Ladies and Gentlemen, Today's Republican Party

Robert Reich rightly calls out the Republicans for who and what they are and work for. I love who he put on the opening screen, don't you?

What the Democrats Must Do

Yes, what, exactly, the Democrats must do, at long last, to break the logjam that is the Republican Party in Congress currently. Then, once that's ended, we must pass the For the People Act so we end gerrymandering, get the dark money out of our elections and put ethics back in government. We must.

The Very Real Dangers of the Republicans' Vote Suppression

I don't think enough Americans realize what Republicans are doing and trying to do to our vote and votes, to our elections. That they even tried in Georgia to disenfranchise fellow citizens is horrible enough. That it has now expanded to 46 more states threatens our Democracy, no overstatement. Fortunately, people like Stacey Abrams, from Georgia are doing their best to get the word out across the nation. So what can we do? Glad you asked. Please support the For the People Act Contact your/our Senators today. Tell them to vote for and support it. Thanks in advance.Let's do this. We must.

What Too Many Americans Don't Know About Working Class America Today

Professor Robert Reich calls it out. Want to support America's working class? Sure you do, unless you're already wealthy. The way to do it? Vote Democratic. Then vote out all Republicans. We must.

Quote of the Day -- On GOP Vote Suppression

"Expand the Supreme Court. Abolish the Electoral College. End the filibuster. The GOP calls these moves radical because they know once we make democracy work, they won't stand a chance." --Robert Reich @RBReich

Question of the Day -- On "Pro-Life"

Professor Robert Reich asks a terrific question today.

"Wouldn't it be nice if pro-lifers focused on ending gun violence? Or suicide prevention? Or abolishing the death penalty? Or stopping police killings? Or fighting poverty? Or combating the opioid epidemic? Or ending wars? You know, things that would actually save lives?" --Robert Reich @RBReich

We Need to Tax the Rich -- Here's Why

Yes, we need to tax the rich. Robert Reich spells out why and then how, too. This would be an excellent way to support and fix our infrastructure. Just look around the city, at, say, Ward Parkway, Wornall Road, 63rd Street, all across town and you can see how and where we need this. Let's do this, America.

Responsible Tax Policy --- What We Should Do

7 necessary ways to tax the rich.

1. Repeal the Trump tax cuts. 2. Raise the tax rate on those at the top. 3. A wealth tax on the super-wealthy. 4. A transactions tax on stocks. 5. End the “stepped-up cost basis” loophole. 6. Close loopholes for the rich. 7. Audit the rich. --Robert Reich @RBReich Logical. Sensible. Responsible. Fair.

From the "From Their Own Mouths" File

Breaking today, this morning, in the last half hour.

The Republican State Lawmakers Association today issued a statement asking all Republicans to wear masks and get vaccinated. “Otherwise, our efforts to suppress Democratic votes will be more than offset by losses of Republican voters,” the statement says, dated April 1. --Robert Reich @RBReich

Quote of the Day -- On Our Wealth Inequality

Please keep in mind, folks, gross wealth inequality actually weakens nations, weakens our nation.

"...When Gates, Bezos, and Musk together have more wealth than the bottom half of Americans put together? When 1 out of 8 American children are hungry? When 20 million can't afford to see a doctor? When our schools are literally falling apart? We need a wealth tax." --Robert Reich   @RBReich

America Needs a Wealth Tax -- Here's Why

Take Heart, America!

Robert Reich has good news for us today.

So there's still more to do.

Also, keep in mind, he, Trump, is still very much being investigated for taxes, at least, in the state of New York as well as internationally in Scotland and Ireland.

Keep the faith, baby.

And stay warm.

Happy Valentine's Day.

Why We Need to Impeach

This, this is why we need to impeach Donald J Trump.

And the next guy that tries this may well be less reckless, ignorant and clumsy and more shrewd and conniving and clever than Mr. Trump.

Quote of the Day -- On the Rich and Poor

 

Robert Reich @RBReich

I will never accept a system that enables billionaires to add $1,100,000,000,000 to their wealth during a pandemic but doesn’t raise the $7.25 minimum wage for over a decade.

Tax the rich. Raise the wage. Now.

The Real Reason Republicans Are Against Biden's COVID Relief Proposal

Yes, the Republicans say things about being concerned about the budget and that's why they're proposing a smaller and honestly weaker COVID relief plan but Robert Reich gets this correct.

