Fire away….

More about the bill…

Total new spending: $550 billion

The bipartisan bill is a lot less than the $2.3 trillion Biden initially asked for in the spring, but it is still a significant amount of funding for the next five years. The senators often like to refer to the bill as a $1.2 trillion package because they are also counting funding that is normally allotted each year for highways and other projects.

The spending is partially paid for with unused coronavirus relief dollars, unused federal unemployment aid, sales of spectrum and oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, increased fees for some Superfund sites and customs, and delaying a Medicare expense for a year. Some money would also come from tighter enforcement to ensure cryptocurrency investors pay taxes once they sell and realize their gains. Budget experts say the bill is likely to add about $350 billion to the deficit over the next decade. On top of the CBO forecast, they say an additional $90 billion must be included since the bill “authorizes” that spending even though it is not technically counted as spent.

Senators and the White House are touting the huge number of jobs this bill would help generate. Many construction jobs do not require college degrees, though they do require some special skills. Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, estimates growth of about 660,000 jobs could result by 2025. Interestingly, construction has been one of the few industries with slow job growth in recent months. The bill includes funding and provisions to get more job training programs going and to get more women into the construction and trucking industries.

Roads and bridges: $110 billion. The biggest-ticket item in the bill is money for building and repairing roads and bridges across the country. Many senators are already touting projects in their home states that will benefit from the funding. Sens. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) were both instrumental in crafting the bipartisan plan, and it is notable that the bill includes specific funding earmarked for Appalachian and Alaskan highways. There is also funding for transportation research at universities, funding for Puerto Rico’s highways and money for “congestion relief” efforts in cities.

Railroads: $66 billion. The U.S. passenger rail system, a favorite of Biden’s, receives a large chunk of funding for upgrades and maintenance. There is substantial funding earmarked for the Northeast Corridor, the heavily traveled route from Boston to D.C. The bill also has money for freight rail safety and calls for stations that average 40 passengers a day to have a station agent on duty. Some were disappointed that the bill does not specifically call for high-speed-rail investment as seen in other countries.

Power grid: $65 billion. The plan has substantial funding for “grid reliability and resiliency,” a fancy way of saying updates to older power lines and cables and investments in ways to ensure the power grid is not hacked. As part of the bill’s efforts to address climate change, the power-grid section also has funding to support the development and adaptation of clean-energy technology.

Broadband: $65 billion. There is a major focus in the bill on expanding broadband in rural areas and low-income communities. This has been a bipartisan priority for years, but the White House estimates that about 30 million Americans still do not have reliable Internet access, which became a major issue for schooling and work during the pandemic. About $14 billion of the funding would go toward making monthly Internet bills more affordable for low-income Americans.

Senate infrastructure bill sets stage for massive effort to make broadband more available and affordable

Water (especially pipes): $55 billion. After the Flint, Mich., lead contamination crisis, there is a renewed focus on ensuring U.S. water infrastructure gets upgraded. The bill includes $15 billion specifically for lead-pipe replacement. There is also $10 billion to clean up man-made chemicals known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. The bill also sets aside money for clean drinking water for tribal communities.

‘Resilience’: $47 billion. The resiliency funding falls mainly into two categories: cybersecurity and climate-change mitigation. There is funding to help protect infrastructure from attacks along with funding to address droughts, flooding, wildfire mitigation, coastal erosion and other big issues affecting many parts of the nation as weather patterns become more extreme.

Public transit: $39 billion. Senators and the White House have been citing a Transportation Department estimate that 40 percent of buses and 23 percent of subway and rail cars are in poor shape. The funding would go a long way toward upgrades. There is also money for new bus routes and making public transit more accessible to seniors and Americans with disabilities.

Airports: $25 billion. Biden famously described New York City’s LaGuardia in 2014 as a “Third World country” airport. The bill contains funding for major upgrades and expansions at U.S. airports. About $5 billion would go specifically toward upgrading air traffic control towers and systems.

Remediation: $21 billion. This part of the bill includes funds to clean up brownfield and Superfund sites, abandoned mines and old oil and gas wells that need to be plugged.

