I urge people to read the transcript or watch the video of Pritzker’s speech, because frankly, that is the way it’s done.
Pritzker didn’t dismiss concerns about crime in the city. “Not one person here today will claim we have solved all crime in Chicago, nor can that be said of any major American metro area,” he said. Instead, the governor turned those concerns on Trump, listing the ways the president and his fellow Republicans have made Chicago less safe for its residents:
If Donald Trump was actually serious about fighting crime in cities like Chicago, he, along with his congressional Republicans, would not be cutting over $800 million in public safety and crime prevention grants nationally, including cutting $158 million in funding to Illinois for violence prevention programs that deploy trained outreach workers to de-escalate conflict on our streets; cutting $71 million in law enforcement grants to Illinois, direct money for police departments through programs like Project Safe Neighborhoods, the State and Local Antiterrorism Training Program, and the Rural Violent Crime Reduction Initiative; cutting $137 million in child protection measures in Illinois that protect our kids against abuse and neglect.
Pritzker put it succinctly: “Trump is defunding the police.”
Not only is that true, it’s great messaging — and Democrats should follow the governor’s lead. Democrats must make it clear to the American people that they take crime very seriously. But they also have to show voters what’s happening in Chicago and that what will likely happen in other Democratic-run cities across the country isn’t really about crime. It’s about the performative retribution of Trump — it’s about politics.
This is a president who is acting as if he has no limits. He is destroying constitutional guardrails and violating the norms of democracy almost daily. The question now is: How much damage can he do before he’s stopped?
One of the major problems that we’ve faced in dealing with Trump has been a failure of imagination. How far would he go? How bad could it get? What would he do with the unchecked powers of the presidency?
In real time, we are seeing what he is capable of doing. We’re seeing it play out in Washington, D.C., and we may soon see it in Chicago. Trump is giving us a brutal reality check about how fragile our constitutional republic really is.
Which brings me to another important line from Pritzker’s speech: “If it sounds to you like I am alarmist, that is because I am ringing an alarm, one that I hope every person listening will heed, both here in Illinois and across the country.”
We must understand the magnitude of the moment. All of this may feel like some sort of dystopian nightmare, but it is literally the times that we are living in, and every American must open their eyes and see what’s happening.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
Comments Off on Trumplestilskin, Spinning Gold into Shit!
My Opinion: Michael Abrams
The “Resident” abetted by sycophantic Congress will personally be responsible for disease outbreaks and closing of rural hospitals while touting the “savings”. The “silent public” who will normally attack the facts have fully embraced the agenda of the current administration purposely or tacitly are upset over “the Epstein files”. The “Epstein files” are just another distraction from the real issues that should concern all voters. The Neer do well Congress has saddled the country with more debt that will be paid by the voters (and their progeny). It would interest the willing to read this bill and understand how the upper 1% are big winners in the “BBB”. The lower end of the income scale (earners under 50K annually) get zip. The ongoing idea that there is massive fraud in the safety net programs (Medicaid and others) which has been proven false. The idea appears to be that the people who are gaming the system are mostly people of color collectively as if there are no white Americans suffering and struggling. The choices we have is pay close attention to your representatives’ actions and statements, call or write to them if you are not happy with their decisions on your behalf. FORGET PARTY POLITICS, this is less important than the integrity of the person.
Nothing is more boring than watching paint dry or Congressional sessions or debates, both are dull subjects but the only one that can educate you in what your representatives are doing! Does anyone remember the statement of Oct 30, 2020? ” I’m going to surround myself only with the best and most serious people,” the Republican said in August 2015. “We want top of the line professionals.” It’s a line that’s come back to haunt him, yet he is still surrounding himself with sycophants who are largely unsuited for the positions they are in. They amount to highly paid “yes men and women loyal to “Trumplestilskin”. This is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Whether you chose to believe it or not, the power is in the hands of the voters if we chose to use it.
Earlier today, I asked rhetorically: When it comes to the necessity of speaking out against this dangerous and detestable regime, where are Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, and where are their vice presidents, Al Gore and Dick Cheney? When I wrote this I had not come across a particularly powerful speech Al Gore delivered last week in San Francisco at Climate Week. My error. Here it is, in full:
***
It is abundantly clear, after only three months and one day, that the new Trump administration is attempting to do everything it possibly can to try to halt the transition to a clean energy future and a deep reduction in the burning of fossil fuels. The climate crisis is a fossil fuel crisis, basically 80% of it.
