It’s pretty good so it’s all here

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/01/12/bernie-sanders-big-budget-plans-458461

The Senate Budget Committee’s new chair is an unabashed progressive and self-described democratic socialist prepared to be as “aggressive” as he possibly can with budget tactics to help Democrats and President-elect Joe Biden enact their sweeping agenda.

Under a narrow Democratic majority in the Senate, Bernie Sanders will oversee budget and spending work, including the procedural power of budget reconciliation the majority can use to evade the filibuster and pass massive bills without a single Republican vote.

During a 15-minute interview on Tuesday, the Vermont Independent pledged to use the tactic to spend billions of dollars to help stop the spread of coronavirus and strengthen the economy, while leaving the door open to a separate reconciliation package focused on job creation, infrastructure, housing, clean energy and health care.

Q: What’s your vision for the upcoming year? How do you plan to approach the job of Senate Budget chair?

A: It is absolutely imperative that the Congress not lose sight of the fact that working families in this country are facing more economic distress today than at any time during the Great Depression. What Congress has got to show the American people is that … it can handle more than one crisis at a time.

While we must address the total irresponsibility of the president of the United States, we must absolutely move forward aggressively in dealing with the economic crisis facing working families today. … We have to start the process of rebuilding the economy and creating the millions of good-paying jobs that we need.

There are enormous challenges facing the Congress, and we need to show the public that we can face all of them simultaneously.

Q: How should Democrats approach reconciliation during the 117th Congress? How far should they go?

A: Understanding that my Republican colleagues have in the past — both under Bush and certainly under Trump — used reconciliation for massive tax breaks for the rich and large corporations, and they’ve also used reconciliation to try to repeal the Affordable Care Act, I’m going to use reconciliation too, but in a very different way.

I’m going to use reconciliation in as aggressive a way as I possibly can to address the terrible health and economic crises facing working people today.

As we speak, my staff and I are working. We’re working with Biden’s people. We’re working with Democratic leadership. We’ll be working with my colleagues in the House to figure out how we can come up with the most aggressive reconciliation bill to address the suffering of the American working families today.

Q: Has President-elect Biden signaled how he might want to use this tool? Do you think it could be used for massive investments in infrastructure, for example?

I think we should think about how we use reconciliation in two ways. And it’s still not clear to me whether the two ways end up being in one piece of legislation or two. One is, dealing with the immediate crisis. Children in America are hungry. People are sleeping on the street. People are facing eviction. People have no health care in the middle of a pandemic. That is the immediate crisis of today, and it must be addressed.

But, there is also a systemic crisis that has been brewing for years that must be addressed. … What we’ve got to do is create millions of good-paying jobs, and that means clearly, as the president-elect has indicated, rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, our roads and bridges. And I would add affordable housing to that, as well.

But it also means creating millions of jobs by transforming our energy system away from fossil fuels to energy efficiency and retrofitting homes and buildings throughout this country, and moving to sustainable forms of energy, and creating jobs in health care. If this crisis has told us anything, it’s that we don’t have enough doctors, we don’t have enough nurses and other health care personnel. We have to build a primary health care system which is now in very, very poor shape.

So, short-term, we know what the crises are. People are desperate. … They’re worried about getting evicted. They’re worried about not being able to go to the doctor.

Second of all, we have structural problems that have to be addressed as well, to get the economy to work for working families.

Q: You’re a staunch supporter of “Medicare for All.” Do you envision reconciliation being used for a massive expansion of health care? What might that look like?

A: Well, look, I am a very strong advocate of “Medicare for All.” I introduced legislation in the Senate. I think at the end of the day, the American people understand that our current health care system is so dysfunctional, so cruel, so wasteful, so expensive, that we need to do what every other major country on Earth does and get health care to all people. What we will be doing is working within the context of what Biden wants.

I will tell you this — that during this terrible pandemic when we’re seeing record-breaking numbers of people being diagnosed with the virus — the idea that 90 million people are worried about whether they can go to the doctor or not is cruel, it’s insane, it’s unacceptable. And that’s something that I think should be addressed and will be addressed in reconciliation.

