It was both exciting and moving for a politics buff like myself to see at around midnight on the night of Nov.5-6, the House of Representatives passed the Infrastructure Bill and passed a procedural hurdle for the Build Back Better Act, paving the way for the passage of that in two weeks time. The elaborate parliamentary procedures which assure that bills passed into law are properly legislated meant that the procedures are ceremonial and repetitious and for that reason all the more dramatic. I watched on live television to see the vote build up, the “yes” votes staying close to twenty votes ahead of the opponents until it became clear that the bill had passed because there were not enough votes left so that the margin of winning could not be overtaken even if all the remaining representatives had voted against it. Then, because this was an important bill, there was a vote on whether to table the bill, and that was defeated, that requiring the process of voting to happen all over again, the tallies going up on the electronic devices for voting as well as requiring members for a second time to announce to the Speaker that they are informing the body that so and so is voting although absent as either yea or nay. This new rule was adopted by the House so that members who are sick from Covid need not be present in the body in order to vote, something that previously had not been allowed. So we saw the same faces saying again that the same names would say yes or no, and that was dramatic for its repetition as if someone might change their mind or if the tallies would be different, and in fact the bill to override tabling the bill did have a different result than the bill itself. The tabling resolution was a party line vote while the original bill passage had some Republican and Democratic crossovers. Then there was a procedural vote for the Build Back Better bill that passed though the Democrats passed it by only nine votes, which testified how hard it was to corral all of the Democratic Caucus to agree to it if it were to pass. What an observer of these proceedings could see was the majesty of Article One of the Constitution, which describes the powers of theCongress, that it can move legislation, as unwieldy and slow as the proceedings may be to accomplish a vote. The power of the Constitution to get things done is actual and visible, despite, as I have said in a previous blog post, there are claims that congresspeople are marionettes whose strings are pulled by elsewhere and by sinister powers. It seems to me that the good and the bad of Congress is right out there: hard negotiations behind the scenes to get narrow majorities on the floor.
Read MorePower Is What It Seems To Be
What is power? Max Weber defined it as the ability to get people to do what they don’t want to do while influence is to be defined as the ability w to convince people to do what it is you want them to do. Employers have power over employees because they can fire them and so those who have unequal power will do what the boss wants because the employee wants his or her paycheck. A priest has power because a member of the laity believes there are serious consequences if the churchman decides the member to be engaged in sinfulness. On the other hand, a charismatic churchman can lead a follower to prefer to do what the churchman thinks is the right thing. That is influence rather than power. So far so good. The difficult question about power is whether all the different kinds of power are versions of the same thing or process, to be known properly as power itself, or whether each form of power is independent of one another and arises out of the particular process under observation. In that case, and here I follow Weber in his view of power, there is no need to even any longer use the term “power” except as a metaphor for some of the consequences of deploying some of the traits of the process under examination. An employer has power because he or she can fire someone when firing people is just an aspect of being in an employment arrangement in the first place just as social power is just a fanciful way of saying that men will disparage ugly women and so in this way men have power over women. Moreover, whether to think or not that there is an essential quality called power has consequences for understanding how society operates and also taking sides on particular controversies.
