YOU CAN BET THE BIDEN, PELOSI, SCHUMER INFRASTRUCTURE HOAX WILL NOT ONLY HAND AMNESTY TO 50 MILLION MEXICAN FLAG WAVERS BUT WILL RICHLY REWARD THEIR CRONIES ON WALL STREET.
Capitalism Run Amok: What went wrong and how to fix it | Marianne Williamson and Richard Wolff
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiEmfXECD9k
Maher: I Have Zero Confidence Spending Bills Actually Cost What Everyone Says They Do
On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher stated that while he thinks we need to rebuild infrastructure and he’s sure the reconciliation bill has plenty of good provisions, he has no confidence that the numbers for how much the two spending packages cost are accurate.
Maher said, “[W]e’ve got a $1 trillion infrastructure bill. Look, we need to rebuild infrastructure. On top of that, they want another, the Democrats want, and may get, 3.5 trillion, that’s for the second infrastructure, I’m sure a lot of worthy things in there. But if you ask me, what confidence do you have that these numbers, a trillion for the first bill, 3.5 trillion for the other bill are what the shit actually costs? I would say none, none. We just make numbers and pull them out of our ass.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
American Jobs Bill: Fantasy, Fiasco
The American Jobs Plan (AJP), AKA The Infrastructure Investment And Jobs Act, is a proposal by U.S. president Joe Biden to spend $2+ trillion on U.S. infrastructure over eight years. A Fact Sheet outlining the goals of this legislation was published in March of this year, and the 2,700-page law is now working its way through Congress. In a recent vote, 17 Republicans voted to move along this bill. It seems to have bipartisan support. This bipartisan support reveals the mental, moral, fiscal, legal, and logical collapse of the USA.
Chris Hedges | WHY The Democrats Are HOPELESS!
Amtrak Joe vs. the Modern Robber Barons
Biden’s big bet on rail infrastructure will be wasted unless he takes on the financiers who control the industry.
For a chief executive whose love of trains won him the nickname “Amtrak Joe,” this must be a pretty exciting moment. President Joe Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure bill, which designates an unprecedented $66 billion to expand rail service across the country, appears poised to pass the Senate.
The bill promises to furnish a more convenient and environmentally friendly mode of travel between destinations that are far enough apart to make driving tedious but close enough together to make flying impossible or at best impractical. You may never use these new trains yourself, but those who do will create less traffic congestion, cleaner air, and a cooler planet. Removing more freight from pavement-pounding long-haul semi-trucks onto super fuel-efficient trains will make driving safer and more pleasant, and may yield huge reductions in carbon emissions.
But for any of this to happen on any meaningful scale, the Biden administration will need to do more than invest more public money in train travel. It will also need to reverse decades of deregulation, lax antitrust enforcement, and other policy blunders that left latter-day robber barons in control of nearly all the nation’s highly monopolized railroad infrastructure, just as they were in the worst days of the Gilded Age. This time, the financiers aren’t presiding over an expanding rail system; they’re selling it off and permanently liquidating its assets for short-term economic gain.
Unless Biden takes on the financiers, merely maintaining Amtrak service–let alone expanding it–will become ridiculously expensive. Here’s an example that shows why.
Amtrak for decades offered train service along the Gulf Coast corridor between New Orleans and Mobile. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina badly damaged the tracks. The two giant corporate rail systems that own the line, Norfolk Southern and CSX, made the necessary repairs, and within a year resumed running their own freight trains. But Amtrak service never returned.
It’s not that people in the region don’t want their Amtrak trains back. A broad coalition of civic and business leaders, including Mississippi’s Republican Senator Roger Wicker, has been trying for years to persuade the railroads to let Amtrak resume service. They point to a study by the Trent Lott National Center at the University of Southern Mississippi that says restoring Amtrak service will boost tourism significantly, greatly benefiting Mississippi’s beaches and casinos. They point to the report of a special Gulf Coast Working Group, created by Congress, that estimates the cost of resuming Gulf Coast passenger service at $5.4 million. They point to the fact that the Biden administration, Amtrak, and the three states involved are all willing to furnish the necessary operating funds to run two roundtrip trains a day.
But after five years of negotiations, you still can’t take the train to Gulfport, Biloxi, Pascagoula, or anywhere else along the Gulf Coast. CSX, which controls most of the track along the route, insists that restoring Amtrak service would interfere with the seven or eight daily freight trains it runs daily along the Gulf Coast. It’s an argument that rail corporations often deploy against passenger service.
The objection is absurd on its face. During World War II, when troop and military freight trains crowded this route along with civilian freight traffic long since lost to trucks, dispatchers still managed to move 11 scheduled passenger trains per day between Mobile and New Orleans. These included the storied “Pan American” of country music fame. And they did it using telegraphs, not the efficient GPS train control technology available today.
CSX’s recalcitrance is a negotiating strategy to get Amtrak either to go away or to pony up for huge infrastructure investments that would mostly benefit CSX itself. The railroad says restoring Amtrak’s two trains requires a second main track, new sidings, siding extensions, yard bypasses, and modernization of drawbridges. At one point, CSX put the price tag at $2 billion–orders of magnitude more than estimates provided by the Federal Railway Administration and other independent experts.
Such maneuverings reflect the growing power of hedge funds and other “activist investors” over the railroad industry. In 2017 the financier Paul Hilal used his activist fund Mantle Ridge to buy a $2 billion stake in CSX and win control of its board. Hilal used this power to depose CSX’s long-standing management and replace it with a team of downsizing specialists committed to boosting short-term profits by shrinking the railroad’s physical assets, labor force, other expenses. The new focus on cost cutting and downsizing seriously degraded CSX freight operations and caused CSX to take an impossibly hard line with Amtrak.
