1) Lift first before doing cardio, and stretch before stepping on the treadmill! If you hit the treadmill before the weights, you're going to be too tired to do your target number of reps at your target weight. Also you get sweat all over the equipment, which is nasty (please please please spray and wipe down equipment after you use it!)

2) Hit all your muscle groups when lifting! On your upper body day, make sure to do 3 sets apiece (with 60 to 90 seconds of rest in between sets) for your biceps, triceps, shoulders, chest, and back. On leg day work your quads, calves, and thighs.

Some hardcore gym nerds insist on doing compound lifting exercises instead of working individual muscle groups, but the machines that work individual groups are just as effective (and a lot safer) at building muscle.

3) Incline walking is just as good for cardio as running, and a lot easier on your knees! Find a good challenging incline and set your speed at 3 mph or a little above and go for at least 30 minutes. Ideally you want to break a sweat pretty quickly and get your heart rate above 160bpm after about 5 minutes and keep it there. If you notice your sides start to hurt and your bpm gets over 170, take your incline down a few notches so you can go your full 30 minutes.

When it's time for your cooldown walk set your incline and speed to 2.0 for the first 2 minutes after your workout, and then 1.5 apiece for the next 3 minutes until your heart rate gets back down.

4) Find the right music that works best for you to keep you going! When lifting I prefer thugged out hip hop like Migos, 2 Chainz, Moneybagg Yo, Future, 21 Savage, etc. And when I'm on the treadmill I have a house music playlist that makes me want to move. On days I forget my headphones my workout is 10x harder.

5) A fun hack for me to make my time on the treadmill go faster is to play a few 10 minute chess games on the Chess app. It's a great combination physical and mental workout! It also helps if your gym has TV screens on the treadmill and there's a good game to watch. The NBA is on most nights in the winter, and you can watch a solid quarter or more in 30 minutes.

6) Drink a protein shake within 90 minutes of getting home from the gym! My lady turned me onto the strawberry Premier Protein shakes and they are EVERYTHING. One shake has 30 grams of protein, drink that before you shower and you'll feel amazing afterward.

7) If you're a regular gym-goer and you see people at the gym you don't recognize, make sure you give them room to do their thing and a thumbs-up if they look like they're struggling. Anyone making the gym a priority should feel welcomed and encouraged.

If you added up the victims of all of history’s worst serial killers — from Jack the Ripper to H.H. Holmes, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy — and even included the names of victims of the worst mass shootings like Columbine, Las Vegas, Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, and countless others, it wouldn’t even come close to the number of people the health insurance industry kills every year by denying claims for life-saving healthcare.

In 2020, respected medical journal The Lancet published a study finding that if the United States had universal healthcare, it would not only save 68,000 lives every year, but would also save American taxpayers approximately $450 billion annually. This is a polite and academic way of saying that the private health insurance industry is a deeply evil and parasitic institution that needlessly kills tens of thousands of people and bleeds taxpayers dry by serving as a superfluous gatekeeper between Americans and life-saving healthcare. This is helpful context to some of the more biting responses on social media in response to Thompson’s murder, like: “Prior authorization needed for condolences,” and “thoughts and premiums” and “sympathy is out of network.”

UnitedHealth in particular is one of the worst offenders when it comes to insurance claim denials. LendingTree’s ValuePenguin found that UnitedHealth’s denial rate of 32% is not only the highest in the industry, but actually doubles the industry average of 16%. And an Arstechnica report from 2023 found that UnitedHealth actually used AI to automatically deny claims even though it had a 90% error rate.

Even though the health insurance industry’s actual claim denial numbers are — for obvious reasons – not public knowledge, it can be safely assumed that the number of people who died as a result of these denials is more than zero. And because UnitedHealth has 52 million customers, this means it is not an inaccuracy to state that Brian Thompson directly profited from the deaths of perhaps double-digit thousands of people as its CEO.

We’re conditioned to think of the decisions made by business leaders and politicians as dollars and cents, rather than life or death. But as journalist Luke O’Neil of the fantastic “Welcome to Hell World” Substack wrote in 2021, the people who represent us in government make decisions every day that result in the deaths of thousands of people, as he demonstrated when some lawmakers were arguing for Covid-19 safety net programs to be eliminated:

Almost every single utterance from a Republican (and plenty from Democrats) about their intended policy is an attempt to set violence against real people into motion by someone else's hands which is ok for some reason. Arguing that we can’t afford to send out $2,000 checks a month is in fact calling for people to die it’s just said with the cover of the savvy politics insider.

It's weird that we all know this but it's so obvious we just kind of let it pass. Even writing it out here feels kind of pointless.

Technically denying life saving and desperately needed money to people during a pandemic isn't killing them in the same way that shooting them would be it's just inserting the ball into the Rube Goldberg machine of pain that provides an exonerating and distancing sleight of hand between cause and effect. Invoking “the deficit” is just saying “let them die” in more acceptable terms.

Of course, there are valid counter-arguments proliferating in response to the celebratory memes. Vigilante justice is indeed a two-edged sword that can cut both ways if we turn Thompson’s murderer into a martyr. And it’s true that one dead CEO will just be replaced with another who will do the exact same things. But it could also be argued that Thompson’s death is already causing reverberations in the health insurance world and yielding immediate changes in how these parasitic companies do business.

One key example is Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield abruptly reversing its policy of not paying for anesthesia if a surgery goes beyond an arbitrary time limit. Just a little over 24 hours after Thompson was shot to death in broad daylight, the company announced that actually, it would be providing full anesthesia coverage (at least in Connecticut).

I think we can all agree that wanton bloodshed is not a solution for positive change. But at the same time, I think we can all agree it’s healthy for society’s richest and most powerful people to be a little more afraid of us and act accordingly.

There — is — a massive weather conspiracy happening right under our noses. And our conservative uncles and old high school classmates are so close to getting it right.

But before we get into that, thanks for all the new followers and subscribers! I know this is my first post since 2021, but since so many of you have followed and subscribed, I feel like I owe folks something a little more frequent. My writing appears more frequently at AlterNet (where I’m a full-time staff editor) and Occupy.com these days, so give those places a read. And a special thanks to Jonathan Larsen and The Fucking News for the recommendations!

When Hurricanes Helene and Milton hit Florida back-to-back, I caught myself describing it as a “once-in-a-century event” while talking to a flood adjuster colleague. But then I wondered: How rare is it really for two hurricanes to hit the same state in the same season? Part of me wondered if the last time this happened was before modern hurricane record-keeping began.

But actually, Nashville ABC affiliate WKRN reported that this has happened three times in the last 20 years! Hurricanes Katrina and Rita both hit Louisiana in 2005, and Hurricanes Laura and Delta slammed into the Bayou State in 2020. The 2020 season was so busy that meteorologists literally ran out of letters for named storms and had to go into the Greek alphabet.

As destructive as Helene and Milton are, they’re even worse considering that many Floridians have just barely started getting things back to normal since Hurricane Ian ravaged the Fort Myers Beach as a Category 4 storm late into the 2022 season. And Milton just ripped through Fort Myers Beach, burying those same neighborhoods in sand.

Ian was Florida’s costliest storm on record, killing 149 people and causing more than $113 billion in damages. As a licensed flood insurance adjuster I got to see a lot of the damage firsthand, and I had insureds calling me asking about their claim check as many as three months after I submitted my final report to the carriers. And that was well into 2023, so it’s not a stretch to say insureds likely finished rebuilding their houses just this year. So what’s causing all this? Is it the liberal weather machine or is it the far more obvious alternative?

(A cat belonging to one of my Hurricane Ian insureds. She followed me around while I took my exterior photos. Courtesy of my Instagram)

Everyone knows the reason we’ve already seen dozens of once-in-a-century storms in the last decade alone is because of our rapidly changing climate, and we all know the climate is changing rapidly due to CO2 emissions from fossil fuel. The 100 companies who are responsible for roughly 71% of global emissions know it too. Even the two Fort Myers insureds I talked to on the front lawn of their million-dollar home with a two-foot waterline and a ripped-up Trump flag on the front of their house didn’t disagree when I mentioned that climate change will make storms like Ian more common.

Exxon in particular has known about the threat posed by climate change since the 1970s. In 2023, a team of Harvard scientists published a study in Science.org about how Exxon executives knew five decades ago about the long-term consequences of burning fossil fuels. The company knew its emissions led to an abundance of CO2, which would rapidly warm ocean temperatures and create a far higher chance of catastrophic and frequent weather events.

Geoffrey Supran — the lead author of the study — told the Harvard Gazette that Exxon effectively chose higher profit margins over informing the public about the very real danger of climate change:

“This paper is the first ever systematic assessment of a fossil fuel company’s climate projections, the first time we’ve been able to put a number on what they knew,” Supran said. “What we found is that between 1977 and 2003, excellent scientists within Exxon modeled and predicted global warming with, frankly, shocking skill and accuracy only for the company to then spend the next couple of decades denying that very climate science.”

A billion-dollar company conspiring to pay “scientists” to deny climate science, and PR experts to downplay climate change in the media, and putting politicians in office all for the sake of killing regulations that might make them part with a slight hit to their profit margins, may not be much of a conspiracy theory as much as it is what’s plainly happening in front of our eyes. If someone is looking for the shadowy organization working to increase the damage, scope, and frequency of catastrophic weather events, they’re all publicly traded companies with boards of directors. There’s no conspiracy to the climate emergency. It’s just capitalism.

(If you’re still reading this far and feel like donating, give to East Carolina University’s efforts to support work on the ground helping North Carolina residents recover from Hurricane Helene.)

Like most people, I’m horrified at the reality that pregnant women in Texas now have to face if they don’t want to carry their pregnancies to full term. Even though the United States Supreme Court has the ability to block Texas’ Senate Bill 8 from going into effect until further judicial review has taken place, it has yet to do so as of Wednesday evening.

Like Welcome To Hell World’s Luke O’Neil recently described in his latest post, I’m just as incensed about Senate Bill 8’s provisions empowering rabid right-wing religious fanatics from filing lawsuits against abortion providers in hopes of getting a $10,000 bounty, as I am about the outright abortion ban itself (and let’s stop acting like there’s a meaningful window for women who are six weeks pregnant from actually getting abortions).

However, because the federal judiciary is the ultimate arbiter of law in the United States, and because the US Supreme Court is capable of halting or even overturning any state or federal law, Democrats — as the majority party in both houses of Congress and the party currently controlling the White House — have the ability to unilaterally stop Senate Bill 8 from taking effect if they truly want to protect the safety of women and girls across Texas. It’s a simple solution that only requires a majority vote.