Q: As Senate Budget chair, you’ll be a key figure in setting overall defense and non-defense funding levels for fiscal 2022. There’s definitely appetite among progressives to rethink the Pentagon’s budget. How hard do you plan to push for cuts?

A: Let’s back it up and understand a couple facts. You understand you’re talking to the guy who led the effort to lower defense spending by 10 percent.

We’re talking about the military budget, which is now higher than the next 10 nations combined. No. 2, you’re talking about the Pentagon budget, which is the only major government agency which has not been able to undertake an independent audit. And I don’t think anyone has any doubt that there’s massive waste and cost overruns in the military budget.

It goes without saying that we want a strong military. It goes without saying we want to make sure that our troops are well taken care of, that they’re adequately paid, adequately housed, that they’re provided health care, child care for their kids, etc. But it also means that the military, the Pentagon, cannot be exempt from a hard look at fraud, crossover funds.

I think if you check the record, you’ll find that every major defense contractor has been found guilty of collusion and fraud.

Q: How do you expect to have that conversation with your fellow Democrats, some of whom aren’t so keen on the notion of military funding cuts?

A: That’s a very good question. That’s a good question. But right now what’s on my mind is really reconciliation and addressing the crisis facing working families today.

#5

https://www.kptv.com/news/republican-rep-jaime-herrera-beutler-will-vote-to-impeach-trump/article_17ad2136-556a-11eb-b166-7f0cde389e6e.html

Republican U.S. Congresswoman Jaime Herrera Beutler, who represents Southwest Washington, said she will vote to impeach President Donald Trump on Wednesday.

Herrera Beutler released a statement released Tuesday, after last week’s deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters. She joins a small number of GOP representatives who have said they will vote to impeach the president.

More MAGA Blue Lives Matter

Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon reveals:
– Rioters tased officers and beat them with pipes
– One tried to shoot an officer with his own gun
– One will “likely lose an eye” and others have head injuries pic.twitter.com/VwWwBZZYAn

— Andrew Solender (@AndrewSolender) January 13, 2021

That's beginning to sound like pre-meditated action to deprive elected representatives of their means of self-defense in the event of a coup. Let's hope there's a different explanation.

— JP (@joannaperkins0) January 13, 2021

Toxic brand

Backlash to riot at Capitol hobbles Trump’s business as banks, partners flee the brand https://t.co/liXq8xCS3N

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) January 13, 2021

In response to the new COVID variant that is much easier to transmit. Cloth masks are better for protecting other people from you than protecting you from other people.

NY just lowered the vaccine age to 65 and it’s now available to anyone with a preexisting condition. That means 7 million people are eligible, much more than the available vaccine. I’ll try to sign up for a date as soon as I can. I have an 80+ friend who is signed up for vaccines in February and March.

PREMIUM MASKS REQUIRED—Bavaria 🇩🇪 will soon require people to wear higher grade masks/respirators in all stores & public transit. European high filtration FFP2 masks now needed—comparable to KN95, N95, KF94 masks. FFP2 is cheap & plentiful in EU. #COVID19
https://t.co/hhL9oUDmtv pic.twitter.com/ieiFvgWi1B

— Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) January 12, 2021

From Wisconsin Dems

Why Bernie is now in an incredibly powerful position. Thank you Georgia!

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22217054/joe-biden-senate-majority-budget-reconciliation

Despite Joe Biden’s defeat of Donald Trump, the November election was a bit of a letdown for Democrats. The party lost House seats, and Senate Republicans did better than expected, dashing progressives’ dreams of a transformational Biden administration.

Then January 5 happened. Democrats Jon Ossoff’s and Raphael Warnock’s victories in the Georgia runoff elections mean that the Democratic policy wish list has been disinterred — even if the reality of a 50-50 Senate and slimmer Democratic margin in the House may force the party and the president-elect to temper their ambitions.

That gives Biden two years to move — two years with a 50-50 Senate when he’ll be constrained by what moderates like Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) are willing to vote for.

Still, Biden and his allies in Congress can accomplish an awful lot through a process called budget reconciliation. The Senate filibuster means that a bill typically requires 60 votes to move forward. With only 50 Democratic senators (plus tie-breaker Vice President-elect Kamala Harris), that’s a nearly insurmountable barrier. But the budget reconciliation process exempts certain legislation that primarily affects taxes and spending from the filibuster, meaning the 50 Senate Democrats can pass it on their own.