Exasperated by the railroads’ refusal to negotiate in good faith over the restoration of Gulf Coast service, Amtrak recently appealed to an independent federal agency known as the Surface Transportation Board. But deregulation left the federal government with very limited control over railroad infrastructure. When Congress and the Nixon Administration created Amtrak in 1970, they relieved railroad owners of their previous obligation to provide passenger service at their own expense. Half a century later, the federal government has no clear legal standard to decide when freight railroads must grant Amtrak access to their track, or what the terms of service will be. And since Amtrak owns track only between Boston and Washington and a few other places, dependence on freight railroads is a huge obstacle to improving or expanding passenger rail service.
For example, more than ten years’ studying and lobbying has been dedicated to the question of whether Amtrak will be permitted to run more than one round-trip train per day between Harrisburg and Pittsburgh. Public policymakers must wrestle with many knotty problems; this shouldn’t be one of them. There’s plenty of track capacity. Amtrak ran two roundtrip trains along the mostly three-track mainline as recently as 2004. But Norfolk Southern says today that bringing back that second train would create unworkable disruptions to its freight service. The railroad’s latest maneuver was to demand that the State of Pennsylvania pay for a study to calculate how much the public must pay Norfolk Southern for the necessary capital improvements, such as a possible fourth track.
Another example is the drawn out battle Amtrak and the public had to wage to restore passenger service between Boston and Portland, Maine. By the time Amtrak came into being, passenger service on the route had already been discontinued. To get it started again, Amtrak, along with state and local governments, had to agree to pay the railroad that owns the tracks tens millions for capital improvements. Then it to took another decade of litigation before the railroad, now known as Pan Am, would allow Amtrak to run its trains fast enough so that people would want to ride them. A pending merger between Pan Am and CSX now threatens the public’s considerable investment in that passenger route and any prospect of expanding Amtrak service elsewhere in New England.
Biden recently signed an executive order that commanded the Surface Transportation Board to put more pressure on railroads to stop their habitual practice of delaying Amtrak trains by making them wait for passing freight trains. That’s helpful. But the order failed to clarify what rights Amtrak possesses to expand service, and on what price it and other public entities must pay railroad owners for capital improvements. Because there’s no clear statutory authority, some industry insiders predict Amtrak’s legal fight to restore Gulf Coast passenger service will go all the way to Supreme Court, which could take years. State and local governments seeking to establish commuter rail service have even less legal leverage than Amtrak in negotiating terms with private railroad owners.
It’s much the same story when you consider the prospects for expanding freight rail service in the U.S. Don’t expect much progress unless we claw back Wall Street control.
There’s an urgent and overwhelming societal need to divert more freight from trucks to trains. Freight trains are three to five times more fuel efficient than trucks, and produce far less emissions. Indeed, when electrically powered by overhead wires, trains can be emission-free, and lack the battery disposal costs that plague electric trucks. According to one study, a modest investment in electrifying freight railroads could reduce carbon emissions by 39 percent and, by 2030, remove an estimated 83 percent of long-haul trucks off the road.
Moving more freight by rail would also reduce the number of Americans who are killed or injured by collisions with large trucks, a casualty rate of 156,000 people per year. In addition, it would reduce dramatically the damage done to America’s roads and highways by large trucks–each of which causes the same wear and tear as 9,600 passenger cars.
Yet hedge funds, private equity firms, and other financiers are using their control of highly monopolized, underregulated railroads not to expand rail freight but to sell off rail assets and hand over all but the highest margin business to trucks.
Some of this downsizing is justified by the decline of the railroads’ thermal coal business as electric utilities convert to natural gas. But most of the downsizing results simply from financiers forcing railroads to shed all but their most lucrative lines of business. Such practices threaten to shrink the nation’s rail network to the point of non-viability, but so long as rail expenses fall faster than rail revenues, the short-term return on assets increases. That’s all Wall Street cares about.
The scale of the downsizing is dramatic. One measure is the rapid disappearance of box cars. During the ten years leading up to 2019, even as GDP increased by nearly 50 percent, the railroad box car fleet shrank by one third. Between 2000 and 2019, the trade journalist Bill Stephens reported, the equivalent of 16,132 merchandise freight trains, each with 75 cars, vanished from the tracks of CSX and Norfolk Southern. The main driver of this decline was an industry trend known as “de-marketing,” in which railroads actively turn away profitable but low-margin business—for example, hauling grain or consumer appliances—if the move doesn’t involve huge volumes or if it requires box cars to be hauled back empty. As a consequence, many farmers now have to use expensive trucks to get their crops to market while many kinds of manufactured products become far more difficult if not impossible to move in towns and cities where the railroads will no longer do business.
Railroads are also making it more expensive and cumbersome for shippers to realize any advantage from combining shipment by truck with shipment by rail. Especially for trips over about 500 miles, moving containers by both truck and train is much more fuel efficient and environmentally friendly than using trucks for the entire journey. During the 1980s and ‘90s railroads won substantial market share back from trucks in some lanes by offering such inter-modal service. But that was before Wall Street started demanding that railroads limit themselves to the highest-margin business.
Bowing to such pressure, in 2018 the Union Pacific and CSX discontinued their partnered service on 197 of 301 cross-country container train routes. As a consequence, even shippers who still use railroads to ship containers wind up making much greater use of trucks. Rather than taking a container from Midwest cities to Baltimore, for example, CSX will take it only as far as Chambersburg, Pennsylvania and then make the shipper hire a trucker to drive the remaining 77 miles to Baltimore.