15 Supreme Court justices. 15 federal circuits.

(Map of all 12 current federal circuit courts including the Washington DC circuit court)

The structure of the federal judiciary is based by region — each region of the US has its own federal circuit, and each circuit has its own district courts (for a total of 94 districts) under its court of appeals. While the US Supreme Court has the final say in judicial matters, it only hears a fraction of the cases litigated at the district and appellate levels. Every single federal judge serves for life, which means each judicial appointment is vitally important.

Because Article III, Section 1 of the US Constitution grants Congress the authority to create new federal circuit courts, a simple majority vote in the House and Senate would make it possible to expand the federal judiciary to 15 circuits, rather than 12, along with all the new district courts for each of those new circuits. Additionally, Democrats can expand the US Supreme Court from nine justices to 15 under that same Constitutional provision. The number of justices on the Supreme Court has been frozen at nine for more than 150 years. A lot has changed since then, why not that?

Taking action like this is a lot more difficult in the US Senate, which empowers the minority party to use the filibuster to stall everything short of budgetary matters with just 41 votes out of 100. Expanding the courts — which is clearly necessary given the blatant violations of civil rights seen in Texas’ Senate Bill 8 — won’t happen until we also succeed in eliminating the filibuster. As the Brookings Institution noted in this graphic, use of the filibuster hit an all-time high during the Obama administration, and continue to be fiercely deployed by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) during the Biden administration.

(Number of cloture motions filed in the Senate, from the 65th Congress to the 115th Congress)

Eliminating the filibuster can be done with just 50 senators and a tie-breaking vote from Vice President Kamala Harris, simply by establishing a new precedent. If a senator raises a point of order during a filibuster and argues that Republicans are violating Senate rules, and if 49 other senators and the Vice President (likely presiding over the session) agree, that effectively kills the filibuster. Then, the courts can be expanded, new district and circuit judges — as well as new Supreme Court justices — can be confirmed, and abortion protections can be written into federal law. As Adam Jentleson (deputy chief of staff to former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid) tweeted, this is clearly necessary if we want to stop Republicans from rolling back Roe v. Wade.

Anyone telling you that Democrats have no choice but to throw up their hands and hope the 2022 elections go their way is lying to you. Democrats have a clear path in front of them to safeguard women’s rights. Whether or not they actually do it depends on their willpower.

All you need to play basketball is a ball and a hoop (a milk crate mounted to a pole will also suffice).

All you need to play tennis is a ball, a racket, and a net.

All you need to play soccer is a ball and a couple of goals (nets optional).

All you need to play golf is 150 acres of land, at least $350 to buy 14 clubs and a bag, and enough income to afford membership fees if the course you’re playing at is at a private club. If you don’t want to lug your equipment across all 18 holes every time you play, you’ll need to rent a golf cart whenever you play, or pay a caddy. Oh, and the average golf course requires an average of 130,000 gallons of fresh water every day to maintain the grass.

Earlier this week, the US Bureau of Reclamation issued an official declaration of a shortage at Lake Mead — the largest freshwater reservoir in the country — for the first time in history. This means that the four states downstream from the Colorado River that depend on Lake Mead for their water needs (Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico) will soon have to make tough decisions.

(Lake Mead levels 20 years ago vs. today. Photo: KLAS-TV)

Already in California, wells are drying up despite the state passing a groundwater preservation law seven years ago, during the last extreme drought. 2,700 California wells are expected to dry up this year alone, with more expected to dry up in the coming years. This means thousands of people are already turning on their faucets to fill glasses, their dog’s bowl, or a pot to boil spaghetti, and nothing comes out.

If political leaders are looking for an easy way to conserve water, allow me to volunteer an idea: Close the damn golf courses.

In Nevada alone — one of the driest states in the country — there are 95 golf courses sucking up an average of 12.3 million gallons of water every day. According to Golfsmash, there are also 921 golf courses in California, 316 golf courses in Arizona, and 79 golf courses in New Mexico. Altogether, golf courses in states that get water from Lake Mead eat up an average of 183.4 million gallons of water every single day.

2015 data from the Environmental Protection Agency shows the average American consumes about 82 gallons of water per day, in between toilet flushing, taking showers, cooking, cleaning, and other everyday tasks. This means New Mexico’s population of 2.097 million people requires an average of 171.9 million gallons of water per day.

For those of you who are good at math, this means golf courses in four Southwestern states. consume 12 million more gallons of water per day than every person in the entire state of New Mexico.

Obviously tackling the climate crisis will require a significant, coordinated mobilization of governments and resources, acting with urgency to conserve resources and consume more sustainably. But in the short term, closing golf courses in dry states can make the dwindling freshwater supply last a hell of a lot longer.

(Desert Highlands golf course in Scottsdale, Arizona. Photo: GolfLifeNavigators.com)

Despite the US’ best efforts, the far-right, religious extremist Taliban now have full control over Afghanistan. It may seem counterintuitive, but the US immediately recognizing the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan will go a long way in terms of saving lives in both the short term and the long term.

It goes without saying that the Taliban taking over Afghanistan is a tremendous blow to women’s and LGBTQ rights, modernism, and science in the region. And given that they’ve since acquired virtually 100% of the billions of dollars in military equipment the US sent there for the failed war effort, the Taliban’s authority in Afghanistan will go unquestioned for many decades.

But if the US continues to treat the Taliban as the enemy and encourage an isolationist approach from the international community, it’s almost certain things will only worsen for Afghanistan’s 38 million residents. Sadly, the Biden administration so far appears to refuse to learn any lessons from the last 20 years of failed antagonistic foreign policy.

The Taliban’s rapid advance through Afghanistan has been happening for the past several years for anyone paying attention. Even though the Afghan army was, on paper, more than four times that of the size of Taliban forces, many of the soldiers in Afghanistan’s military were drastically underpaid and even underfed. The apparent lack of will to fight the Taliban is hardly surprising given how low morale was among the ranks of Afghanistan’s security forces.

Afghanistan’s US-backed government also lacked legitimacy throughout the occupation. Its 2014 election saw only seven million ballots cast, meaning roughly 80% of the population didn’t participate. Both the 2009 and 2014 elections were rife with allegations of vote tampering and fraud. The Afghanistan Papers — which consist of 2,000 pages of sensitive documents and interviews that the Washington Post obtained only after a three-year legal battle with the Pentagon — declared that the US-backed Afghan government had “self-organized itself into a kleptocracy.” Former Afghan president Hamid Karzai blamed the widespread corruption on hundreds of millions of dollars sent from the US with essentially no accountability.

And as CNN’s Fareed Zakaria recently stated, the government’s corrupt reputation disgusted the Afghan people, with support for US forces declining from 90% to just 55% between 2008 and 2018. And a relative lack of interest among American media outlets in covering US-backed forces losing ground over the last five years meant everyone was caught off guard by the Taliban’s swift conquest of Kabul and Afghanistan’s regional capitals.

The Taliban have retaken Afghanistan, defeating both the Afghan military and the world’s most well-funded military in the process. So what is their endgame at this point? Given their willingness to be interviewed by female reporters despite their rigid beliefs, their invitations to western media outlets to press conferences, and their repeated assurances to the world that they’ll be accommodating to women within the bounds of Sharia law, it appears the Taliban ultimately want legitimacy more than anything. Otherwise, why try to engage with the international community at all?

To be clear, legitimizing the Taliban wouldn’t mean endorsing their viewpoints or their treatment of women. It wouldn’t mean giving them more money or weapons. And it wouldn’t mean not criticizing their policy decisions that negatively impact the Afghan people. The US has legitimized some of the most oppressive governments in the world, like Saudi Arabia (the world’s fifth worst country for women), Egypt (run by a military junta since 2013), and North Korea.

Ultimately, recognition of the Taliban would mean Secretary of State Anthony Blinken could freely meet with Taliban leadership to broker deals that would allow for the peaceful exodus of refugees who wish to leave. Legitimizing the Taliban as the official government of Afghanistan would also mean the UN could convene talks between Taliban leaders and the leaders of other central Asian countries to foster more dialogue and cooperation (like fighting ISIS, for example).

Legitimizing the Taliban could also prove to be a major turning point in the opioid crisis. In 2018, Afghanistan’s poppy fields produced 82% of the world’s opium supply, which eventually finds its way into prescription pills and syringes across the United States. If the Taliban had proper support from the international community, it could revamp its agricultural economy to transition from opium poppies to more value-creating crops. At the end of the day, Afghan farmers just want to be able to provide for their families. If they can do that growing food and hemp as opposed to poppies, they will.

(An Afghan shepherd tending to his flock. Photo: Pixabay)

Additionally, a move to immediately form diplomatic relations with the Taliban now could help build leverage in the future. Should the Taliban go back on their word and renege on their promises to allow women to work and attend school, threats from US and the international community to implement sanctions and halt trade could make the Taliban rethink implementing more draconian positions on human rights if they felt an immediate economic impact.

Recognizing the legitimacy of a fundamentalist group that chants “death to America” is certainly a bitter pill to swallow. But the past 20 years of aggression hasn’t worked. More hawkish foreign policy toward Afghanistan at this point would only hurt civilians. The Biden administration should demonstrate true international leadership and immediately recognize the Taliban’s legitimacy.

On May 15, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) bombed a tower that contained the offices of numerous media outlets, including the Associated Press (AP). Israeli officials failed to provide any justification for the bombing other than that the building was also being used by Hamas. That’s the same vague reasoning provided every time the IDF bombs a civilian target, whether it’s a media office, a hospital, or a school.

“The world will know less about what is happening in Gaza because of what happened today,” AP president Gary Pruitt said in a public statement. 

Despite having its own office leveled in an unjustified attack by the Israeli military, the AP recently fired Emily Wilder — one of its own journalists — for her pro-Palestine activism in college when she attended Stanford University. According to Wilder, her firing was the result of a smear campaign by the Stanford College Republicans that was amplified by conservative pundits like Ben Shapiro, and that she was fired despite promises from higher-ups that she wouldn’t be fired for her past activism. Wilder’s sudden termination even prompted a lengthy Twitter thread from a former AP editor about the problematic nature of policing journalists’ social media accounts.

“It’s terrifying as a young woman who was hung out to dry when I needed support from my institution most,” Wilder wrote. “And it’s enraging as a Jewish person — who grew up in a Jewish community, attended Orthodox schooling and devoted my college years to studying Palestine and Israel — that I could be defamed as antisemitic and thrown under the bus in the process.”

In an email to staff, AP U.S. West News Director Peter Prengaman — a generic white guy with a generic white guy name in a generic red tie posing in front of a generic white background who could pass for a human version of the NPC meme — only said that Wilder was “no longer with the AP” and gave no further reason for her termination.

