Politicians, elected officials and civil servants are the help we hire to facilitiate that, but a significant part of the problems we face today comes from failing to properly supervise these people we've deputised to accomplish our work. Over time, they've come to consider themselves to be special; th…
Politicians, elected officials and civil servants are the help we hire to facilitiate that, but a significant part of the problems we face today comes from failing to properly supervise these people we've deputised to accomplish our work. Over time, they've come to consider themselves to be special; that there's a "Political Class" and instead of seeing themselves as public servants their attitude becomes aristocratic.
That's contrary to our original principles. The notion never quite goes away, tho.
It’s a capital C Conservative, not a small c conservative. That puts it in the tradition of the John Birch Society and William F. Buckley. Those Conservatives who, heedless of the warning one of their own, Barry Goldwater, embraced the Southern Strategy and fused their antisocial and regressive economic ideas with the culture of the Confederacy and the Bible Belt, creating a coalition capable of winning elections. When they captured the white working class under Nixon, they became very, very powerful. Watergate slowed them, but they came back stronger with St. Ronald Reagan. Obama shook them up, but they responded with the Tea Party, and then Trump. All the while The Heritage Foundation pursued Operation REDMAP to capture statehouses and packed the Courts with their acolytes.
All results of the kind of political thinking that caught fire during and after the Civil Rights movement began having an actual effect on people's lives.
We will be forced to “stand for it” until we “do something” about campaign finance. We can easily “outspend” the plutocrats with a relatively inexpensive campaign finance voucher program. We do not need a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. Just a little donor power in the hands of all voters. See Seattle or the fibustered HR1 For The People Act. Read my Substack posts on the subject
An eternal tension between elites /leaders and the masses / general public. Elites have generally considered themselves as "betters". And ever here the joke about the guy walking into a roomful of senators where each person thought he was the "smartest man" in the room.... an old joke, it was all about men.
Possibly, early on in the country, it wasn't unreasonable for farmers, merchants, educators, etc. (and their wives, but we really didn't count officially - thanks, John Adams, for failing to consider the ladies) to trust the elected representatives to get on with the task and do it honestly and honorably without being micromanaged. Welp, things have changed. What a pain - as if we don't have enough to do, what with working, raising families, etc., but we also have to ride herd on our elected representatives every minute as if they are just more two-year-olds who can't be trusted not to throw their Cheerios onto the floor. I want to elect responsible grownups who can do their own jobs properly - REPRESENT! Vote Blue!
And that they always leave office with a great deal of money. That money isn’t from the people, it is from lobbyists with deep pockets, funded by the corporations and 1%. They work for the money, not for the people, in order to keep their jobs. The Uber rich do not pay taxes they pay congress. How do we change that?
Take MA, a reputedly "blue" state. The Dems' platform is very progressive. We've had universal health care in our platform since at least 1997. But it's 2024, and once again, the Legislature has failed to pass single payer. My town of 10,000 would have saved $2,000,000 (yes, that's two million dollars) this past year in health insurance costs, but our legislators belong to the insurance companies and Big Pharma. They hold many of their votes in secret and thus avoid individual responsibility. Ask most voters, and they will tell you that they are happy with their legislators, legislators who consistently refuse to pass legislation that would afford us greater transparency if we wanted to follow their votes. I'm not sure if that's what Gary meant, but it's what I thought of when I read his post and then your question, Richard. I hope that that helps.
I agree, as in North Carolina, a purple state with a GOP lead General Assembly holding a surplus of over 2 Billion dollars which would benefit all if used correctly. Their solution is to use some for school vouchers for all citizens with children, regardless of income and let the public school system suffer. This is not acceptable, only in November will there possibly be a change.
The quality of our public schools must be top priority. Our future aspirations and achievements should not be left to the economic hierarchy of private schools.
In hundreds of school districts across the country public schools are the main focus and receive the bulk of the property tax dollars.
My daughter attended public schools in NE, FL and ME and had some wonderful teachers in all three states. Some were rural districts and some urban. But they all had competent school boards that cared about the education of the kids in their community.
But, many districts do not have the money to hire or retain good teachers or administration. Many of these districts still do an amazing job in spite of this.
Unfortunately, many don't. And often times it's only a few noisy nutcases, that try to force their far right ideology on their district by questioning topics in textbooks, banning books and banning free speech. They penalize teachers for saying "the wrong thing" or teaching from the wrong book, media, etc.