Read MoreAbolishing Drugs the Soft Way
Unlike Prohibition, which was a failure at abolishing alcohol because rates of alcohol use were by the Seventies back to pre-Prohibition levels, social programs to eliminate tobacco were extremely successful and should be applied to another addiction problem, those of illegal drugs like cocaine and heroin. The soft approach to the very harsh reality of drugs which diminish the capacities of the users and plague the neighborhoods whereby drug financed gangs engage in drive by and random shootings and seem incapable of becoming resolved are programs that do not require Supreme Court decisions or major legislation, while the abortion debates seem never to end and environmental debates on air pollution and fossil feul emissions remain a quandary despite efforts of legislation to control them. The soft model is large scale reeducation of the population and making drug use simply inconvenient. Tobacco use was everywhere present in 1965 in that 42% of Americans used cigarettes and cigarette encouragement was everywhere in TV and print advertising. Cigarette companies had major lobbies so as to maintain their power. But by 2018, smokers were now down to 14% of the population and, even more, only 8% of those between the ages of 18 and 24, suggesting that the younger cohort of the population were using even fewer smokes, that defined as daily or every second day use, and so the habit was dying off. This happened, even though it took half a century to accomplish, because there was widespread publicity of the report of the Surgeon General’s Report of 1965 that smoking led to cancer, and lawsuits by state Attorneys General to sue tobacco companies for providing cancer killing products, and also, perhaps most important, restrictions by municipalities, one by one, to make cigarette smoking more difficult. Public buildings were barred from smoking, and so smokers congregated on their plazas during work breaks. Then universities and colleges barred students and teachers from smoking, and then restaurants. It just became just too difficult to manage. Rather than treating personality problems to be the cause of addiction, with studies showing how useful tobacco addiction is to well-being, there was the development of operational shortcuts to avoid smoking, such as tieing a box of cigarettes with rubber bands so that it took time and effort to get at a cigarette. People eliminated ashtrays, much less cigarette boxes, on their coffee tables and side tables. And so cigarettes are largely over. Solution accomplished. What next for a public outcry, this time against heroin and cocaine, that is beyond the political, that sidesteps the political?
Read MoreThe Haitian Mess
There are three ways to approach the mess in Haiti, its failure as a society, which was best symbolized by the 15,000 Haitian refugees, now down to zero, that for a week or so crowded in an underpass near Del Rio, Texas. What was to be done about them and what to do with Haiti? The first proposal, propounded at the time by journalists, local politicians and the American diplomat who resigned over the issue, is to do the humane thing, regardless of what the law says, and grant asylum to the Haitians because there is no life to be found in Haiti given its earthquake, its political disruption and its failure to make a living for its people. After all, we allow any Cubans who get to the United States to remain there because of the remnants of a Cold War that ended 35 years ago. Haiti has about the same population as Cuba, about 11 million, even if Haiti is one third the size of Cuba and Haiti is the most densely concentrated population in the Western Hemisphere. Why not let in the ones who can manage to get to America, the failure of Haiti to thrive being sufficient reason? The Monroe Doctrine has been taken to mean that the United States takes responsibility for its hemisphere so as to preclude foreign control of the area, and so the United States cannot pawn off Haiti to France just because of their related language and history. Moreover, the United States has regularly intruded into Haiti. The U. S. Marines occupied the nation during the Twenties so as to pacify the nation and Bill Clinton both restored a legitimate Presidency to Haiti and then took up a major initiative to reconstruct the nation economically after one of its regular earthquakes. Why not now, after another earthquake and another period of political unrest? What was done before can be done again, never mind the debate about immigration policies having to do with any number of other peoples trying to make it into the United States. Think of immigration as a blessing rather than a problem. It shows that people want to come to the United States so as to achieve better lives. Would one prefer people not to want to get to the United States, legally or not? The pressure of immigration shows the U.S. is thriving. As one wag put it, take two billion dollars from Biden’s 3.5 trillion dollar reconciliation package, and then Haiti could be reconstructed into being a respectable nation.
Read MoreThe French Submarines
The decision by the Biden Administration to declare that it would build nuclear submarines with Australia and the United Kingdom rather than conventional submarines with the French was significant and controversial and leads into some very complex matters even though that decision is only a very short blip on the political horizon and will have no impact on the midterms. First off, that decision would have seemed unnecessary. Ever since Henry Kissinger negotiated the Shanghai Communique in 1972, it might have seemed unnecessary to present a significant military force to confront the Chinese by having nuclear subs stay indefinitely on station between China and Formosa, something conventional submarines apparently can't do. The Kissinger plan was that China and the United States would become economically interdependent and so not likely to face up in a war. The two powers avoided the containment policy that relied on military power to keep the Soviet Union under control until it had matured enough as an economic nation and had put aside its totalitarian political and social system so that it would no longer be a belligerent party. Maybe all the submarine sabre-rattling is overdone because it only means that there has to be an additional force to help guide the two superpowers through the inevitable antagonism that results from the fact that the two are so powerful, but it is still unnerving in that the United States was in a Cold War in the Twentieth Century that lasted from 1949 until 1989 and that except for particularly adroit mutual management and a lot of luck, the two superpowers might have gone on to a nuclear war, and the fear of that shrouded two generations. We don’t want that again. I went through it the first time and the prospect of it by younger people may not appreciate its gravity.