(The NPC meme)

(AP U.S. West News Director Peter Prengaman. Photo: Twitter)

It’s no surprise that Prengaman has risen so high in the AP’s ranks. Mainstream media outlets consistently favor NPCs and reward them with promotions and titles. Back when I worked in broadcasting, I constantly ran into journalists who were completely devoid of personality, humor, and morality. On one three-hour boat ride to Petit Bois Island (one of Mississippi’s barrier islands affected by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010), my attempt to make conversation with a New York-based Reuters photographer clad in a stereotypical khaki vest covered with pockets that carried different lenses and film rolls was met with gruff, monosyllabic responses. I’ll never forget an interaction I had with an NBC journalist who, just mere moments after several media witnesses and I all watched a man die at a death row execution at Mississippi’s Parchman Pentitentiary, asked me if the prison had ordered food delivery for the reporters stationed there.

A journalist driven to expose wrongdoing and hold evil accountable will have a much harder time finding a job with a prestigious outlet like the AP than a meek, wooden automaton who has never once shared a strong opinion in favor of or against anything beyond sports teams and ice cream flavors. This is why Peter Prengaman is the AP’s U.S. West News Director, and why Emily Wilder is unemployed.

Mainstream media editors’ concept of “objectivity” is almost always viewed in the context of a white-centered, heteronormative status quo. While the AP never pointed to any specific tweets as the reason for her supposedly violating the company’s social media policy, Wilder told The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple that even just having “Black Lives Matter” in her Twitter bio ruffled the feathers of her editors.

Prior to her firing, Wilder elaborated on how calls for “objectivity” are almost always used to uphold injustice, and that supposedly “objective” language is in fact biased in how it is weaponized to obfuscate the truth.

Columbia Journalism Review, which always does spot-on reporting of the media industry, aptly pointed out that Wilder’s firing shows the “tyrannical nature of newsrooms’ social media policies” and that “major outlets still bend all too easily to coordinated, confected right-wing outrage campaigns online.”

“[I]n the context of the media industry, it brings the conversation back round to the debate over objectivity that has taken on a fresh urgency since last year,” CJR’s Jon Allsop wrote this week. “Objectivity is another slippery term, but in this debate, critics see tradition as one of its central sins: privileged perspectives and practices have ossified, over time, into core tenets of journalism, such that deviating from them can be perceived as deviating from journalism itself.”

At its core, journalism is the practice of telling the truth. What does that mean? In a practical sense, journalists take massive chunks of raw information, data, and context, assemble a cohesive narrative, and digest all of that into a single, easily consumable product for the masses. Truth-telling requires both courage and nuance, and readers expect that by the end of your article they will not only get the plain truth, but have a richer knowledge about the topic at hand.

Concealing truth and couching it in “objectivity” — like deceptively utilizing the passive voice to shield certain parties from accountability or lazily bothsidesing stories in which one party is clearly at fault — hurts the cause of journalism, as it encourages readers to not believe their eyes and ears, and to doubt reality itself. I’d venture to say that journalists, more than anyone else, are entitled to share their opinions, as we consume far more raw information than the average citizen and thus have far more informed views on most topics in the news. The trend the AP is setting with Emily Wilder’s firing will, if left unchecked, have a chilling long-term effect on the practice of truth-telling itself.

The chances of the US Senate convicting Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial were always low. As I wrote in The Independent last month, several Republican senators voted to end the trial before House impeachment managers even got a chance to make their case, making the chances of 17 Republicans joining all 50 Democrats in a conviction vote that much more unlikely.

But one form of accountability that Trump — as well as the Republicans who supported the effort to overturn the election — may yet face could come from the 14th Amendment. Section 3 states that anyone who “engaged in insurrection or rebellion,” and those who gave “aid or comfort” to insurrectionists, will be ineligible to hold federal office. The amendment was ratified in 1868, just after the Civil War, and sought to prevent remnants of the Confederacy from attempting to seize power in the future.

“The language in Section 3 applies to anybody who has made an oath to the Constitution and then violates that oath,” Civil War historian Eric Foner told The Washington Post.

(A gallows pro-Trump insurrectionists erected outside of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Photo by Tyler Merbler/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY 2.0)

Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren (D-California) may have just made public the bulk of evidence that could be used to justify invoking the 14th Amendment against the 139 House Republicans who voted to decertify the results of the 2020 election (eight Senate Republicans also voted to overturn the election).

Over the weekend, Rep. Lofgren published a 1,939-page report documenting social media posts from those 139 Republicans egging on the big lie that led up to the January 6 insurrection, and in some cases, continuing to do so after the attack was underway. Lofgren stated that, even beyond expelling members of Congress, the report could be used for potential criminal charges:

"Statements which are readily available in the public arena may be part of any consideration of Congress' constitutional prerogatives and responsibilities," Lofgren writes. "Accordingly, I asked my staff to take a quick look at public social media posts of Members who voted to overturn the 2020 presidential election."

All information in the report was already available publicly, but this is the first comprehensive review of how lawmakers relentlessly promoted falsehoods about the election on Facebook and Twitter. It compiles posts between November 3, 2020 and January 31, 2021 from the 147 House Republicans who voted to overturn the election's outcome.

The report shows that some of former President Donald Trump's most vocal supporters in the House posted more than 100 attacks on the election's integrity in less than three months. 

Of course, the prospect of a Democratic House majority suddenly voting to rule more than half of the Republican Caucus ineligible to hold office would be a drastic move. However drastic, the move would still be legal, according to legal experts I consulted.

“The 14th Amendment does not say who makes the determination or how it is to be made,” Dr. Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC-Berkeley School of Law, wrote in an email. “But historical practice suggests the House could do this as[sic] to one of its members by majority vote.”

“The House (and Senate) could certainly try to invoke Section 3. It isn’t at all a frivolous argument,” University of Texas Law School constitutional law professor Dr. Sanford Levinson told me. “It would instantly be challenged in court.”

Levinson outlined three possibilities: The first is that courts would dismiss the invocation of the 14th Amendment as a “political question,” meaning that insurrectionist Republicans’ future would be up for voters to decide in the 2022 midterms. The second would be that the court accepts the validity of the disqualification, and the third would be to strike it down and declare it Congressional overreach.

“There are plausible arguments going both ways,” Dr. Levinson continued. “The main thing I’m confident of is that it would escalate the polarization considerably.”

The legal battle surrounding the potential of 147 Republicans being deemed by Congress to be ineligible to hold federal office would almost certainly be a bitter one. While Trump appointed more than 200 federal judges during his four years in office, it’s likely the question would eventually come before the Supreme Court, which still has a 6-3 conservative majority.

However, the question of interpreting the 14th Amendment could be a toss-up for originalist conservative justices like Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh (originalists believe in interpreting the Constitution according to how an amendment was understood at the time of its ratification).

In 1868, with the Civil War still fresh in everyone’s minds, it’s hard to argue those who helped ratify it didn’t intend for insurrectionists to be permanently banned from holding federal office. And given that the January 6 attack killed 5 and could have potentially been a much bloodier massacre if Officer Eugene Goodman’s attempt to distract terrorists from breaching the Senate didn’t work, it would be hard to interpret the events of that day as anything but an insurrection.

Whatever the end result may be, it’s urgent for Democrats to use all available means to hold insurrectionist Republicans accountable for stoking dangerous lies and fomenting the Capitol attack. If they wait too long, justice for January 6 may never occur.

In 2008, when Barack Obama and Joe Biden won a landslide victory against John McCain and Sarah Palin on a mantra of Hope and Change, I, like many others, urged everyone to “give them a chance” and let the new guys have some time to undo all the damage their predecessors caused.

When President Obama whiffed on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 by not going big enough on the stimulus bill to help people hit by the recession, I still held out hope that he was Our Guy, and that He Just Needs Time. When Obama refused to fight for the public option during the Affordable Care Act debates in early 2010, I was still willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, since governing is messy and sausage-making requires compromise. Even when Obama refused to hold the bankers accountable for the Great Recession, I was still holding out hope that perhaps the midterms would get him a larger majority to really pursue progressive policies.

But when Obama signed an extension of the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy, I was exhausted from trying to defend him. And when he sought a “Grand Bargain” with Republican leaders to impose austerity on the working class at the tail end of a devastating recession, I was disgusted.

As Obama showed us, presidents only really have two good years to govern, since presidents typically see their party’s Congressional representation shrink after their first midterm election. And given that Republicans have shown us they’re not above instigating a violent insurrection in order to get their way, it’s imperative that they remain out of power. To do so, Democrats need to work double-time to undo the damage of the Trump administration and give the American people a reason to support them in 2022.

Joe Biden is getting in the way of that.

(Immigrant rights activists demonstrating at the White House in 2018. Photo: Susan Melkisethian/Flickr/Creative Commons 2.0)

The Washington Post just reported that Biden is opening a new border camp for unaccompanied migrant children, despite Biden promising to reunite immigrant children with their families after the Trump administration separated them. A San Antonio-based immigration attorney who represents unaccompanied migrant children told the Post the opening of the facility was “a huge step backward.”

Biden’s new camp is being operated by the nonprofit BCFS Health and Human Services, which has at least 80 recorded health and safety violations over the past three years, according to the Texas Tribune.

President Biden has also come under scrutiny from immigrant rights activists for his recent wave of deportations. Even though Biden pledged a 100-day moratorium on deportations, his administration has nonetheless deported several hundred undocumented immigrants since he took office roughly a month ago.

According to Law & Crime, the Biden administration’s latest guidance to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) signifies “a return to form viz. the enforcement priorities of the Obama administration.” This is worrying, since President Obama deported approximately three million immigrants during his eight years in office. Obama’s harsh deportation policy prompted protests at Biden’s campaign events, including one at a South Carolina town hall in which Biden told an immigration activist upset about deportations, “you should vote for Trump.”

Biden’s immigration policy, when combined with other policy disappointments like gaslighting us on $2,000 checks (which are now $1,400 checks that will only go out to Americans who pass rigorous means testing), refusing to use his executive authority to cancel student debt and only committing to the painfully low bar of $10,000, and running away from the $15/hour minimum wage he previously said he would include in Covid relief legislation, mean Biden has painfully little to show for his first month in office outside of a few executive orders and cabinet appointments.

If Biden’s first two years are like Obama’s in that the only push for accountability comes from the left while liberals stay silent, we can be assured of repeating history. Except instead of a Tea Party takeover of Congress in the midterms, it’ll be a Q takeover. And instead of an unemployed game show host attempting ham-fisted fascism from the White House after neoliberalism’s failed run, it will be an actual fascist brutally imposing the worst kind of fascism.