The Real Reason the GOP Don’t Want Biden’s Plan? They Fear It Will Work

Biden’s success would put into sharp relief Trump and Republicans' utter failures on COVID and jobs

A bit from the article:

Ten Senate Republican have proposed a COVID relief bill of about $600 billion. That’s less than a third of Biden’s plan. They promise "bipartisan support" if he agrees.

Their proposal isn’t a compromise. It would be a total surrender. It trims direct payments and unemployment aid that Americans desperately need. Biden should reject it out of hand.

Republicans say America can’t afford Biden’s plan. “We just passed a program with over $900 billion in it,” groused Senator Mitt Romney.

Rubbish. We can’t afford not to. Millions of people are hurting.

Besides, with the economy in the doldrums it’s no time to worry about too much spending. The best way to reduce the debt as a share of the economy is to get the economy growing again.

Beyond COVID relief, Biden has other proposals waiting in the wings, such as repairing aging infrastructure and building a new energy-efficient one. These would make the economy grow even faster over the long term—further reducing the debt’s share.

There’s no chance that public spending will “crowd out” private investment. If you hadn’t noticed, borrowing is especially cheap right now. Money is sloshing around the world in search of borrowers.

It’s hard to take Republican concerns about debt seriously when just four years ago they had zero qualms about enacting one of the largest tax cuts in history, largely for big corporations and the super-wealthy.

If they really don’t want to add to the debt, they have another alternative: A tax on super-wealthy Americans...

The total wealth of America’s 660 billionaires has grown by a staggering $1.1 trillion since the start of the pandemic, a 40 percent increase. They alone could finance almost all of Biden’s COVID relief package and still be as rich as they were before the pandemic. So why not a temporary emergency COVID wealth tax?

Let’s be honest. The real reason Republicans don’t want Biden’s plan is they fear it will work.

This would be the Republican’s worst nightmare: All the anti-government claptrap they’ve been selling since Ronald Reagan will be revealed as nonsense.

Government isn’t the problem and never was. Bad government is the problem, and Americans have just had four years of it. Biden’s success would put into sharp relief Trump and Republicans’ utter failures on COVID and jobs.

If Biden gets his plans through, he and the Democrats would reap the political rewards in 2022 and beyond.Democrats might even capture the presidency and Congress for a generation. After FDR rescued America, the Republican Party went dark for two decades.

Further proof new President Joe Biden's plans and ideas are good and positive? 

Bolstering Reconciliation Case, Study Shows $15 Wage Would Boost Federal Budget By $65 Billion

Added to this, Joe Biden has only been President just shy of 2 weeks and his popularity is soaring, by any comparison, whether to the previous orange President or nearly any other.

Biden's Popularity Is Surging 

This is how Americans feel on our most pressing issue of the day, too.

Poll: 73 percent say Biden administration will do a good job handling coronavirus vaccine distribution

Joe Biden won by such a large margin in this election and he's so popular presently, Republicans are moving in 28 different states now, again, to make it even harder for Americans---you and I--to vote. 

Republicans Push to Make Voting Harder

The fewer people vote, the more likely they, Republicans, can get into government office and stay there. Wrap your head around that.

So don't think for a moment anyone in the Republican Party is concerned just now about keeping the national debt lower. Oh, no. They're concerned for the their own political party and for their own power, nation and people be damned, as we keep seeing from them over time, repeatedly.

Additional links to further Republican Party ugliness:

All 10 GOP Senators Behind Skimpy $600 Billion Covid Relief Offer Happily Voted for $740 Billion Military Budget

Meanwhile, we can do this.

'We Have Got to Act Now': As GOP Introduces Weak Relief Bill, Sanders Says Dems Already Have Enough Votes to Pass Stronger Package

I say again, why anyone, anyone from the middle or lower classes considers themselves a Republican and votes that way is beyond me. WAY beyond me.

Additional links:

Trump Tax Cuts Helped Billionaires Pay Less Taxes

Trump's 2017 Tax Cuts Helped Super-rich Pay Lower Rate

Trump Tax Cuts Have Failed To Deliver On GOP's Promises

Study: Trump Tax Cuts Failed to Help Anybody But the Wealthy

Trickle-Down Economics: Four Reasons Why It Just Doesn't Work

Robert B. Reich: Trickle-down economics doesn’t work

Trickle-down theory is a monstrous lie

From the Frightening to the Hopeful Today

Heather Cox Richardson's latest summary. I think these daily updates of hers have become nearly required reading she does that great a job of summarizing where we are and what's happening of late, showing where we stand and where we might be going.