Railroads have also been stripping out terminal capacity. Wonder why it took so long to get that new car you ordered? The shortage of rail terminal space is a major reason for the widespread logistical bottlenecks that have occurred since the economy began recovering from the Covid pandemic.
In July, the Union Pacific railroad told customers it was suspending all container freight service between West Coast ports and its Global IV terminal in Chicago, a hub clogged with stacked containers that the railroad lacked the capacity to sort and redirect. The embargo immediately meant that still more boxes coming from Asia, with everything from auto parts to transistors, piled up on docks as West Coast ports waited for canceled trains. As the chain reaction continued, the steamship line HMM warned customers to expect more delays and announced restrictions on loading containers bound for Chicago. Rail expert Larry Gross calculated that it would take 50 double-stack trains, each carrying 800 20-foot containers, to haul away the pileup caused by just one week of suspended rail service.
Why was Global IV overwhelmed? In large part because, to appease Wall Street’s demands for higher margins, Union Pacific closed a separate Chicago facility, Global III.
Wall Street has also pressured railroads into cutting expenses by reducing the frequency of freight service. If you live near railroad tracks, or if you drive regularly over grade crossings, you may have noticed that railroads run freight trains much less frequently nowadays, and that the trains they do run can stretch as long as three miles. The industry refers to this as PSR, or “Precision Scheduled Railroading.” In practice, PSR has nothing to do making trains run on precise schedules. The term was coined by the late E. Hunter Harrison, a railroad executive who, starting in the 1990s, boosted railroad stock prices through radical downsizing. This made him the darling of hedge funds like Pershing Square Capital Management and Mantle Ridge.
The late CSX CEO Hunter Harrison pioneered the use of radical downsizing to boost the price of railroad stocks. (Larry MacDougal/The Canadian Press via AP)
PSR mostly just involves running fewer trains to fewer places using fewer employees, while imposing all kinds of new fees on shippers. After Harrison implemented PSR at CSX, Norfolk Southern and Union Pacific and other railroads imitated him, and freight rail operations deteriorated nationwide. In 2019, Congress held hearings where shippers relayed example after example of paying more for worse service. Since then, CSX and other railroads have taken PSR still further by ripping out yards and laying off hard-to-replace employees such as locomotive mechanics and engineers. Between 2014 and 2019, before COVID had any impact, the four largest railroads laid off 30,000 mostly unionized workers.
The downsizing was so great that railroads can’t meet the post-pandemic surge of freight shipments. As a consequence, still more freight will crowd onto the nation’s highways. “We can’t let hedge fund managers write the rules of railroading,” complained Rep. Peter DeFazio, (D-OR), chairman of the House Transportation Committee, in May, as he called for an investigation of the way PSR has degraded railroad freight service.
Deregulation and a retreat from antitrust enforcement also feeds the financiers’ control over railroads. Since 1980, the number of major, or Class 1 railroads has shrunk from 33 to seven –-a number that will drop to six if a proposed merger between Canadian National and Kansas City Southern wins regulatory approval. The result is that more shippers are served by only a single railroad. There’s always trucks, of course, but some commodities (grain and chemicals, for instance) are too heavy and bulky to move economically by truck for more than short distances.
Captive shippers once could depend on the Interstate Commerce Commission to protect them from predatory pricing, but in 1980 the Carter Administration and Congress stripped the government of almost all its practical ability to do so. The combination of deregulation and lax antitrust enforcement that ensued leaves railroads free to hike prices or degrade service standards.
The shippers’ loss has been the railroad stockholders’ gain. Less than three years after Mantle Ridge brought in Harrison to run CSX, the railroad’s stock price doubled. Today, its new CEO says he’s committed to growing the business—but that isn’t necessarily the railroad business. On his watch, CSX bought a trucking company and used a $5 billion stock buyback program to raise the company’s stock price and fatten his own $15 million compensation package. The stock of other Class 1 railroads have also surged thanks to cost cutting that now allows railroads to spend less than 60 cents for every dollar they take in as revenue.
This is the industry on which Congress and Biden propose to bestow $66 billion. To protect that investment, we’ll need to do a lot more.
Government played an oversized role in building the nation’s railroads. Historically, railroads operated under charters granted by state and local governments that required them to serve the public good. CSX’s tracks along the Gulf Coast, for example, were originally laid by a corporation created by an act of Alabama’s state legislature in 1866. The legislature gave this corporation government-like powers, including eminent domain to acquire right of way across the state. But in return, the legislature stipulated that the line must be built and managed in a manner “best adapted to and for the public accommodation.”
This basic relationship between railroads and the public was codified into federal law in the late 19th century and lasted until the end of the 1970s. America’s early railroads received vast grants of public land and other direct subsidies that turned them into local or regional monopolies. In return, American law treated them as quasi-public utilities, subject to strict price regulation and the principle known as “common carriage,” which prohibited them from turning away some customers or classes of business while favoring others.
As Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote for the majority in the 1898 case of Smyth v Ames:
A railroad is a public highway and none the less so because constructed and maintained through the agency of a corporation deriving its existence and powers from the state. Such a corporation was created for public purposes. It performs a function of the state. Its authority to exercise the right of eminent domain and to charge tolls was given primarily for the benefit of the public.
This led to railroads being heavily regulated, first by state railroad commissions in the 1870s and then, after 1887, by the Interstate Commerce Commission, the first federal regulatory agency. The I.C.C. came to wield enormous influence over industrial development by barring railroads from favoring one shipper, industry, city or region over another. The I.C.C. also compelled railroads to provide certain low-margin or even money-losing lines of busines, such as branch lines necessary to connect smaller cities and villages to the political and economic life of the nation. By controlling rates and terms of service, the I.C.C. also prevented price wars and other ruinous competition among railroads and gave them a legal vehicle to coordinate operating plans so that freight and passengers could travel efficiently across more than one railroad.
