https://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/531739-sanders-trumps-threats-of-derailing-covid-bill-are-unbelievably

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Sunday called out President Trump’s response to the $900 billion COVID-10 relief bill passed in Congress last week “unbelievably cruel.”

While appearing on ABC’s “This Week,” host Jonathan Karl noted the president is essentially threatening to veto the legislation by calling for larger direct payments of $2,000, something Republican lawmakers would strongly oppose.

“What the president is doing right now is unbelievably cruel,” replied Sanders. “Many millions of people are losing their extended unemployment benefits. They’re going to be evicted from their apartments because the eviction moratorium is ending. We are looking at a way to get the vaccine distributed to tens of millions of people. There’s money in that bill.”

Sanders said that, considering the “terrible economic crisis facing this country,” the current bill should be passed immediately, after which another bill for the proposed $2,000 checks should be quickly passed.

Trump’s calls for larger payments came as quite a surprise, Karl noted, as many assumed he would sign the aid bill as soon as it landed on his desk. The ABC News host asked Sanders if there had been communication coming from the White House that indicated Trump’s position before he suddenly called for larger payments.

“No, everybody assumed, everybody, that Mnuchin was representing the White House,” Sanders replied, referring to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. “I talked to Mnuchin a couple of weeks ago. And that was the assumption that everybody had.”

Karl ended the interview by asked Sanders for his thoughts on President-elect Biden’s Cabinet picks.

“I believe that the progressive movement deserves seats in the Cabinet, that has not yet happened,” said Sanders, though he refrained from commenting directly on any nominees.

On stimulus checks, @BernieSanders claims,“What the president is doing right now is unbelievably cruel. Many millions of people are losing their extended unemployment benefits. They're going to be evicted from their apartments. There's money in that bill.” pic.twitter.com/LpFJXlEUlE

— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) December 27, 2020

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/26/americans-acceptance-of-trumps-behavior-will-be-his-vilest-legacy

Most of the 74,222,957 Americans who voted to re-elect Donald Trump – 46.8%of the votes cast in the 2020 presidential election – don’t hold Trump accountable for what he’s done to America.

Their acceptance of Trump’s behavior will be his vilest legacy.

Nearly forty years ago, political scientist James Q Wilson and criminologist George Kelling observed that a broken window left unattended in a community signals that no one cares if windows are broken there. The broken window is thereby an invitation to throw more stones and break more windows.

The message: do whatever you want here because others have done it and got away with it.

The broken window theory has led to picayune and arbitrary law enforcement in poor communities. But America’s most privileged and powerful have been breaking big windows with impunity.

In 2008, Wall Street nearly destroyed the economy. The Street got bailed out while millions of Americans lost their jobs, savings, and homes. Yet not no major Wall Street executive ever went to jail.

In more recent years, top executives of Purdue Pharmaceuticals, along with the members of the Sackler family that own it, knew the dangers of OxyContin but did nothing. Executives at Wells Fargo Bank pushed bank employees to defraud customers. Executives at Boeing hid the results of tests showing its 737 Max Jetliner was unsafe. Police chiefs across America looked the other way as police under their command repeatedly killed innocent Black Americans.

Here, too, they’ve got away with it. These windows remain broken.

Trump has brought impunity to the highest office in the land, wielding a wrecking ball to the most precious windowpane of all – American democracy.

The message? A president can obstruct special counsels’ investigations of his wrongdoing, push foreign officials to dig up dirt on political rivals, fire inspectors general who find corruption, order the entire executive branch to refuse congressional subpoenas, flood the Internet with fake information about his opponents, refuse to release his tax returns, accuse the press of being “fake media” and “enemies of the people”, and make money off his presidency.

And he can get away with it. Almost half of the electorate will even vote for his reelection.

A president can also lie about the results of an election without a shred of evidence – and yet, according to polls, be believed by the vast majority of those who voted for him.

https://jacobinmag.com/2020/12/right-wing-populism-may-be-wounded-but-its-certainly-not-dead

Donald Trump has been defeated, and for all his wallowing in a state of denial, will soon have to leave the White House. But does the Trump defeat really signify the end of Trumpism and its global counterparts?

