibi a murderous self-serving lunatic…or uses the phrase “regime change”…I don’t buy that the man actually thinks what’s happening to gaza is okay…or even necessary…hell…even people who used to try to deal with hamas from within mossad have gone on the record that they told netenyahu there were other ways to nip that in the bud

[…finna drop di link…but dem bin dropping dis in pidgin…& eviritin?]

Mr Levy – who was head of economic warfare in the Mossad, Israel’s spy agency, until 2016 – says he told Mr Netanyahu many times that Israel had the means to crush Hamas, which controls Gaza, “by using only financial tools”.
[…]
When asked if he considered there was a connection between Mr Netanyahu’s alleged reluctance to deal with Hamas’s finances and the 7 October attack, Mr Levy is unequivocal.

“Yes, of course,” he says. “There is a very good chance that… we would [have] prevent[ed] a lot of the money” that had gone into Gaza, and that “the monster that Hamas built probably [wouldn’t be] like the same monster that we faced on October 7th.”

Hamas would have needed “billions, not millions” of dollars, says the former spy chief, to build hundreds of kilometres of tunnels underneath Gaza and pay for an estimated 30,000-strong military force.

One specific funding stream, which Mr Levy says he raised with Mr Netanyahu in 2014, was an alleged multi-million-dollar investment portfolio which Israeli intelligence said was controlled by Hamas and managed out of Turkey.

Mr Levy says that Mr Netanyahu chose not to act on the information.
[…]
Hamas, which rejects Israel’s right to exist and is committed to its destruction, is much more than just a military force. It’s a political movement with financial support extending well beyond Gaza.

“We spoke about Qatar and Iran as the main sponsors,” says Mr Levy of his conversations with Mr Netanyahu. “Turkey is even, in some aspect, more important because it is a critical focal point for Hamas to manage [its] financial infrastructure.”

Panorama has been investigating documents, which had been acquired in 2020, said to reveal the extent of Hamas’s investment portfolio. They are a snapshot of an eight-month period that ends in early 2018. Israeli intelligence says they show how Hamas makes some of its money.

Some 40 companies across the Middle East and north Africa are believed to be in the portfolio, including Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Sudan, Egypt, the Gulf and also Turkey.

The alleged investments include everything from road construction, pharmaceuticals and medical equipment to tourism, mining, gold prospecting and luxury real estate projects.
[…]
Next to each company listed in the portfolio ledger is what is said to be the value of each Hamas-controlled holding, running into the millions of dollars for some of the companies – and adding up to a total value of $422,573,890 (£335m).
[…]
One of the companies sanctioned by the US is Trend GYO – a Turkish real estate firm. In the 2018 document, it is referenced several times as Anda Turk – which documents show was an old trading name, before it was renamed Trend and floated on the Istanbul stock exchange.

The 7 October attacks or, as Hamas calls them, “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood”, were recently praised by Trend’s former chairman, Hamid Abdullah al-Ahmar – who stood down in 2022 but remains as the head of Trend’s parent company.

Speaking at a conference in Istanbul in January 2024, he was filmed saying: “We meet… while the Aqsa Flood is at its peak, a sweeping and roaring flood that will never stop before the occupation of beloved Palestine is defeated.”

He went on to call on the conference to “work to criminalise Zionism as a racist and terrorist movement”.
[…]
The Turkish authorities have said they have investigated Trend and found “no abuse of our nation’s financial system” and that Turkey abides by international financial rules.
[…]
Micha Koubi, a former Israel security agency officer says he interrogated Sinwar for more than 150 hours. He said Sinwar managed to forge links with Iran by sending covert messages from prison.

In 2007, a year after Hamas was voted into power, Israel and its neighbour Egypt tightened the blockade on Gaza, both saying they were concerned about their security. Mr Koubi said that Sinwar’s Iranian connections helped him to beat the blockade.

“He sent messengers to Iran, to start the contact. He asked them to send… weapons and arms. And they agreed to help [Hamas] with everything that they need.