January 31, 2021

Heather Cox Richardson      Feb 1

The most prominent story these days is that the Republican Party is sliding toward a full-on embrace of authoritarianism. Former president Trump’s exit and ban from his favorite social media outlets has left a vacuum that younger politicians imitating Trump’s style are eager to fill by rallying people to the former president’s standard. 

Notably, Representatives Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) have tried to step into the former president’s media space by behaving outrageously and becoming his acolytes. Gaetz last week traveled to Wyoming to attack Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY), the third most powerful Republican in the House, for her vote in support of Trump’s impeachment. Not to be outdone, yesterday Greene tweeted that she had spoken to Trump and has his support, although neither her camp nor his would comment on her statement.

Republican state parties have also thrown in their lot with the former president. In Arizona, the state party voted to censure former Senator Jeff Flake, the late Senator John McCain’s wife Cindy, and Governor Doug Ducey for criticizing the former president. In South Carolina, the state party formally censured Representative Tom Rice for voting to impeach Trump, and Republican lawmakers are starting to consider stripping Cheney of her party position, a development that led former President George W. Bush to indicate his support for her this weekend. She has already drawn a primary challenger.

Across the country, Republican-dominated legislatures are trying to suppress the voting that led to the high voter turnout that fueled Democratic victories in 2020. According to the Brennan Center, which tracks voting rights, 28 states have put forward more than 100 bills to limit voting. Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania, whose voters chose Biden this year after going for Trump in 2016, all have introduced plans to lower voting rates. So have other states like Texas, which have voted Republican in recent years but show signs of turning blue.

The former president would like to solidify power over the party, but he has his own problems right now. The top five lawyers in his team defending him against the article of impeachment in his Senate trial all quit this weekend. Trump apparently wanted them to argue that the attack on the Capitol was justified because Democrats stole the election from him. Recognizing that this is pure fantasy—courts have already thrown this argument out more than 60 times—which could put them in legal jeopardy, the lawyers instead wanted to argue that it is unconstitutional to try a former president on charges of impeachment.

Tonight, Trump’s office announced that David Schoen and Bruce L. Castor, Jr., will lead his defense. Schoen represented Trump advisor Roger Stone when he challenged his convictions; Castor was the district attorney who promised actor Bill Cosby he would not be prosecuted for indecent assault. The impeachment trial is scheduled to start on February 9.

There are signs that some Republicans have finally had enough of their party’s march toward authoritarianism, especially as pro-Trump Republicans grab headlines for their outrageous behavior, including shutting down a mass vaccination effort at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles for about an hour yesterday.

Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), a 2010 Tea Partier but now one of the ten Republicans in the House to vote in favor of impeachment, told Anthony Fisher of Business Insider that “My dad’s cousins sent me a petition — a certified letter — saying they disowned me because I’m in ‘the devil’s army’ now….”

Kinzinger announced today that he has started a political action committee (PAC) to finance a challenge to Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party. Calling Trump’s loyalists in the Republican caucus “political terrorists,” Kinzinger said in the video launching the PAC, “Republicans must say enough is enough. It’s time to unplug the outrage machine, reject the politics of personality, and cast aside the conspiracy theories and the rage.”

It also appears to be sinking in to Republicans that momentum is on the side of the Democrats. Biden’s executive actions have generally been popular, and his support for workers threatens to shift a key constituency from the Republicans to the Democrats.

Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus proposal offers to give to ordinary Americans, hurting badly from the coronavirus recession, the kind of government attention that has lately gone to wealthier Americans. Among other things, it calls for $1400 stimulus payments, extends unemployment benefits, provides funds for state and local governments, and establishes a higher minimum wage. While Biden has said repeatedly that he would like Republican support for this measure, the Democrats have enough votes to pass a version of it without Republican support.

This would put Republicans in the position of voting against a measure that promises to be popular, and at least ten Republican senators would prefer not to do that. Today, they offered their own $600 billion counterproposal, and asked for a meeting with President Biden to discuss it.

In their letter to the president, they hinted that they think the nation has devoted enough money to the economic crisis already, noting that there is still money unspent from the previous coronavirus packages. But they did not state that reasoning explicitly, perhaps recognizing that this argument will not be popular from people who voted for Trump’s 2017 tax cut, which disproportionately benefited the wealthy, when one in seven adults say their households don’t have enough food to eat.