Because of the I.C.C and passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890, railroads in that era were subjected to far more regulation and antitrust enforcement than today. That’s one big reason why late 19th and early 20th century rail tycoons like James Hill or E.H. Harriman concentrated on building railroads rather than on predatory pricing and “demarketing” like today’s financiers.
This regulatory regime worked reasonably well until the mid-20th century. As a the political scientist Samuel Huntington would write in 1952, “During its sixty-five years of existence, the Commission developed an enviable reputation for honesty, impartiality and expertness.” But then it began falling apart. As advancing technology expanded transportation by automobile, truck, and air, policymakers should have adjusted transportation policy to take advantage of potential synergies. They could have encouraged, for example, combining trains and trucks to move long-haul freight, or trains and planes to reach out-of-the-way places. Instead, funding was lavished on highway and airport construction.
A telling symbol of this imbalance is Washington’s monumental Union Station, built by a consortium railroads in the early 20th century. By the early 1960s, the railroads were paying property taxes on the station of $350,000 a year and an annual maintenance bill of more than $1 million, even as they lost money on passenger train service mandated by the I.C.C. Meanwhile, across the Potomac, airlines availed themselves of the federally owned and operated National Airport–built, expanded, and operated by a tangle of federal agencies that included the Civil Aeronautics Board, the Army Corp of Engineers, and even the National Park Service.
This imbalance led to massive railroad bankruptcies in the 1970s. Washington at that point might have nationalized the railroads, as nearly every other industrialized nation had done long before. Instead, it bailed out railroad stockholders by allowing railroads to shed public responsibilities such as operating passenger trains and branch lines, while allowing them to engage in a mad merger frenzy.
The strategy saved much of the industry from insolvency, but at a tremendous cost to the public good. Since 1980 the nation has lost more than 40 percent of its rail mileage, as many lines were ripped out that would be invaluable today as we struggle to decarbonize the economy and rationalize our transportation system. And once financiers twigged that Congress had turned railroads into unregulated monopolies answerable only to shareholders, they swooped in and pressured rail management to adopt policies like PSR to further downsize and squeeze out the last drops of monopoly profit.
One solution to this mess would be to nationalize the railroads. The U.S. actually did this, temporarily, during World War I, with many impressive results. Or we could nationalize only rail infrastructure, leaving private companies to operate trains. This “open access” approach has shown promising results in Europe, and it’s not all that different from how the Interstate Highway System works.
Alternatively, we could take a “back to the future” approach, once again treating railroads as public utilities, but paying better attention this time to coordinating regulation and subsidies among all transportation modes, including new ones like drones and self-driving cars.
The one thing we shouldn’t do, however, if we want to preserve Planet Earth and build back a transportation network that suits our needs, is give the railroad industry more money without demanding that it serve the public interest. The looting has gone on long enough.
Research assistance for this article was provided by Rachel Cohen.
No Party Ever Tried What the Democrats Are Trying Now
The audacity of the reconciliation bill.
When journalists describe the Democratic Party’s $3.5 trillion budget resolution, the most common descriptor is “sweeping” (CNN.com used the word three times in one story.) Perhaps the next most common is “vast” (used twice in this Washington Post story, plus one “sweeping”). But these words fail to capture the unprecedented magnitude of what’s being proposed.
Think of Simone Biles. Think of the triple twisting double somersault. Think of the Yurchenko double pike vault. As with Biles’ feats on the gymnastic floor, the Democrats are trying to accomplish something nobody has ever accomplished, let alone attempted, on the House and Senate floors: a single piece of legislation designed to overhaul the social contract on a disparate array of fronts.
Such audacity is thrilling … and also terrifying. Those who’ve long envisioned a federal government that robustly supports the needs of Americans, from their first days to their last, can only hope the Democrats are prepared to stick the landing.
Let’s try to put this in historic perspective.
As Congress put together the $2.2 trillion pandemic relief bill in March 2020, USA Today declared, “the measure would be, by far, the largest economic package ever approved by Washington.”
The Democrats are now proposing an economic package that’s more than 50 percent bigger.
After President Barack Obama enacted his roughly $800 billion stimulus package (about $1 trillion in today’s dollars), Michael Grunwald wrote a book christening it The New New Deal. “In constant dollars,” Grunwald calculated, “it was more than 50 percent bigger than the entire New Deal, twice as big as the Louisiana Purchase and Marshall Plan combined.”
The proposal from today’s Democrats is 3.5 times bigger than that.
Grunwald argued that Obama’s stimulus went beyond short-term crisis measures, citing a wide range of visionary investments, from genome sequencing to electronic health care recordkeeping to advanced battery development. In retrospect, though, it was largely incrementalism, albeit incrementalism on steroids. Biden is trying to lock down huge new programs that would directly alter daily life, which is more like the Old New Deal than the New New Deal.
Not even FDR tried to wrap Social Security, the National Labor Relations Act, the Banking Acts, the Securities Act, the National Industrial Recovery Act, and the Relief Appropriation Act into a single bill. Nor did LBJ did try to bundle the Civil Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Economic Opportunity Act, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the Food Stamp Act, the Urban Mass Transportation Act and the creation of Medicare and Medicaid.