The rise of a new nationalist right, represented by figures such as Trump, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Italy’s Matteo Salvini, and France’s Marine Le Pen, was the most significant political trend of the 2010s. Using a toxic reactionary discourse that combined national chauvinism, enmity towards migrants and minorities, and denunciation of intellectuals and experts as traitors to the people, these figures achieved impressive electoral successes, with many conquering the heights of state power or coming close to it.

Now that Trump is on the way out, the big question is whether this upsurge of the far right proves to be just a flash in the pan or a persistent trend.

The success of this narrative also reveals a major failure on the part of the left, something that Mondon and Winter overlook, and which I believe to be of crucial importance. The rise of the racist right underlines the incapacity of left-wing forces to respond to the concerns of industrial workers — the very people that socialists formerly saw as the ideal subject of their movement.

These workers, who are now disproportionately located in exurban and non-urban areas, have found themselves sharply exposed to international competition, which has become ever fiercer in recent years, as evinced by the trade war between the US and China. Workers and the communities in which they live are particularly sensitive to fluctuations in global demand and supply chains, and the changing fortunes of export sectors.

As Thomas Piketty has argued, these workers no longer support the left because they feel as if they have been left unprotected, and because they identify left parties with the urban middle classes and neoliberal elites. If the left is not capable of appealing to manufacturing workers and their communities, other forms of collective identity will end up filling the void. By the same token, if the left does not cast the wealthy as the Great Villain, the far right will nominate other figures for that role.

The far-right wave discussed in Reactionary Democracy is now experiencing a moment of crisis, with Trump on his way out and some of his allies also in trouble, partly because of their clumsy responses to the pandemic. But sooner or later such tendencies will reemerge. The neoliberal policies of the coming Biden administration are likely to reinforce the social discontents from which the far right has drawn strength.

To counter this, the left must develop a platform and a language that can break up the unnatural right-wing social bloc. An important part of this will be laying claim to the populist mantle, wresting it from the right, and turning populist sentiments towards progressive ends.

https://jacobinmag.com/2020/12/religion-trump-christian-conservatives-tony-benn?fbclid=IwAR1xpdoeO4ca7hS80fvML90qsTtZw-z-QPQ23Ij2FXhRgy4uSab12wpWfJw

As Republicans win a growing share of poorer voters, and as the Democrats bleed support in rural areas where churchgoing is more widespread, serious thinking is needed about the place of religious believers and belief on the Left. Especially for those hoping to see the emergence of another Bernie Sanders, someone capable of constructing a winning coalition across racial and religious lines, it is vital that these voters aren’t shrugged off or condescended to.

Leftists can and should reclaim the long tradition of relating modern socialist values to time-honored religious themes — one of the key legacies of Christian socialism. While from our vantage point in the twenty-first-century United States, we see predatory capitalists exploiting religious fervor to further their own agenda of social conservatism and tax cuts for the rich, in the nineteenth century, a different way was advanced by thinkers who traced their views directly to the gospel. These included Philippe Buchez in France, originally a figure in the Saint-Simonist movement (followers of the quasi-socialist writer Henri de Saint-Simon), and John Malcolm Ludlow, who launched a Christian socialist movement in England, claiming for socialism “its true character as the great Christian revolution.”

The ideas of early American socialism evolved out of Christian thought. Those on the left wing of the nineteenth-century Social Gospel movement were socialists who condemned the misery that accompanied rampant industrialization as a violation of Christian ethics, with profit placed ahead of the commonweal. George Herron, a Congregationalist minister and socialist, attacked capitalist competition as the “mark of Cain,” while Edward Bellamy, the author of the international best seller Looking Backward — which imagined a socialist utopia in America by the year 2000 — was the son of a minister.

Over time, the prominence of Christian socialism waned, both inside and outside the Left. After 1917, the prestige of Bolshevism solidified the position within the Left of a militantly atheistic form of Marxism. Meanwhile, with the advent of the Cold War, right-wing ministers and preachers railed against “godless” Communism and sought to fuse Christianity with capitalist principles. If churchgoers believed in helping the less fortunate in their own community, the idea of allowing the government to do the same was lambasted as ungodly.

Religion, in other words, doesn’t have to be the exclusive domain of conservatives in America, and it shouldn’t be. But if this ground is further ceded to the Right, a whole new generation of voters might well become promising recruits for the kind of multiracial Republican coalition that some conservative voices have been calling for. That would be an incalculable — and avoidable — setback for the Left.