America won’t survive another period of liberal silence. We can either have accountability now, or fascism later.

In 2011 and 2012, when I lived in Houston, Texas, almost everyone I met told me they were more proud to be from Texas than they were to be American. I thought that strange, given that patriotism has been drilled into us since we were all required to stand and put our hands over our hearts and recite the Pledge of Allegiance every day before school started. And of course, millennials will remember the Toby Keith-ing of America in the post-9/11 years when we were in high school, as dutiful patriotism morphed into rabid nationalism.

Of course, Texans love to remind you that they were an independent republic before they reluctantly joined the union (before seceding in 1861 and then being admitted once again in 1870). And, fittingly, Texas’ flag is basically the United States flag minus all the other states.

This willfully individualistic attitude defines Texas, and is perhaps the best explainer for why Texas has its own electrical grid independent of America’s other two power grids — one of which powers the Eastern states and the other powering the Western states (El Paso is not on the Texas grid, and neither are the more remote parts of the panhandle nor parts of East Texas).

Following the passage of the New Deal in the 1930s, the Lone Star State established the organization that is now known as the Electrical Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT). This was done to avoid federal regulation, which is required for all interstate electricity sales. To this day, ERCOT is not regulated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).

That’s how it all started. So how is it going?

The images from Texas are akin to the Venezuelan poverty porn American corporate media has been churning out for the better part of the last decade (all of which are appropriately devoid of context about how brutal US sanctions are the key driver of those conditions). And like Venezuela, Texas is overly dependent on fossil fuels, which helps explain its unprecedented power grid failure during this latest storm.

According to the Austin American-Statesman, two-thirds of the 46,000 offline megawatts of power generation as of Wednesday came from coal and gas-powered facilities, while just one-third of megawatts came from solar and wind-powered facilities. This flies in the face of the narrative concocted by Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) and Fox News, which have both falsely blamed renewable energy sources for the grid failure.

Texas’ leaders have had a decade of lead time to winterize its electrical grid, but chose not to. In February of 2011, extreme cold also led to widespread power outages, again due to power plants fueled by coal and natural gas going offline. Even Mexico’s government had to step in and transmit 280 megawatts of electricity to Texas. Yet despite the grid failure in 2011, ERCOT still doesn’t require Texas power plants to winterize even to this day.

In the meantime, the lack of federal regulation means ERCOT gets to jack up electricity rates as high as they want during the crisis. Reuters reported earlier this week that ERCOT was charging as much as $9,000 per megawatt hour, whereas during normal weather prices are typically around $50 per megawatt hour. Texans are already warning their friends and neighbors to cancel their autopay utility arrangements to avoid being gouged.

In the absence of federal regulation, one would expect Texas politicians to be speaking up on behalf of their constituents. Instead, they’re giving struggling Texans a giant middle finger and telling them that if they die during the storm they probably had it coming.

“Only the strong will survive and the weak will parish[sic],” said now former Colorado City, Texas mayor Tim Boyd in a Facebook post. “Bottom line quit crying and looking for a handout! Get off your ass and take care of your own family!”

"Texans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business,” former Texas Governor Rick Perry recently said, most likely from a warm room with electricity.

Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), for his part, booked a vacation to Cancun, Mexico. Cruz’s departure to the sandy beaches and warm temperatures of Cancun comes just days after a Houston woman and her eight-year-old daughter died of carbon monoxide poisoning from trying to stay warm in their car (as of this writing, records suggest Cruz booked a return trip back to Houston after news of his vacation went viral).

Rick Perry may very well be right: Texans — especially the kind who voted for Tim Boyd to be their mayor and for Ted Cruz to be their senator — may be willing to put up with a few days of brutal cold in order to keep their electrical grid independent of federal regulation. But when people in America’s fourth-largest city are lining up at a public park to fill water bottles from a spigot because they don’t have running water at home, maybe it’s time for rugged individualism to take the L and accept that people need other people.

(Image by @GoodPoliticGuy on Twitter)

My most recent post talked about how Democrats were dropping the ball by breaking a campaign promise — $2,000 checks for everyone, immediately — right off the bat, despite the fact that they won a trifecta based on this specific promise. It’s not even that “$2,000 checks” became “technically $2,000 if you count the $600 ‘down payment’ from The Orange Boogeyman,” it’s the fact that roughly 40 million people who got checks last time may be excluded this time around due to Democrats’ desire to provide “targeted” (means-tested) assistance.

Justice Democrats political director Amira Hassan pointed out that if Democrats implement stricter means testing for this new round of stimulus checks, the “down payment” argument is no longer valid.

David Sirota and Andrew Perez at The Daily Poster break it down better than I can:

The Washington Post, HuffPost and Bloomberg are reporting that Democrats may limit full $1,400 survival checks to individuals earning less than $50,000 and couples earning less than $100,000. A bipartisan group of senators is also now pushing an amendment to “ensure upper-income taxpayers are not eligible” for checks. At least one Democratic senator, Ron Wyden of Oregon, has said he opposes the new proposed income limits.

Biden’s original proposal would send full checks to individuals earning up to $75,000 and married couples earning up to $150,000 — the same income limits Congress has used for previous rounds of checks.

The proposed changes, which are being discussed in the name of “targeting” payments to those who need it, could affect checks for millions of people who have previously received COVID economic impact payments. 

Under the new terms being debated, about four in ten Americans could be excluded or receive partial checks, according to census data. Roughly 36 percent of U.S. households earn more than $100,000 — and some of the 29 percent of American households earning between $50,000 and $100,000 are single households. 

I’m just going to go on record and say that I really don’t give a shit if Jeff Bezos gets a $2,000 check from the government if it means we all get ours too.

Send Bezos a check. Send one to Bill Gates. Send one to Warren Buffett, and one to Zuck, and to Jamie Dimon, and some NFL team owners and hedge fund jagoffs. What’s cool about rich people getting government checks who don’t need them is that you can claw them back with a simple little thing called “taxes.”

Rich people getting checks isn’t as important as the people drowning in rent and bills and facing eviction getting help right away. While the Biden administration’s cabinet of millionaires and the Democratic-controlled Congress full of millionaires is figuring out how to further means-test life-saving aid, the people they promised $2,000 checks to literally month ago are drowning in poverty.

Aside from the fact that Democrats control both houses of Congress and the White House and yet are still determined to decrease the amount of help for people during record unemployment in the middle of a pandemic, Republicans will almost certainly seize on the fact that Democrats violated their chief campaign promise when the 2022 midterms roll around.

In both 2016 and 2020, Democrats refused to run on policy, and instead simply ran on insisting that they weren’t The Orange Boogeyman. This didn’t work in 2016, and only worked in 2020 because we had just lived through four years with The Orange Boogeyman. It looks as if, once again, Democrats are basing their 2022 midterm strategy on the fact that The Other Guys Are Worse:

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee on Tuesday began a $500,000 advertising campaign on television and online tying eight House Republicans, including Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader, to Ms. Greene and QAnon, an effort to force them to make a public affirmation about Ms. Greene.

“Congressman Don Bacon,” an ominous-sounding voice intones in the ad targeting the Nebraska Republican, “he stood with Q, not you.”

As of February 5, 2021, Democrats have 641 days to make their case to voters why they should keep their majorities. While President Biden indicated he would pursue a second, more ambitious Covid relief bill, there’s no guarantee he would follow through — especially given that Democrats already backtracked on $2,000 checks. This makes it all the more vital for House Democrats to insist on $2,000 checks once the Senate stimulus bill reaches the House. Twitter user @YesYoureRacist grimly predicted that Democrats’ whiffing on stimulus checks would cost them.

I would personally like to prevent the party of Marjorie Taylor Greene from expanding its ranks in Congress. The best way to prevent that from happening is to just send the damn checks already.

The already insufficient $1.9 trillion proposal from the Biden administration to address Americans’ immediate material needs due to the Covid-19 pandemic looks like it may be watered down in President Biden’s efforts to reach a bipartisan agreement. 10 Republican senators are proposing an alternative $600 billion plan, indicating they would be willing to help Democrats achieve the 60-vote cloture threshold if he’s willing to go smaller in his pursuit of a bipartisan stimulus bill.

I’ll get to why this is a terrible idea. But the best way might be to just show you something that just happened in Littleton, Colorado.

A few days ago, a carjacker targeted a 63-year-old woman in her minivan while she was in a car wash. Video shows the attacker grabbing her, biting her, and throwing her out before driving away. The carjacker is still at large as of this writing.

I genuinely hope they catch this scumbag and that the lady he attacked is okay. But can we just reflect for a moment how desperate someone has to be to carjack a 2011 Toyota Sienna? While it’s in a carwash? While attacking a driver who is almost Medicare age? Would this have happened if the carjacker had been getting $2,000 monthly checks since March?

(A masked woman shopping in a grocery store. Licensed image: Shutterstock)

Like I wrote in December, the millions of people who are months behind on rent and bills and facing eviction and trying their best to exist on scant unemployment benefits are growing increasingly desperate. Even though shoplifting is on the rise, the most commonly stolen items are basic grocery staples like bread, pasta, baby formula, and diapers. These aren’t items that can be flipped on the street, so it seems safe to say these shoplifters would buy these items instead if they could count on guaranteed monthly $2,000 checks.

Democrats know the country is struggling. They won a trifecta majority for the first time in nearly a decade by promising Americans $2,000 stimulus checks. Before she was Vice President, Kamala Harris co-sponsored a bill with Ed Markey and Bernie Sanders that would have sent $2,000 monthly checks to everyone until the pandemic was over.

This idea is hugely popular — especially in the swing state of Georgia. A recent Atlanta Journal-Constitution/University of Georgia poll found that $2,000 checks had a +56 favorability rating, which is way higher than the two Democratic senators and the Democratic president Georgia just elected.

But now, the Democratic Party — including even Bernie Sanders — is gaslighting us into making us think the promise this whole time was a one-time, $1,400 check which would add up to $2,000 after including the $600 from December (@Demswatchdog made a two-minute montage of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Jon Ossoff, and Raphael Warnock all promising $2,000 checks in the lead-up to the Georgia runoffs. I could only stomach 30 seconds of it).

It’s truly mind-boggling to think that Democrats defeated an incumbent Republican president, maintained their House majority, and won a Senate majority all on the promise of giving people free money, and then still managed to fuck that up. This is apparently all in an effort to be “bipartisan” with the same people who rammed through Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s replacement, with a sneer and a hearty “elections have consequences,” just a few months ago.

