Today, President Joe Biden signed the continuing resolution that will give lawmakers another week to finalize appropriations bills. Lawmakers will continue to hash out the legislation that will fund the government. Republicans have been stalling the appropriations bills for months. In addition to inserting their own extremist cultural demands in the measures, they have demanded budget cuts to address the fact that the government spends far more money than it brings in.
How can the Republicans think that taking any of our social security away is a winning proposal? Remove the cap. If corporations are people then people pay taxes. Fund the IRS to make sure tax cheats don’t!
The IRS has now been adequately funded much to the dismay to the R’s. They discovered that there are approximately 125,000 people who have not paid the taxes they owed since 2017. Next week, the IRS will begin sending out letters to these individuals. Mind you, they are not after us peons. They are after the filthy rich who want to destroy our democracy and take away our Social Security and Medicare. Oh how I hope it’s some notorious members of Congress who get those letters! https://apnews.com/article/irs-tax-season-audit-back-taxes-77c891313f5233366fbe4f6fb5d896e8
If Republicans really want to govern and help fund Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid all they have to do is take the cap off wages for contribution purposes. As Heather discussed, they can also increase revenue by allowing the tax cuts to expire for those earning more than $400,000 and raising the corporate income tax rate. Trickle down economics doesn't work and corporations take excess profits and use them to buy back stock which increases their stock value. It's time to make everyone pay a fair share so we can do want other wealthy countries do and provide healthcare, education, child care, rent relief and other basic items to everyone. Of course, Republicans don't want to govern. They want to give more money to the wealthy and corporations because they don't care about anyone else. We need to vote Blue, up and down the ballot.
Important to remember when we see historic old Carnegie Libraries that this was paternalism, not merely generosity or genuine public spirit.
I'm not suggesting their destruction.
They should be preserved wherever they are habitable and capable of being used either for their original purpose or repurposed. But they also need to remind us that they were a marketing gimmick for his statement that instead of paying state or local taxes, he thought he knew what was best in the patronizing phrase that he was "doing for them better than they would or could do for themselves."
Much writing about Carnegie fills the definition of hagiography, but a contemporary of his, Theodore Roosevelt, said this about him and his sometimes self-serving pacifism and isolationism:
"[I have] tried hard to like Carnegie, but it is pretty difficult. There is no type of man for whom I feel a more contemptuous abhorrence than for the one who makes a God of mere money-making and at the same time is always yelling out that kind of utterly stupid condemnation of war which in almost every case springs from a combination of defective physical courage, of unmanly shrinking from pain and effort, and of hopelessly twisted ideals. All the suffering from Spanish war comes far short of the suffering, preventable and non-preventable, among the operators of the Carnegie steel works, and among the small investors, during the time that Carnegie was making his fortune…. It is as noxious folly to denounce war per se as it is to denounce business per se. Unrighteous war is a hideous evil; but I am not at all sure that it is worse evil than business unrighteousness."
Nasaw, David (2006). Andrew Carnegie. New York: Penguin Group. p. 675. ISBN 978-1-59420-104-2.
In addition to Heather's citation to the recent Guardian article, an excellent 2022 Guardian article also describes the self-serving nature of business leaders like Jamie Dimond who brand themselves "stakeholder capitalists."
Those were some disturbingly patronizing words from Andrew Carnegie. Yet still, Carnegie built and funded the perpetuation of libraries and museums in the post Civil War Industrial Age. Today's private equity and tech titans, make both the Robber Barons like Stanford, Rockefeller and Morgan, and the other uber wealthy individuals of the time, such as Carnegie, seem like Frederich Engels in comparison.
The concept of the corporation was just getting started in Carnegie's time, and now, it is far, far bigger than Frank Norris' "Octopus", far more powerful, and aided and abetted by far more otherwise good people who work for them and depend upon them.
Louis Brandeis famously said that we can either have a working Democracy, or a Country led by the wealthy, i.e., an oligarchy. Looks like we've chosen the wrong path.