Is the End of the Unreformable Democratic Party?

History has been rewritten almost daily this week, almost immediately as it occurs. A Wall Street Journal editorial on November 4 spun its view of what is at issue for the Democratic Party: “Voters warn Democrats to walk away from the Sanders-Pelosi agenda.” The Democrats’ own leadership quickly agreed with this take, playing the blame game against the Progressive Caucus for insisting on economic reforms that opinion polls have reported are precisely what voters say they want.

But these are not the policies that the party’s major donors want. What really is at issue is just whom the Democratic Party (and their duopoly partners the Republicans too, of course) supports: corporate lobbyists and the Donor Class, or wage-earning voters seeking economic policies that benefit them as employees, consumers and debtors.

Can there really be doubt as to what is causing the apathy of voters to support the Clintonite Virginia candidate Terry McAuliffe? Was his loss really because voters opposed Sanders and the Congressional Progressive Caucus as radical extremists for supporting the policy platform that President Biden himself ran on and which got Democrats elected? Was it that Democrats are not sufficiently supporting their Wall Street and corporate donors and lobbyists, and that somehow voting for McAuliffe might empower Bernie Sanders, AOC and the Squad?

Democrats calling themselves “centrist” or “moderate” insist that the Progressives surrender to the Manchin-Sinema rewrite of the original version of the Build Back Better (BBB) act and make it into a grab-bag benefiting the Five Percent instead of the 95 Percent by replacing its most popular proposals with giveaways to the wealthy – as if this will win elections. Or at least, win campaign financing for the party.

One of the most popular proposals in the original BBB act was twelve weeks of paternity/maternity, sick and caregiving leave, child support and pre-schooling support. Such aid is provided by nearly every advanced nation for its citizens. But the Democrats assigned Senator Joe Manchin the task of opposing this as an anti-corporate move to subsidize employees getting paid without working. Nancy Pelosi and the House leadership obliged by removing it altogether, but then agreed to a rather stingy four-week support program. Even so, Joe Manchin will not commit himself to support the downsized BBB bill when it is sent over to the Senate, saying that he wants “to work with Republicans on paid leave in separate legislation.”[1]

In today’s U.S. political duopoly the role of the Democratic Party is to protect the Republicans from attacks from the left. What the Republicans and centrists want is the “hard” business infrastructure program, not its pro-labor elements. The Progressives rightly warn that their only opportunity to get the pro-voter BBB version approved by Congress is to tie it to Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure bill. Their fear is that Manchin will make good on his preference to wait a half year (meaning “never” in political time) before submitting the BBB that was downsized first from $6.5 billion to $3.5 billion, and now to a reported $1.8 billion.

Another popular element criticized as being too pro-labor to appeal to voters is dental and vision care for Medicare recipients, and payments for hearing aids and home health care. As medical and health insurance costs squeeze family budgets, most voters also back negotiating drug prices to stop the price gouging by the pharmaceutical companies. Governments throughout the world have long been doing this. But the “centrists” threatened to exclude it, and finally proposed some reduction in the most exorbitant monopoly prices by promising a give-back to their drug-company donors in the form of more patent protection (for research initially funded by the government itself). The aim is to prevent other drug companies from producing low-priced generic versions after the patents expire.

Student debt relief has been drastically cut back, along with plans two free years of community college. One after another, Biden’s campaign promises are being broken – with Biden himself disowning them and showing impatience at how long it is taking the Progressives to surrender to “reality”.

Already thrown overboard at the start of the Biden Administration was his promise to raise the minimum wage. The Senate parliamentarian pretended that this could not be submitted as a “reconciliation” agenda, on the ground that it did not affect federal revenue. That was nonsense, of course. Raising the minimum wage would reduce federal subsidies to families below the poverty level – a subsidy that has long saved Walmart and other minimum-wage employers dollar for dollar by enabling them to pay less than the actual living wage, as food stamps and other transfer payments make up the gap.

Ted Rall

Democratic Moderates Aren’t the Answer to Right-Wing Republicanism. They Are the Cause.