The insistence on bipartisanship seems to be prodded by sniveling beltway media outlets like Politico. Reporters who are comfortable and privileged enough to treat politics like team sports apparently think Biden should be taken to task for not immediately giving into the demands of the opposition party — whose leaders just instigated an deadly terrorist attack on the Capitol — despite overwhelmingly defeating them in the most recent election.

As of this writing, Politico has yet to ask people who are 10 months behind on rent if they think it’s important for the next Covid relief bill to have bipartisan support.

Thankfully, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer seems ready to abandon bipartisanship if it means watering down Covid relief, saying “the dangers of undershooting our response are far greater than the dangers of overshooting it.”

“We should have learned the lesson, from 2008 and 2009, when Congress was too timid and constrained in its response to the global financial crisis and it took years — years — for the economy to get out of recession,” Schumer said.

Even Governor Jim Justice (R-West Virginia), whose state voted for Donald Trump over Joe Biden by a 39-point margin, made it clear the focus should be on getting as much money as possible to needy people right away.

“We’ve got people who are really hurting, I mean that’s just all there is to it,” Justice told CNN’s Poppy Harlow. “My executive assistant came in the other day and said that not far from my home, there was an elderly man who froze to death in his house and everything. Probably couldn’t afford to pay the power bill.”

To his credit, President Biden has indicated his first Covid relief bill would be bipartisan, and that he’d be in favor of a subsequent bill that would be much more robust and be passed with a simple 51-vote majority in the Senate under the reconciliation process. But that requires a) even more time that people like the elderly man in West Virginia don’t have and b) assuming Democrats won’t just lie and gaslight us again like they’re doing with the $1,400 nonsense.

Given the overwhelming level of popular support for $2,000 checks, the fact that Fed chair Jerome Powell has said there’s “no limit” to how big of a stimulus Congress should pursue, and that many other countries have already been providing their citizens with regular monthly payments during the pandemic, there’s no reason we shouldn’t get $2,000 a month, every month, until the pandemic is over, retroactive to March when we all lost our jobs. If we’re counting the $1200 and $600 checks we already got, then Democrats owe us $18,200 now, and $2,000 every month until we’re all vaccinated.

Billion-dollar hedge funds are filing for bankruptcy because of Reddit shitposters, and wealth is being redistributed from the ownership class to the working class in real-time. It’s way more effective than anything Occupy Wall Street ever did, and I say this as someone who was active in the Occupy movement for months, camped out in public parks, and got arrested at multiple Occupy actions.

For those unclear about what the hell is happening on Wall Street, here’s the gist of it:

A big part of the hedge fund business model is aggressively “shorting” stocks. This is basically making a bet that a struggling business’ stock price will plummet and never go above a certain amount. This destroys the lives of ordinary working people, kills jobs, and makes rich people a lot of money. It’s an inherently sick, predatory, vulture-like practice. Remember that episode of The Sopranos where Tony “busts out” the local sporting goods store because the owner was in debt to him? It’s like that.

Earlier this month, the /r/WallStreetBets subreddit found out that a hedge fund called Melvin Capital was shorting the stock for Gamestop. This was probably considered a safe short given how the Covid pandemic has devastated the retail sector. Reddit decided they were going to do the opposite — seemingly overnight, thousands of retail investors collectively bought Gamestop shares and speculated the price up to more than $325 per share, where it is today.

For reference, Gamestop was trading at $17 per share the day of the Georgia runoffs. That’s an increase of 1,911% over just three weeks. That’s unheard of in the stock market.

Naturally, a lot of Redditors made a lot of money from buying Gamestop low and selling high. And unlike the hedge funds, they’re using their gains for the greater good.

“When this is over and the battle is won - let’s do something the fat cats on Wall Street would never do. Let’s donate some of our earnings to a deserving charity,” one Redditor wrote. “Post some great charities, non-profits, funds, etc. in the comments! Let’s give to those in need together.”

“I can now write my mom a check and put my sister through lymes treatment,” another wrote, posting a screenshot showing he made more than $64,000 from Gamestop. “This has been a rough year, I’m so thankful for every single one of you.”

Naturally, wealthy investors and their lickspittle are furious that the rabble has caught onto their game and is now making money on the Wall Street casino that they thought they had to themselves. The Biden administration is reportedly “monitoring the situation.” Business Insider columnist Josh Barro wants us to please think of the publicly traded megacorporations. A MarketWatch op-ed is urging us to “stop laughing about Gamestop’s stock mania.”

“You may think it’s funny to value GameStop like it’s 2007 again and hurt some hedge funds in the process, but you might not think the next target is funny, nor the next, nor the next,” MarketWatch San Francisco bureau chief Jeremy C. Owens wrote, without mentioning that Wall Street has pilfered ordinary people out of their savings with similar speculation for decades.

While this is all hilarious, what’s not very funny at all is that hedge funds are now expecting the federal government to bail them out.

It’s hard to comprehend the amount of balls required to insist on a bailout for wealthy investors while millions of families facing eviction during a lethal pandemic are still waiting for theirs. Healthcare workers who are overwhelmed by the nearly 80,000 Covid deaths this month alone are still in need of personal protective equipment. Elderly and immunocompromised people in long-term care facilities still need help getting vaccines. Workers who lost their jobs amid the pandemic through no fault of their own are still waiting on the $2,000 checks Biden and the Democrats promised would go out “immediately.”

Here’s a better idea: Maybe hedge fund investors who make millions of dollars recklessly speculating could get a real job? Many of the nearly 8,000 journalists whose publications laid them off in the great media apocalypse of 2019 were told to “learn to code.” Home health aides are the most in-demand job in America right now, and investors can earn a cool $11.98 an hour doing real, actual work!

Figure it out, investors. But save us the crocodile tears.

After the swearing in of Senators Jon Ossoff (D-Georgia) and Raphael Warnock (D-Georgia), President Joe Biden now has Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress for the first time in a decade, and a mandate from the people to respond appropriately to both a once-in-a-century pandemic and the economic fallout it created. But first I want to tell you about what happened the last time Democrats didn’t respond appropriately to a crisis.

The 2009 recession and the 2010 midterms: A cautionary tale

In 2009, at the peak of the Great Recession, NPR’s Steve Inskeep spoke at my college graduation (we share the same alma mater). He candidly remarked that a lot of us would move back in with our parents despite just earning our degrees, given the severity of the recession. One line from that speech still resonates with me:

“The bad news is that your parents can’t sell their house. The good news is you can move back into your old room.”

For a lot of us, the Great Recession of the late aughts has already been memory-holed given how the Covid recession has dwarfed it. By April of 2020, for instance, all the job gains in the decade since the recession officially ended had been wiped out. But the effects of the recession that affected college grads like me were felt long after economists deemed it to be over.

As Michael Hobbes wrote in Huffpost, the generation that graduated college during the recession took on an average of 300% more student debt than our parents. One in five of us lives in poverty, and most of us won’t be able to retire until we’re at least 75. The hard part about graduating during a recession is that by the time the economy has rebounded, everyone’s forgotten about you (emphasis mine):

“A lot of workers were just 18 at the wrong time,” says William Spriggs, an economics professor at Howard University and an assistant secretary for policy at the Department of Labor in the Obama administration. “Employers didn’t say, ‘Oops, we missed a generation. In 2008 we weren’t hiring graduates, let’s hire all the people we passed over.’ No, they hired the class of 2012.”

You can even see this in the statistics, a divot from 2008 to 2012 where millions of jobs and billions in earnings should be. In 2007, more than 50 percent of college graduates had a job offer lined up. For the class of 2009, fewer than 20 percent of them did. According to a 2010 study, every 1 percent uptick in the unemployment rate the year you graduate college means a 6 to 8 percent drop in your starting salary—a disadvantage that can linger for decades. The same study found that workers who graduated during the 1981 recession were still making less than their counterparts who graduated 10 years later. “Every recession,” Spriggs says, “creates these cohorts that never recover.”

(From left: First Lady Michelle Obama, President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and Second Lady Jill Biden at the 2009 inauguration. Photo: Carol M. Highsmith/loc.gov)

When Barack Obama took office, he also had Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, as well as a mandate to deal with the fallout of the financial meltdown that had bled the economy of millions of jobs.

However, Obama squandered his early political capital with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which was a wholly inadequate response. As Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman wrote just prior to Obama’s inauguration, Obama’s $775 billion plan — about 40% of which was a one-time tax cut rather than public infrastructure spending — was not enough to counteract unemployment rates that hovered near the double digits.

“[T]he Obama plan is unlikely to close more than half of the looming output gap, and could easily end up doing less than a third of the job,” Krugman wrote. “Why isn’t Mr. Obama trying to do more?”

As Krugman predicted, the stimulus hadn’t focused enough on job creation, and even though a second stimulus was necessary, Obama had already spent up his stimulus-related political capital and had to move on to other items on his agenda.

Meanwhile, Republicans had ammunition to use in the midterms — Democrats were recklessly spending up our money and not getting results. They rode this disingenuous narrative to the 2010 midterms, which netted them a majority in the House and marked the end of President Obama’s ability to get any significant legislation passed for the reminder of his eight years in office. Even by 2016, the Wall Street Journal reported that 93% of US counties still hadn’t recovered from the Great Recession.

Typically, the incumbent president’s party takes a big hit in the following midterm election. And if Mitch McConnell becomes Senate Majority Leader again after 2022, Biden likely won’t even get to confirm another judge, let alone sign any bills into law. But Biden and the Democrats could stave off losses in 2022 by simply responding appropriately to the scale of Covid and the pandemic recession.

Going big is both the necessary and politically expedient thing to do

(Bricks of $100 bills at the US Bureau of Engraving and Printing packed for shipment to the Federal Reserve. Photo: Moneyfactory.gov)

Like I wrote in December, there are several things Democrats can do that will simultaneously result in significant improvement to the lives of struggling workers, and also earn major brownie points with voters. One of those is as simple as paying people to stay home and paying businesses to stay closed until everyone is vaccinated.

An April 2020 poll from Data for Progress (rated a respectable B- by FiveThirtyEight) found that 83% of self-identified Democrats — and remarkably 84% of self-identified Republicans — supported universal basic income (UBI) by way of paying businesses to keep employees on the payroll despite being closed. This could be not just a one-time $2,000 check, but monthly, recurring $2,000 checks.

Before she was Vice President, Kamala Harris cosponsored a bill with Senators Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) to give everyone $2,000 a month until the end of the pandemic. Markey reiterated his desire to make this happen last week.

Republicans will inevitably raise the “but where will we find the money” question, which, if Democrats have a spine, will ignore. Article 1, Section 8 of the US Constitution gives Congress the sole, exclusive authority “to coin money,” meaning the US government is the sole issuer of currency. All Congress has to do to is pass a bill authorizing the spending.