“That was the very beginning.”

Cash for Hamas also arrived from the Gulf state of Qatar, both overtly and covertly, according to former Mossad officer, Udi Levy.

Israel has acknowledged that some of that money was delivered in cash with its blessing. It was allocated to pay the salaries of officials in the Hamas government and provide humanitarian support for the people of Gaza.

“The Qataris [had] a special envoy that came every month, with a private jet to Rafah with a suitcase, enter to Gaza, gave it to Hamas, say hello and go back, that’s it,” says Mr Levy.
[…]
In 2019, Mr Netanyahu told colleagues in his ruling Likud party: “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas… This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.”
[…]
More recently, Mr Netanyahu has denied he wanted to build up Hamas and said he had only allowed Qatari money into Gaza to prevent a humanitarian crisis.
[…]
But, by destroying so much of Gaza and killing so many Palestinian, Israel may achieve the opposite effect.

“Iran will probably continue to arm and financially support Hamas,” says Mr Elgindy. “But more than that, as long as there is a reason for a group like Hamas to try to acquire those weapons, and those resources, and those capabilities, they will do that.

“Because the justification for it, the reasons for it, are still in place.”

Israeli PM ‘missed chance’ to cut off Hamas cash, says ex-spy chief [BCC]

…& I don’t mean to sound like that’s unpersuasive…but…there’s no end of justification or reasons to do all manner of stuff we consistently don’t do…so why are the unavoidable imperatives so rarely the ones that address things so as to avoid rather than encourage disaster?

The salaciousness of the details in Mr. Trump’s case obscures what it is actually about: making covert payments to avoid losing an election and then further concealing it. Indeed, that is how Mr. Bragg has described the case, that it is “about conspiring to corrupt a presidential election and then lying in New York business records to cover it up.”

It is entirely possible that the alleged election interference might have altered the outcome of the 2016 contest, which was decided by just under 80,000 votes in three states. Coming, as it might have, on the heels of the “Access Hollywood” disgrace, the effort to keep the scandal from voters may have saved Mr. Trump’s political prospects.
[…]
Mr. Bragg’s prosecution is the next step in probing — and, however much possible, deterring — this pattern of conduct by Mr. Trump and his display of contempt for the rule of law that every other New York business and Manhattan executive has to follow.

To succeed, Mr. Bragg will need to overcome the first impressions of the case from its critics. In this view, it is nothing more than a years-old, stale case about hush money payments to a porn star on shaky legal ground. But since the indictment in April 2023, the legal foundations of the case have been revealed to be much stronger than the naysayers suggested. A particularly strong endorsement, for example, came from federal Judge Alvin Hellerstein, who rebuffed efforts from Mr. Trump’s lawyers to move the case to federal court.

In his opinion sending the case back to state court, Judge Hellerstein seemed to endorse Mr. Bragg’s theory of the case. He noted that the evidence against Mr. Trump appeared to support Mr. Bragg’s “allegations that the money paid to [Michael] Cohen was reimbursement for a hush money payment.”
[…]
Mr. Cohen has not wavered in his account of the hush money payments, their election interference purpose and their cover-up. And perhaps most important, everything Mr. Cohen has said is corroborated by documentary evidence and other witnesses. Even after a tough cross-examination in the New York civil fraud case, Justice Engoron found that “Michael Cohen told the truth.” Prosecutors also have the benefit of learning from Mr. Cohen’s civil testimony and can focus on his consistency, corroboration and acceptance of responsibility.
[…]
Second, Mr. Bragg and his team will be confronted with the challenge of working with Justice Merchan to prevent Mr. Trump from acting out in front of the jury and thereby disrupting the case or introducing irrelevant information to try to prejudice the outcome. We all saw the spectacle that Mr. Trump created in the New York State civil fraud trial. But we also saw Mr. Trump reined in by federal Judge Lewis Kaplan in the E. Jean Carroll case, which, unlike the civil fraud one, featured a jury watching every move.