Another election, another shellacking. Democrats are returning to the political reality that predated the quantum singularity of Biden’s anti-Trump coalition: adrift, ideologically divided and, as always, arguing over whether to chase swing voters or work hard to energize their progressive left base.

At the root of the Democrats’ problem is rightward drift. The 50-yard line of American politics has moved so far right that Richard Nixon would be considered a liberal Democrat today. How did we get here? In part it’s due to the moderates who control the party leadership—not just because they don’t fight for liberal values hard enough (though that’s true), but because of an intended consequence few people focus upon: their campaigning reinforces the right.

Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle wrote an essay a few weeks ago that’s still rattling around in my brain. It’s about a topic that students of politics often wonder about: what’s the smartest way forward for Democrats?

In general terms, McArdle takes up the mantle of the dominant moderates who argue that the party can’t push for progressive policies, or push for anything at all, unless it holds the reins of power. Win first, improve people’s lives later.

It’s an old position. I’ve countered the wait-for-progress folks by pointing out that later rarely seems to come. When Democrats win, as Barack Obama did in 2009—he won the House and the Senate and even briefly achieved a filibuster-proof 60-vote supermajority—they choose not to go big or push hard for purported liberal goals like increasing the minimum wage, federally legalizing abortion or socializing healthcare. I agree with progressive strategist Anat Shenker-Osorio’s answer to the attentistes: “The job of a good message isn’t to say what’s popular but to make popular what needs to be said.”

In other words, use the bully pulpit. Lead.

Still, I’ve never read or heard the mainstream position articulated quite as clearly as McArdle does. She quotes self-described progressive election analyst David Shor. “To me, Shor’s vision — sort your ideas by popularity, then ‘Start at the top, and work your way down to find something that excites people’ — sounds less inspiring but more likely to help Democrats get and hold power,” McArdle summarizes. “It doesn’t require Democrats to persuade voters that, say, an Asian-American assistant professor has exactly the same interests as a rural, White call-center worker or a Hispanic plumber and that only a conspiracy of the very rich prevents them from realizing it. Democrats merely have to learn what voters already want.”

She attacks “the young idealists who staff campaigns and newsrooms” who “sustain a rarefied bubble where divisive slogans such as ‘defund the police’ can be questioned only with great delicacy, while significantly more popular propositions like ‘use the military to help police quell riots’ cannot be defended at all.” Pointing out that only a third of American voters have a bachelor’s degree, she concludes: “Democrats cannot afford to cater only to that hyper-educated class [of young, urban, educated idealists].”

Leftists can easily agree that ignoring less-educated voters is a prescription for electoral defeat. More importantly, everyone deserves representation—for the Left, “everyone” especially includes the poor and working-class, who are less likely to be highly educated. But her assumption that (for lack of a better word) the underclasses are inherently reactionary, cannot be organized behind a slate of progressive policy goals, and that this state of affairs must be accepted is fundamentally flawed and ideologically self-sabotaging.

We thinking of pre-election campaigning, the election and post-election governing as discrete phases. Actually, they’re highly intertwined. For example, political campaigning is itself a self-reinforcing mechanism that affects not merely a race’s outcome but the ideological reality under which the winner must govern.

Democrats, McArdle says, must win first before they can improve things. But what’s the point of winning if you go to make things worse?

The above presents a classic example of single-mindedly seeking Pyrrhic victory at the polls. If Democrats abandon “defend the police” in favor of “use the military to help police quell riots” as per McArdle’s counsel, they might win more elections. But to what end? Victorious law-and-order Democrats will further militarize policing, increase shootings and beatings of civilians and hasten creeping authoritarianism. “Defund the police” is a tone-deaf slogan but the idea of shifting resources away from violence-based law enforcement into programs that reduce crime by strengthening communities is a good one. We need a better slogan, not adding armed goons to city streets.

Bill Clinton won twice but his signature legislation—welfare reform, NAFTA-GATT and the crime bill—were right-wing wish-list items that could have just as easily been signed into law by George W. Bush. With Democrats like that, who needs Republicans?