There are many people that post here that are life long educators that can better speak to this topic, and I truly thank you for your service to the families where you taught.
Only “big” because so few regular folk contribute campaign funds. Campaign finance vouchers would put “big” donors in their proper place. Please read and comment on my Substack posts on this subject
I used to contribute much more. As a recent widow, I pay a schittload of taxes because Elon and Jeff don't. We "regular folk" could use a few loopholes.
JD: When I read this response and read your self-description it suddenly felt personal.
In 2016, I worked as a campaign volunteer (even tried door to door stuff that turned out to be too hard for me because I am partially disabled). I was not shocked by Trump's victory because I saw a disconnect between Democratic complacency and his supporter's responses. I have been interested in campaign finance vouchers since early in the 2020 campaign. I got as involved as I could in the 2022 midterms as my wife recovered from a crisis. But in 2022 I turned my attention (to the degree caregiving allowed) pretty much full time to analyzing how vouchers should be considered. People advised me to divide my writing into smaller chunks, so I turned to Substack. My main concepts are out there now. But it appears we got Tea Party and Trump as a side effect of the 2008 financial crisis and its slow recovery. So, I began to wonder: Can it happen again? Have we done enough to prevent another 2008?
My conclusion: Not hardly. In particular, we have done virtually NOTHING to prevent the ACTUAL cause of the crisis: a "run" on short-term loans/deposits, like "repo" and money market funds that shut down commercial credit and, with that, normal business activity. That is more accurate than the usual surface explanations about a few billion dollars of bad mortgage loans created by crooked banks (the kind of foolishness we see fairly often, such as the Fed's easy money reversal tipping over banks like Silicon Valley Bank).
Leading to the next question: If the money-printing actions of the Fed and half-baked fiscal policy response by Congress got us (eventually) out of 2008, would the same combination work for the next financial crisis? My tentative answer: We seem to be in a significantly worse place than we were in 2009 when the Fed and Obama tried to organize a joint monetary and fiscal response.
If Harris wins, we might have a rational fiscal response. But there is a potential fly in the monetary ointment: We have a serious problem with deficit spending. Those deficits raise doubts about the usefulness of "the mighty dollar" as a means to money-print our way out of a crisis. And, despite the overwhelming success of the fiscal spending response in getting our economy going after to the Covid recession, those same deficits could be used to cripple a response. Crippled by big money donors in our highly partisan, winner-take-all, care-nothing-about-mere-voters, only-donors-count Congress.
Our basic personal income system is reasonably progressive. It has some provisions to benefit those with the least income. Those with the least income are usually net recipients versus payers. From what I have read (not an expert) I think one could argue that the biggest source of our deficits is our system of tax expenditures (AKA "loopholes") that mostly benefit the upper 20%. Especially the upper 1% to 10%.
There are serious danger signs tied to those deficits.
Our too-big-to-fail-or-save banks (ok, bank holding companies) seem to be seriously insolvent, burdened by holdings of low-interest bonds (being protected by accounting systems that do not require that their low value be reported at true market value) and growing piles of rapidly defaulting commercial real estate loans. If something pushed them, could we have another "run" on short term finance ("repo," commercial paper, money-market funds, etc.) like 2008? Answer: Yes. If so, would the world respond if the Fed decided to "print" money to make loans like it did in 2009. Or would our huge deficits make them hesitate, fearing a US dollar default on its trillions of bonds?
We desperately need a working Congress that can tackle these deficits. Even if it requires higher taxes on the not-so-rich (despite Biden's promises to not do so). Along with other critical issues such as climate change and ....
We didn't have a working Congress in 2009 and it took 8 years to slowly emerge from 2008. Giving us Trump. Another Great Recession might bring much worse than Trump.
That is why I am spending all my available time working on pushing campaign finance vouchers - I think they are key to unlocking a working Congress.
But approval of a voucher program is only likely if pushed by leaders who are honest about how tied they have been the current money system. The Democrats did quietly try in 2022 with HR1 -For the People Act. But much too quietly - almost no one, not even me who had been urging vouchers for 5 years, knew those provisions were in the bill. In 2020 some presidential candidates suggested vouchers, but so quietly no one (even their own volunteers) knew it.