Justice Merchan is cut more from the cloth of Judge Kaplan. He is a widely respected and experienced jurist. Moreover, criminal trial rules and practice give him even more latitude than Judge Kaplan had in the E. Jean Carroll civil matter. With a jury in the box, Justice Merchan is unlikely to tolerate repeated outbursts. We got a taste of that at the hearing last week, when he repeatedly and summarily shut down frivolous objections from Mr. Trump’s counsel.

The seriousness of the prosecution can also be conveyed at sentencing. If Mr. Trump is convicted, Mr. Bragg should seek jail time. Each count of document falsification carries a term of up to four years in prison. Many individuals, including first-time offenders, are sentenced to imprisonment for this crime in New York.

Whether it comes to American business or constitutional democracy, individuals who flamboyantly and persistently flout the rules of a system must be deterred for that system to endure. That principle underlines the gravity of the forthcoming case in Manhattan and the cases elsewhere, against Mr. Trump.

There Is Much More at Stake in Trump’s Manhattan Case Than Just Hush Money [NYT]

…see…at first blush…a thing can sound a certain way

Boris Johnson withdrew from a debate with the US rightwinger and Putin interviewer Tucker Carlson after the death of Alexei Navalny, having previously agreed to the event for a $1m fee which his team says would have gone to charities for Ukrainian veterans.

…like…that sounds like boris said he’d debate the don of d’oh…& then navalny died & tucker kowtowed to pooters & the featherweight flywheel with a fringe decided it wasn’t a good look…right?

The US presenter said he extended the invitation after becoming “annoyed” that Johnson had denounced him as a Kremlin stooge after his controversial interview with Putin that failed to challenge the Russian president over the bloodshed in Ukraine.

…after…huh…would you look at that…& he thought it was a good enough look…for a price

The TV host claimed that Johnson had demanded $1m but this was rejected as untrue by Johnson’s camp, who said the sum was offered by Carlson and the former prime minister would have given the money to charities for Ukrainian veterans.

Carlson claimed he approached the former prime minister, and a member of Johnson’s team said “it’s going to cost you $1m” and “then he will explain his position on Ukraine”.

Carlson added: “I’m not defending Putin, but Putin didn’t ask for $1m … This whole thing is a freaking shakedown.”

He said: “If you’re making money off a war, you know, you can deal with God on that, because that’s really immoral.”

…but…it was navalny dying that made him reconsider…not taking a long hard look at himself being in a position to have take that kind of shit from tucker fucking carlson…I mean…how low can you go, bojo?

It is the latest flare-up in a row between the pair after Johnson used his Daily Mail column to brand Carlson “a traitor to journalism” for his interview with the Russian president.

Johnson said the presenter had betrayed “viewers and listeners around the world” for not taking Putin to task for “the torture, the rapes, the blowing-up of kindergartens” in Ukraine.

…something, something…broken clock

In the Carlson interview, Putin claimed Johnson helped scupper a deal aimed at ending the war – a claim that has been denied by the former MP and rubbished by senior Ukrainian figures.

…something, something…uh…twice in a day?

Since leaving parliament, Johnson has made millions of pounds giving speeches and making appearances, including £3.7m in 2023.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/feb/21/boris-johnson-withdrew-from-tucker-carlson-debate-after-navalny-death

…so he was looking to take tucker for a quarter’s income…give or take…how terribly noble of him…since I’m sure that was always earmarked for charity…to think otherwise would be…uncharitable?

But right-wingers seem immovable in their conviction that New York is an urban hellscape — only 22 percent of Republicans consider it a safe place to live in or visit — despite the fact that it’s one of the safest cities in America.