“We want to work in good faith with you and your administration to meet the health, economic and societal challenges of the covid crisis,” the senators wrote. After years in which Republican senators refused to discuss bills with the Democrats, this is a change indeed.

But perhaps not enough of one. In the Washington Post, James Downie noted that a proposal that is less than a third of Biden’s package is not a compromise. It also cuts stimulus checks down to $1000, cuts supplemental unemployment insurance, gives no local or state aid, and kills the minimum wage increase.

When asked why Democrats should compromise rather than go ahead without them, as Republicans repeatedly did when they held the majority, Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA) and Senator Rob Portman (R-OH) told “Fox News Sunday” and CNN’s “State of the Union,” respectively, that Biden should honor his call for unity and that refusing to do so would kill future hopes for bipartisanship.

In an article in The Guardian today, former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich dismissed Republican concerns about the national debt, noting that if they were worried about it, they could just tax the very wealthy. “The total wealth of America’s 660 billionaires has grown by… $1.1 [trillion] since the start of the pandemic, a 40% increase,” he noted. Those billionaires could fund almost all of Biden’s proposal and still be as rich as they were before the pandemic hit.

Reich suggested that “[t]he real reason Republicans want to block Biden is they fear his plans will work.” A successful government response to coronavirus, the economic crisis, inequality, the climate crisis, and poverty would devastate modern-day Republicans’ insistence that the solution to every problem is tax cuts and private enterprise. If Biden’s plans succeed, Reich wrote, Americans’ faith in government, and in our democracy, will be restored.

Tonight, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki announced that Biden has spoken with Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) and has invited her and the other nine signers of the letter to the White House (we later learned they will meet tomorrow).

But Psaki’s statement did not give ground. It reiterated the need for fast action, and noted that “$1400 relief checks, a substantial investment in fighting COVID and schools, aid to small businesses and hurting families, and funds to keep first responders on the job (and more) – is badly needed. As leading economists have said, the danger now is not in doing too much: it is in doing too little. Americans of both parties are looking to their leaders to meet the moment.”

Quotes of the Day -- On Health Care

Universal health care is such a complex beast that only 32 of the world's 33 nations have been able to make it work.

--Duke @Maxonsdad 

If you think Covid treatment should be free (of course it should), why do you think insulin shouldn’t be? 

Or cancer treatment? 

Or mental health?

Health care should not be run for profit. Period.

--Robert Reich @RBReich

Quote of the Day -- Thanksgiving, Republican Party Edition

A staggering one in EIGHT Americans reported they sometimes or often didn’t have enough food to eat in the past week. That’s nearly 26 million Americans who are going hungry the week of Thanksgiving. And a full quarter of out-of-work Americans with children at home reported not having enough food to eat. The numbers are worse for Black households than for white ones: 22 percent of Black households reported going hungry in the past week, over 2.5 times the rate for white households. Food banks are overwhelmed trying to meet the new surge in demand: “We'll be hard pressed to keep up. We’re just bracing for the worst,” said the CEO of Feeding Texas.

Meanwhile, Mitch McConnell adjourned the Senate last week and let them skip town early for Thanksgiving. He and his do nothing Senate Republicans get to go home to their families and sit down to a table bursting with food, while 26 million of their fellow Americans starve. As long as their rich friends are happy now that the stock market is soaring, they couldn’t be bothered to serve their constituents. It’s one of the grossest abdications of duty I’ve ever seen. There are no words to truly describe Mitch McConnell’s moral bankruptcy.

--Robert Reich

Thanks, Senator McConnell

Thanks, Republicans.

Links:

Robert Reich

Robert Reich - Wikipedia

Question of the Day -- State of America Edition

Trump is golfing, the Senate is on vacation, there is no COVID relief, food lines stretch for miles, 40,000,000 Americans face eviction, and Americans are dying in droves.

Is this what they mean by American exceptionalism?

--Professor Robert Reich

Links:

Robert Reich

Robert Reich - Wikipedia

 

Meanwhile, This Is Going On

 While a man-child tries to ignore, deny our votes, election and Democracy, this, too, is going on.

Robert Reich    @RBReich    Nov 21

Walmart made $129B in profit last year, but at least 14,500 of their employees receive SNAP benefits. 

McDonald's made $11B in profit, but at least 8,780 employees receive SNAP benefits. 

Execs are paying workers poverty wages to boost stock prices and line their pockets.

Ain't America great?