That makes reconciliation the most crucial process for the Biden presidency, through which his legislative agenda will live or die.

Not everything can pass through budget reconciliation. It likely rules out measures like a minimum wage increase, or DC and Puerto Rico statehood, or updates to the Voting Rights Act, or gerrymandering reform.

Still, it’s plausible that Biden and his allies in Congress can use budget reconciliation to accomplish large swaths of his agenda, including paid parental and sick leave, universal pre-K, a $3,000 child allowance, universal housing vouchers, a massive investment in clean energy, expanded health care coverage, and more.

During the general election, Biden’s team talked about him as the next FDR: a president who could seize a crisis to fundamentally transform the role of government. What he can achieve through reconciliation falls short of those ambitions; he will not turn America into a European social democracy overnight.

But what Biden can do — consensus items that most congressional Democrats agree on and have been campaigning on for years or decades — could nonetheless transform American life dramatically. An America where pre-K is universal and child care is affordable for all, with trillions in clean energy investment, free community college, paid maternity leave, a child allowance for parents, and a housing program that nearly eliminates homelessness, is a very different America. And it is in reach for the Biden administration.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/13/arts/design/arts-stimulus-biden.html

Not since 1945 has the United States required catharsis like it does in 2021. The coronavirus pandemic is the most universal trauma to befall the nation since World War II, its ravages compounded by a political nightmare that culminated, last week, in an actual assault on democratic rule. The last year’s mortal toll, its social isolation and its civic disintegration have brought this country to the brink. Yet just when Americans need them most, our artists and arts institutions are confronting a crisis that may endure long after infections abate.

Professional creative artists are facing unemployment at rates well above the national average — more than 52 percent of actors and 55 percent of dancers were out of work in the third quarter of the year, at a time when the national unemployment rate was 8.5 percent. In California, the arts and entertainment fields generated a greater percentage of unemployment claims than even the hospitality sector. Several hundred independent music venues have closed; art galleries and dance companies have shuttered. And in my own life, I’ve listened to painters and performers weep over canceled shows and tours, salivate over more generous government support in Europe or Asia, and ask themselves whether 2021 is the year to abandon their careers.

As President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. prepares to take office next week, and begins to flesh out his proposals to help the nation recover, he and his cabinet have the chance — the responsibility — to offer a new settlement for American culture. Mr. Biden had planned an “F.D.R.-size” presidency, and, with the Democrats’ recapture of the Senate, such heft seems more viable than it did after Election Day. What can the new administration do for culture in crisis? What examples should it draw from in American history, and current international practice? How should Washington approach culture policy with state and local authorities, with nonprofits, and with the entertainment industry? Does the U.S. government need a “Dr. Fauci of culture,” as the Washington Post theater critic Peter Marks called for last month — or even a full-bore Department of Culture, with a cabinet-level secretary?

The Works Progress Administration was a latecomer to Roosevelt’s economic recovery plans, begun in 1935 as part of the so-called second New Deal. Federal Project Number One, as its cultural division was known, accounted for only about one-half of 1 percent of the W.P.A.’s budget — but it endures as its most visible legacy, especially in the murals that adorn the country’s post offices, courthouses, school buildings and even prisons. And it should offer the Biden administration a blueprint for a new, federal cultural works project, which treats artists, musicians and writers as essential workers, and sees culture as a linchpin of economic recovery.

I’ve always been wary of arguments about art’s “necessity.” But a soul-sick nation is not likely to recover if it loses fundamental parts of its humanity. Without actors and dancers and musicians and artists, a society will indeed have lost something necessary — for these citizens, these workers, are the technicians of a social catharsis that cannot come soon enough. A respiratory virus and an insurrection have, in their own ways, taken the country’s breath away. Artists, if they are still with us in the years ahead, can teach us to exhale.

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/01/communism-socialism-american-democracy-anti-fascism/

My late uncle, LeRoy H. Wood, spent years in a federal prison in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, for what he did in Washington, DC.