More generally, there’s a striking disconnect between Americans’ perceptions about crime where they live — relatively few, from either party, consider it a serious problem — and their much more pessimistic assessment of the nation as a whole. This disconnect exists for both parties but is much wider for Republicans:

[…there’s a picture here…two short bars for perception of problem locally…two tall ones for perception of those problems nationally]

This is part of a broader phenomenon. America has become a country in which, for many people, especially but not only on the political right, believing is seeing. Perceptions on issues from immigration to crime to the state of the economy are driven by political positions rather than the other way around.

To take a subject I’ve obviously spent a lot of time on: During the Biden years, most measures of consumer sentiment have been much lower than you might have expected, given standard measures of the economy’s performance. This is still true, even though sentiment has risen substantially over the past few months. There’s practically a whole genre of analysis devoted to arguing that people are actually right to feel bad about the economy because of something or other.

So here’s a pro tip: Ignore anyone who says that Americans are down on the economy without noting that the reality is that Republicans are down on the economy.

I wrote about this last week, but let me make the point again using slightly different data and graphics. The widely cited Michigan survey of consumers provides data on sentiment broken down by partisan affiliation, although it has been a regular monthly feature only since 2017. I prefer to focus on the current economic conditions index, since people might legitimately have different expectations, depending on who’s in charge.
[…]
Now, this comparison doesn’t prove that negative perceptions of the economy are all about partisanship — maybe things really are somewhat bad and Democratic partisanship is holding the numbers up — although Democrats don’t seem to experience the kind of mood swings when the White House changes hands that Republicans do. But at the very least, any discussion of economic sentiment that doesn’t take partisanship into account is missing a key part of the story.

As I wrote last week, the believing-is-seeing nature of public opinion may mean that perceptions of the economy, and perhaps crime, won’t matter very much for this year’s election: Americans who believe that things are terrible probably wouldn’t have voted Democratic, no matter what. But to take a longer view: How are we going to function as a country when large numbers of people just see a different reality from the rest of us?

Believing Is Seeing [NYT]

…a lot can depend on your point of view…& how secure your footing is when you try to look forwards

When asked what drives the economy, many Americans have a simple, single answer that comes to mind immediately: “greed.” They believe the rich and powerful have designed the economy to benefit themselves and have left others with too little or with nothing at all.

We know Americans feel this way because we asked them. Over the past two years, as part of a project with the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, we and a team of people conducted over 30 small-group conversations with Americans from almost every corner of the country. While national indicators may suggest that the economy is strong, the Americans we listened to are mostly not thriving. They do not see the economy as nourishing or supporting them. Instead, they tend to see it as an obstacle, a set of external forces out of their control that nonetheless seems to hold sway over their lives.

Take the perceived prevalence of greed. This is hardly a new feeling, but it has been exacerbated recently by inflation and higher housing costs. Americans experience these phenomena not as abstract concepts or political talking points but rather as grocery stores and landlords demanding more money.

Income inequality has been in decline over the last few years. But try explaining that to someone struggling to pay the rent. “I just feel like the underdog can’t get ahead, and it’s all about greed and profit,” one Kentucky participant noted. It is not necessarily the actual distribution of wealth that troubles people. It is the feeling that the economy is rigged against them.
[…]
There is a clear disconnect between the macroeconomic story and the micro-American experience. While a tight job market has produced historic gains for lower-income workers, many of the low-income workers we spoke with are unable to accumulate enough money to build a safety net for themselves. “I like the feeling of not living on the edge of disaster,” a special education teacher in rural Tennessee said. “[I am] at my fullest potential economically” right now, but “I’m still one doctor’s visit away from not being there, and pretty much most people I know are.”
[…]
An absence of economic resilience prevents people from spending time with family, from getting involved in their community and from finding ways to build a safety net. “The way the economy is going right now, you don’t know where it’s going to be tomorrow, next week,” a human resources employee in Indiana said. Well-being “is about being financially stable. It’s not about being rich, but it’s about being able to take care of your everyday needs without stressing.”

Stress is a rampant part of American life, much of it caused by financial insecurity. Some people aspire for the mansion on the hill. Many others are looking just to get their feet on solid ground.