I'm surprised that Little Mikey ("He Likes It!") Johnson, a self-proclaimed prosletyzing Christian would take the sycophantic of the wealthy classes position in opposition to a certain well known, and much beloved, sandal wearing prognosticator and prime persona in the New Testament who once said,
"It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven"
The GOP. Robbing the Poor and giving to the Rich, who need more money like I need another hole in my head. The most egregious thing was when the GOP told their voters Biden’s plan to fund the IRS, (to tax the wealthy,) was the "guvmint cummin' fo yo munny."
American history is full of deep, dark pockets; D.J. Trump’s attraction to dictators is nothing new.
'The Real Reason Trump Loves Putin' (Atlantic Magazine, excerpts)
'A new book explores the American right’s tendency to admire and want to emulate foreign dictators.'
By Franklin Foer
MARCH 1, 2024, 8:17 AM ET
‘FOR NEARLY THE ENTIRETY of the past decade, a question has stalked, and sometimes consumed, American politics: Why do Donald Trump and his acolytes heap such reverent praise on Vladimir Putin? The question is born of disbelief. Adoration of the Russian leader, who murders his domestic opponents, kidnaps thousands of Ukrainian children, and interferes in American presidential elections, is so hard to comprehend that it seems only plausibly explained by venal motives—thus the search to find the supposed kompromat the Kremlin lords over Trump or compromising business deals that Trump has pursued in Moscow.’
‘But there’s a deeper, more nefarious truth about people on the right’s baffling unwillingness to criticize the Kremlin: They actually share its worldview. Putin worship isn’t even an aberration in the history of conservatism, merely the latest instance of a long tradition of admiring foreign dictators. Over the past century, without ever really blushing, the American right has similarly celebrated the likes of Adolf Hitler, Francisco Franco, and just about every Latin American military junta that called itself anti-communist.’
‘The right hails these dictators as ideological comrades in the war to preserve traditional society, the values of order and patriarchy, against the assault of the decadent left. Unlike conservative politicians in the United States, these foreign leaders don’t even need to bother with mouthing encomiums to concepts like tolerance, freedom, and democracy. They can deliver reactionary politics in the unvarnished form that some hard-liners on the American right have always hoped would take root in their own country. As the journalist Jacob Heilbrunn argues in America Last, his history of conservatives’ romance with dictators, “Conservatives have searched for a paradise abroad that can serve as a model at home.”
‘Heilbrunn makes the interesting decision to begin his history on the eve of World War I. A primary villain in these chapters is the newspaper columnist H. L. Mencken, perhaps the most celebrated curmudgeon in the history of American letters. Walter Lippmann called him “the most powerful influence on this whole generation of educated people.” A conservative movement as such did not exist in the earliest decades of the 20th century, just a constellation of reactionary intellectuals and their wealthy patrons who nodded in agreement, nostalgic for the antebellum South and a world before mass suffrage. Mencken, the most eloquent of the reactionaries, put their cantankerous thoughts into ornate, often quite funny prose.’
‘Mencken believed fervently in the superiority of German civilization—and in the leadership of its racist, war-mongering monarch, Kaiser Wilhelm. This reverence stemmed from ancestral pride; Mencken’s paternal grandfather came from Saxony. But his affection for Germany also grew from his disdain of American democracy, which he believed ceded control of society to mediocre politicians. By contrast, he liked that Germany was “governed by an oligarchy of its best men.” Just before America officially entered World War I, he submitted an article to The Atlantic in which he imagined that Germany might one day conquer the United States and create a new utopia on its shores. Ellery Sedgwick, then the editor of this magazine, had the good sense to reject it. “I have no desire to foment treason,” Sedgwick wrote him.’