Look at what Biden is trying to do in one fell swoop: free preschool; free community college; long-term eldercare through Medicaid; new dental, hearing and vision benefits in Medicare; lower drug costs from new Medicare bargaining power; quasi-permanent extension of the recently expanded child tax credit; major green energy and climate mitigation investments; a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants; and a tax code revamp to extract more revenue from the wealthy and corporations. This is not an exhaustive list.
The breadth of the agenda may make your heart pound in anticipation, or stop beating out of fear of spectacular failure. The more you’re trying to do at once, the more opportunities for your opponents to draw blood, and for your allies to flinch.
Democratic leaders have proceeded on the logic that what they want to do is innately popular, so their fellow Democratic members of Congress will have no reason to flinch. But the legislative process is rarely smooth, and the Democrats’ narrow margin in both chambers provides fertile turf for brinksmanship.
Already there are grumblings. Senator Kyrsten Sinema, a Democrat from Arizona, has declared she won’t vote for anything as big as $3.5 trillion, and Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia, has expressed “serious concerns” about the topline number. Eight House moderates signed a letter sharing “concerns” about spending levels, though stopping short of issuing a threat. These House moderates want to take up the Senate’s bipartisan infrastructure bill before turning to the larger package, but House progressives led by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are threatening to withhold their votes for the bipartisan bill until the Senate passes the reconciliation bill–even though that could take months. These tensions are surfacing before we even get to the actual drafting of the multi-faceted reconciliation bill.
As the news spotlight follows the intra-party jockeying, an overarching narrative to help sell the bill itself risks getting lost. When Biden kicked off this process, he proposed an “American Jobs Plan” and an “American Families Plan” which the White House described as follows:
The American Jobs Plan will create millions of good jobs, rebuild our country’s physical infrastructure and workforce, and spark innovation and manufacturing here at home. The American Families Plan is an investment in our children and our families—helping families cover the basic expenses that so many struggle with now, lowering health insurance premiums, and continuing the American Rescue Plan’s historic reductions in child poverty. Together, these plans reinvest in the future of the American economy and American workers, and will help us out-compete China and other countries around the world.
But attempts to amplify this narrative with coordinated message are grievously hampered for the time being as Democrats squabble among themselves.
Progressives are looking to tack on as much as they can to what seems to be the last legislative train leaving the station, while moderates raise alarms about spending and inflation. Meanwhile, congressional Republicans, who have yet to their find political footing this year, are gearing up to hammer the reconciliation bill as a left-wing spending spree. The harder those blows hit, the stingier the moderates may get.
Granted, Democrats are starting from a pretty good position. A Quinnipiac University poll this month asked, “Do you support or oppose a $3.5 trillion spending bill on social programs such as child care, education, family tax breaks, and expanding Medicare for seniors?” Sixty-two percent said yes, only 32 percent said no. The price tag and the rough outline aren’t triggering an automatic negative response.
We’ve yet to see vicious attacks, but they will come. Biden’s American Rescue Plan, like Obama’s stimulus, were passed lightening-fast in the midst of urgent crisis, making it difficult for attacks to get traction. (In the case of the American Rescue Plan, disoriented Republicans barely tried to launch any attacks.) Then Biden pursued the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which Republicans opted to shape instead of scorch. Now we are entering a legislative process that is not crisis-driven and not bipartisan. We can’t know if Republicans will hit their marks, but they will surely fire at will. If they succeed in driving down the poll numbers, moderate Democratic support could get wobbly.
Democrats do have enormous incentive to stick together. This legislative package is too big to fail. If the so-called two-track plan goes off the rails, Democrats likely lose their agenda this year, the Congress in 2022 and the presidency in 2024. So something is likely to pass. The question is how big will that something be. Without a strategy to maintain public support with an easy-to-understand narrative, squeamishness amongst the moderates will end up shrinking the size.
So beyond the challenge to find substantive common ground between progressive and moderate factions inside Washington, Democrats also have to continually remind voters outside Washington why they are working so hard to find that common ground. In order to stick the landing, this can’t be a story about Democratic intra-party political machinations. This has to be story about Democrats helping Americans live their lives.
Chris Hedges & Richard Wolff | Infrastructure & Pandemic Relief Are BLATANT SCAMS
Chris Hedges & Richard Wolff | America's OBVIOUS DECLINE
Chris Hedges & Richard Wolff | Billionares PROFITED FROM PANDEMIC!
What Happened To The American Middle Class? | Financial Crash Documentary | Business Stories
Don’t be fooled by Joe Biden
Chris Hedges | NAFTA, Clinton, and Obama BETRAYED Americans... and Joe Biden was right there with the worst of them!
Biden defended the wealthy in his speech to the donors but begged them to be aware of wealth inequality.
THE CRONY CLASS:
Income inequality grows FOUR TIMES FASTER under Obama-Biden and their bankster regime than Bush.
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2014/12/obamanomics-at-work-depressed-wages-and.html
“By the time of Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, the Democratic Party had completely repudiated its association with the reforms of the New Deal and Great Society periods. Clinton gutted welfare programs to provide an ample supply of cheap labor for the rich (WHICH NOW MEANS OPEN BORDERS AND NO E-VERIFY!), including a growing layer of black capitalists, and passed the 1994 Federal Crime Bill, with its notorious “three strikes” provision that has helped create the largest prison population in the world.”
“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes. This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” ----Karen McQuillan AMERICAN THINKER
Biden defended the wealthy in his speech to the donors but begged them to be aware of wealth inequality.
Wealth concentration increases in US.
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2019/02/staggering-concentration-of-wealth-in.html
The latest research on wealth inequality by University of California economics professor Gabriel Zucman underscores one of the key social and economic trends since the global financial crisis of 2008. Those at the very top of society, who benefited directly from the orgy of speculation that led to the crash, have seen their wealth accumulate at an even faster rate, while the mass of the population has suffered a major decline.