Why Republicans in Congress are so against providing state and local aid

https://newrepublic.com/article/160745/new-jersey-corporate-tax-incentives-bad-omen

In September, New Jersey officials announced a plan to borrow $4.5 billion to cover what The New York Times referred to as a “gaping financial hole” in the state’s budget. It was an understandable move given the Covid-19 pandemic’s deleterious effect on employment and local tax revenue, and Democratic Governor Phil Murphy’s advisers said they wished to avoid the “slashing of government services” that working families rely on. To that end, the budget also included a millionaire’s tax.

With direct federal aid to local governments off the table in the most recent Covid stimulus talks, thanks to Senator Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s apparent desire to see widespread austerity spending cuts and service reductions, states like New Jersey, which cannot print their own money as the federal government can, have to make difficult decisions about revenue and expenditures. Terrified of borrowing and reluctant to raise taxes (on the wealthy, at least), most states balance the books in regressive ways. As an Economic Policy Institute study found, in the wake of the Great Recession, state and local spending on K-12 education “did not grow at all (adjusted for inflation) between 2008 and 2015.” Much of the sluggish nature of the Obama-era recovery, in fact, can be attributed to this state and local austerity.

Which is why it was heartening to see a Democratic-run state signal that it was willing both to raise revenue from the rich and borrow money if necessary, in order to get through what could still be a temporary budget shock without harmful cuts to services that its citizens rely on. But it was much less heartening when, a few months later, New Jersey officials suddenly announced the return of a giant tax giveaway to politically connected corporations. Crafted in secret, made public last week, and voted on with rapid speed, the new $14 billion corporate tax incentive program replaces one that collapsed in scandal and corruption last year, following revelations that much of the program benefited a local party machine boss and his family and associates.

Corporate tax incentive programs are a largely discredited means of boosting an economy, and they also perpetuate a race-to-the-bottom competition between states to offer the most giveaways to corporations that threaten to move across state lines. Even when they are not riddled with flagrant corruption, as New Jersey’s program was practically designed to be, they remain an incredibly overpriced and ineffective way for a government to “create” jobs. And they have real costs to a state’s ability to spend money on actually useful things. Under New Jersey’s revamped tax incentive program, The American Prospect reports, “the state is agreeing to forgo $1.4 billion in revenue a year to pay for these subsidies.” And that was before New Jersey lawmakers added an additional $2 billion in tax credits for film and television production.

This is bad enough just as a story of one state’s economic decision-making. It could also be an omen of what state and local budget debates are going to look like over the next year. New Jersey under Governor Murphy at first seemed to be charting a course away from regressive austerity, handouts to corporations, and low tax burdens for the well-off. This is several steps backward.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/dec/27/deb-haaland-interview-interior-secretary-native-americans

Debra Haaland is making American history.

The 60-year-old congresswoman from New Mexico will next month become the first Native American cabinet secretary in US history, when she takes responsibility for the country’s land and natural resources as head of the Department of the Interior under Joe Biden.

Haaland is a member of the Laguna Pueblo, one of 567 sovereign tribal nations located across 35 states. According to the 2010 census, 5.2 million people or about 2% of the US population identifies as American Indian or Alaskan Native – descendants of those who survived US government policies to kill, remove or assimilate indigenous peoples.

Come January it will also be Haaland’s job to uphold the government’s legally binding obligations to the tribes – treaty obligations which have been systematically violated with devastating consequences for life expectancy, political participation and economic opportunities in Indian Country.

In an interview days before her nomination, Haaland told the Guardian that as secretary of the interior she would “move climate change priorities, tribal consultation and a green economic recovery forward”.

It’s a big job with high expectations after four years of racist rhetoric and destructive environmental rollbacks by the Trump administration, which showed contempt for the climate or environment by green-lighting planet-heating fossil fuel projects on public and tribal lands with little regard for culturally and ecologically important sites.

“I’ll be fierce for all of us, for our planet, and all of our protected land,” said Haaland in her acceptance speech. “This moment is profound when we consider the fact that a former secretary of the interior once proclaimed it his goal to, quote, ‘civilize or exterminate’ us. I’m a living testament to the failure of that horrific ideology.”