‘Looking back on World War I, there were compelling conservative reasons for considering intervention a catastrophe. Financing the war required the imposition of a federal income tax, which never went away in peacetime. And no matter one’s political stripe, the war’s staggering body count was hard to justify. But what emerged on the right in the aftermath of the fighting wasn’t a form of pacifism—rather, it was a set of conspiratorial arguments that became a dishonorable tradition of isolationism. This pattern would repeat itself at the onset of every war: The isolationists would point an accusatory finger at bankers, whom they accused of being eager to profit off bloodshed. They would describe the authoritarian enemies of the United States as helpless victims, peaceful governments minding their own business. In the course of casting the dictators as the injured party, conservatives airbrushed their records of militarism and racism. Minimizing these sins wasn’t just a matter of rhetorical convenience; it was an act of sympathy. In the case of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, a significant segment of the intellectual American right shared their racialist views about the superiority of Nordic peoples.’
‘HEILBRUNN ISN’T THE FIRST to tell the story of the right’s barely submerged affinity for Hitler. Philip Roth’s great counterfactual novel, The Plot Against America, takes this affinity as its premise—and as does Rachel Maddow’s recently published history, Prequel. But it’s always bracing to be reminded of how former President Herbert Hoover made excuses for Hitler before the war and how the press baron William Randolph Hearst commissioned stories by him.’
‘The biggest fans of fascist autocracy weren’t yokels shaking their pitchforks, but cultivated patricians from the oldest New England families. Benito Mussolini’s American fan section consisted of the eminent literary critic Irving Babbitt, a legendary Harvard professor, and the modernist poet Ezra Pound. Not just Hearst but also Henry Ford and others among the nation’s richest men were some of the chief apologists for Nazi Germany. Their attraction—sometimes subconscious, but quite often stated flatly—was born of fear that America was slipping away from them, as immigrants poured into the country and mass democracy took hold. Fascism represented a hopeful example of a revanchist elite reversing the tide.’
‘Hitler’s defeat, and the full knowledge of the horrors of the Holocaust, did little to spur the right to rethink its admiration of authoritarianism. In fact, the historian Fred Siegel once described the late 1940s and early ’50s as the moment when the isolationists attempted to exact revenge. Senator Joe McCarthy and his allies tried to tear down the reputations of the internationalist proponents of the New Deal who most fervently advocated for the war, by smearing them as Communists. But McCarthy was also waging a retrospective argument about World War II: that the Americans had no claim to superiority over the Germans. When he burst onto the scene, in 1949, McCarthy held hearings into what he described as the mistreatment of a Nazi Panzer division, on trial for murdering dozens of American prisoners of war. McCarthy speciously argued that the Germans were being tried on trumped-up evidence. Such accusations about America’s supposed abusive treatment of Nazis became a right-wing trope. Henry Regnery’s publishing house provided an outlet for criticism of the Nuremberg trials, before it went on to print books by William F. Buckley, James Burnham, and Whitaker Chambers that launched the modern conservative movement. '(Atlantic Magazine, By Franklin Foer) The gifted link below will only be available for the next 13 days)
Mr Johnson's term "debt commission" actually refers to the debt he and the GOP owe to the mega-corporations in keeping their taxes non-existent for their "investment" (translation,...donors) in the republican pay-to-play scheme and providing them their insider trading tips.
"The idea that corporate leaders should take responsibility for the community rather than paying taxes to the government so the community can take care of itself..."
Right... like Walmart (and others) shifting the healthcare costs of their underpaid workers to the community (Medicaid) *and* not paying their share of taxes. Win-win for them.
If you spend your money at these types of sleazy businesses, don't expect much of it to come back to your community, or any community.
The Biden administration should blast on repeat the statistics about corporations and the tax rate, as well as the total taxes they do or do not pay. It angers me that my tax rate and payments are higher. That’s wrong beyond measure for me and plenty of our fellow citizens.
I am on an expedition ship and overheard some Brits talking about the incredible negative impact another trump term would have on the world. They can’t believe it is even a reality that might happen. We our an international embarrassment. Nothing great about maga.
“One sacrificed himself to save the country, the other one sacrificed the country to save himself.”
There is a very prescient parallel here in this country, as one is attempting to sacrifice all of us to save himself.
How can the Republicans think that taking any of our social security away is a winning proposal? Remove the cap. If corporations are people then people pay taxes. Fund the IRS to make sure tax cheats don’t!