Read MoreWhat's Next?
When dealing with politics or whatever is large enough as a social matter to be considered history, those of us who are viewers or observers or whatever is the audience to politics and history always await what will happen next, knowing that, except for people who are alarmists or very certain about how well off they may be when the world ends, there is no end of new things, just like in a soap opera, where characters emerge and reemerge if the audience likes them or pass from the scene to new figures and their problems. In politics, there is always a new campaign, a new Young Turk, a superannuated figure who lingers on to become President, and new configurations whereby Jews and Blacks and women and Gays can become part of the political elites as well as the political masses. There are new issues, like climate change, and older issues, like abortion or voting rights, that get revived with a slightly different spin. Politics is like going to a carnival where you pick out which game you wish to take part in. The only cost to the game is the willingness of time and attention to deal with it, everyone is a master strategist or a tout who predicts which horse will win. Consequently, the viewers or observers are always trying to construct the succession of events as comprising a story so as to make sense of those events. What candidate will peak too early (like Kamala Harris) or just hold on, like Joe Biden, when, in fact, Biden was always ahead in the popularity contest even if he did not make headway in the delegate votes until after the South Carolina Primary. Nixon thought a candidate should peak just right while Nixon thought you go full out all the time. So, at the moment, a viewer like me thinks politics is at a lull, the dust up over Afghanistan over, waiting for whether Biden can pull off his reconciliation and infrastructure bills, neither voting rights or police violence going to amount to much, Biden a hero if both of the major bills pass and a good chance for him to retain congressional control after the midterms, while losing both will make him regarded as a failed President, and the press uncertain what to make of it if Biden gets infrastructure but has to be very scaled down to get reconciliation of what has now been called social infrastructure, which means the extension of entitlements, which is always the goal of Liberal politics. My theory is that there are lulls and moments of high drama, as when John McCain sustained the Affordable Care Act over President Trump’s objection, partly out of policy and partly out of pique. Isn’t that usually the case?
Read MoreThe Drama of the A-Bomb
There are many accounts of those distinctive images and situations that are associated with the atomic bombing that ended the Pacific War in World War II. Very well told is Ian Toll’s “The Twilight of the Gods” in that he covers everything, including whether a diplomatic tweak on the part of the Americans might have ended the war without requiring the A-bombs to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Toll does not provide anything new but he is well balanced. There is the Oppenheimer operation in Los Alamos, a city of young scientists doing with limited comforts. Then the first A blast in the New Mexico desert, the sun rising twice, as has often been said, and toll’s retelling of the green ferrous oxide that was all that was left at the original site of the blast.Then the shift to the politicians when the scientists turn their weapon to the decision makers. Then the hordes of B-29 fleets pulverizing the Japanese homeland and then delivering the bombs themselves, and then the stunned aftermath where the agonizing decision was made for the Japanese to surrender, and then the start of the occupation, Americans startled that the Japanese people who greeted them when they arrived as conquerors in their home territories were grateful and joyous rather than sullen or dejected.
Read MoreMorals and the Taliban
Other people are regarded as taking responsibility. Then they can be blamed for it. The existential fact of doing one thing rather than another is on their hands for reasons always inexplicable and after the fact. My mother and her sister decided to leave Poland for the United States in 1939 knowing things were going bad but also knowing that they would never see their families again and must find work and people in a new life. That was the bravest thing they ever did though it seemed to them to be doing the natural thing, how fearful they were of the Germans. It seemed to them obvious self interest and, anyway, being servants and shopgirls in Poland did not seem to be an appealing future and so making a decision was like following water down an inclined street. It was bound to happen; it was the thing to do, even if their friends and relatives stayed put and were eradicated by the Germans.. People from their own mind’s eye make decisions easily and in a flash, not agonizing, even if they agonize later, as if they were contemplating other people for whom decisions in those other minds always seem paradoxical and unrequired.