If Harris really wants to draw attention to something that would make sense to voters, propose a solution to campaign finance AND then decline to take any money from the big banks.
USA has the largest per capita health costs in the OECD by far, about $14K vs $8k in eg Canada, with a public health system, and is well down the list in health outcomes overall. ikely because it is a private profit based system, leaving many Americans unable to afford private health care costs. Gentrification writ large. Affordable health care, Medicaid has been an attempt to address this. Just the same, about 26 million Americans remain uninsured.
Not regular money as we know it- GREAT WEALTH buys votes and congress and SPOTUS. Humongous acculmulations of billions that the owners do not want to pay taxes for.
"Money" for most people is what we use to buy groceries, clothes, vacations somethimes.
Recent report, this past week: 800 Americans have as much wealth as one-half of the American population. This is a huge cancer growing on the body politic.
Right off the top of my head, look into Schlesinger's "The Imperial Presidency", and the recent SCOTUS decision on presidential immunity.
Some of our more egotistical leaders (Nixon, for example) wanted fancier trappings associated with the office. Trimp wanted a military march similar to Russia's Mayday parade thru D.C. on the 4th of July with him prominently reviewing the troops.
It starts at the top but it extends to the bottom: think of Huey Long or the system someone like TV's Boss Hogg represents. Eventually considering political professionals aseparate class leads to feudalism and a rigidly tiered society.
Contrast that with say, George Washington willingly handing his presidency to a successor, and leaving government to be a private citizen again.
Some of Nixon's wannabe "Imperial Guard" Secret Service uniforms ended up being sold for $5 (or $10 each in the case of the Meriden-Cleghorn High School Band Uniforms), in Marcus, Iowa per https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/news/pomp-and-circumstance
It's OUR work and it's OUR business.
Politicians, elected officials and civil servants are the help we hire to facilitiate that, but a significant part of the problems we face today comes from failing to properly supervise these people we've deputised to accomplish our work. Over time, they've come to consider themselves to be special; that there's a "Political Class" and instead of seeing themselves as public servants their attitude becomes aristocratic.
That's contrary to our original principles. The notion never quite goes away, tho.
Citizens United is the accelerant.
Citizens United, Holder v. Shelby, Dobbs, and Trump. All of them together comprise the greatest assault on our democracy since… well, forever.
You can thank conservative Court for that! SCOTUS needs reform. 4 moderate liberals right off.
This is not a conservative court but a radical right wing authoritarian, power grabbing misogynist court, legislating from the bench.
It’s a capital C Conservative, not a small c conservative. That puts it in the tradition of the John Birch Society and William F. Buckley. Those Conservatives who, heedless of the warning one of their own, Barry Goldwater, embraced the Southern Strategy and fused their antisocial and regressive economic ideas with the culture of the Confederacy and the Bible Belt, creating a coalition capable of winning elections. When they captured the white working class under Nixon, they became very, very powerful. Watergate slowed them, but they came back stronger with St. Ronald Reagan. Obama shook them up, but they responded with the Tea Party, and then Trump. All the while The Heritage Foundation pursued Operation REDMAP to capture statehouses and packed the Courts with their acolytes.
All results of the kind of political thinking that caught fire during and after the Civil Rights movement began having an actual effect on people's lives.
Money and politics become intertwined and result in a power hungry class attempting to take over. We will not stand for it..
We will be forced to “stand for it” until we “do something” about campaign finance. We can easily “outspend” the plutocrats with a relatively inexpensive campaign finance voucher program. We do not need a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. Just a little donor power in the hands of all voters. See Seattle or the fibustered HR1 For The People Act. Read my Substack posts on the subject
An eternal tension between elites /leaders and the masses / general public. Elites have generally considered themselves as "betters". And ever here the joke about the guy walking into a roomful of senators where each person thought he was the "smartest man" in the room.... an old joke, it was all about men.
Possibly, early on in the country, it wasn't unreasonable for farmers, merchants, educators, etc. (and their wives, but we really didn't count officially - thanks, John Adams, for failing to consider the ladies) to trust the elected representatives to get on with the task and do it honestly and honorably without being micromanaged. Welp, things have changed. What a pain - as if we don't have enough to do, what with working, raising families, etc., but we also have to ride herd on our elected representatives every minute as if they are just more two-year-olds who can't be trusted not to throw their Cheerios onto the floor. I want to elect responsible grownups who can do their own jobs properly - REPRESENT! Vote Blue!
