There are only two issues Republicans have: the border and tax cuts. The American people are expecting a tax cut if a Republican is elected to the Oval Office. That's the reason they are complaining about the economy. The American people have gotten a lot of good economic stuff out of the Biden administration. Now they want their tax cuts. Every Republican administration in recent history has promised tax cuts. Biden should steal that thunder and run on tax cuts for the middle class and tax increases for the very wealthy. He started sounding this note during the last election cycle. He needs to reemphasize this medley. Biden needs to take these issues away from Republicans. I wrote previously about the fact that Biden should go full Trump on the border issue. It's ridiculous that the US has 750 military bases around the world, and seeks to control every other country's borders but can't control its own. A majority of these bases are equipped with modern military equipment and airfields. According to a report, the U.S. had about 750 military bases across 80 countries in the world and had deployed 173,000 troops in 159 different countries as of July 2021.
Let's review the Biden record on the economy which is truly epic. Biden has added 14 million jobs in less than three years, bringing the Black unemployment rate to a record low and reducing student loan debt by billions. That's for starters. The astoundingly strong labor market is arguably the White House’s biggest victory. In some ways, the bump was inevitable — Biden took office at a time when millions were still out of work because of the pandemic. Even so, the rapid job gains in recent years have blown past economists’ expectations and have fueled the economy’s blockbuster growth. To date, the White House has canceled some $132 billion in student loan debt for more than 3.6 million Americans. It has also increased federal Pell Grants to low- and middle-income students, allowing them to take on less debt. As a result, outstanding student loan balances have been falling for six months.
The American Rescue Plan passed in March 2021, injected a $1.9 trillion stimulus into the U.S. economy. It included financial safety nets like payments of $1,400 to households earning up to $75,000, extended unemployment benefits, and an expansion to the child tax credit. Collectively that cut overall povertyby 44%, according to the Brookings Institution, and lifted Americans’ financial health to new heights. Biden’s $1 trillion Infrastructure and Jobs Act was the next major spending package to win congressional approval in November 2021. It fulfilled the president’s campaign-trail promise to refurbish the country’s roads and bridges, while expanding access to clean water and broadband internet. It will support an additional 600,000 new jobs by the end of next year and 800,000 jobs in 2025, according to Moody’s Analytics.
The passage of the so-called “Chips and Science” plan allowed Biden to cement an industrial-policy legacy and fulfill a bipartisan desire to rely less on China’s semiconductor industry. More than 460 companies have shown interest in its $53 billion of research and production subsidies, the Commerce Department said last month. And the relationship between public and private investment is something to brag about. Micron Technology’s (MU.O), opens new tab $100 billion outlay for a New York chip factory is expected to create nearly 50,000 jobs in the state. Intel’s (INTC.O), opens new tab $20 billion expansion in Arizona is expected to support 3,000 new jobs. The Inflation Reduction Act gave Biden a chance to revive progressive proposals before the 2022 midterm elections. Though the final plan was whittled down from $1.8 trillion to $430 billion of new spending, it still included Biden’s plans for clean energy tax credits and Medicare drug price negotiation. Bank of America estimates it has already spurred $132 billion of investment across more than 270 new clean energy projects.
So what is the American people's response to these clear economic gains that Biden has been responsible for? Now we want our tax cuts so we will elect Trump since that is what he provided after his election in 2016. This is an ominous predilection for the reelection of Joe Biden. He can neutralize this threat by out promising Trump on the issue of tax cuts for the American people. At the same time he can balance this by his previous promise of not increasing taxes on anyone making less than $400 million a year. This would make Biden's policy on tax cuts more fiscally responsible than Trump's. Trump's tax cuts added $7 trillion to the national debt, something Republicans weren't too concerned about. Biden should take the wind out of Trump's sails on tax cuts while also providing a more responsible policy regarding the national debt.
There has been so much obfuscation about the situation at the border. Let's clarify one thing: the amnesty law gives anyone the right to ask for amnesty even if they set foot in the US illegally. This law needs to be changed. Any migrant that sets one foot in the US can ask for amnesty and then be assigned a case to be heard 4 or 5 years down the road. Meanwhile, they get to live and work in the US and probably disappear into the shadows never to be seen or heard from again. Even if this law were to be changed, people would still try to get into the country illegally and not be detected. That's why the border security needs to be ramped up both physically and using electronic and/or satellite surveillance. The goal should be to eliminate illegal immigration totally and completely so that the only alternative from the migrant's point of view is LEGAL immigration. This should be an orderly process and it should be made easier to migrate legally. In fact legal immigration should be increased.