Read MorePolitics Akilter
There is a widespread perception afoot, so announced by a number of pundits, that American politics and American society are out of whack. The evidence that suggests that the regular institutions and the usual arrangements and interests of the various demographic populations are not doing what they are supposed to be doing include the fact, central to me, that half of the Republican congresspeople have not admitted that Biden was legitimately elected, that Congress does not want to investigate an insurrection at the Capital, and that poor people are supporting Republicans and that farmers are also supporting Republicans even if trade wars against China have not been to their economic advantage. What is going on? The usual explanations have come up empty.
Read MoreA Competent Admininistration
The Biden Administration is churning along on its various projects but things are in stasis, at the moment, because the fruits of their endeavors have not yet arrived with the exception of that easy one that occurred early on when the Recovery Act passed and, among other things, provided jobs for health care workers and cops, and gave everyone a fourteen hundred dollar check, and covered the costs of Covid relief. Not minor but the real test is whether Biden will get his infrastructure bill and his family plan, both of which should result whether from bipartisanship or reconciliation in late summer. As it is, there is no movement on the George Floyd Act to deal with police violence, where negotiators are still negotiating and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act seems to be getting nowhere however much Biden says he is strongly in favor of those two bills. So Biden will either be a great success and run in the midterms on his success at the infrastructure and family bills, a tribute that government can work in spite of the fifty fifty tie in the Senate and only a majority of a handful in the House, or he will be a failed President, in which case the Republicans who had blocked his efforts will run against him as a do nothing President. Either a hero or a failure rather than just middling with just some accomplishments along with his defeats. So we all wait and think that the very fabric of democracy is in the balance in that a Republican majority in Congress, most Republicans still not having pledged itself to the legitimacy of the 2020 election, and those Republicans might do any number of deplorable matters though. like as not, will do not very much other than allow states to undercut democratic elections because doing nothing and being obstructionist is what Republicans have done for a while, even before Trump, in that their creed is no longer balancing the budget or being aggressive at foreign powers or fighting the cultural wars like abortion, the last issue to be dealt with next year by the Supreme Court when its 6-3 majority will likely seriously curtail the right to an abortion just as this year it seriously curtailed the 1965 Voting Rights Bill, leaving only the possibility that the Biden Attorney General will cleverly find a way to sue states for voting rights incursions even though the Supreme Court limited that by saying these suits had to be significant and cognizant of the need to avoid voter fraud even though the Court never had to say the states had to show there had indeed to be voter fraud before restrictions to protect it from happening occurred. The Supreme Court is not simply wrong headed; it is fatuous. So we wait and so have foreboding about what will happen when events break.Meanwhile, I get some solace, despite my anxieties, for watching the Biden Administration perform itself so smoothly. It is a pleasure to watch given the chaos of the Trump Administration when that President made off the cuff and erratic and wrong and lying remarks and performances and his Executive Branch was understaffed or ever changing or riddled with ideologues and ignorant people and Trump, for the nation’s relief, was not able to control the reins of government because he didn’t know how to and so could do trivial things by clearing rioters so he could have a photo op at a church, to no effect, although reports have it that he did plan to undermine institutions, while only undercutting Bill Barr and his predecessor because of the only parochial concern over whether the two of them had supported him in the investigations by Congress of his misdeeds. No big policy agenda. Just a wall to nowhere and giving money to rich people, that last something Republicans always like to do so as to get reelected to office.
Read MoreIs Civic Education the Answer?
George Packer is a seasoned and judicious political journalist and has offered in the Atlantic magazine this week a very pessimistic portrait of the American scene. He says that we are engaged in an extended civil war in that people have difficulty recognizing themselves as fellow Americans because of their ideologies, emotions and customs. The other side is the enemy. Hillary Clinton’s side thought she was right to think her opponents deplorable and irredeemable while those opponents thought that the coastal elites, as they considered them, condescending and remote from ordinary life, not willing to recognize that so many families of both stripes supported Little League and soccer practice. I observe the truth of this view when I see and hear people who are committed to law and order and think the looting that occurred last summer during the reaction to George Floyd was unconscionable while those who attacked the Capitol in January were people out on a lark and visa versa, the insurrectionists unpardonable and the looters understandable. Moreover, Packer thinks this situation is likely to remain of longstanding, each side more deeply sunk into its own silo of thought, fact and observation, whatever is the order of these three perceptions, and may lead to the disintegration of the American polity and something could set off a spark that not even the military should or could suppress.