You can win with a political bait-and-switch. Joe Biden did. He ran as Not Trump, the ultimate centrist compromiser who bragged that he was friends with every Republican senator, even the racist ones. But you can’t govern after you pull one off. Biden’s attempt to pass infrastructure and social spending bills are being shredded by centrists who point out that he didn’t run on policies inspired by Bernie Sanders. I love those policies. But where’s the electoral mandate for these changes?

More subtly but I think more importantly, running right is a lose-lose proposition. If you win, you can’t pass the progressive agenda you claim to really want. If you lose, you’ve validated and endorsed hardline Republicans. Win or lose, polls should provide prompts for smarter messaging and framing, not selling out. A party that claims to represent the left has to run to the left.

Don’t Eliminate the SALT Cap by Senator Bernie Sanders

At a time of massive income and wealth inequality, when the rich are becoming richer and working families are struggling, the job of Congress is to demand tax fairness for working families and to make certain that the wealthiest people in this country begin to pay their fair share of taxes.

Unfortunately, in 2017, the Trump tax plan, which was supported by every Republican, moved us in exactly the wrong direction. The vast majority of the tax breaks in that proposal went to the wealthiest people in our country and the largest corporations – the people who needed it the least – and resulted in a $2 trillion increase in our national debt.

One of the negative aspects of the Trump tax plan was to limit deductions on state and local taxes to $10,000. That resulted in millions of middle class and working class Americans being forced to pay more in federal taxes. That was a regressive and unfair proposal, and this Congress must rectify it.

Unfortunately, as some of you may know, a proposal has been recently circulating which would completely eliminate the SALT cap. While the $10,000 cap is much too low, eliminating the cap entirely would result in a massive tax break for the wealthiest families in this country. The multimillionaires and billionaires who own mansions in exclusive neighborhoods, and who can afford to make extremely expensive purchases do not need a tax break.

According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a 5-year repeal, which is what some are talking about, would cost roughly $475 billion, with $400 billion of that tax cut going to the top 5% of households. According to this non-partisan organization, if this proposal were to go into effect, the top 5% would receive a net tax cut of $30 billion a year – even after including all of the other provisions to increase taxes on the wealthy that are currently in the Build Back Better Act.

At a time when Democrats are correctly demanding that the wealthy finally pay their fair share of taxes, it would be absurd and hypocritical to provide the richest people in the country with a massive tax break.

That’s not just Bernie Sanders talking. Jason Furman, President Obama’s chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, recently tweeted, ‘My guess is the majority of Americans with a net worth of $50 to $300 million would get a tax cut under the Build Back Better plan with a full repeal of SALT.’ He concludes by saying ‘that’s obscene.’

So, if completely eliminating the cap on state and local tax exemption is regressive and unfair, what is the solution? The answer is obvious. We should eliminate that cap for families making $400,000 or less, not for millionaires and billionaires. And we should make that permanent. This would not only provide tax relief to millions of middle income and working class families, it would be deficit-neutral.

I was delighted to hear from Senator Menendez that he has a very similar perspective on this issue and our offices have agreed in principle on a compromise proposal that would eliminate the SALT cap on middle class families who need it the most and ensure that millionaires and billionaires don’t receive any of the benefit. Over ten years, this proposal would be deficit neutral and the Build Back Better Act would be fully paid for by demanding that the wealthiest Americans and most profitable corporations pay their fair share of taxes.

We have heard reports that the House bill may include a proposal to raise the SALT cap to $72,500 for all Americans, including the wealthy. This approach would cost over $50 billion a year and would provide 37% of its benefits to the top 1%. In my view, that is not an acceptable compromise. We should be substantially increasing taxes on the top 1%, not giving the wealthiest people in America a tax break.

Did Bernie’s team see my blunt comment the other day? In any event, this explains his proposal with Mr. Pharma, and now I have a better understanding. Thank you, Bernie! I don’t think this will happen, but it’s good to know what you had in mind.

Silicon Valley Rep. Ro Khanna’s campaign to pay $16K to FEC

A San Jose congressman’s campaign will pay $16,000 to a federal watchdog for using software that divulged donor history for fundraising purposes.