The past 40 years have seen the consolidation of a plutocratic elite, which has subordinated every aspect of American society to a single goal: amassing ever more colossal amounts of personal wealth. The top one percent have captured all of the increase in national income over the past two decades, and all of the increase in national wealth since the 2008 crash.
“This was not because of difficulties in securing indictments or convictions. On the contrary, Attorney General Eric Holder told a Senate committee in March of 2013 that the Obama administration chose not to prosecute the big banks or their CEOs because to do so might “have a negative impact on the national economy.”
"This is how they will destroy America from within. The leftist billionaires who orchestrate these plans are wealthy. Those tasked with representing us in Congress will never be exposed to the cost of the invasion of millions of migrants. They have nothing but contempt for those of us who must endure the consequences of our communities being intruded upon by gang members, drug dealers and human traffickers. These people have no intention of becoming Americans; like the Democrats who welcome them, they have contempt for us." PATRICIA McCARTHY
A key factor in Obama’s newfound and growing wealth are those who profited from his presidency. A number of his public speeches have been given to big Wall Street firms and investors. Obama has given at least nine speeches to Cantor Fitzgerald, a large investment and commercial real estate firm, and other high-end corporations. According to records, each speech has been at least $400,000 a clip.
During his presidency, Obama bragged that his administration was “the only thing between [Wall Street] and the pitchforks.”
In fact, Obama handed the robber barons and outright criminals responsible for the 2008–09 financial crisis a multi-trillion-dollar bailout. His administration oversaw the largest redistribution of wealth in history from the bottom to the top one percent, spearheading the attack on the living standards of teachers and autoworkers.
No, Joe, There Was No Economic Boom Under Obama
The great Jackie Gleason once said, "The past remembers better than it lived." And so it is, apparently, with the Obama years.
BLOG EDITOR: THE ECONOMIC MELTDOWN OF 2008 WAS CAUSED ENTIRELY BY THE VERY BANKSTERS WHO OWNED BARACK OBAMA AND JOE BIDEN FROM DAY ONE. THEY NOW ALSO OWN KAMALA HARRIS.
ULTIMATELY, THE ‘OBAMA RECOVERY’ SAW THE GREATEST TRANSFER OF WEALTH TO THE RICH IN AMERICAN HISTORY.
There was no economic "boom" as Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are misremembering. This was an economy that skidded into a financial ditch and seemingly never pulled out of it and got back on the prosperity hot lanes until Donald Trump won the election in November 2016.
You can mark the real recovery -- an economic inflection point almost the day after that surprise election outcome.
Every liberal forecaster and most academic economists had guaranteed America that, if Trump were elected, the stock market would crash; workers would be flattened; and, as New York Times economist Paul Krugman famously predicted, the economy would "never" recover.
Instead, the Dow Jones Industrial Average soared by 257 points the morning after the election (that's some crash), and it rose for the next three years, as it has again over the last several months. A few days after that election, small-business optimism surged by its most considerable amount ever measured, going back many decades. Family incomes surged to record-high levels in 2017, 2018 and 2019 as deregulation and tax cuts fueled a powerful engine. In three years, ordinary people had made more income gains than in eight years under the Obama-Biden administration.
But now we are being told a fairy tale that the Obama economy was booming and Biden miraculously fixed it and Trump "blew it."
Here's the reality check. Under Barack Obama, the economy barely grew 2% -- rather pathetic for a "recovery." The people who made the preposterous bullish claims that Obama saved the economy are the ones who now say the Biden economic plan will gain millions of jobs.
In the last year of Obama's presidency, growth shrunk to 1.6%, and the concern was the possibility of another recession. That's some boom.
If the Obama recovery had been as rapid as the average recovery, we would have had at least $1 trillion more GDP by 2016. If we had experienced a Ronald Reagan-style recovery, the GDP would have been $2.5 trillion larger when Obama left office. It is almost equivalent to the size of the entire output of the state of California gone missing.
The first four years of the Obama presidency were abysmal. The Obama-Biden $800 billion stimulus plan left unemployment higher every year than their economists had predicted if we did nothing. What bailed out Obama, ironically enough, was the shale oil and gas revolution that added millions of jobs despite the Obama-Biden hatred of fossil fuels. Most of the employment growth came in Texas, Oklahoma and North Dakota. Meanwhile, most of the green energy subsidies went into failed and now-bankrupt companies such as Solyndra. And now Biden promises another $2 trillion for "clean energy" corporate welfare subsidies.
Throughout nearly all of the Biden-Obama presidency, roughly 1 out of 3 people in the United States rated the economy as "good" or "excellent." Most of the rest rated the economy "fair" or "poor." That number surged to about 65% rating the economy as "good" or "excellent" within a year of Trump's presidency.
People can debate Trump's handling of the virus and the mistakes that have been made. It now looks like under any scenario, except an airtight sequestering of those over the age of 75, smokers, diabetics and severely overweight people, we would have seen the same or worse results.
Now the question is which game plan gets the economy and employment back to normal as quickly as possible. Biden promises a $4 trillion tax hike on almost all U.S. businesses and investors. That's roughly 5% of everything we produce that gets snatched away in higher taxes. If you believe that this will get America back on the fast track, you probably believe Obama caused an economic boom.
Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and an economic consultant with FreedomWorks. He is the co-author of "Trumponomics: Inside the America First Plan to Revive the American Economy."
The Four Horsemen of the Biden Apocalypse
In the waning days of the Trump administration, the country was showing signs of economic improvement, people were feeling more confident about battling COVID, and the border was relatively secure as the wall was finally being constructed.