Read MoreCriticizing Critical Race Theory
When critical race theory was a manifesto proposed by Black lawyers and other Black intellectuals in 1980 to set straight American history, claiming that Black people were the backbone for creating American society and yet its endemic racism had turned the tables and victimized Black people and it was time to restore to Black people the rightful historical and present order of things, I thought the theory, though it was not worked out well enough to award that term of praise, was both jejune and meretricious, and I thought the so-called theory destined to fall on its own weight and to be overtaken by more enlightened Black intellectuals because its success would turn back race relations for generations. The movement it has inspired, however, has become hallowed in its brief history and has inspired a counter movement to abolish it, in school boards and state houses, both the advocates and their opponents neither of them appreciating history as the way to see history is complicated but instead think of history as a way to take sides on peoples and races and so the controversy has indeed set back a more enlightened view of race relations and so there is indeed a need to point out the shortcomings and malice of the movement and the same of its opponents. It is just another case of bad ideas continuing to fester and we would all be best rid of it, which is also the case of Naziismand Qanon. Bad ideas, after all, do matter. I will grant, however, that the two sides are ignorant rather than as meanspirited or vicious as those other benighted movements.
Read MoreCommunism and Qanon
Frank Lovejoy was a mid-level supporting movie actor whose base voice, prominent chin and dour personality should have given him more recognition, much more so than Robert Stack, who also developed a persona as a stone face and became a Hollywood fixture for twenty years. But Lovejoy did manage to act as the star of a minor movie, “I Was a Communist for the FBI”, made in 1950, close to the top of the Second Red Scare, and he portrayed a Communist undercover agent for the FBI so as to let the audience see both the workings of Communism in the American midst as well as how the hero persevered to finally reveal himself as a true patriot, something all right thinking people would endorse because all the Reds were bad and devious and violent while the FBI and civilians understood that all Reds were bad, no ambiguities allowed. As Whittiker Chambers put it, the real war was between Reds and ex-Reds. They would decide the fate of the world. Other movies such as “I Led Three Lives'' and “Dear John'', which starred Helen Hayes and the last year of the overweight Robert Walker, made the same point: monolithic heroes and monolithic villains in our midst. The point of these movies was to see the Communist side as impenetrable, beyond the ability to understand what ordinary people thought of them, and nothing redeeming about them, and so it was that there was a gnostic divided between the two that was not mediated by ideological interchange or mixed feelings, the female Communist in the movie realizing it was a lost cause as soon as she realized what the Party was doing, never wondering whether allowances might be made for its imperfections after she had joined its initial idealistic enthusiasm. Even German generals within a few years of the war were recognized as having human touches and mixed feelings and a kind of honor, but not so for Communists.
Read MoreBiden's New Deal
Before assessing Biden’s initiative to change America’s social structure through government, let’s stand back and consider these other initiatives to do this in the course of, say, the last hundred and twenty years, when government emerged out of a Wild West culture where businesses jousted with one another to industrialize America without much government intervention. Remember that wars, or the Space Program, or establishing national parks, or conventional infrastructure, such as building the Continental Railroad or the Interstate Highway System, however admirable they may be and of considerable consequence, are not part of these social initiatives, all of which, whether Republican or Democratic, failed or successful, have tried to expand entitlements and regulations, where an entitlement means awarding money or some other favor, such as ten points oxtra on a civil service exam for veterans, and a regulation is the stipulated procedures for an organization, such as regulating the way to calculate utility charges for the consumer, and these entitlements and regulations have been opposed by those who had preferred whatever had already been there, or thought government was too intrusive and so a danger to individual liberty, or were simply oppositional, in that the other party was always to be opposed against the incumbents for that reason alone, and that is the present case, where Mitch McConnell is against Biden’s programs just because Biden is proposing them, and think that Republicans can win the Congress and the White House just by being contrary.