The problem is that deporting any person who sets one foot in the US and asks for asylum is illegal according to the current asylum law. Of course Trump glosses over this fact. Biden should too. What's the worst that could happen? Biden would be sued for violating the asylum law. He should let it happen. It'll be tied up in court till after the election when, hopefully, Democrats will control all three branches of government and can then remedy the situation with the appropriate legislation. That legislation would change the asylum law so that people would have to apply for asylum and/or legal immigration in an orderly manner and not just set a foot in the US to do so. In fact anyone caught entering the US illegally would automatically be deported which is approximately Trump's position. Of course Trump wants to use this as his campaign Trump card so he tells his lackeys in Congress not to pass a new immigration law now. That's why Biden should just go ahead and act as if.
Biden should just do it. Automatically deport anyone entering the US illegally whether or not they are asking for asylum. Make it clear that there is an orderly process for asking for asylum and that entry to the US will not be allowed until that process has been completed. After all approximately 80% of those asking for asylum are denied it. The asylum law is being totally abused by migrants. The number one issue for Trump voters is the situation at the border, namely, illegal immigration. Illegal immigrants are adding to the homeless crisis all over the country. We can't even adequately house all the American citizens who are homeless, yet we are supposed to house, feed and take care of thousands of illegal immigrants who ask for asylum. It's not right. It's ridiculous.
Biden needs to take the wind out of the sails of the number one campaign issue for Trump and/or Republican voters. Just go ahead and fix the borders with or without Congressional help. Let the Supreme Court object. Who cares? It'll be a moot issue anyway after the election, and it'll be tied up in court for years. Then Biden should take the number 2 issue away from the Republicans and that is tax cuts. Tax the rich and give tax breaks to the middle class. The right approach to these two issues should secure the election for Biden.
Competition Leads to the Proliferation of Redundant Commodities. Cooperation is Necessary to Deal with Global Warming
by John Lawrence
Private enterprise fueled by competition is a great mechanism for creating products which can be sold in the market place to consumers. This has worked wonders for economies both in the western world and in China where private enterprise brought 800 million people out of poverty in 40 years, the largest reduction in poverty in world history. This was accomplished by private enterprise at the local level not by communism at the national level. However, private enterprise, while good at creating products to be sold in the market place, is not good at global cooperation which is what is needed to solve the problem of climate change let along create world peace. The problem of cooperation on a multi state level has not been solved let alone hardly addressed with the result that human society is hastening down the path to its own destruction, meanwhile trying to proliferate the sale of gadgets and the making of money and the regaling of competition as the solution to the world's problems. It's not. Unless national societies can learn to cooperate, the destruction of the earth's ecosystems necessary for human and animal well being is assured. While giving lip service to reducing the effects of climate change, no politician anywhere in the world wants to contemplate the fact that national GDPs might actually have to be reduced in order to reorient human energy and natural resources to the most important job of saving the planetary environment so that humans can safely live in it. Last year, 2023, was the hottest year on record and the year in which the most carbon dioxide was released into the atmosphere, just the opposite of the necessary conditions to save the planet for human habitation on a long term basis.
Meanwhile, advertising is supercharging the hawking of relatively worthless redundant products to individual consumers. Bolstered by the upcoming presidential election and attention-grabbing sporting events such as the Olympics, the U.S. will account for almost a third of the total ad spend, rising 2.2% to $303.6 billion in 2023 and 7.6% to $326.7 billion in 2024. Lingering macroeconomic concerns are not expected to hold back ad spending in 2024 amid a confluence of attention-grabbing events. Global ad spending is on track to top $1T for the first time, WARC (the World Advertising Research Center) says. Five companies — Alibaba, Alphabet, Amazon, ByteDance and Meta — will attract 50.7% of global spending in 2023 and 51.9% in 2024. Their ad revenues are expected to increase by 9.1% in 2023 and by 10.7% in 2024, while the rest of the industry remains stagnant. “High interest rates, spiralling inflation, military conflict and natural disasters have made for a bitter cocktail over the preceding 12 months, but the latest earnings season shows that the ad market has withstood this turbulence and has now turned a corner,” said James McDonald, director of data, intelligence and forecasting for WARC, in a release. “With the establishment of retail media as an effective advertising channel, the advent of connected TV as the next evolution of conventional video consumption, and the continued growth of social media and search, we are seeing once again the value advertisers place in leveraging first-party data to target the right message to the right person at the right time,” McDonald continued. WARC’s forecast suggests social media will account for $227.2 billion of ad spending in 2024, more than a fifth (21.8%) of the total spend. Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp and controls almost two-thirds of the social media market, can expect to see more than $146 billion in ad revenue, followed by TikTok owner ByteDance, which will see just under $40 billion in ad revenue (equating to a 17.6% share). It is to be noted that Meta does not produce one product necessary for human survival.