What a difference seven months can make. It has been a horrific 207 days since President Joe Biden and his radical administration were unleashed on the country.
In effect, a political apocalypse is approaching. In the New Testament Book of Revelation, the four horsemen of the apocalypse are revealed to be "Conquest, War, Famine, and Death." In the Old Testament Book of Ezekiel, the four horsemen are referred to as "sword, famine, wild beasts, and plague."
In the era of Joe Biden, the four horsemen of our political apocalypse are the border invasion, the economic catastrophe, the assault on our families, and the use of the COVID plague to eliminate our constitutional rights.
1. Invasion. Biden inherited a secure border and immediately decided to destroy the progress of President Donald Trump and create an unmitigated disaster for Americans. The border wall was foolishly stopped, the policy of "catch and release" was reinstituted, the "Remain in Mexico" policy was ended, and illegal aliens were given an invitation to enter the United States.
As a result, the flood of illegal aliens has been unprecedented. The number of new apprehensions is increasing each month at the border, reaching the highest level in 25 years in July. Over 210,000 illegal aliens were apprehended on the southern border last month. Simultaneously, an untold number of people have been entering the country without detection. Coupled with ongoing legal immigration efforts, the United States of America is being radically and quickly transformed.
These illegal aliens are not being tested for COVID, are not being vaccinated, and are being sent all over the country. This is spreading the virus across the country while cynically changing the demographics of many "red" states. Although most citizens living in these areas are opposed to this resettlement, they have been powerless to stop it.
2. Catastrophe. Upon entering office, Biden should have continued Trump-era economic policies that were working. Instead, he stopped the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline and displacing thousands of workers from their jobs. Biden also placed a moratorium on the issuance of new oil and gas drilling leases on federal territory, both onshore and offshore.
As a result, America is transitioning from being energy independent for the first time in decades, under President Trump, to being energy-dependent once again. Ironically, Biden is now asking OPEC members to increase their oil production.
Biden has also happily supported radical legislation in Congress that will add to the national debt while spending trillions of dollars that will create severe inflationary woes in our county. During the Biden administration, prices on a wide range of items such as gasoline, lumber, and groceries are rapidly escalating. This has created the sharpest rise in inflation in 20 years.
If it passes in the U.S. House of Representatives, the new $1.2-trillion "infrastructure" bill that just was approved in the U.S. Senate will be an economic disaster. It includes very little real infrastructure, but it does include tax increases, at least $256 billion in additional federal debt that will exacerbate inflationary pressures, and a grab bag of liberal proposals. The bill advocates zero-emission vehicles, combats "racist" highways, and for good measure uses the word "equity" 64 times.
It sets the stage for an even bigger monstrosity, the "human infrastructure" bill that will cost over $3.5 trillion. It is being advertised as a de facto "Green New Deal" that will include a staggering number of climate change initiatives. The economic chaos that such a bill will institute is mind-boggling to contemplate.
3. Assault. Across America, our cities are on fire as crime is exploding. An increasing number of innocent Americans are being victimized each day. Incredibly, liberal politicians have used the opportunity to demand the defunding of police departments. This has only increased the number of police officers resigning and retiring. As a result, police departments are understaffed, and recruitment is becoming extremely difficult in urban areas that are viewed as being anti-police.
The answer, according to Biden and the Democrats, is always more gun control and never more criminal control.
Citizens are unsafe on the streets of our cities, and our children are unsafe in our public-school classrooms. Families are facing hostile environments in schools as teachers are using Critical Race Theory to educate students about American history. Instead of celebrating the greatness of our founding documents and the uniqueness of our system of government, teachers are demonizing our Founding Fathers and casting blame on white Americans for racism and unfair treatment of minorities. In many schools, students are being separated by race, and white students are being made to feel guilty for the color of their skin. While parents are expressing their anger, too many school boards remain committed to the divisive curriculum.
4. Plague. Schools are also one of the focal points of the insane battle over how to deal with the COVID pandemic. Teacher unions and Biden officials are touting masks in classrooms, while a growing number of parents are fighting this nonsense at school board meetings across the country.
The Biden administration is not stopping at mask mandates but is considering COVID vaccine requirements for all Americans. The Defense Department will be requiring vaccines for all the members of the respective branches. This obligation will be enforced starting in mid-September.
The president has also mandated vaccinations for members of the United States Department of Veterans' Affairs. Surely other government agencies will face similar mandates in the foreseeable future.
Whenever he addresses the media, Biden pushes vaccinations on the public. He implies that unvaccinated Americans are not only unpatriotic but also contributing to the deaths of their fellow citizens. In addition, the president is actively encouraging businesses to implement vaccine mandates at their workplaces.
All these initiatives are quite disturbing, as Americans should have medical privacy and the right to make their own health decisions. In a "free" country, a citizen should not be forced to inject any sort of experimental vaccine into his body. Americans should have the freedom to say "no," without any negative repercussions.
Individually, each of the four horsemen of the Biden apocalypse is extremely worrisome. Unfortunately, Americans are facing all four of them simultaneously.
In addition, we must deal with a mentally incompetent president; a biased press; social media sites that censor conservatives; and a "woke" corporate, entertainment, and Big Technology culture that are promoting these dangerous trends in our country.
It is crunch time for America, and "We the People" must stand up to protect our rights, our families, and our futures. This Biden agenda must be stopped immediately. Otherwise, we can say goodbye to America and say hello to Venezuela.