And that they always leave office with a great deal of money. That money isn’t from the people, it is from lobbyists with deep pockets, funded by the corporations and 1%. They work for the money, not for the people, in order to keep their jobs. The Uber rich do not pay taxes they pay congress. How do we change that?
I like your line that "the Uber rich do not pay taxes, they pay congress". Well said!!
Inspired and inspiring, Gary - super well observed !!!
I'm not sure that I follow your train of thought, Gary. Can you be more specific, with some concrete examples?
Take MA, a reputedly "blue" state. The Dems' platform is very progressive. We've had universal health care in our platform since at least 1997. But it's 2024, and once again, the Legislature has failed to pass single payer. My town of 10,000 would have saved $2,000,000 (yes, that's two million dollars) this past year in health insurance costs, but our legislators belong to the insurance companies and Big Pharma. They hold many of their votes in secret and thus avoid individual responsibility. Ask most voters, and they will tell you that they are happy with their legislators, legislators who consistently refuse to pass legislation that would afford us greater transparency if we wanted to follow their votes. I'm not sure if that's what Gary meant, but it's what I thought of when I read his post and then your question, Richard. I hope that that helps.
I agree, as in North Carolina, a purple state with a GOP lead General Assembly holding a surplus of over 2 Billion dollars which would benefit all if used correctly. Their solution is to use some for school vouchers for all citizens with children, regardless of income and let the public school system suffer. This is not acceptable, only in November will there possibly be a change.
The quality of our public schools must be top priority. Our future aspirations and achievements should not be left to the economic hierarchy of private schools.
In hundreds of school districts across the country public schools are the main focus and receive the bulk of the property tax dollars.
My daughter attended public schools in NE, FL and ME and had some wonderful teachers in all three states. Some were rural districts and some urban. But they all had competent school boards that cared about the education of the kids in their community.
But, many districts do not have the money to hire or retain good teachers or administration. Many of these districts still do an amazing job in spite of this.
Unfortunately, many don't. And often times it's only a few noisy nutcases, that try to force their far right ideology on their district by questioning topics in textbooks, banning books and banning free speech. They penalize teachers for saying "the wrong thing" or teaching from the wrong book, media, etc.
There are many people that post here that are life long educators that can better speak to this topic, and I truly thank you for your service to the families where you taught.
When did your daughter go to PS in FL???? They no longer have books in their school librabries!!
Really? She graduated from Ponte Vedra High School in 2014.
So, the students can check out books on their I-Pads or laptops now?
How do the elementary kids learn to read and write now?
NC deserves better. Is Art Pope still pouring big bucks into the Repub coffers
Only “big” because so few regular folk contribute campaign funds. Campaign finance vouchers would put “big” donors in their proper place. Please read and comment on my Substack posts on this subject
I used to contribute much more. As a recent widow, I pay a schittload of taxes because Elon and Jeff don't. We "regular folk" could use a few loopholes.
JD: When I read this response and read your self-description it suddenly felt personal.
In 2016, I worked as a campaign volunteer (even tried door to door stuff that turned out to be too hard for me because I am partially disabled). I was not shocked by Trump's victory because I saw a disconnect between Democratic complacency and his supporter's responses. I have been interested in campaign finance vouchers since early in the 2020 campaign. I got as involved as I could in the 2022 midterms as my wife recovered from a crisis. But in 2022 I turned my attention (to the degree caregiving allowed) pretty much full time to analyzing how vouchers should be considered. People advised me to divide my writing into smaller chunks, so I turned to Substack. My main concepts are out there now. But it appears we got Tea Party and Trump as a side effect of the 2008 financial crisis and its slow recovery. So, I began to wonder: Can it happen again? Have we done enough to prevent another 2008?
My conclusion: Not hardly. In particular, we have done virtually NOTHING to prevent the ACTUAL cause of the crisis: a "run" on short-term loans/deposits, like "repo" and money market funds that shut down commercial credit and, with that, normal business activity. That is more accurate than the usual surface explanations about a few billion dollars of bad mortgage loans created by crooked banks (the kind of foolishness we see fairly often, such as the Fed's easy money reversal tipping over banks like Silicon Valley Bank).