Many of you here today have likely felt the chilling effect of the policies and the rhetoric coming from Washington, D.C. and what the effect has been on businesses and investors and far beyond.
The Dow Jones, of course, today fell another thousand points and since Donald Trump’s inauguration it’s gone down six thousand points. But while the most visible impacts of what the new administration is doing may be in the market for stocks and bonds, that’s not the only thing that he has caused to crash.
The trust market has crashed.
The market for democracy has taken a major hit.
Hope is being arbitraged in the growing market for fear.
Truth has been devalued and confidence in U.S. leadership around the world has plummeted.
We are facing a national emergency for our democracy and a global emergency for our climate system.
We have to deal with the democracy crisis in order to solve the climate crisis.
The scale and scope of the ongoing attacks on liberty are literally unprecedented. With that in mind, I want to note before I use what is not a precedent, I understand very well why it is wrong to compare Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich to any other movement. It was uniquely evil, full stop. I get it.
But there are important lessons from the history of that emergent evil, and here is one that I regard as essential.
In the immediate aftermath of World War II, a small group of philosophers who had escaped Hitler’s murderous regime returned to Germany and performed a kind of moral autopsy on the Third Reich. The most famous of the so-called Frankfurt School of Philosophers was a man named Jurgen Habermas – best known, I would say. But it was Habermas’ mentor, Theodor Adorno, who wrote that the first step of that nation’s descent into Hell was, and I quote, “the conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power.” He described how the Nazis, and I quote again, “attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false.”
The Trump administration is insisting on trying to create their own preferred version of reality. They say Ukraine attacked Russia instead of the other way around, and expect us to believe it! At home, they attack heroes who have defended our nation in war and against cyberattacks as traitors.
They say the climate crisis is a “hoax” invented by the Chinese to destroy American manufacturing.
They say coal is clean.
They say wind turbines cause cancer.
They say sea level rise just creates more beachfront property.
Their allies in the oligarchic backlash to climate action argue that those who want to stop using the sky as an open sewer, for God’s sake, need to be more “realistic” and acquiesce to the huge increases in the burning of more and more fossil fuels (which is what they’re pushing), even though that is the principal cause of the climate crisis.
You may not be surprised to learn that this propagandistic notion of “climate realism” is one that the fossil fuel industry has peddled for years.
The CEO of the largest oil company in the world, Saudi Aramco has said “We should abandon the fantasy of phasing out oil and gas.”
His colleague, Exxon CEO Darren Woods, has claimed that “the world needs to get real. … The problem is not oil and gas. It’s emissions.”
The American Petroleum Institute says that we need “a more realistic energy approach” – one that, you guessed it, includes buying and burning even more oil and gas.
So, allow me to put this question to all of you: What exactly is it that they want us to be realistic about?
Their twisted version of “realism” is colliding with the reality that humanity is now confronting.
The accumulated global warming pollution (because these molecules linger there on average about 100 years and it builds up over time), it’s trapping as much extra heat now every single day as would be released by the explosion of 750,000 first generation atomic bombs blowing up on the Earth every single day!
Is it realistic to let that continue?
Is it realistic to think that if we opt out of taking action to reduce greenhouse gas pollution, we’ll be able to just wish it away and continue with business as usual? Well, Mother Nature makes a pretty good case against that argument. Every night on the TV news is like a nature walk through the Book of Revelation.
Is it realistic, for example, to continue stoking the risk of wildfire in California, after what has already happened to so many communities in Northern California? And just look at the devastation caused by the Los Angeles wildfires in January.
Is it realistic to tell homeowners around the world that the global housing market is expected to suffer a $25 trillion loss in the next 25 years? Fifteen percent of all the residential housing stock in the world if we do not change what we’re doing? Is that realistic in their view?
Is it realistic to continue quietly accepting 8.7 million deaths every single year from breathing in the particulate co-pollution that also comes from the burning of fossil fuels? That is the number of people who are already being killed. According to health experts, it is, and I quote, “the leading contributor to the global disease burden.” When you’re burning coal, oil and gas, it puts the heat trapping pollution up there and it puts the particulate and PM 2.5 pollution into the lungs of people downwind from where the facilities are burning the fossil fuels.