Jeff Crouere is a native New Orleanian. His award-winning program, Ringside Politics, airs nationally on Real America's Voice Network, AmericasVoice.News weekdays at 7 A.M. C.T. and from 7 to 11 A.M. weekdays on WGSO 990-AM & Wgso.com. He is a political columnist, the author of America's Last Chance, and provides regular commentaries on the Jeff Crouere YouTube channel and on Crouere.net. For more information, email him at jeff@ringsidepolitics.com.
Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.
American Jobs Bill: Fantasy, Fiasco
The American Jobs Plan (AJP), AKA The Infrastructure Investment And Jobs Act, is a proposal by U.S. president Joe Biden to spend $2+ trillion on U.S. infrastructure over eight years. A Fact Sheet outlining the goals of this legislation was published in March of this year, and the 2,700-page law is now working its way through Congress. In a recent vote, 17 Republicans voted to move along this bill. It seems to have bipartisan support. This bipartisan support reveals the mental, moral, fiscal, legal, and logical collapse of the USA.
The bill lacks a conceptual and logical foundation. It is a hybrid of types of legislation from the Progressive Era of American history, elements of New Deal thinking, and has some ideas taken from the pathetic stimulus package with its nonexistent "shovel ready" jobs during the Obama years. U.S. government intensification of control of the railroads in this proposed legislation is an updating of the thinking that led to the creation of the ICC in 1887, whereby railroad rates and later wages came under U.S. government oversight. By the way, in 1995, the ICC was replaced by the Surface Transportation Board, which now has regulatory authority over intercity buses, pipeline carriers, and interstate moving as well as railroads. This is further evidence that when governmental authority is enhanced, over time, its purview and authority become broader and broader.
The Biden plan envisages even more intense modernization of the railroads as the climate bigots desire greater and greater use of the railroads and less and less use of airplanes. The climate change obsessionists claim that downsizing airplane dependence will also add to the health of our republic, as there will be less CO2 in the air. Although the coal stacks of Pittsburgh and elsewhere have long since disappeared, the environmental freaks are still worried about our contracting black lung disease or cancer.
The summary Fact Sheet put out by the White House repeats ad nauseam that the infrastructure plan will be increasing the employment of the "underserved" (a buzzword meaning minority black and brown people) in all sectors covered by the legislation. Thus, we see elements of the New Deal — the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) — in the AJP. Just as these agencies were to be mechanisms for addressing unemployment during the Depression, this bill will focus on training and hiring minorities in numerous sectors of our economy, which the legislation intends to upgrade.
The AJP specifically says the jobs provided to minorities will be higher-paying jobs. The government, not the marketplace, will determine what skills are needed, provide training for those skills if needed, pay a salary based on what they believe said minority employees should get as a matter of "fairness," and in fact create a marketplace for employment independent of the free marketplace. The government will create the jobs, place people in those jobs, decide who works where, and calculate what is a proper wage in each and every case. In short, without saying so, the ideal is building an economy within an economy. We had already begun to do that during the New Deal, but now that idea will be re-instated on steroids.
For the America Firsters, the legislation will encourage more goods to be Made in the USA. But how will this be accomplished? Not by sound trade policy, but, on my reading, by governmental fiat. The government somehow is going to "make it happen." The government will dictate what has to be made in the USA and what does not.
This leads us to the subject of the utopian veneer on this so-called infrastructure bill. We see this generally — in fact, it is not solely about infrastructure. Everything but the kitchen sink is referred to as infrastructure. Topics in the legislation to be covered include human-trafficking violations; promoting women in trucking; information reporting for brokers and digital outlets; certain Medicare drug refunds; time for filing a petition in tax court; customs user fees; clean school buses; climate science; changing the tax code to make it harder to evade taxes; creation of safer, healthier workplaces; reduction of impact of climate change; improvement of our internet transmission; and cleaner water.
The bill also puts electric charging stations along the highways, which is something I do not support. Why? This writer likes using gasoline-powered cars, and while driving, it is sometimes satisfying to leave the highway to get gas and an Arby's roast beef sandwich. Despite its claims of comprehensiveness, there is no mention of Arby's in the Biden Fact Sheet.
There is nothing in the bill defining how the programs are to be created or how they will be administered. All it states is that eight different Cabinet-level departments will receive certain appropriations. This vast influx of cash accompanying a vast new legislative mandate will present tremendous administrative challenges. But in essence, the legislation is just allocating the funds and giving the agencies or departments administrative free rein in how to practically implement the legislative mandate should the infrastructure bill finally pass Congress and become law.
To put the matter bluntly, incorporating so many non-infrastructure topics inserts a soap opera element into this legislation. Instead of being focused and accomplished, it is a hodgepodge. It is a bunch of madmen throwing incomprehensible amounts of money at certain issues or supposed problems and waiting for the paper-pushers to correct a society that is in noticeable material and moral decay.
The White House American Jobs Fact Sheet states, "The plan targets 40 percent of the benefits of climate and clean infrastructure investments to disadvantaged communities." Does this imply nicer climates in poorer minority neighborhoods? Do they really expect to have cleaner air on the Southside of Chicago or in East New York? Will spring arrive earlier in poorer neighborhoods? Instead of talking about climate in poorer neighborhoods, how about intensive cleaning of the elevated and subway stations with decades of dirt ground into the cement station floors, many of which stations are in "disadvantaged communities"?
The omnibus aspect of this legislation dooms it. Too many areas of life are covered. Too much money is allocated. Instead of beginning with smaller test projects, the bill is attempting to do too many projects at once. We are seeing a type of legislative derangement...full of sound and fury, yet without conceptual, institutional, or financial unity — disjointed, unconnected. Assuming it will pass, it is doomed from day one to chaos and failure.