The money doesn’t come from our tax dollars. As Stephanie Kelton — the former chief economist for Democrats on the Senate Budget Committee — explains in her book The Deficit Myth, it’s simply created out of thin air after the US Treasury instructs its bank — the Federal Reserve — to credit the accounts of the recipients of the spending. In the case of UBI, it would be our personal banks, who would then notify us (like they have twice already) that they put money in our accounts.

In terms of finding the votes to pass that bill, Democrats have a slim majority in the House of Representatives, and a paper-thin 50-50 majority in the Senate which would require Vice President Harris to break. Republicans can typically deny unanimous consent to bring a bill to the Senate floor for a vote, which then requires an impenetrable 60-vote threshold to meet (also known as cloture).

However, as Sen. Sanders — the new chairman of the powerful Budget Committee — recently argued in an op-ed for CNN, Democrats can bypass this hurdle on strictly budgetary matters through a process known as reconciliation. This only requires 51 votes. And centrist Senator Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) has already indicated he won’t stand in the way of President Biden’s agenda.

This, combined with Fed chair Jerome Powell’s insistence that there’s “no limit” to how much stimulus Congress should pursue to respond to Covid, and the fact that interest rates will be frozen at zero until at least 2023, means that Democrats have a green light to go big on recovery. Here’s to hoping they don’t make the same mistakes as they did in 2009.

As President Trump himself admitted, DeJoy’s deliberate sabotage of the mail was a futile attempt to hold up mail-in ballots that ended up making the difference for Joe Biden. But a side effect of that failed endeavor was that our Christmas presents arrived a month late, even after paying extra for priority shipping.

You get the picture.

The main idea of government is that we need it to have a functioning society. Government is supposed to take care of the everyday menial things we all take for granted, like food safety inspection and vaccine distribution and air traffic control and mail delivery. When any of those get fucked up — as we learned during the 2018-2019 government shutdown — it negatively affects millions of people. It isn’t sexy by any means, but fixing the US Post Office should be near the top of President-elect Biden’s first 100-day agenda, especially now that he has a Democratic Senate majority.

The arduous task of replacing Louis DeJoy

(Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. Photo: Screenshot, Fox 8 Greensboro/Fair Use)

The Republican-controlled US Postal Service Board of Governors appointed DeJoy in May of 2020, and the logistics CEO immediately went to work dismantling sorting machines that postal workers depend on to get mail to people on time. He also forbade postal workers from working overtime to deliver mail. This led to disastrous consequences, like people waiting for weeks to get medication, paychecks, and bills paid.

Due to the structure of the USPS, Biden can’t simply appoint a new Postmaster General — he has to place five new appointees on the USPS Board of Governors. America appears to have very nearly dodged a bullet in that Trump’s lame-duck appointment of Republican Roy A. Bernardi to the USPS Board of Governors last month has not yet been confirmed by the full Senate. Had he been confirmed, Bernardi would have been the fifth Republican on the nine-member board, establishing a 5-1 conservative majority and all but assuring DeJoy would be in his role through at least October of 2022, the soonest one of Trump’s appointees would end their term (no party can have more than five seats at a time).

As of this writing, we still have to endure one more week of the Trump administration. The Senate has adjourned until January 19, but may convene sooner given that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) is trying to force the Senate back into session to conduct President Trump’s impending and unprecedented second impeachment trial.

In the meantime, Senators-elect Jon Ossoff (D-Georgia) and Raphael Warnock (D-Georgia) are waiting to be sworn in as the 49th and 50th additions to the Senate Democratic Caucus, which would allow Democrats a paper-thin majority with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris as the tiebreaker.

Georgia has until January 22 to certify the results of the January 5 runoff elections, so it’s possible that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) will have a few days, even with Joe Biden as president, to dictate what business the Senate takes up. Given McConnell’s penchant for ramming through Trump’s judicial appointments at breakneck speed — even during the lame duck period — it’s likely McConnell could force a confirmation vote on Bernardi’s appointment to the USPS Board of Governors before Ossoff and Warnock are sworn in.

However, if Ossoff and Warnock are sworn in before Bernardi’s confirmation vote, Bernardi’s appointment is likely kaput. This would allow Biden to appoint five USPS Governors of his own choosing, given that there are four other vacancies aside from the slot Bernardi was appointed to fill. The new 5-member Democratic majority could appoint a new Postmaster General to replace DeJoy, and that person could replace the sorting machines, reinstitute overtime for postal workers, and get the mail back up and running.

Strengthening the USPS for the long term

(Former President George W. Bush. Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

In December of 2006 — the lame duck period after the Republicans lost their majorities in both the House and the Senate — President George W. Bush signed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act into law. That legislation requires the US Postal Service to pre-pay all of its employees healthcare benefits for future retirees 75 years in advance. This is not required of any other federal agency. Between 2007 and 2016, $54.8 billion of financial losses the USPS sustained were directly due to that law.

The Democratic-controlled House passed a bill to undo this in 2020, though the Republican-controlled Senate refused to take it up. However, with Democrats once again in control of the Senate and the White House, they could undo this law and get the USPS back on its feet.

None of this will happen on its own, however. Whether or not Biden’s appointees to the USPS Board of Governors are confirmed, and whether or not the 2006 law that gutted the post office gets repealed, are up to how often we call our senators to demand it.

Even Parler — conservatives’ favorite new social media hangout where they openly plotted sedition for months — has been dropped by the Google Play Store. Apple’s App Store has threatened to ban it if the site doesn’t institute a moderation policy. Freelance writer Ryan Broderick pointed out that the massive de-platforming of right-wing voices wouldn’t have happened if those voices weren’t openly plotting violent acts of sedition.

To underscore Broderick’s point, Twitter user @TiffanyNeel3 took screenshots of several posts from Parler user @JuarezTX, who called for a U-Haul truck to be rigged with explosives and detonated outside of former President Barack Obama’s home. Other posts showed him wanting to “teach the commie marxist libs democrats a lesson” and fantasizing about genocide. Several of his posts got multiple upvotes from other Parler users (@JuarezTX is a verified Parler user, meaning the platform has a copy of his government identification).

“butcher there[sic] children, grandkids, great grandkids, grandmas, aunts, nieces, wives last. Skin them all. Slowly, in front of the commie men. Maybe it starts in one city, then another and another,” @JuarezTX wrote. “The sweet music of commie women shrieking in agony and pain, only drowned out by gargling on their own blood.”

“[W]hat needs to happen is leftist commie democrat traitor politicians kids and grandkids need to be burned alive and thrown into wood chippers in front of them. When democrats see Americans murdering their wives kids parents grandparents etc only then will they realize this is no longer a game.”

The mass purging of extremist social media accounts like these isn’t “censorship” or a violation of free speech — it’s simply people suffering the consequences of not abiding by a business’ terms of service. It’s no different than a convenience store with a “NO SHIRT NO SHOES NO SERVICE” sign ejecting a shirtless customer.

But de-platforming people with dangerous and violent ideologies isn’t just something to high-five each other over — it’s critically important for a functioning democracy.

(Adolf Hitler, 4th from right, with other Nazi defendants in the Beer Hall Putsch trial of 1924. Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

After the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, in which Adolf Hitler organized a mob of several thousand fascists to converge on Munich’s city hall, several Nazis died and multiple Nazis, including Hitler, were arrested and tried on charges of treason. Hitler himself was sentenced to five years in prison, though he only served nine months. And the sentence only came after Hitler was given a massive platform over the course of his three-week trial in 1924 to espouse his hateful and bigoted beliefs.

Following his failed coup attempt, Hitler realized that the best way to seize power was by legal means, rather than by force. He dictated his book Mein Kampf while in prison, which turned his dangerous beliefs into an easily consumable media product that helped his Nazi Party organize to win more seats in Weimar Germany’s parliament. By 1933, Nazis held a plurality of seats in parliament, but fell short of a majority. Conservative German politicians convinced President Paul Von Hindenburg to appoint Hitler chancellor. The next year, Hitler appointed himself Führer. And the rest is history.

This week, the Trump supporters who laid siege to the US Capitol failed in their effort to overturn a lawful election. But they’re still out there. And while some have been arrested and charged, many others with potentially lethal intentions — including the person who left multiple pipe bombs outside of the Democratic and Republican National Committee buildings — have not.

The most important thing we can do right now is to identify those who took part in last week’s act of sedition at the US Capitol, get them banned from social media, and force the violent, hateful bigots who have been emboldened by President Trump over the last four years to go back into their caves. Then we have to begin the hard work of de-programming our radicalized friends, neighbors, and relatives who have been consuming their poisonous bile. Only then can we have any hope of having a functional government and society.

At some point, she ended up at a security checkpoint near the White House. When attempting to make a u-turn to get back onto the street, Secret Service put a barrier in front of her. Carey panicked and tried to drive away. Secret Service and US Capitol Police killed her as she tried to escape, firing 26 bullets while Carey’s baby was still in the car.

But as January 6, 2021 showed, the problem isn’t that US Capitol police don’t know how to show restraint — it’s that they selectively apply restraint to like-minded fellow travelers. It’s hard to view the failure to secure the capitol as anything but intentional, given that the US Capitol is under the jurisdiction of multiple municipal, state, and federal law enforcement agencies including the Capitol Police as well as DC Metropolitan Police, US Park Police, the US Marshals, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Protective Service, the Secret Service, the FBI Police, US Military Police, US Customs and Border Protection, the DC National Guard, and many others.

I’ve done my best to show a video timeline of events as they occurred. All of these videos show not only unprecedented restraint from police, but in some cases, outright cooperation.

(A US Capitol Police officer taking a selfie with a Trump supporter who breached the doors of the US Capitol while lawmakers were inside. Photo is screenshot from livestream of breach.)

The Siege of the US Capitol

On January 6, thousands of President Trump’s supporters converged for a fascist rally on Capitol Hill, the day a joint session of Congress was set to conduct its Constitutional certification of Electoral College results. Trump encouraged his diehards to march to the capitol building and to show “strength.” Trump’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani, encouraged Trump supporters to engage in “trial by combat.” Trump’s oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., said “we’re coming for you” in reference to lawmakers.

The word “fascist” is necessary to describe the rally, because in addition to the fascistic threats to subvert an election, newly minted Congresswoman Mary Miller (R-Illinois) was heard saying “Hitler was right” (in reference to a quote where he said youth are the future, because apparently he’s the only person who ever said that making it necessary to quote him).

Some of the rally attendees wore merchandise made for the specific day, including a man in a sweatshirt that read “MAGA — CIVIL WAR — JANUARY 6, 2021.” At some point during the day, pipe bombs were found outside the US Capitol as well as outside the headquarters of both the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee. At least two of those bombs were meant to explode and cause harm, according to Fox News producer Jake Gibson (no relation).