One does not need to look hard beyond traditional metrics to see the prevalence of insecurity. In June, an industry report found that auto loan delinquencies were higher than they were at the peak of the Great Recession. Credit card use has swelled, and delinquencies are at among their highest rates in a decade. After hitting a historic low in 2021 thanks to the expansion of the child tax credit, child poverty more than doubled in 2022 after the tax credit’s expansion expired. Also in 2022, rates of food insecurity reached their highest levels since 2015.
[…]
The political system is supposed to make all this better. Instead, even as both major parties have vied to cast themselves as the standard-bearer of the working class, many Americans see politicians as unable or unwilling to do anything to help them. “In my democracy, I’d like to see us get rid of Republicans, Democrats,” one Kentucky participant told us. “Just stand up there, tell me what you can do. If you can do it, I don’t have to care what you are.” Many Americans seem to see Washington as awash in partisan squabbles over things that have little effect on their lives. Many believe that politicians are looking out for their political party, not the American people.
[…]
What would make the people we talked to less stressed? The ability to accumulate savings. Low-wage workers have seen their incomes rise only for many of these gains to be wiped out by inflation. And the costs of housing, health care and child care can quickly absorb even a very robust rainy-day fund. Without a safety net that can propel people into security, the threat of these costs will continue to make many Americans feel unstable, uncertain and decidedly unhappy about the economy.

A helpful starting point would be to address benefit cliffs — income eligibility cutoffs built into certain benefits programs. As households earn more money, they can make themselves suddenly ineligible for benefits that would let them build up enough wealth to no longer need any government support. In Kansas, for example, a family of four remains eligible for Medicaid as long as it earns under $39,900. A single dollar in additional income results in the loss of health care coverage — and an alternative will certainly not cost only a buck.
[…]
The Americans we listened to want resiliency so they can feel that they are in control of their lives and that they have a say in the direction of their community and their nation. They want a system focused less on how the economy is doing and more on how Americans are doing. As one Houston man observed: “We’re so far down on the economic chain that we don’t have nothing. It seems like our voices don’t matter.” But they do matter. The rest of us just need to listen.

‘It’s All About Greed and Profit’: How Many Americans Feel About the Economy [NYT]

…so…how’s it looking?

A chorus of political analysts on the center left is once again arguing that the Democratic Party must reclaim a significant share of racially and culturally conservative white working-class voters if it is to regain majority status.
[…]
However persuasive they are, these arguments raise a series of questions.

First, is the Democratic attempt to recapture white working class voters a fool’s errand? Is this constituency irrevocably committed to the Republican Party — deaf to the appeal of a Democratic Party it sees as committed to racial and cultural liberalism?

Second, do Democrats actually need more white working class voters, a constituency declining in numbers, when they are doing as well as they are with college-educated voters, who make up a growing share of the electorate?

Third, would appeals to the more culturally conservative white working class require backing off or moderating the party’s positions on civil rights, women’s rights, reproductive rights or L.G.B.T.Q. rights in a way that would cause progressives to vote for third-party candidates or fail to vote altogether?
[…]
Judis argued, however, that this approach is not adequate to “establish solid majorities capable of upending the balance of power in American politics.” For Democrats to return to their position as the dominant political party, Judis maintained that “they have to win back working-class voters.”

Disaffected working class voters, according to Judis, “have been put off by Democratic stands on free trade, immigration, crime and affirmative action, and by social programs that require sacrifice primarily by those in the middle to benefit those on the bottom.”

Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at Yale, emphasizes a different dimension of the Democrats’ evolving political strategy. In an article published in December, “Bridging the Blue Divide: The Democrats’ New Metro Coalition and the Unexpected Prominence of Redistribution,” Hacker, Amelia Malpas, Paul Pierson and Sam Zacher readily acknowledge the importance of relatively affluent college-educated voters in the Democratic coalition and the party’s loss of support among working and middle class voters, especially whites.
[…]
Hacker and his colleagues write that Biden’s 2021 proposals “constituted the most extensive package of economic benefits for low- and middle-income families in a majority party’s legislative agenda since at least the 1960s.”
[…]
While Hacker’s argument that Democrats’ dependence on voters in upscale areas is “both necessary and consequential” is a subject of contention, Frances Lee, a political scientist at Princeton, argues that the consequences of the strategy Hacker describes could prove problematic.