The force feeding of products to individual consumers is reminiscent of the force feeding of ducks to produce foie gras. It's relentless. United States Private Consumption accounted for 67.5 % of its Nominal GDP in Sep 2023. In other words without private consumption of individual consumer oriented products, the US GDP would hardly exist. Yet for the world to get climate change under control, it must reduce private consumption and individual competion for sales to consumers and redirect these resources to combating climate change. Instead human beings prefer actual combat and competition among nations to the global cooperation and cooperation between nations and the national efforts required to get climate change under control. It's a different mindset than the mindset that competition to sell products in the market place in order to get rich engenders. 2023 was the hottest on record by a long shot. Europe’s top climate agency released data showing 2023 global temperatures averaged 1.48 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Record-high temperatures are expected to continue this year. The planet didn't just set a new global annual heat record. It shattered previous records.
Greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels are projected to reach a record 36.8 billion metric tons in 2023, an increase of 1.1% over 2022, according to an annual report by the Global Carbon Project. While emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are declining in some regions including Europe and the United States, they continue to rise overall, the authors said, adding that global action to reduce fossil fuel consumption is not happening fast enough to prevent dangerous impacts from climate change. The steep reductions that are urgently needed to meet global climate targets have yet to emerge, said Professor Pierre Friedlingstein of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute, who led the study. Atmospheric CO2 in 2023 will likely reach 419.2 ppm, 51% above pre-industrial levels. Remember when countless scientists, climate experts, and governments officials agreed that 350 ppm was the “safe” level of carbon dioxide?
So the handwriting is on the wall. Far from an all hands on deck effort to prevent climate change so that future generations can live in peace and comfort on planet earth, global competition in both the commercial and military realms is the preferred and ongoing mode of human behavior, climate change and global warming be damned. Hey, humans seemingly say, we'll get around to preventing climate change just as soon as we win this war. Human greed and the competition among greedy individual participants is a far greater force than altruistic human cooperation to do what's right by future generations. Greed has outpaced morality in the competition for individual accumulation of economic and financial resources. The cooperation and sacrifice that the world saw in the 1930s and 40s to win the Second World War is nowhere to be found today. The US is still preoccupied with individual consumption and especially in entertainment venues which contribute nothing to the effort to make the world safe in terms of climate change. Instead of making the world safe for democracy we must change the paradigm to making the world safe and habitable for future generations by an all hands on deck effort to prevent global warming, an effort, objectively speaking, that seems doomed for failure unless our collective mindsets somehow find a way to change. By the way, U.S. oil production reached a record high of over 13 million barrels per day in September 2023, surpassing all other countries.
Democracy or plutocracy? Which label better fits today’s US of A? An apt question to contemplate as we enter what could turn out to be our most harrowing political year since Abe Lincoln’s election. Where to begin this contemplation? How about we take a stab at some definitions.
In a democracy, people identify the problems they face and, working together, try to fashion solutions. In a plutocracy, by contrast, a society’s richest employ their power to exploit the most pressing problems their nation faces — and keep real solutions off the table.
Where do these definitions leave the 21st-century United States? In deep plutocratic doo. Consider, for instance, how we’re responding, as a nation, to our contemporary housing crisis.
For younger American families, the classic American dream — a home of your own! — has become an ongoing nightmare. Some 20 percent of young American men between 25 and 34 lived with their parents last year, 12 percent of young women. America’s multigenerational household population, the Pew Research center notes, has quadrupled since the early 1970s.
Some 20 percent of young American men between 25 and 34 lived with their parents last year, 12 percent of young women.
What explains these stats? The simple story: Fewer and fewer American young people can afford a home of their own. Overall, an Amherst Group analysis has found, some 85 percent of renting households cannot “qualify for a mortgage.” America’s most typical first-time homebuyers last year, adds the National Association of Realtors, had already turned 36 years old. Young people a generation ago were becoming first-time homebuyers in their 20s.