Read MoreThe Anger of Rashida Tlaib
An event in current events prompted for me a consideration of the nature of anger. Rashide Tlaib, the only Palestinean American person in Congress, was at the tarmac in Dearborn, Michigan meeting with President Biden a week or two ago when he was touting the recovery and promise of the Ford River Rouge auto plant and she was reported to have had a heated exchange with him about what was the then continuing war between Israel and Gaza, she reported to have claimed that Netenyahu was a “aparteid prime minister”. Afterwards, at the auto plant, Biden had publicly praised Tlaib as an eloquent and passionate spokesperson for her own point of view and that he hoped her family on the West Bank was doing well. The question is how she would have taken to his response, putting aside that the meeting itself, as that had been engineered by the President, allowed the congresswoman to be known as someone expressing the concerns of her constituents in a particularly pointed manner. Quite aside from these politics where one hand washes the other and that Biden might need a favor from her later on for his having given her the opportunity to speak out, a deeper question is whether she would have felt the President was to be noticed as having been gracious rather than angry for what she said, certainly not how Biden’s predecessor would have done, which was to angrily chastise Tlaib for her point of view. Rather, Biden and Tlaib had acted in a civilized manner to one another. Biden had in effect said that being cordial whatever are the political differences, however emotional they can become, and that recognizing familial loyalty is something everyone can embrace. Biden. In his brief remarks, refused to villainize an opposition just as George Bush ‘43 had done when he did not villainize Arab Americans after the World Trade Center disaster. Biden, I might take it, was binding wounds and making all of us feel better, rejecting animosity in favor of mutual respect. That is the way I first took it. Biden’s remark was to remind us that American politics can put aside personal rancor while pursuing the political process, each of those who hold positions in the government to be treated as worthy of dignity. We all become warm, or many of us do, for having risen to this occasion.
Read MoreThis Week in History
Here is a record of what happen this week that might be worth remembering fifty years from now, just as I wish I remembered vividly some week’s events in 1962 when people like me were wondering whether Kennedy would push for some civil rights bill, that mounting sense of disappointment occurring at the same time of heightening tensions while there were rumors and reports that the Soviet Union was placing missiles in Cuba. I have also repeatedly seen the record captured in the footage of George Stevens of the ravages of Berlin and Munich in mid 1945. Women send bushels of rubble from one hand to another in a chain of workers so as to clear some of the debris (I understand they were paid a day wage by the American government so that some people could get some work). Stevens also, at the time, filmed German POWs, smiling perhaps because they had survived the war or, perhaps, only angry that they had lost, not yet rehabilitated from Naziism. Like every moment, there was a knife edge on whether Germany would change what was not at all inevitable, which is to return to a democratic society. The Stevens films conveyed the tenor of the times, more accurate than a reconstruction through history. I also remember having read the next day of the New York Times reporting on the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, in 1911, when 146 girls died and 78 were injured in a sweatshop factory where the doors were locked so that the girls could not take bathroom breaks. Journalism didn’t only provide “the first draft of history”, a phrase invoked to praise journalism. Rather, such journalism or newsreel footage or memory provide but facts that might otherwise ever escape notice and retain the character or flavor of the concatenation of events that make the period of a time as being such.There were reports of girls jumping off the building, where the Triangle Shirtwaist Company was housed, to their deaths so as to avoid the fire, just as people did when they also jumped from the World Trade Center on September 11th, teachers not telling the children who saw it that these were not birds. That immediacy of experience is not as well captured as happens in, let us say, the 9/11 Commission, and so should be treasured for what is established as a record just last week too.