Is it realistic, in their view, for governments to manage 1 billion climate migrants crossing international borders in the balance of this century? That’s how many the Lancet Commission estimates will be crossing borders in the decades to come, if we continue driving temperatures and humidity higher and making the physiologically unlivable regions of the world vastly larger by continuing to put 175 million tons of man-made heat-trapping pollution into that thin shell of the troposphere surrounding the planet. You know what that blue line looks like, that thin blue shell is blue because that’s where the oxygen is. And it’s so thin, if you could drive a car straight up in the air at highway speeds, you’d get to the top of that blue line in five to seven minutes.
That’s what we’re using as an open sewer. Is that realistic? I don’t think it is.
We’ve already seen, by the way, how populist authoritarian leaders have used migrants as scapegoats and have fanned the fires of xenophobia to fuel their own rise to power. And power-seeking is what this is all about. Our Constitution, written by our founders, is intended to protect us against a threat identical to Donald Trump: someone who seeks power at all costs to get more power. Imagine what the demagogues would do as we continued toward a billion migrants crossing international borders. We could face a grave threat to our capacity for self-governance.
Is it “realistic” to continue inflicting the financial toll that the climate crisis is taking on the global economy? According to Deloitte, climate inaction will cost the economy $178 trillion over the next half century. And is it realistic to miss out on the economic opportunity that we could seize by going toward net-zero? Over that same period, climate action would increase the size of the global economy by $43 trillion.
A question with particular relevance in nearby Silicon Valley: is it realistic for the semiconductor industry to experience losses of up to 35% of annual revenues due to supply chain disruptions caused by the stronger and more severe cyclonic storms and supercell storms?
Is it realistic to continue with a system of financing that leaves the entire continent of Africa completely out? Right now, the entire continent of Africa, fastest-growing population in the world, has fewer solar panels installed than the single state of Florida in the United States of America. That’s a disgrace to the makeup of our financial system. But Africa has three times as many oil and gas pipelines under construction and preparing for construction to begin than all of North America. It is ridiculous to allow this system to continue as it is. How is that realistic? Or fair? Or just?
Is it realistic for us, all of us here, to consign our children and grandchildren to what scientists warn us would be Hell on Earth in order to conserve the profits of the fossil fuel industry? The predictions of the scientists 50 years ago have turned out to be spot on correct. Their predictions just a few decades ago have turned out to be exactly right. Should not that cause us to listen more carefully to what they’re warning us will happen if we do not sharply and quickly reduce the emissions from burning fossil fuels?
Is that unrealistic to listen to a proven source of advice?
This newfound so-called climate realism is nothing more than climate denial in disguise. It is an attempt to pretend there is no problem and to ignore the reality that is right in front of our faces.
What’s never present in any of this so-called “realism” is any credible challenge whatsoever to the conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC. They never address that. They just wish it away and say, “Oh it’s unrealistic to actually do anything about it.”
I wish we could wish it away, but we cannot.
The hard reality is that the fossil fuel industry has grown desperate for more capital. They’re seeing their two largest markets wither away: electricity generation, number one and transportation, number two. They’ve been losing their share of investment in the energy market to renewables and so they’re panicked.
That explains why they are so aggressively using their captive policymakers to block meaningful solutions. Of course, as you know, they’re way better at capturing politicians than they are at capturing emissions. They’ve grown very skillful at that.
They are the wealthiest and most powerful industry lobby in the history of the world. They make the East India Company look like a popcorn vendor. They are the effective global hegemon.
They have used their war chests and their legacy network of political and economic power to block any reductions of fossil fuel burning emissions – whether at the international conferences that we call the COPs, the Conference of Parties in the UN process, or at the global negotiations for a plastic treaty. They blocked anything there, too.
Why? They’re losing the first market of electricity generation because 93% of all the new electricity generation installed worldwide last year was solar and wind. They’re losing that market steadily. EVs are rising dramatically. They say they’ve slowed down. Well, we just got the new figures – an 18% increase year-on-year here in the United States. In many countries much faster than that.