The economic reality behind all these stats: the shrinking share of America’s wealth that belongs to average Americans. Back in the mid-1990s, America’s “middle class” — the middle 60 percent of U.S. households by income — held double the wealth of the nation’s richest 1 percent. Last year, Fed Reserve researchers calculate, top 1 percenters held more wealth than our entire middle 60 percent.
And America’s richest aren’t just enjoying that turnaround. They’re exploiting it — on a wide variety of housing-related fronts.
Some rich are busy turning the 20th-century dream of owning your own home into the grubby 21st-century reality of renting your own home forever. These rich and the corporations they run have spent recent years buying up homes for sale and turning their new purchases into rental properties.
In big cities ranging from Atlanta to Phoenix, deep-pocket investors have accounted for between a quarter and a third of local home purchases. The impact of this deep-pocket dabbling in the sale of middle-class housing? Corporate landlords turn out to be more likely, a Vox analysis points out, to evict tenants, raise rents, and dodge needed repairs and maintenance.
Apologists for the richest among us are claiming that critics of this deep-pocket interest in middle-class housing are making a mountain out of an investment molehill. They point out, for instance, that private-equity firms and other “institutional investors” drove less than 3 percent of all home sales in 2021 and 2022.
But that low national percentage, note housing experts like Cincinnati’s Laura Brunner, can obscure what’s happening in many actual local neighborhoods. Private-equity dollars can routinely buy up “50 percent of the houses on a single street.”
Other deep-pocketed movers and shakers, meanwhile, are taking different routes to exploiting America’s inadequate supply of affordable housing. Just how inadequate? In the decade that ended in 2022, Realtor.com reported last March, the nation ended up with “a shortfall of 6.5 million single-family homes.” The investor response to that shortfall? An explosion of “residential transition loans.”
These loans go to America’s growing army of house “flippers,” local speculators of various sorts who buy up older homes from families that can’t afford to make badly needed upgrades and repairs. The loans come at a “relatively high interest rate,” as much as 10 percent annually, notes Barron’s.
Financial industry outfits like 1Sharpe Capital, a subsidiary of the Blackstone private-equity colossus, package these high-interest notes into investment funds that offer millionaires returns that can average over three percentage points more than investments in U.S. Treasury funds.
The sharpies at 1Sharpe Capital, for their role in all this, reap an annual management fee of 0.5 percent and a 20-percent “performance fee” if they deliver investment fund returns that run 1.3 percent or more above the three-month Treasury index.
These ample fees ultimately make up only a tiny share of the income that annually pours into the Blackstone private-equity pool. But every little bit helps. Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman, we learned this past August, “received a total adjusted compensation package of $253.1 million in 2022.”
Rewards that outrageous have begun capturing some serious attention from progressive lawmakers in Congress. A year ago this past fall, Rep. Ro Khana from California introduced the Stop Wall Street Landlords Act of 2022, legislation that would, among other provisions, prohibit “large investors from obtaining certain federal mortgage assistance” and create a tax credit that affordable housing developers could tap to build and rehab homes in low-income communities.
In big cities ranging from Atlanta to Phoenix, deep-pocket investors have accounted for between a quarter and a third of local home purchases.
Two lawmakers from the Pacific Northwest, Senator Jeff Merkley from Oregon and Rep. Adam Smith from Washington, have recently upped the reform ante. The End Hedge Fund Control of American Homes Act they introduced this past December would, if enacted, ban hedge and private-equity funds from buying up single-family homes and force them to sell off — over the next decade — the homes they already own.
Still another new bill now before Congress, the American Neighborhoods Protection Act proposed by North Carolina lawmakers Jeff Jackson and Alma Adams, would require corporate owners of over 75 single-family homes to pay $10,000 per home annually into a housing trust fund individual families could tap for help on housing downpayments.
None of these pending reforms have any shot at making it through the current Congress, not given America’s current plutocratic realities. America’s richest don’t just have the wherewithal to exploit the real needs of average American families. Their wealth distorts our national political dialogue. Their political power dooms and delays real solutions to the problems average people face.
How can we advance those real solutions? We need to think big. We need to start redistributing the fabulous amounts of wealth that have concentrated at America’s economic summit. Without that redistribution, our wealthiest will continue to exploit our society’s most aggravating unmet needs.
Take, for instance, the wheeling and dealing of one of the latest billionaire entrants into the buy-up-America’s-housing-stock sweepstakes, Jeff Bezos. The investment fund start-up Bezos is backing, Vicereported last month, “is betting on single-family home rentals because fewer people can afford to buy homes and more people are stuck renting.”