The IRS has now been adequately funded much to the dismay to the R’s. They discovered that there are approximately 125,000 people who have not paid the taxes they owed since 2017. Next week, the IRS will begin sending out letters to these individuals. Mind you, they are not after us peons. They are after the filthy rich who want to destroy our democracy and take away our Social Security and Medicare. Oh how I hope it’s some notorious members of Congress who get those letters! https://apnews.com/article/irs-tax-season-audit-back-taxes-77c891313f5233366fbe4f6fb5d896e8
If Republicans really want to govern and help fund Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid all they have to do is take the cap off wages for contribution purposes. As Heather discussed, they can also increase revenue by allowing the tax cuts to expire for those earning more than $400,000 and raising the corporate income tax rate. Trickle down economics doesn't work and corporations take excess profits and use them to buy back stock which increases their stock value. It's time to make everyone pay a fair share so we can do want other wealthy countries do and provide healthcare, education, child care, rent relief and other basic items to everyone. Of course, Republicans don't want to govern. They want to give more money to the wealthy and corporations because they don't care about anyone else. We need to vote Blue, up and down the ballot.
"they have demanded budget cuts to address the fact that the government spends far more money than it brings in. "
You mean tax cuts (for the rich*) DON'T pay for themselves? Who could have predicted????
* https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/apr/13/wealthiest-americans-tax-income-propublica-investigation
Important to remember when we see historic old Carnegie Libraries that this was paternalism, not merely generosity or genuine public spirit.
I'm not suggesting their destruction.
They should be preserved wherever they are habitable and capable of being used either for their original purpose or repurposed. But they also need to remind us that they were a marketing gimmick for his statement that instead of paying state or local taxes, he thought he knew what was best in the patronizing phrase that he was "doing for them better than they would or could do for themselves."
Much writing about Carnegie fills the definition of hagiography, but a contemporary of his, Theodore Roosevelt, said this about him and his sometimes self-serving pacifism and isolationism:
"[I have] tried hard to like Carnegie, but it is pretty difficult. There is no type of man for whom I feel a more contemptuous abhorrence than for the one who makes a God of mere money-making and at the same time is always yelling out that kind of utterly stupid condemnation of war which in almost every case springs from a combination of defective physical courage, of unmanly shrinking from pain and effort, and of hopelessly twisted ideals. All the suffering from Spanish war comes far short of the suffering, preventable and non-preventable, among the operators of the Carnegie steel works, and among the small investors, during the time that Carnegie was making his fortune…. It is as noxious folly to denounce war per se as it is to denounce business per se. Unrighteous war is a hideous evil; but I am not at all sure that it is worse evil than business unrighteousness."
Nasaw, David (2006). Andrew Carnegie. New York: Penguin Group. p. 675. ISBN 978-1-59420-104-2.
In addition to Heather's citation to the recent Guardian article, an excellent 2022 Guardian article also describes the self-serving nature of business leaders like Jamie Dimond who brand themselves "stakeholder capitalists."
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/nov/20/stakeholder-capitalism-jp-morgan-walmart
Heartache for Navalny.
Those were some disturbingly patronizing words from Andrew Carnegie. Yet still, Carnegie built and funded the perpetuation of libraries and museums in the post Civil War Industrial Age. Today's private equity and tech titans, make both the Robber Barons like Stanford, Rockefeller and Morgan, and the other uber wealthy individuals of the time, such as Carnegie, seem like Frederich Engels in comparison.
The concept of the corporation was just getting started in Carnegie's time, and now, it is far, far bigger than Frank Norris' "Octopus", far more powerful, and aided and abetted by far more otherwise good people who work for them and depend upon them.
Louis Brandeis famously said that we can either have a working Democracy, or a Country led by the wealthy, i.e., an oligarchy. Looks like we've chosen the wrong path.