Read MoreRace Relations Today
There have been much congratulations offered by Black activists and observers as well as the President and Vice-President about the fact that Derek Chauvin was convicted on all charges for the murder of George Floyd. Those surrounding Floyd’s family think that this decision was pivotal. Police officers whose actions that illegally kill Black citizens are usually covered up and police officers charged with such a crime are usually vindicated. This time was different and the conviction will increase the pressure for Congress to pass the well crafted and long overdue George Floyd Act which would restrict police violence. But remember that we just barely missed the bullet shot against both social order and equal rights for Blacks and whites under the law. The building where the trial was held and the decision delivered was crowded with National Guard members and other kinds of police officers because there might have been significant rioting if the verdict had been otherwise, whether to acquit Chavin or just to convict him only of manslaughter. That shows there is an imbalance of forces in that the Black community has a sense of justice on its side and also a threat of rioting while the white population has an ingrained sense that the Black community is not on the side of social order and that its grievances are exaggerated even if the outrage against police violence is eloquent. The combination of justice upheld and violence deterred suggests that race relations are very bad. Blacks have a justified grievance against persistent police violence and whites think that Black neighborhoods are suspect because there are hoodlums and gangsters among them that the rest of the community cannot control. And Black advocates do not help the matter because they come up with preposterous slogans that offer justice or nothing instead of a balanced and nuanced presentation of the issues as they were once proclaimed by the Black leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, and especially by Dr. MLK, Jr.
Read MoreBiden's Gun Control
Biden is going big in his Liberalism in that he believes that big government is the solution rather than big government being the problem, which is what most Conservatives think. Big Liberalism thinks that government can provide money and programs that will alleviate inequities and discrimination between class and ethnic groups, as happened when Social Security and Medicare led to abolishing the fact that the elderly were poorer than the other age groups in the population. Laws to insure equal accommodation transformed the southern states. Conservatives may think that government might tweak the market system, such as by creating incentives whereby private companies could expand broadband to rural areas, but Liberals think that only a government effort can make broadband universal so that it can become the basis for educating young people through distance learning and so broadband has to be the equivalent of a public utility, part of the national infrastructure, rather than a luxury item for those able to buy the product. You can’t have elementary and middle school and high school students attend distance learning if broadband isn’t universal. The prior model was rural electrification, where the government had to step in because customers were far enough apart that it made no sense for private power companies to expand their reach to rural areas and the cost of some areas, should the private companies enter the field, were prohibitively expensive. The government, such as in the TVA, had to do it, and so does broadband today, where a third of rural areas do not have broadband.
Read MoreBiden's Long March
Biden’s press conference on last Thursday made clear that the achievement of his legislative agenda will be a long slough, inched forward, rather than a blitzkrieg whereby Biden will rush law after law following his spectacular success at the American Recovery Plan. The reasons for this are that the American Recovery Plan was a fluke in that it was subject to reconciliation, whereby only a majority was required, and also because McConnell has made clear that he will hold his caucus together to be against any legislative measure Biden may propose just so that McConnell can in 2022 claim that Biden hadn’t done anything and so the Republicans should take the House and the Senate, even though McConnell has no legislative agenda himself, the same pattern whereby Republicans had said they would replace Obamacare with a better plan and never bothered to offer one for twelve years.
Read MoreJoe Biden's Radical Liberalism
Rahm Emanuel, when he was Chief of Staff to Barack Obama, said “No crisis should be wasted”. What he meant was that when there is a legislative moment where there is an urgency and general willingness to act, measures should be added to the package of other measures that are a long time part of the leadership’s agenda. That is what happened with the passage yesterday of the American Recovery Act. No Republicans joined to aid the Democrats, truthfully saying that many of the measures had nothing to do with coronavirus relief but were part of long time Democratic wish lists, but some of the Democrats did not waver too much from the bill, except for eliminating the fifteen dollar minimum wage and forgiving student loans, and did approve of provisions that could be considered radical in a liberal way in that they moved forward major programs to expand entitlements so as to provide a more substantial way of life for all citizens and particularly those who were all but the rich, the rich not needing the assistance. Biden’s law is incremental but substantial, a firm way whereby economic situations do not interfere in people achieving their life, liberty and quest for happiness. From a Liberal point of view, this is the greatest advance since the New Deal, and Democrats from Bernie Sanders to John Manchin are impressed by the audacity, even if Larry Summers says that the package of money is so large that it will lead to inflation. The U. S. has had no inflation since the late Seventies, which is two generations ago, and the Federal Reserve has the ability and the power to squeeze out any inflation should it arise. Look at the solid policy accomplishments rather than speculation.
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