And so, their third market – they’re telling Wall Street that they’re going to make up all of the expected lost revenue in their first two markets by tripling the production of plastics over the next 35 years.
Well, we might have a word to say about that. Is that realistic? Because we’ve already found – the scientists say – that some seabirds are manifesting symptoms like Alzheimer’s disease from the plastic particles in their brains and they found that it crosses the blood-brain barrier in humans, and the size of the amount has doubled just in the last decade.
Do we really want to continue that?
It’s crazy, but they are blocking action at both of these international forums and they’re blocking action in the deliberations of nation-states, even in states and provinces, and even at the local level. Anywhere in the world where there is an effort to pass legislation or regulations that reduces the burning of fossil fuels, they are there with their money, with their lobbyists, with their captive politicians, blocking it as best they can.
And the solution is what you’re doing here at Climate Week here in San Francisco. We have got to rise up and change this situation.
That’s also why they are ballyhooing ridiculously expensive and hilariously impractical technologies like building giant mechanical vacuuming machines to suck it back out of the atmosphere after they put it up there. Could that someday be a realistic part of the solution? Perhaps, perhaps. But not now! Not even close.
They use it as a bright, shiny object to distract attention and say, ‘see this, see this, this could be so miraculous, we don’t have to stop burning fossil fuels at all! We can actually continue to increase the burning of fossil fuels because look at this bright, shiny object. We’ve got this vacuuming machine.’
Well, CO2 is 0.035% of the molecules in the air. You’re gonna use an energy-intensive, ridiculous, expensive process to filter through the other 99.965% of the molecules? It’s absolutely preposterous.
In reality, the Sustainability Revolution is powering more and more of our global economy. It has the scale and impact of the Industrial Revolution and is moving at the pace of the Digital Revolution.
By the way, in Texas, which used to have a free market for energy, over 90% of all their new electricity generation last year was solar and wind. And, you know, they’ve got captured politicians there. They’re pushing legislation in Texas to legally require any developers of solar and wind to spend time and money developing more oil and gas before they’re given permission to develop renewables.
That’s not realism, that’s pathetic.
That is a sign of desperation.
They don’t trust the free market. They’re just relying more and more on the politicians who will jump when they tell them jump and ask how high when they tell them to jump again.
So, around the world, the market is transforming. Since the Paris Agreement, the cost of solar has dropped 76%. The cost of wind is down 66%. Utility-scale batteries are down 87%.
In 2004, when Generation was founded, it took a full year for the world to install one gigawatt of solar power. Now it takes one day to install one gigawatt of solar power.
And it’s not just renewables. We’re seeing the Sustainability Revolution rapidly take hold across the rest of the global economy from transportation, to regenerative agriculture, to circular manufacturing, and so much more.
So, as we gather here to kick off Climate Week and as we gather on the eve of Earth Day, we have to treat this moment as a call to action.
So, I’m here not only to respond to the invitation for which I’m grateful…. I’m here to recruit you.
Many of you are already working on this, but those of you who are not, I’m here to recruit you. We need you. This is the time and this is a break glass moment. This is an all hands on deck moment.
Now is the time to look at every aspect of your businesses, your investments, and your civic engagement to determine whether or not you can contribute even more to solving the climate crisis.
It’s easy to adopt our own versions of climate realism to say that the challenge is too great. Some people worry about that. To say that our individual role is too small to have an impact. Some use that as an excuse: that if the government won’t act, what can any of us do about it?
Well, just as the climate crisis does not recognize borders between countries, it does not either recognize delineations between the duty of government and businesses and all significant participants in the global economy.
Climate change is already impacting your life and work and will more so through disrupted supply chains, increased liability, changes in consumer demand, and more.
This is a moment when we all have to mobilize to defend our country. And remember the antidote to climate despair is climate action. It was in this city in the 1960s that Joan Baez first said that the antidote to despair is action. And we need to remember that now.
And during a time of when people were tempted to despair in the struggle for civil rights in this country, Martin Luther King said something about overcoming the forces that try to discourage you and halt progress. He said this: “If you can’t fly, run. If you can’t run, walk. If you can’t walk, crawl. But by all means, keep moving.”
And that’s where we are.
Every one of the morally based movements in the past had periods when advocates felt despair. But when the central choice was revealed as a choice between right and wrong, then the outcome at a very deep level became foreordained.