The Federal Elections Commission (FEC) reached a settlement with Rep. Ro Khanna‘s campaign to pay for using information from the commission’s database to send people emails during his 2014 and 2016 runs for Congress. That included taking information, such as donor history, from the FEC’s donor lists to ask for donations—something that violates federal law.

The FEC did not find any wrongdoing on Khanna’s part, and did not fine him personally.

Tech executive Steve Spinner, who Khanna tapped as campaign chair for his failed 2014 run and subsequent successful 2016 run, was instrumental in the email campaign. Spinner is the founder of Redwood City-based RevUp Software, whose software looks at donor history to assess who would support a campaign. Then it targets the individuals as potential donors. People on RevUp’s list are ranked by their likelihood of donating to a political cause, which campaigns use to ask for donations.

“I’m happy that the FEC addressed RevUp Software illegally using their data,” San Jose resident Glen Shaffer told San José Spotlight. Shaffer filed the original FEC complaint against Khanna in 2016. Shaffer and his wife were members of the Santa Clara County Democratic Club at the time of the complaint. “But there’s also the part where Ro Khanna was collecting other people’s info.”

Spinner licensed his software—often starting at $13,500 or more a pop, according to court documents—to representatives, senators and national committees on both sides of the aisle.

Spinner founded RevUp in 2014 and dissolved it in December 2019. According to court documents, Khanna continued to use the software until RevUp’s dissolution.

Khanna denies any wrongdoing and says the software’s use was within the FEC’s rules.

“There were hundreds of campaigns that used this RevUp software, including Democratic and Republican committees,” a spokesperson for Khanna’s campaign told San José Spotlight. “The committee did nothing wrong, but settled the matter to avoid litigation and administrative fees.”

Shaffer, a canvasser for then-South Bay Congressman Mike Honda’s campaign at the time, first raised the complaint after he discovered he was added to Khanna’s campaign email list. A Khanna official explained that Shaffer and other Honda supporters were added to the campaign list after Khanna’s personal Gmail account contacts were uploaded to the software by mistake.

LA Sheriffs Deputies Use Minor Infractions to Search Bicyclists; Latinos Often the Most Stopped

Thousands of times a year, Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies pull over bicyclists for minor violations such as riding on the sidewalk or not using lights at night — infractions that can be handled with a warning or a ticket.

But deputies routinely escalate the stops into more intrusive encounters and disproportionately pull over Latino riders.

A Los Angeles Times investigation found deputies search 85% of bike riders they stop even though they often have no reason to suspect they’ll find something illegal. Most bicyclists were held in the backseat of patrol cars while deputies rummaged through their belongings or checked for arrest warrants.

The Times’ analysis of more than 44,000 bike stops logged by the Sheriff’s Department since 2017 found that 7 of every 10 stops involve Latino cyclists, and bike riders in poorer communities with large nonwhite populations are stopped and searched far more often than those in more affluent, whiter parts of the county.

For all the stops and searches, deputies rarely catch criminals. During searches, they find illegal items just 8% of the time, The Times’ analysis shows. Weapons were seized just 164 times — less than half a percent of all searches.

A Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department cruiser patrols Whittier Boulevard and Arizona Avenue in East Los Angeles.
A Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department cruiser patrols Whittier Boulevard and Arizona Avenue in East Los Angeles. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
The Times interviewed cyclists in some of the communities most frequently targeted by the Sheriff’s Department, including 40 who had been stopped at least once and in some cases multiple times. Many came away angry and humiliated, describing the stops as small but nonetheless hurtful injustices of having their freedom momentarily stripped so a deputy could go on a fishing expedition.

“You feel powerless,” said Ubaldo Delacruz, a Boyle Heights resident who has been stopped several times in East L.A.

“People, they assume, they’re on bicycles, they’re … some sort of criminal,” he said.

Tamika Butler, former head of the nonprofit Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition, rides in Leimert Park.