The moment the assault on the Capitol began, a swarm of Trump supporters were met by just five (5) US Capitol Police officers behind a barricade, who were easily overwhelmed. At around the one-minute mark of this video, Trump supporters start assaulting officers. Eventually the officers are seen running away. Not one shot was fired.

In this video embedded below, a slew of Trump supporters are pushing on another layer of barricades intended to separate the crowd from the capitol building. Police not only didn’t fire a shot, they simply moved the barricades aside and let the crowd through.

In this video, the crowd, which has reached the capitol steps, continues to push on barricades until one rioter gets through and beckons others to join him. The crowd pushes on the barricades and the police retreat once more, ceding the remaining ground to the army of Trump supporters. Not one shot was fired.

In this video, Trump supporters who have breached the final barricades to reach the Capitol’s exterior start breaking a window with a riot shield and climbing inside. Despite the seat of the legislative branch of the federal government being literally under siege, not one shot was fired.

At the front door of the US Capitol, Trump supporters breached the entrance after punching officers in their way, and stealing one of their riot shields. Officers once again retreated further into the building. Again, not one shot was fired.

The assaulting of officers continued as the coup supporters moved further into the capitol building. This video shows a lone US Capitol Police officer frantically pick up the baton he dropped and swing it in vain at the Trump supporters who were menacing him. He retreated up the stairs to join a small handful of other officers attempting to hold back the mob. At this point, there were still no shots fired.

The Shooting of Ashli Babbitt

Capitol Police didn’t use their firearms until Trump supporters reached the door of the House chamber. Ashli Babbitt, who flew from San Diego to Washington, DC specifically to participate in the January 6 coup attempt, got shot in the neck as she was trying to reach the House floor while lawmakers were still present.

"As protesters were forcing their way toward the House Chamber where Members of Congress were sheltering in place, a sworn USCP employee discharged their service weapon, striking an adult female," the US Capitol police wrote in a public statement.

Babbitt was a rabid supporter of President Trump, and often recorded videos of herself ranting hysterically about California politicians and undocumented immigrants. She was also a believer in the QAnon conspiracy theory, which has inspired numerous acts of terrorism and racist violence across the country. In the last the last tweet she wrote before her death, Babbitt said “nothing will stop us….they can try and try and try but the storm is here and it is descending upon DC in less than 24 hours….dark to light!” (dark to light is a QAnon slogan)

Radio host Garrison Davis dug into Babbitt’s tweets and found that she had completely bought into QAnon by April of 2020. While news outlets mentioned that Babbitt was an Air Force veteran, Babbitt also appears to have been a law enforcement officer. In one particular exchange about female cops, Babbitt doesn’t deny that she was a police officer.

It isn’t a stretch to say that Ashli Babbitt willingly traveled across the country to sacrifice her life for the cause of sedition — a cause she fervently believed was a just one given the information she was consuming. Babbitt’s radicalization and subsequent death is a tragic example of why combating online disinformation campaigns like QAnon is so critical.

White supremacists, neo-Nazis, and other terrorists given a pass by cops

The fact that Babbitt was the only terrorist who got shot during the siege of the US Capitol is remarkable, especially considering the actions of others who stormed the capitol with her. Another man named Richard “Bigo” Barnett came to DC from Arkansas fully expecting to die.

“I came into this world kicking and screaming, covered in someone else’s blood,” Barnett wrote in a post on his Facebook account in which he also proudly identified as a white nationalist. “I’m not afraid to go out the same way.”

Barnett somehow made his way to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office, put his feet up on her desk, posed for a photo, and stole a piece of mail from her desk as a souvenir before making it back outside and posing for another photo and even doing an interview with the New York Times. One Twitter sleuth found a man with the same name and from the same city receiving a PPP loan for over $9,000.

Another viral photo showed a terrorist clad in head-to-toe tactical gear, wearing a vest and a sidearm and holding a handful of flex cuffs. It’s unknown whether or not the man was ever arrested.

Elsewhere in the building, US Capitol Police were seen taking photographs with Trump supporters who had since pushed their way through barricades, breached the doors of the capitol, and assaulted officers.

$2.8 trillion in counterterrorism funding for what?

By 11 PM, DC police only arrested 52 insurrectionists according to Politico reporter Heather Caygle. To compare, Wisconsin Capitol Police arrested more than 120 people (myself included) over just a few days in the summer of 2013 for the crime of singing protest songs in the capitol rotunda. All of us went peacefully, and none of us tried to storm legislative chambers.

But you don’t even need to go back that far to find examples of excessive policing of protesters. In the summer of 2020, the numerous police forces with jurisdiction over DC met Black Lives Matter with an excessive display of force that included riot cops, armored vehicles, and even a military helicopter. Forbes reported that between May 30 and June 2, police arrested 427 protesters in DC.

As many observed on Twitter, the restraint shown to a mob that attacked one of our three branches of government is a strange example of how skilled police are in not using lethal force. It makes the lethal response of Miriam Carey for making a u-turn that much more egregious.

Now is the time to ask the question of, if not to stop something as awful as a terrorist attack on the US Capitol, why have a sprawling, militarized police state? The US government has spent $2.8 trillion on counterterrorism funding since 9/11, yet the Capitol was overtaken by Trump supporters in just a few hours. Local police have received $7.4 billion in military equipment through the 1033 program since the 1990s. But why have all of that if it’s only going to be deployed on nonviolent protests like Black Lives Matter — an estimated 93% of which have been peaceful?

It’s good the media is outraged at the restraint police showed the mob of Trump supporters who attacked the Capitol. Sustaining that outrage can and should sustain the conversation about defunding police, and forcing them to figure out how to do their jobs without shooting and killing and maiming.

We’ve been hearing since November that partisan control of the US Senate depends on the January 5 Senate runoffs in Georgia and in a best-case scenario, Democrats would only have 50 Senators and would need to unite their entire caucus and get a tiebreaker vote from the Vice President to pass any bills.

But this is wrong. Partisan control of the Senate could still be in Democrats’ favor even if Democrats lost both Senate seats in Georgia, since we have a Democratic president and plenty of appointments to make.

According to Axios, President-elect Joe Biden still has five significant appointments to make — three cabinet positions (Attorney General, Secretary of Commerce, Secretary of Labor) and two cabinet-level positions (CIA Director and Small Business Association administrator). And if Democrats lost both races in Georgia, they would need three more Senators in order to have a 51-seat majority.

Ballotpedia shows that 37 states allow for governors to appoint senators in the event of a vacancy, and that replacement can serve out the remainder of their predecessor’s term before having to run for reelection. And currently, there are 10 Republican senators Biden could appoint who come from 23 states with Democratic governors — either to his cabinet, as ambassadors to foreign missions in more than 180 countries around the world, or to any one of 49 current vacancies in the federal judiciary. Of those 10 Republicans, eight are from states where no special election is required to fill a Senate vacancy.

Here are those eight senators:

• Richard Burr (R-North Carolina)

• Susan Collins (R-Maine)

• Roger Marshall (R-Kansas)

• Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky)

• Jerry Moran (R-Kansas)

• Rand Paul (R-Kentucky)

• Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina)

• Pat Toomey (R-Pennsylvania)

(From left: Senators Jerry Moran, Susan Collins, and Pat Toomey. Photos: Wikimedia Commons)

Remember, Biden only needs three in a worst-case scenario in which Democrats lose both seats in Georgia. If they win both, he technically doesn’t need to appoint any of these Republicans to his administration, but he should probably consider appointing a few of these if he wants to avoid having Republican-lite Senators Mark Kelly (D-Arizona), Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia), and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona) stymie his legislative agenda.

It goes without saying that Senate Republicans are monstrous pieces of shit who gleefully confirmed equally monstrous pieces of shit like Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court (not to mention their support for Trump’s worst cabinet picks like William Barr, Ben Carson, Betsy DeVos, Scott Pruitt, and Jeff Sessions). The trick is separating the worst of the bunch from the rest, and appointing the remainder strategically to fill the vacancies that would allow them to do the least amount of damage possible.

For argument’s sake, let’s just go ahead and strike Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul from the list of eligible Republicans, since they’re both easily the worst on the list. We’ll go ahead and strike Roger Marshall from the list too, since he’s an anti-masker and a coup supporter. Richard Burr and Thom Tillis are both hardcore Trump partisans who voted with Trump more than 90 percent of the time. This leaves Senators Collins, Moran, and Toomey as the most ideal Republican senators to target for strategic cabinet appointments.

All are unpalatable, and it’s likely McConnell is pressuring these Republicans in particular to not accept any cabinet appointments. However, it’s worth noting that cabinet secretaries not only have immense power as heads of sprawling bureaucracies and can exert significant influence over how policies are implemented, but they’re also paid $210,700 a year, which is $36,700 a year more than they make as rank-and-file senators, and even $17,300 a year more than what the Senate Majority and Minority Leaders make.

We’ll rank these last three based on their FiveThirtyEight Trump score (percentage of the time they voted in line with President Trump).

1. Susan Collins (66.1%)

2. Jerry Moran (82.4%)

3. Pat Toomey (86.9%)

While there’s no definitive system to rank the importance of cabinet postings, my own general assessment of the influence each of the remaining cabinet positions assert would be:

1. Attorney General

2. Secretary of Labor

3. Secretary of Commerce

4. CIA Director

5. SBA Administrator

And of course, while the allure of a cabinet position would probably be the easiest way to try and convince a Senate Republican to upset their precarious majority, President-elect Biden could just as easily dangle an appointment on the federal bench in front of them. Like I mentioned earlier in this post, there are 49 current openings in the federal judiciary, and unlike cabinet positions, you’re not in any danger of losing your job in four years.

Biden could also simply ask senators what country their spouse has always wanted to visit, and offer them an ambassadorship to a vacation destination country like France or Italy or Spain, where they’ll make up to $187,000 a year and get VIP treatment everywhere they go.

Obviously having two more Democrats in the Senate would be great, and both Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock would be significantly better than Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue. But we shouldn’t let ourselves think their election and consistent unity of the Senate Democratic Caucus is the only way we can ever pass any legislation.

In fact, if Biden were so inclined, he could find places to appoint these Republicans even if Ossoff and Warnock win, in order to expand the Democrats’ Senate majority enough to pass statehood resolutions for Washington, DC and Puerto Rico. Both DC and Puerto Rico have passed resolutions petitioning for statehood, which means Congress is the last remaining obstacle standing in the way of their goal.