Because of the way Pope Francis reminded us we have been created as God’s children.
We love our families.
We are devoted to our communities.
We have to protect our future.
And if you doubt for one moment ever that we as human beings have the capacity to muster sufficient political will to solve this crisis, just remember that political will is itself a renewable resource.
Comments Off on Big Beautiful Bill: Effects on Freedom and American Lives
This will be the fourth of July to remember- we have seen our(?) Congress gives us up to the demands of a child. That being said: pay attention to the results of the Big Beautiful Bill’s effect on the country as a whole and how it affects individual lives. This is not so much political as it is an attack on the freedoms that we have enjoyed for hundreds of years, the current actions of Congress and the administration is a perfect example of excessive government while ignoring the will of the people (us!). Our shining example is being tarnished and held up as maybe not so great.
An internal Trump administration document reportedly shows that anti-fraud checks recently installed at the Social Security agency have found just two cases of potentially improper benefit claims out of more than 110,000—a rate of 0.0018%.
The documents, first reported Thursday by Nextgov/FCW, further undercut President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk’s narrative that Social Security is brimming with fraud. Musk falsely claimed in March that “40% of the calls into Social Security were fraudulent.”
The anti-fraud checks for Social Security have been applied only to benefit claims made over the phone. According to the internal document, “No significant fraud has been detected from the flagged cases.” Earlier this year, amid widespread outrage, the Social Security Administration (SSA) walked back a proposal to scrap many of its phone-based benefit claim services.
Nextgov/FCW noted Thursday that the Trump administration’s deployment of the anti-fraud tools beginning last month “did cause delays, as SSA changed its phone procedures to add the checks on the backend.”
“The lags stem from the three-day hold placed on telephone claims in order to run the anti-fraud [checks], a move that ‘delays payments and benefits to customers, despite an extremely low risk of fraud,'” Nextgov/FCW reported, citing the internal document.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said in a statement that “the Trump-Musk Social Security takeover has only meant more chaos and confusion for Americans.”
“Every one of DOGE’s so-called ‘mistakes’ is a backdoor cut to people’s benefits,” said Warren. “There’s nothing efficient about making it harder for people to access the checks they’ve earned and are owed.”
On social media, Warren called the revelations in the internal administration document “a HUGE scandal.”
It’s long been clear that Social Security fraud is minuscule, with an inspector general report published last year estimating that just 0.84% of Social Security benefits paid out between 2015 and 2022 were dispensed improperly—and even those improper payments were not necessarily fraudulent.
The new reporting out Thursday bolstered warnings that the Trump administration’s hunt for fraud is a mere pretext for slashing Social Security benefits and weakening the program.
“Turns out there ISN’T rampant Social Security fraud, but Elon’s witch hunt, driven by his insane conspiracy theories, IS keeping seniors from getting their benefits as quickly as they should be,” Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) wrote on social media. “THIS is Republican governing: hunting for nonexistent fraud while breaking Social Security.”
Frank Bisignano, the newly confirmed SSA administrator, has close ties to Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and has defended the president’s false claim that tens of millions of “dead” people are receiving Social Security benefits.
CNN reported earlier this week that as SSA combs “through its databases to check whether beneficiaries are alive or dead” at Trump and Musk’s behest, agency staffers are “seeing more people coming in to be resurrected” after being falsely deemed deceased.
“I’ve been saying it all along,” former SSA chief Martin O’Malley wrote Thursday. “Elon Musk is the biggest fraud, not Social Security.”
Comments Off on America is The Backbone of Democracy
Apparently Not!
All of the touted greatness of the United States and the assistance given to other countries has started to pale. Our former world dominance is being relegated to this country being seen as potentially near mediocre actor on the world stage. All of the bad actors are looking at the current “leader” as a purchasable commodity who if offered the right largesse will ease their situations with the U.S. in the way of sanctions or restrictions. As shown in his first term DJT is out for DJT and it will always be so. His Cabinet members, his Whitehouse staff all play to his ego and his greed so they can insert their agendas onto the American public.