I'm surprised that Little Mikey ("He Likes It!") Johnson, a self-proclaimed prosletyzing Christian would take the sycophantic of the wealthy classes position in opposition to a certain well known, and much beloved, sandal wearing prognosticator and prime persona in the New Testament who once said,
"It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven"
The GOP. Robbing the Poor and giving to the Rich, who need more money like I need another hole in my head. The most egregious thing was when the GOP told their voters Biden’s plan to fund the IRS, (to tax the wealthy,) was the "guvmint cummin' fo yo munny."
Vote BLUE.
"As soon as Mike Johnson (R-LA) became House speaker, he called for a “debt commission” to address the growing budget deficit."
Reagan proved deficits* don't matter. (attributed to Dick Cheney)
*Republican created deficits
American history is full of deep, dark pockets; D.J. Trump’s attraction to dictators is nothing new.
'The Real Reason Trump Loves Putin' (Atlantic Magazine, excerpts)
'A new book explores the American right’s tendency to admire and want to emulate foreign dictators.'
By Franklin Foer
MARCH 1, 2024, 8:17 AM ET
‘FOR NEARLY THE ENTIRETY of the past decade, a question has stalked, and sometimes consumed, American politics: Why do Donald Trump and his acolytes heap such reverent praise on Vladimir Putin? The question is born of disbelief. Adoration of the Russian leader, who murders his domestic opponents, kidnaps thousands of Ukrainian children, and interferes in American presidential elections, is so hard to comprehend that it seems only plausibly explained by venal motives—thus the search to find the supposed kompromat the Kremlin lords over Trump or compromising business deals that Trump has pursued in Moscow.’
‘But there’s a deeper, more nefarious truth about people on the right’s baffling unwillingness to criticize the Kremlin: They actually share its worldview. Putin worship isn’t even an aberration in the history of conservatism, merely the latest instance of a long tradition of admiring foreign dictators. Over the past century, without ever really blushing, the American right has similarly celebrated the likes of Adolf Hitler, Francisco Franco, and just about every Latin American military junta that called itself anti-communist.’
‘The right hails these dictators as ideological comrades in the war to preserve traditional society, the values of order and patriarchy, against the assault of the decadent left. Unlike conservative politicians in the United States, these foreign leaders don’t even need to bother with mouthing encomiums to concepts like tolerance, freedom, and democracy. They can deliver reactionary politics in the unvarnished form that some hard-liners on the American right have always hoped would take root in their own country. As the journalist Jacob Heilbrunn argues in America Last, his history of conservatives’ romance with dictators, “Conservatives have searched for a paradise abroad that can serve as a model at home.”
‘Heilbrunn makes the interesting decision to begin his history on the eve of World War I. A primary villain in these chapters is the newspaper columnist H. L. Mencken, perhaps the most celebrated curmudgeon in the history of American letters. Walter Lippmann called him “the most powerful influence on this whole generation of educated people.” A conservative movement as such did not exist in the earliest decades of the 20th century, just a constellation of reactionary intellectuals and their wealthy patrons who nodded in agreement, nostalgic for the antebellum South and a world before mass suffrage. Mencken, the most eloquent of the reactionaries, put their cantankerous thoughts into ornate, often quite funny prose.’
‘Mencken believed fervently in the superiority of German civilization—and in the leadership of its racist, war-mongering monarch, Kaiser Wilhelm. This reverence stemmed from ancestral pride; Mencken’s paternal grandfather came from Saxony. But his affection for Germany also grew from his disdain of American democracy, which he believed ceded control of society to mediocre politicians. By contrast, he liked that Germany was “governed by an oligarchy of its best men.” Just before America officially entered World War I, he submitted an article to The Atlantic in which he imagined that Germany might one day conquer the United States and create a new utopia on its shores. Ellery Sedgwick, then the editor of this magazine, had the good sense to reject it. “I have no desire to foment treason,” Sedgwick wrote him.’