Sheriff’s officials defended the use of bike stops as a necessary and legitimate tool to fight crime, arguing that criminals use bikes to evade detection. The low rates of success deputies have finding drugs or other contraband while searching bicyclists “do not raise serious questions,” a department spokeswoman told The Times.

The inequities in how the Sheriff’s Department uses bike stops come to light amid a broader national debate over whether police should no longer be permitted to pull over motorists — and bike riders — for small infractions.

“It’s just another version of stop and frisk,” said Tamika Butler, former head of the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition, comparing the sheriff’s enforcement to the New York City Police Department’s practice of patting down Latinos and Black people. The NYPD tactic, now defunct, was found to have violated people’s civil rights. “It’s just another way to profile, to stop, to harass.”

Los Angeles County is built largely for automobiles. Bicyclists are second-class travelers, often left to vie for space alongside cars on congested, poorly maintained streets.

They ride for a host of reasons, but many have no choice. They cannot afford a car, as well as the gas, registration fees and other expenses that come with driving in a sprawling metropolis.

And they ride despite risks. Hit-and-run collisions are an intractable problem in the county, and efforts to build dedicated bike lanes have been uneven.

Times reporters fanned out across the streets of various neighborhoods in L.A. County and interviewed people they encountered riding their bikes, as well as nearly a dozen biking advocates.

Many riders said they had been pulled over riding to work or running errands. A Latino rider in East L.A. was headed home with two bags of clean clothes after a visit to a laundromat. A Black man felt that the color of his skin led to him being stopped in West Hollywood while he was making food deliveries late one night. Many said deputies were suspicious of them simply for riding a bike.

“They would even ask me, ‘Why don’t you [drive]? Is that by choice?’” said Gabriel Ledesma, 48, a Latino cook from East L.A. who said deputies have stopped and searched him several times while he was biking in his neighborhood. “I never saved enough money when I was growing up and I never learned how to drive, so that’s why I’m on a bike.”

Gabriel Ledesma, 48, has been stopped by deputies while riding his bike around his home in East L.A.

Many bicyclists said they were asked if they were on probation or parole and if they had drugs or weapons. The Sheriff’s Department data mirror their experiences. Deputies asked 93% of riders about their probation or parole status. And in 71% of stops, cyclists were held in the backseat of a patrol car while deputies searched their backpacks or checked to see if they had outstanding arrest warrants.

Some cyclists shrugged off the encounters as an inconvenience that comes with living in high-crime neighborhoods. Others felt deeply harassed, targeted because they fit the vague description of a crime suspect deputies claimed to be searching for, usually because they were the same race.

Being stopped was even more disruptive for some riders interviewed. One white bicyclist in Norwalk said he lost his job because he was two hours late to work after he was held in the backseat of a patrol car while deputies searched his belongings and questioned him about who in the neighborhood was dealing drugs and carrying guns. A Latino rider in East L.A. said deputies took him to jail after they found a pipe in a bag of recyclables he planned to redeem for cash. A Black rider said a deputy confronted him at gunpoint and ordered him to stop while he was riding home from Lueders Park in Compton and doesn’t understand why.

L.A. County Sheriff’s Deputy Manan Butt advises Ubaldo Delacruz that he can’t ride on the sidewalk in East Los Angeles. Delacruz, who has been stopped at least three times in the last four years, was let go with a warning.

Delacruz was riding on the sidewalk on Whittier Boulevard in East L.A. one Friday in April when Sheriff’s Deputy Manan Butt pulled up next to him and called out for him to stop. Times reporters observed from inside the patrol car.

The deputy told Delacruz he was not allowed to ride on the sidewalk and asked for identification.

He didn’t have his license with him and, at first, he resisted telling Butt his name. Since he had agreed to ride on the street, he said later, he didn’t think he should have to answer any more questions.

Delacruz told Butt, “You want to know if I have warrants.” He told the deputy he didn’t.

But, fearing he was making matters worse for himself by refusing, Delacruz relented and gave his name.

Butt ran Delacruz’s name and saw he was telling the truth. He let him off with a warning.

Butt told The Times afterward that he became more suspicious of Delacruz when he refused to identify himself.