California congressman Ro Khana’s reaction?
“The last thing Americans need is a Bezos-backed investment company further consolidating single-family homes and putting homeownership out of reach for more and more people,” Khana noted last month. “Housing should be a right, not a speculative commodity.”
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The Negativity of the Republican party Preceded Trump. He Just Came to Embody It.
by John Lawrence
The vitriol expressed towards Barack Obama by the Republican party existed before Trump even entered the race. The controversy regarding Obama's birth certificate is something that Trump just latched on to and capitalized on as his entree into national politics. He saw an opportunity and he acted on it. During Barack Obama's campaign for president in 2008, throughout his presidency and afterwards, there was extensive news coverage of Obama's religious preference, birthplace, and of the individuals questioning his religious belief and citizenship – efforts eventually known as the "birther movement", by which name it is widely referred to across media. Conspiracy theories proliferated during Obama's run for the Presidency. There were some that encouraged the electoral college not to certify Obama. Activists unsuccessfully lobbied Republican members of Congress to reject the 2008 Electoral College vote and block Obama's election when it came before Congress for certification on January 8, 2009. This set the stage for Trump's unsuccessful attempt to manipulate the electoral college after the 2020 election in which he lost to Joe Biden. Republican finagling with the voting system is nothing new. Neither is their promotion of conspiracy theories in order to defeat their opponents and gain power in the US government.
Donald Trump predicated his run for the Presidency in 2016 on lies and deception. That should have been enough to disqualify him right there. But it wasn't and lies and deception became a staple of Republican, and, therefore, US politics. Lies and deception were mainstreamed and normalized. The New York Times weighed in thusly:
[The fact that Obama was not born in the US] was not true in 2011, when Donald J. Trump mischievously began to question President Obama’s birthplace aloud in television interviews. “I’m starting to think that he was not born here,” he said at the time.
It was not true in 2012, when he took to Twitter to declare that “an ‘extremely credible source’” had called his office to inform him that Mr. Obama’s birth certificate was “a fraud.”
It was not true in 2014, when Mr. Trump invited hackers to “please hack Obama’s college records (destroyed?) and check ‘place of birth.’”
It was never true, any of it. Mr. Obama’s citizenship was never in question. No credible evidence ever suggested otherwise.
In fact, it took Mr. Trump much longer than that: Mr. Obama released his short-form birth certificate from the Hawaii Department of Health in 2008. Most of the world moved on.
But not Mr. Trump.
He nurtured the conspiracy like a poisonous flower, watering and feeding it with an ardor that still baffles and embarrasses many around him.
Mr. Trump called up like-minded sowers of the same corrosive rumor, asking them for advice on how to take a falsehood and make it mainstream in 2011, as he weighed his own run for the White House.
And there you have the essence of corruption in American politics. The fact that anyone can base a political campaign on something that he or she knows to be a lie just because they can get a large portion of the electorate to believe in it is part and parcel of the American system. And now, despite the fact that there is plenty of evidence including 91 indictments that Trump perpetrated a hoax on the American public, still a large number of the American people still believes in him. He has created a personality cult around himself based on lies and deception yet the American system of government so far has not been able to prevent him from possibly attaining the office of President of the United States again! Surely, this is free speech run amok. The First Amendment should not entertain the possibility that lies and conspiracy theories should be left to fester and confuse the American public. Free speech should not allow that lies and deception are allowed into the political arena so that a politician can actually win office by convincing people to believe them. The cult centered around Trump has progressed or degenerated to the point that his believers have their own egos invested in the lies, and so are reluctant to disabuse themselves of them for fear of losing their self identity. It is easier to go on believing what they thought to be true, even though these beliefs have been thoroughly debunked, than it is to admit that they were fooled.
"Over the next 10 days, we get to see the machines that are crooked, the ballots that are fraudulent, and if we’re wrong, we will be made fools of. But if we’re right, a lot of them will go to jail. Let’s have trial by combat. I’m willing to stake my reputation, the President is willing to stake his reputation, on the fact that we’re going to find criminality there."
They were wrong and they have been made fools of. However, a large percentage of the American people are not willing to admit that they have been made fools of. Their collective egos will not entertain that possibility. In order not to think of oneself as a fool, one must go on believing in the lies and deception that Trump is still allowed to spew. His rallies are reminiscent of the rallies of another would be dictator who gained traction with the German people in the 1930s. And still there is no provision in the American constitution or the rule of law that would prevent the dictatorship of Donald Trump from taking place.
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