‘Looking back on World War I, there were compelling conservative reasons for considering intervention a catastrophe. Financing the war required the imposition of a federal income tax, which never went away in peacetime. And no matter one’s political stripe, the war’s staggering body count was hard to justify. But what emerged on the right in the aftermath of the fighting wasn’t a form of pacifism—rather, it was a set of conspiratorial arguments that became a dishonorable tradition of isolationism. This pattern would repeat itself at the onset of every war: The isolationists would point an accusatory finger at bankers, whom they accused of being eager to profit off bloodshed. They would describe the authoritarian enemies of the United States as helpless victims, peaceful governments minding their own business. In the course of casting the dictators as the injured party, conservatives airbrushed their records of militarism and racism. Minimizing these sins wasn’t just a matter of rhetorical convenience; it was an act of sympathy. In the case of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, a significant segment of the intellectual American right shared their racialist views about the superiority of Nordic peoples.’
‘HEILBRUNN ISN’T THE FIRST to tell the story of the right’s barely submerged affinity for Hitler. Philip Roth’s great counterfactual novel, The Plot Against America, takes this affinity as its premise—and as does Rachel Maddow’s recently published history, Prequel. But it’s always bracing to be reminded of how former President Herbert Hoover made excuses for Hitler before the war and how the press baron William Randolph Hearst commissioned stories by him.’
‘The biggest fans of fascist autocracy weren’t yokels shaking their pitchforks, but cultivated patricians from the oldest New England families. Benito Mussolini’s American fan section consisted of the eminent literary critic Irving Babbitt, a legendary Harvard professor, and the modernist poet Ezra Pound. Not just Hearst but also Henry Ford and others among the nation’s richest men were some of the chief apologists for Nazi Germany. Their attraction—sometimes subconscious, but quite often stated flatly—was born of fear that America was slipping away from them, as immigrants poured into the country and mass democracy took hold. Fascism represented a hopeful example of a revanchist elite reversing the tide.’
‘Hitler’s defeat, and the full knowledge of the horrors of the Holocaust, did little to spur the right to rethink its admiration of authoritarianism. In fact, the historian Fred Siegel once described the late 1940s and early ’50s as the moment when the isolationists attempted to exact revenge. Senator Joe McCarthy and his allies tried to tear down the reputations of the internationalist proponents of the New Deal who most fervently advocated for the war, by smearing them as Communists. But McCarthy was also waging a retrospective argument about World War II: that the Americans had no claim to superiority over the Germans. When he burst onto the scene, in 1949, McCarthy held hearings into what he described as the mistreatment of a Nazi Panzer division, on trial for murdering dozens of American prisoners of war. McCarthy speciously argued that the Germans were being tried on trumped-up evidence. Such accusations about America’s supposed abusive treatment of Nazis became a right-wing trope. Henry Regnery’s publishing house provided an outlet for criticism of the Nuremberg trials, before it went on to print books by William F. Buckley, James Burnham, and Whitaker Chambers that launched the modern conservative movement. '(Atlantic Magazine, By Franklin Foer) The gifted link below will only be available for the next 13 days)
https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2024/03/jacob-heilbrunn-america-last-trump-putin/677609/?gift=HXqjFN-j-dud0TbzU8NbDkj0-2fc_M2m6rfCLbYS-eo&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
Mr Johnson's term "debt commission" actually refers to the debt he and the GOP owe to the mega-corporations in keeping their taxes non-existent for their "investment" (translation,...donors) in the republican pay-to-play scheme and providing them their insider trading tips.
"The idea that corporate leaders should take responsibility for the community rather than paying taxes to the government so the community can take care of itself..."
Right... like Walmart (and others) shifting the healthcare costs of their underpaid workers to the community (Medicaid) *and* not paying their share of taxes. Win-win for them.
If you spend your money at these types of sleazy businesses, don't expect much of it to come back to your community, or any community.
The Biden administration should blast on repeat the statistics about corporations and the tax rate, as well as the total taxes they do or do not pay. It angers me that my tax rate and payments are higher. That’s wrong beyond measure for me and plenty of our fellow citizens.
“One sacrificed himself to save the country, the other one sacrificed the country to save himself.”
Putin like Trump
I am on an expedition ship and overheard some Brits talking about the incredible negative impact another trump term would have on the world. They can’t believe it is even a reality that might happen. We our an international embarrassment. Nothing great about maga.