Busting Out of The Silos! Some Different Perspectives!

 Oh, boy, I ducked into Fox News recently. I got my usual reaction - are people doing drugs? Or an alternate universe? They go off on how badly Biden is handling the economy on the day the stock market hit a new record high, there is no mention of inflation going down. When they talk about the ability to buy houses, they neglect to mention that the Federal Reserve has been raising interest rates. Also going unmentioned: it does not look like a recession is going to hit us soon.

Well, let's see what else is out there.

Jacobin reports Bidenomics Puts Business, Not Workers, First. This will probably surprise the viewers of MSNBC as much as those of Fox News.

Bidenomics never got much love. Interest peaked in July, according to Google Trends, and is down three-quarters since. It probably would be hard to find someone who could define it. For the Right, it’s practically Bolshevism. The president himself defines it as “building the economy from the middle out and bottom up — not the top down.” It rests, as things so often do, on three pillars: “First, making smart investments in America. Second, educating and empowering American workers to grow the middle class. And third, promoting competition to lower costs and help small businesses.”

How’s all that stand up to reality?

And here is some news that will upset everyone:

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, workers in the bottom half of the pay distribution saw nineteen consecutive months of yearly real wage declines in 2021 and 2022, and workers in the top half, twenty-three. According to another set of Atlanta Fed numbers, which adjust for changes in workforce composition — low-wage workers exited in large numbers in 2020, artificially boosting the average wage, and their return artificially depressed it in 2021 — average real hourly wages have fallen an average of 0.4 percent a year under Biden; under Trump, they rose 1.4 percent a year (which was three times Obama’s rate, by the way).

 And for those watching too much Fox News without a fact-checker at hand, these Washington Post pieces will be not only unknown but anathemas:

American democracy is cracking. These ideas could help repair it.

 “I’m ever more convinced that everyday people — regular folks who aren’t in the political system — we have to be the ones driving this change, because the political beast just wants to keep feeding itself,” said Fahey, who worked as program manager for the Michigan Recycling Coalition in 2016 and is now executive director of a government-reform organization, The People.

And those who think the Republicans are raising teither too much fuss or not enough fuss about Trump's eligibility to run, The Nation's More Democracy, Not the Courts, Will Defeat Trump’s Authoritarianism may surprise.

Moyn’s argument rests not just on the issue of likely legal outcomes but also the underlying sources of Trump’s authoritarian danger. Trump and the larger Republican rejection of democracy—evident both in Trump’s presidency and the 2021 attempted coup—are not (despite the frequent misuse of the term by some pundits) populist threats of a mass movement with majority backing. Trump has never actually won the popular vote; instead, he has benefited time and again from the very counter-majoritarian (and anti-populist) institutions that thwart American democracy. It was the Electoral College that made Trump president—and that keeps him a viable candidate. It was the Senate, dominated by small states, that prevented Trump’s two impeachments from ending in conviction. The stacking of our unelected federal courts with reactionary judges was the chief political legacy of Trumpism—and one that ensures that his shadow will dominate policy for decades to come on issues such as abortion and voting rights. The Electoral College, the unrepresentative Senate, a gerrymandered House of Representatives, and the outsize power of the unelected courts are the foundations of GOP power and the true reasons Trumpists can thumb their noses at a majority of Americans.

Given this reality, the anti-Trump movement has to coalesce around the issue of democracy. Time spent pursuing a 14th Amendment solution is mainly useful for helping to further delegitimize the courts....

 

Meanwhile, over at Mother Jones there is  POLITICS DECEMBER 5, 2023 Biden Pushes to Renew Spy Program That Threatens Communities of Color.

And there I leave you.

sch 12/30