These are the same actions performed during the 30 or so years prior to WWII. There are too many folks who don’t think it can happen here while it’s happening here! DRT is seeking a “Kingship” with absolute authority, that aspiration was imbued by same folks who pushed the “moral Majority, attacked and killed abortion rights”. These are the people who think Medicaid should get less funding (do you hear that Seniors with medical needs and disabilities?) It is not wrong to pursue waste and fraud but usually after a complete investigation as to where misdeeds occur. Forcing needy folks whose disabilities and age preclude any ability to work is ridiculous and wrong. At the bottom of all of this is funding the massive tax cuts for the wealthy.
The elected members of Congress who are kissing the “Arse” of FFLOTUS are people elected by the people to represent them in government but have failed and will continue to fail as long as they are in office. Terms are limited at the ballot box not by the people running for office.
The statements made on the campaign trail along with the empty promises are borne out by the negative rhetoric about Americans and allies against the sucking up to middle eastern strongmen who have swayed his views with pomp and circumstance long with lavish gifts. All of this aside, the promises made by the people we elected are next to useless while the promises made by a inveterate self-serving liar is as Anti American as you can get without actually stating that fact!
Apparently, we are not as sharp politically as we should be, we have more rested on our laurels aka Asses while the government is in the hands of an idiot on steroids!
Information overload has caused a gap in facts. The fact that the conservative right, right, far right have quietly been remaking our educational system. They have changed or erased parts of history to keep modern learners ignorant of the real origins of our country that include the good, bad and ugly. History is history and remains unchanged until the manipulators get a hold of it. It has always been incumbent on the learners to source out what true and what is not. It is irrational to follow “the party line” for the sake of deceiving the public and pushing agendas against the public and sometimes national interests. The first world war was started by an assassination based on a rumor or perceived injustice. World war 2 was started by almost the same reasons with the help of (then) modern communication methods. Now the same bad actors are updated with the advent of the world wide web and its associated components (“X”, Google, Microsoft, etc.).
Again, the onus is on the public to be wary of mass communication and become skeptics of what is being reported as facts. Investigating information is fairly easy compared to 5 or 10 years ago, it just requires reading which again is not what it used to be. Something as simple as ‘cursive” writing is foreign to many younger people along with books about real history. Books are the ever-giving resource for information hence the “selective ban” on certain books which have been mainstays in our educational system. It is ironic that many of the banning’s occur in Southern, Republican states under the guise of fighting against “woke”(whatever that means). It is well to remember that the Modern Republicans bear no resemblance to past Republicans while against some Democratic agendas, made a way to function for the country through the fog of disagreement.
Apparently, the lessening of historical information is evident in our politics. The banning of books, the removal of true history in schools and lack of “civics” education all should remind us of the reason for 1933 – 1945 world war and it’s aftermath. One (1) person played on the woes of their countrymen to persuade them that they were being targeted by a specific group of citizens and those “people” were the reason for their problems. Fast forward to 2016- the most unlikely candidate for President of the United States gains that position. This event provided some of the same primal issues that resulted in our Civil War as well as a basis for the later European, then worldwide conflicts resulting in millions of lives lost, countries devastated and a long slog to normalcy. During that time of “normalcy”, the United States continued its “Jim Crow ” ways resulting in years of repression for anyone who was considered “less than”. This underlying layer of America appeared to be subsiding at one point but was rapidly revived with the election of DJT. aka, LOTUS, Orangeman or any of several other sobriquets. Using the same (less than or othering) playbook DJT took on the office of President and proceeded to run it as he ran his businesses with an iron fist and no plans other than whims (against expert advice in many cases). Aided by a group of sycophants and Neer do well Congressional members, laws were enacted which had no basis in the real and overall needs of the country.
The past number of months in the Presidential campaign has clearly shown that our Democracy is in trouble. We have legislators bent on revenge rather than fulfilling their duty. Some who have no understanding of what it takes to maintain a democracy. The Far-right side of the GOP is busily following the “former guy.” whose sole objective is to sow dissent and disorder. His Presidency is a wide open testament to his petulance and ineptitude. His followers are no more than pawns and have no clear concept of what Governing is. As we approach the national elections, the ongoing trials of DJT keeps surfacing while the topic needs to be a non-issue! The formation of parties and the sub sects of them has created more confusion over the real collective issues we face daily, while fomenting divisions that should not exist or perhaps should not take high priority in Governing. Nationality, Race, ethnicity are not indicative of a person’s qualities but appear to color our everyday. The election of DJT aka, TOTUS, LOTUS, Orange Guy” or whatever you want to name him is a recipe for disaster. This is not about politics as much as it is about who is capable of running the country. The last thing we need is folks like MTG, AOC raging over nothing rather than being serious about governing. We need people who will address the High court’s integrity by perhaps term limits, a code of ethics (that should also apply to Congress as well). This should be the goal, achieving or approaching those goals will allow for the correction needed to truly make America the country everyone thinks we are!