This was mentioned yesterday and here’s a longer article about it.

https://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/531721-brother-of-bidens-white-house-counselor-hired-as-lobbyist-at-amazon

The brother of one of President-elect Joe Biden’s top advisers has recently secured a lobbying contract with the technology giant Amazon.

Jeff Ricchetti, the brother of Biden’s designated White House counselor Steve Ricchetti, registered to lobby for Amazon Web Services, the tech company’s cloud platform, on Nov. 13, according to a new lobbying disclosure report obtained by CNBC.

The report comes after ethics attorneys told CNBC last month that Steve Ricchetti may need to recuse himself from matters that could potentially affect his brother’s clients.

However, a source familiar with the brothers’ relationship told CNBC that the two plan to separate their professional and personal lives.

“Jeff has never and will never lobby his brother on behalf of any of his clients, and Steve has had no role in his brother’s business since he sold his stake in the firm in 2012,” the source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the relationship is private, told the news outlet.

The Hill has reached out to the Biden transition team, Jeff Ricchetti and Amazon for comment on the reported contract.

Biden in May said during an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that Amazon “should start paying their taxes.”

“I don’t think any company, I don’t give a damn how big they are, the Lord almighty, should absolutely be in a position where they pay no tax and make billions and billions and billions of dollars, No. 1,” Biden added at the time.

According to CNBC, the disclosure report indicates that Jeff Ricchetti plans on lobbying for Amazon specifically on issues related to the coronavirus pandemic and the CARES Act.

This comes as progressive lawmakers have pushed Biden to make an ethics pledge similar to the executive order from former President Barack Obama that put restrictions on former lobbyists working in the White House.

Steve Ricchetti formerly worked as a lobbyist, as has Tom Vilsack, Biden’s pick for Agriculture secretary.

Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) wrote to Biden this week seeking an ethics pledge that includes a total ban on lobbyists employed by corporations from serving in the administration and requiring more extensive public reporting of all lobbying activity directed toward the White House.

“We strongly support your commitment to demonstrate with your actions – not just your words – that public servants in the Biden-Harris administration will serve all Americans, not just themselves or narrow special interests,” the lawmakers wrote.

https://www.salon.com/2020/12/27/50-year-study-of-tax-cuts-on-wealthy-shows-they-always-fail-to-trickle-down/

A study of 50 years of tax cuts found that “trickle-down” economics — a concept pushed by Republican lawmakers to justify slashing taxes on the wealthy — have only benefited the rich and worsened economic inequality while failing to decrease unemployment or grow the economy.

Republicans have touted the idea popularized by Ronald Reagan that tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations would inevitably “trickle down” to workers, despite ample evidence showing that wealth has accumulated at the top while worker wages have barely budged for decades. A new working paper from researchers at the London School of Economics and Kings College’s London, which looked at the effect of five decades of tax cuts for the wealthy in 18 developed countries, shows that the concept has always been flawed.
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“Major tax cuts for the rich increase the top 1% share of pre-tax national income in the years following the reform. The magnitude of the effect is sizeable; on average, each major reform leads to a rise in top 1% share of pre-tax national income of 0.8 percentage points,” researchers David Hope and Julian Limberg concluded.

While the tax cuts for the top 1% have obviously benefited the wealthiest taxpayers, they have failed to “trickle down.”

“The results also show that economic performance, as measured by real GDP per capita and the unemployment rate, is not significantly affected by major tax cuts for the rich,” the authors wrote. “The estimated effects for these variables are statistically indistinguishable from zero.”

Millions lost unemployment benefits today, millions more fear losing their homes b/c they can't pay rent, Food lines are growing longer.

Trump is in luxury resort, perfecting art of cruelty & chaos.

We proposed $2k checks months ago. Pass it, GOP. https://t.co/Nc0Xwpdu7A

— Rep. Pramila Jayapal (@RepJayapal) December 27, 2020

Since the start, House Democrats have been trying to deliver critical relief to help people survive this pandemic. It’s time for Republicans to do the right thing and pass $2,000 survival payments. pic.twitter.com/1veizSKw5t

— Rep. Barbara Lee (@RepBarbaraLee) December 27, 2020