“To the extent that the nation’s political discourse is driven by highly educated people,” Lee wrote by email, “there is danger that opinion leaders are falling increasingly out of touch with the rest of the population.”
[…]
William Galston, a senior fellow at Brookings with extensive experience in Democratic politics, disagrees to some extent to with the approach outlined by Hacker. In an email, Galston wrote:

There are decisive arguments against this strategy:

1. The lines between the white working class and the nonwhite working class are eroding. Donald Trump received 41 percent of the non-college Hispanic vote in 2020 and may well do better this time around. If this turns out to be the case, then the old Democratic formula — add minorities to college-educated voters to make a majority — becomes obsolete.
2. The share of young Americans attending and completing college peaked a decade ago and has been fitfully declining ever since.
3. The “stop chasing the working-class vote” approach flunks the most important test — Electoral College math. The stubborn fact is that working-class voters (especially but not only white) form a larger share of the electorate in key battleground states, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania than they do nationally.

Galston provided The Times with data showing that while the national share of white working class voters is 35 percent, it is 45 percent in Pennsylvania, 52 percent in Michigan and 56 percent in Wisconsin, all battleground states Biden won in close contests in 2020 and states that the Democrats are very likely need again this November.
[…]
While much of the focus of this debate has been on the white working class, minority voters have become ever more important to election outcomes.

Patrick Ruffini, a Republican strategist who published “Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the G.O.P.” last year, contended in an email that “many Black and Hispanic voters are culturally and ideologically misaligned in the Democratic Party.”
[…]
Ruffini acknowledged “that the chances of that happening in the near term are pretty remote, but it underscores the fragility of a coalition based not on ideological unity but group interest.”
[…]
William Frey, a demographer and a senior fellow at Brookings, provided The Times with data showing that as whites of all education levels decline as a share of the population — and of the electorate — the decline will be concentrated among Republican-leaning non-college whites, while the share of Democratic-leaning college-educated whites will remain stable.

Projections for the elections of 2024, 2028 and 2032, according to Frey, show the non-college white share of the population falling from 38 to 36 to 34 percent, while the white college-educated share remains at 32 percent in all three presidential election years.

Those trends will, in turn, magnify the importance of minority voters, whose share of the electorate will grow from 30 percent in 2024 to 32 percent in 2028 and to 34 percent in 2032.

Sean Westwood, a political scientist at Dartmouth, made the case by email that “It is foolhardy for Democrats to count on higher education to offset the growth of more conservative minority populations.”

The number of students entering the nation’s colleges, Westwood wrote, are about to fall off an “enrollment cliff,” while “the nonwhite portion of America is on track to continue surging. The undeniable truth is that the future of America and of both parties rests in the hands of America’s minority population.”

In support of his argument, Westwood cited a 2022 Vox article by Kevin Carey, “The Incredible Shrinking Future of College,” which documents a sharp decline in the number of annual births that began in the 2008 recession
[…]
In fact, Biden has done far more than either of his Democratic predecessors, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, to enact legislation economically beneficial to the working class, including the white working class.
[…]
Despite these substantial programs providing well-paying jobs for non-college workers, the implementation of these measures has so far done little to improve Biden’s prospects with the white working class.

During 2023, NBC News surveys found that Trump led Biden among white non-college voters by 25 points. In January, after many of the projects financed by the Biden legislation broke ground and the economy continued the improve significantly, Trump’s advantage grew to 33 points.