The one remaining problem can’t be dealt with through higher interest rates. It needs vigorous antitrust enforcement.
ROBERT REICH FEB 2 Friends, It’s the economy, stupid. Thus spoke my friend James Carville, one of Bill Clinton’s campaign managers, in 1992. He was correct then and he’s been right ever since. Today, the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the U.S. economy added 353,000 jobs in January, and the unemployment rate remains at 3.7 percent. The BLS also revised upward the two prior months, bringing the average monthly job gain in 2023 to 255,000. Even manufacturing, which has been in the doldrums, added 23,000 positions. Average hourly earnings grew 0.6 percent from December. Few economists expected job gains to remain this strong when high interest rates were needed to bring down inflation. But inflation is way down. Larry Summers (with whom I worked in the Clinton administration) predicted that the Fed would have to cause excessive joblessness to tame inflation (Summers also called the 2021 American Rescue Plan the “least responsible” fiscal policy in 40 years). He was wrong. Jobs growth continues to roar. Economic growth is good. Wages are moving in the right direction. Yet despite all the good news, 71 percent of Republicans say the economy is getting worse, and Donald Trump is once again claiming that the unemployment numbers are fake. Trump and Republicans are focusing on the only real remaining economic problem: Although inflation is down, prices haven’t come down. Why not? Because of corporate pricing power. Consider Pepsi. In 2021, PepsiCo, which makes all sorts of drinks and snacks, announced it was forced to raise prices due to “higher costs.” Forced? Really? The company reported $11 billion in profit that year. In 2023 PepsiCo’s chief financial officer said that even though inflation was dropping, its prices would not. Pepsi hiked its prices by double digits and announced plans to keep them high in 2024. If Pepsi had lots of competitors, consumers would just buy something cheaper. But PepsiCo’s only major soda competitor is Coca-Cola, which – surprise, surprise – announced similar price hikes at about the same time as Pepsi, and also kept its prices high in 2023. With just one or a few competitors, it’s easy for giant corporations to coordinate price increases and prevent price cuts, to keep their profits up while shafting consumers. The CEO of Coca-Cola claimed that the company had “earned the right” to push price hikes because its sodas are popular. Popular? The only thing that’s popular these days seems to be corporate price gouging. Pepsi and Coca-Cola dominate the soft drink market. They own most of the brands that appear to be competitors. This corporate pricing power isn’t just happening with Coke and Pepsi. Take meat products. At the end of 2023, Americans were paying at least 30% more for beef, pork, and poultry products than they were in 2020. Why? Just four companies now control processing of 80 percent of beef, nearly70 percent of pork, and almost 60 percent of poultry. So of course, it’s easy for them to coordinate price increases and prevent price cuts. In 75 percent of U.S. industries, fewer companies now control more of their markets than they did twenty years ago. Which is why the Biden administration is taking on this monopolization with the most aggressive use of antitrust laws in half a century. It’s taken action against alleged price fixing in the meat industry. It’s also suing Amazon for using its dominance to artificially jack up prices — one of the biggest anti-monopoly lawsuits in a generation. It successfully sued to block the merger of JetBlue and Spirit Airlines, which would have made consolidation in the airline industry even worse. But given how concentrated American industry has become, there’s still a long way to go. Inflation is down. But many people don’t feel it because prices are still high, and in some cases are still rising because of continued price gouging. That’s given Trump and his Republican lapdogs an excuse to tell Americans that the economy remains bad. The truth is, the economy is remarkably good, but too many big corporations have too much power over prices. The answer is to break them up — but I don’t expect Trump and the Republicans to say this. Do you?
Michael1942's Blog 
You must be logged in to post a comment.