Roy was convicted of “conspiring to teach the advocacy of the overthrow of the US government by force and violence.” No, Uncle Roy was not a billionaire who incited a mob to storm the US Capitol with Molotov cocktails. He did not shut down a session of Congress as it completed the final stages of an electoral process. He did not encourage those plotting the assassination of political leaders.

Rather, Uncle Roy was a leader of the Communist Party in Washington in the early ’50s. He worked out of the organization’s bookstore there; the “evidence” against him was the pamphlets and books contained therein which talked about the necessity of a future beyond capitalism.

The real “crime,” though, was his work in the militant struggles for unions, racial equality, and working-class empowerment that were at the heart of the Communist Party’s work.

As a teenager in Idaho, Roy Wood led movements of farmers against foreclosures at the height of the Great Depression. He organized unemployed workers to win relief payments. They rallied at the State Capitol building in Boise for a federal program to support workers in their retirement. They supported the strikes of hard rock miners.

When legislation establishing Social Security was won, Roy got a job with that administration and moved to the DC area, at the same time continuing his work with the Communist Party, including working with the Steel Workers Organizing Committee at Bethlehem Steel in Baltimore.

Uncle Roy himself was a mild-mannered, charming, working-class intellectual. A piano player whose boogie woogie could get you out of your seat and onto the floor, he and my Aunt Lariene often jammed late into the night with a circle of musicians which included fellow communist Woody Guthrie.

Uncle Roy was an astute student of history. He would have said that you would have to look deeper to see the real forces behind the 2021 insurrection. The real culprits, he would say, were not the conspiracy theory adherents or the misguided Hell’s Angels types. He would have pointed the finger directly at the 153 Ivy League representatives and senators who shamelessly voted to overturn the vote of the American people. And even more, he would have pointed to the corporate forces who bankroll the shadowy networks of insurrectionists — Big Oil, Big Finance — and the media sewer they fund.

The billionaire demagogues, from Donald Trump to Kelly Loeffler, spent months trumping up the menace of communism during the 2020 election against Biden and Harris, and most recently against Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff. How ironic it was that these same demagogues fueled the very “conspiracy to overthrow the US government by force and violence” that they claimed to be warning against.

Uncle Roy served his time, but he never had to apologize for what he’d done. A lifelong champion of the working class, not once did he doubt that he was on the right side of history.

LeRoy Wood convicted of conspiring to overthrow the US government.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/isn-t-final-chapter-analyst-warns-again-about-rise-right-n1253950

In April 2009, a senior Homeland Security intelligence analyst named Daryl Johnson wrote an internal report warning that right-wing extremism was on the rise in the United States and that it could lead to violence.

The report leaked, and the backlash was swift. Republican lawmakers were furious. Veterans advocates criticized a section raising concerns about service members returning with post-traumatic stress. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano apologized for parts of it, and the unit ultimately was dissolved.

Nearly 11 years later, a mob of right-wing extremists, spurred by President Donald Trump, stormed the U.S. Capitol in a deadly riot that highlighted the magnitude of the threat.

“This Capitol insurrection that we just had last week — some people were like OK, this is the climax of the story. No, it’s not. This is ushering in a new phase of violence and hostility,” Johnson said in an interview. “This isn’t the final chapter of a movement that’s dying out.”

Johnson, who runs DT Analytics, a security consulting firm, published a 2019 book about U.S. extremism called “Hateland.” He spoke to NBC News about the threat and how it can be quelled.

NBC NEWS: Do you believe the president’s defeat will potentially stoke the fires even more, or do you think his ouster paves the way for calming them?

JOHNSON: It has the potential to do either. And it’s going to depend on Republican leaders, what they decide to do. Because the Democrats, no matter how hard they’re going to try, these people won’t listen. It’s going to take Republican leadership for these people to listen and actually tone down.

The majority of these people are radicalizing in different phases of it. They haven’t committed criminal actions yet. Those are the ones that you need to talk to — don’t jump off the side of the cliff and become a terrorist.

NBC NEWS: You alluded earlier to a final chapter that this is not. What would that final chapter look like if these people have their way?

JOHNSON: According to them, they want a civil war. So that would be a final chapter. Having a bunch of massive terrorist attacks and chaos in the streets and political leaders’ being assassinated. That’s kind of the phase we’re moving into right now.