Leading to the next question: If the money-printing actions of the Fed and half-baked fiscal policy response by Congress got us (eventually) out of 2008, would the same combination work for the next financial crisis? My tentative answer: We seem to be in a significantly worse place than we were in 2009 when the Fed and Obama tried to organize a joint monetary and fiscal response.
If Harris wins, we might have a rational fiscal response. But there is a potential fly in the monetary ointment: We have a serious problem with deficit spending. Those deficits raise doubts about the usefulness of "the mighty dollar" as a means to money-print our way out of a crisis. And, despite the overwhelming success of the fiscal spending response in getting our economy going after to the Covid recession, those same deficits could be used to cripple a response. Crippled by big money donors in our highly partisan, winner-take-all, care-nothing-about-mere-voters, only-donors-count Congress.
Our basic personal income system is reasonably progressive. It has some provisions to benefit those with the least income. Those with the least income are usually net recipients versus payers. From what I have read (not an expert) I think one could argue that the biggest source of our deficits is our system of tax expenditures (AKA "loopholes") that mostly benefit the upper 20%. Especially the upper 1% to 10%.
There are serious danger signs tied to those deficits.
Our too-big-to-fail-or-save banks (ok, bank holding companies) seem to be seriously insolvent, burdened by holdings of low-interest bonds (being protected by accounting systems that do not require that their low value be reported at true market value) and growing piles of rapidly defaulting commercial real estate loans. If something pushed them, could we have another "run" on short term finance ("repo," commercial paper, money-market funds, etc.) like 2008? Answer: Yes. If so, would the world respond if the Fed decided to "print" money to make loans like it did in 2009. Or would our huge deficits make them hesitate, fearing a US dollar default on its trillions of bonds?
We desperately need a working Congress that can tackle these deficits. Even if it requires higher taxes on the not-so-rich (despite Biden's promises to not do so). Along with other critical issues such as climate change and ....
We didn't have a working Congress in 2009 and it took 8 years to slowly emerge from 2008. Giving us Trump. Another Great Recession might bring much worse than Trump.
That is why I am spending all my available time working on pushing campaign finance vouchers - I think they are key to unlocking a working Congress.
But approval of a voucher program is only likely if pushed by leaders who are honest about how tied they have been the current money system. The Democrats did quietly try in 2022 with HR1 -For the People Act. But much too quietly - almost no one, not even me who had been urging vouchers for 5 years, knew those provisions were in the bill. In 2020 some presidential candidates suggested vouchers, but so quietly no one (even their own volunteers) knew it.
If Harris really wants to draw attention to something that would make sense to voters, propose a solution to campaign finance AND then decline to take any money from the big banks.
Good idea. But, as you say, we need a working congress.
Yes, I believe so or his ‘buds’
USA has the largest per capita health costs in the OECD by far, about $14K vs $8k in eg Canada, with a public health system, and is well down the list in health outcomes overall. ikely because it is a private profit based system, leaving many Americans unable to afford private health care costs. Gentrification writ large. Affordable health care, Medicaid has been an attempt to address this. Just the same, about 26 million Americans remain uninsured.
Thank you, Betsy. And, I think that you've nailed the issue - money. Money buying votes.
Not regular money as we know it- GREAT WEALTH buys votes and congress and SPOTUS. Humongous acculmulations of billions that the owners do not want to pay taxes for.
"Money" for most people is what we use to buy groceries, clothes, vacations somethimes.
Recent report, this past week: 800 Americans have as much wealth as one-half of the American population. This is a huge cancer growing on the body politic.
Right off the top of my head, look into Schlesinger's "The Imperial Presidency", and the recent SCOTUS decision on presidential immunity.
Some of our more egotistical leaders (Nixon, for example) wanted fancier trappings associated with the office. Trimp wanted a military march similar to Russia's Mayday parade thru D.C. on the 4th of July with him prominently reviewing the troops.
It starts at the top but it extends to the bottom: think of Huey Long or the system someone like TV's Boss Hogg represents. Eventually considering political professionals aseparate class leads to feudalism and a rigidly tiered society.
Contrast that with say, George Washington willingly handing his presidency to a successor, and leaving government to be a private citizen again.
Some of Nixon's wannabe "Imperial Guard" Secret Service uniforms ended up being sold for $5 (or $10 each in the case of the Meriden-Cleghorn High School Band Uniforms), in Marcus, Iowa per https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/news/pomp-and-circumstance
Exactly!!!