In other words, backed by legislative victories economically beneficial to the working class, rising employment and a growing gross domestic product, Biden still lost ground

…according to the numbers…so…you know…margins of error & statistical significance & all that freeform jazz funky stuff where the notes that aren’t played are important

The Democratic Party as it is now constructed is backed by a network of constituencies, each determined to protect its current status in the party hierarchy. Equally important is the network of interest groups, foundations and advocacy organizations that wield power in party deliberations.
[…]
Unions have increasingly targeted service workers in health care, hospitality, food services and related industries.

Richard Florida, professor of economic analysis and policy at the University of Toronto, may have the wisest guidance for Democrats. “The service class, not the working class, is the key to the Democrats’ future,” Florida writes, in an Evonomics essay,
[…]
On one hand, the 2024 election, as it now stands, will be determined by how many undecided men and women Trump alienates.

…you know that jon stewart bit about when biden could have walked out of the press conference but then turned around?

…I’m a sucker for this kind of piece with the deluge of citations…but…I could have done without the other hand

On the other, as CNN reported on Feb. 12, “The 2024 campaign gets grimmer, with Trump’s extremism on full display alongside concerns over Biden’s age.”

Not a great choice this time around, either way.

Does Biden Have to Cede the White Working Class to Trump? [NYT]

…seriously?

…what’s more important…how great the choice is or how great the difference it makes which one you make…only it seems like that might be great enough to make it a fucking obvious choice…so what’s with the flip hip-shot throwaway line thrown in at the end, thomas?

…maybe…he’s facing an uncertain future

It is an axiom and an accusation: Journalists consider the phrase “good news” an oxymoron. There is a short slide from “We don’t report the planes that land safely” to a generally jaundiced view of things, which makes consuming journalism akin to eating spinach — virtuous, but more a duty than a delight.

Technology — radio, then television, then satellites, the internet and social media — has vastly expanded the menu of choices of news sources. Simultaneously, some journalistic practices, including the conflation of everything with politics, have forfeited the public’s trust in, and appetite for, journalism.

A steady stream of bad economic news about the newspaper business has elicited some supposedly ameliorative ideas. Many, however, illustrate another axiom: Some improvements can make matters worse.

[…]Most stunning, however, is the collapse of the newspaper culture. The annual report from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism says:

• Since 2005, nearly 2,900 newspapers have closed, eliminating the jobs of two-thirds (43,000) of newspaper journalists.
• In 2023, an average of five papers disappeared every two weeks.
• More than half of the nation’s counties (1,766 of 3,143) are “news deserts,” having either no local news source, or just one, typically a weekly newspaper.
• A large majority of the 6,000 remaining newspapers are weeklies.
• Newspapers’ Washington bureaus are vanishing: Most states have no journalist reporting from the seat of the federal government.

[…]
The common economic problem is the migration, for reasonable economic calculations, of advertising dollars to digital platforms. The Illinois Local Journalism Task Force proposes making local news organizations wards of government by subsidizing them with direct grants, providing subsidies for low-income subscribers, giving tax exemptions and tax credits for news organizations (also for subscribers and advertisers and for hiring reporters), and mandating government advertising in the news outlets.

What could go wrong? Everything.

…on the upside…the implication is that it hasn’t already…so that’s nice

The Roman Empire is gone, as are the Carolingian, Byzantine, Ottoman, Habsburg, Spanish, Portuguese, British, French and Soviet empires. Newspapers need not be eternal. They need not, however, despair about improvising new ways to present fresh material that readers are willing to pay for. At least if they are not force-fed journalists’ politics.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/02/21/government-subsidies-newspapers/

…now…I ain’t sayin’ the ward of government thing is a great idea…but…the absence of force-feeding…might be a big ask…because they might say where there’s a will there’s a way…but georgie boy there is named will…& he failed to find a way…pretty sure if you read that whole thing you’ll get enough of a taste to have a flavor of the man’s politics…& plenty of patreon or substack beneficiaries garner subs for being pretty forthright about theirs…still…we must have left that golden mean laying around here somewhere?