Should DC and Puerto Rico be added as the 51st and 52nd states, that would virtually guarantee four new Democratic senators, which would give the Biden administration plenty of leeway to abolish the filibuster and hold up-or-down votes on the hundreds of bills the Democratic-controlled House has already passed and that Mitch McConnell has refused to bring up for a floor vote. America would be a drastically improved country in short order.

The only question now is, does Biden have the political will to get all of this done, or will he do as Obama did for eight years, shrug his shoulders, and blame a gridlocked Senate on his inability to get anything done?

Congress’ recent agreement to give us $600 means-tested stimulus checks after nine months of nothing prompted comedy writer Matt Oswalt to recall a scene from the Dan Aykroyd/Eddie Murphy classic Trading Places. In the scene, two wealthy investors are boasting about making millions on trading frozen orange juice futures when a butler brings them a glass of milk.

Upon seeing the butler, one of the investors says he’s “right on time” and says “I bet you thought I forgot your Christmas bonus” as he hands him a $5 bill. The other investor adds, “half of it is from me.”

“Maybe I’ll go to the movies,” the butler says. “By myself.”

Earlier this month The Washington Post reported on how shoplifting is on the rise across America. But people aren’t shoplifting TVs and video games and jewelry. You know what they’re stealing? Diapers. Shampoo. Laundry detergent. Hand sanitizer. Bread. (emphasis mine)

The coronavirus recession has been a relentless churn of high unemployment and economic uncertainty. The government stimulus that kept millions of Americans from falling into poverty earlier in the pandemic is long gone, and new aid is still a dot on the horizon after months of congressional inaction. Hunger is chronic, at levels not seen in decades.

The result is a growing subset of Americans who are stealing food to survive.

Shoplifting is up markedly since the pandemic began in the spring and at higher levels than in past economic downturns, according to interviews with more than a dozen retailers, security experts and police departments across the country. But what’s distinctive about this trend, experts say, is what’s being taken — more staples like bread, pasta and baby formula.

According to the Post, roughly 12 million renters owe an average of nearly $6,000 in back rent and utilities, due to the fact that a bunch of us have been unemployed since March through no fault of our own. Last month, Bloomberg reported that nearly six million Americans expect to be evicted within the next 60 days due to lack of payment on rent, and roughly 18 million more are behind on rent and mortgage payments.

Former presidential candidate Marianne Williamson recently urged the incoming Biden administration to understand the urgency of the moment and work quickly to address the dire situation faced by millions of Americans.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has a personal net worth in excess of $100 million and earns a taxpayer-funded salary of $223,500/year, called the $600 checks “significant.”

To be clear, Pelosi and the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives passed the $3 trillion Heroes Act in May, which included another round of (still insignificant) $1,200 checks along with aid for cash-strapped state and local governments and an extension of the $600/week unemployment assistance through January of 2021. The Heroes Act never got a vote in the Republican-controlled Senate because Senate Republicans called the bill “dead on arrival.”

(House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Licensed photo: Susan Walsh/AP)

Even a bipartisan measure cosponsored by Senators Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) to send $1,200 checks to everyone never got a vote thanks to objection by Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) over concerns about the federal deficit. Johnson, who has almost $40 million in personal wealth, showed no such concern when voting for $1.5 trillion in tax cuts for the rich in 2017. According to The Daily Poster, Johnson fought for the “pass-through” tax break in the bill, which netted him an additional $205,000 in personal income (also, deficits don’t actually matter in countries with monetary sovereignty like the US, more on that in another post).

And of course, there was almost no hand-wringing about the deficit from Senate Republicans when they voted overwhelmingly in favor of another $740 billion for the Pentagon this month. Aside from seven “nay” votes (Braun, Cotton, Cruz, Hawley, Kennedy, Lee, Paul), the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) had no Republican opposition. The 83 votes in favor of the bill would be more than enough to override any potential veto from President Trump.

While we all decide whether or not we send our $600 fuck-you checks to the outstanding balances we have with Navient for our student loan debt, or to the electric company to get the lights turned back on, or the gas company to pay for heating costs, or our car title loan company to keep them from repossessing our vehicles, or our landlords to keep them from kicking us out of our homes, or our banks for overdraft fees, here are a few highlights of the 2021 defense spending bill:

• $40 million for Space Force

• $1.87 billion for 98 new F-35 fighter jets (20 more jets than what Trump requested)

• $1.375 billion for Trump’s border wall

And according to Stars and Stripes, there’s no funding allocated in the 2021 NDAA for bringing troops home from Afghanistan, meaning the longest-lasting war in US history will almost certainly stretch on for at least another year.

So what should our response be to all of this? Here’s how the rest of the world protests their governments.

In France, the Gilets Jaunes (yellow vest) movement sprung up in November of 2018, in response to a proposed increase in the gas tax. According to The Guardian, almost 300,000 people took to the streets clad in the yellow vests the government requires cab drivers to wear. In response to repression from riot cops, some French firefighters aligned with protesters lit their gear on fire and charged at riot cops.

One specific tactic of Yellow Vesters was to physically destroy symbols of capitalist opulence, like the luxury boutique stores lining Paris’ Champs-Elysees avenue. Even after Macron scrapped the gas tax proposal, the Yellow Vest movement endured, moving the goal posts from the gas tax to other kitchen-table concerns like stagnant wages, rising costs of living, and persistent unemployment. Some French people even praised the radical tactics of Yellow Vesters.

“I’m glad there are the thugs, because without them our movement wouldn’t get any attention. We need the violence so we can be heard,” said Marie, a mother of two from Seine-et-Marne who wouldn’t give the Los Angeles Times her last name.

Last month, in Guatemala, protesters stormed their capitol building and set it ablaze in response to a government budget that made steep cuts to education and healthcare spending. This budget vote came right after Guatemalans devastated by back-to-back hurricanes (Eta and Iota) were clamoring for relief.

In October, protesters in Kyrgyzstan stormed parliament and the presidential residence and even broke their former president out of jail in response to claims that the incumbent had rigged the election in his favor. Protesters were reportedly so numerous that the police didn’t do anything to stop them.

Americans do know how to protest like this. But American culture lacks class awareness and class solidarity (by design). And because American corporate media cares more about broken windows than Black life, protesters who set police precincts ablaze and destroyed corporate property were bullied by fellow protesters into less militant measures that are non-threatening to the state in order for protests to be praised by the media.

It’s also important to note that protesters are routinely targeted for violence by not just police, but by domestic terrorists, with vehicular attacks (a literal ISIS tactic) being among the more common methods. As Twitter user @molotics put it, one main reason the American working class doesn’t engage in militant protest is because of the “startling amount of people cool with shooting us down like animals.”

Obviously we shouldn’t allow our fear of reprisal from police and domestic terrorists to discourage us from taking direct action. But it’s hard to see how anything will convince Congress of our desperation without action that is at least as militant as we are desperate.

Earlier this week — just days after armed right-wing protesters surrounded the home of Michigan’s Secretary of State as she was decorating her Christmas tree with her children — Bloomberg reported that the incoming Biden administration wants to create a position “to find common ground with conservatives” and has tasked Rep. Cedric Richmond (D-Louisiana) with leading the effort.

Reaching out to the 72 million Americans who willingly voted for four more years of *gestures at all of this* may seem like a lost cause, but there’s actually several policies Biden could pursue that would accomplish this (since I haven’t had W-2 employment since March, Rep. Richmond is free to consider this post as my cover letter applying for the job).

1. Universal Basic Income

The best way to contain the virus is to pay people to stay home, and to pay businesses to stay closed. The Federal Reserve has already announced its plans to keep interest rates frozen near zero until at least 2023, meaning there’s almost no risk in the Fed effectively printing trillions of dollars in new money. This would simultaneously address both the spread of Covid-19 and the economic depression caused by Covid-related unemployment. And according to an April poll by Data for Progress, 84% of self-identified Republicans (compared to just 83% of self-identified Democrats) support universal basic income by way of paying employers to keep their employees on payroll even when shut down.

Fed chair Jerome Powell said “there’s no limit” to how ambitious of a stimulus Congress should pursue. He’s basically begging Congress to pass a bill to make the money printer go brrrrr. In fact, the money printer has already been working overtime in 2020, as one in five dollars in circulation today were printed this year, when the Fed added new currency to the money supply to prop up financial markets once the pandemic started shutting down the economy.

We’ve exploited the Fed’s money printer before with no real inflationary impact. The Levy Institute of Economics at Bard College estimated the true cost of the response to the 2008 financial crisis to be $29 trillion. Essentially, the Fed created $29 trillion out of thin air (not tax money) to use to buy up toxic assets held by big banks as a means of stabilizing the economy. This was called “quantitative easing,” (QE) though as former Fed chair Ben Bernanke described it, QE is literally the Fed changing bank account numbers on a computer screen.

2. Student Debt Relief

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) has been repeatedly calling on President-elect Joe Biden to cancel up to $50,000 of student debt per borrower, which he says the incoming president can do with “the flick of a pen.” According to Nerdwallet, 92% of the approximately $1.54 trillion in student debt held by more than 40 million Americans is owned by the U.S. Department of Education, which is part of the executive branch. And roughly three out of four borrowers owe less than $50,000.

The high cost of college continues to spiral out of control. According to Congressman Ro Khanna (D-California), the cost of attending college today is 798% higher compared to 1983. CNBC reported that attending a public college as an out-of-state student can cost up to $70,000 per year.

There would be essentially no political blowback for forgiving student debt. A September 2020 poll conducted by Student Defense, the Defend Students Action Fund, and Data for Progress found that more than two-thirds of Americans (and even 58% of Republicans) are in favor of some form of student debt forgiveness.

All that being said, there’s really nothing stopping the Biden administration from forgiving most of the debt held by most student borrowers, other than Joe Biden.

While this excerpt is somewhat disappointing, Biden didn’t specifically say he wouldn’t forgive student debt by executive order, though it’s clear we’ll need to make him do it when push comes to shove. We have to remember the President-elect is the same person who, in 2018, said “give me a break” when asked about the plight of struggling millennials, saying he has “no empathy” for them when compared to youth in the 1960s.

(For what it’s worth, Joe Biden graduated from the University of Delaware in 1965. According to the university’s archives, out-of-state tuition in 1966 was $750 per year back then, or $6,023 in 2020 dollars. Today, an out-of-state student attending the University of Delaware would have to pay $35,710 in tuition.)

3. Ending the War in Afghanistan

The war in Afghanistan will turn 20 years old next September. The Afghan war has already been the longest war in US history since 2012, but if it’s still ongoing by next year, it will have gone on twice as long as the Vietnam War (1965-1975). According to Brown University’s Costs of War project, the Afghanistan War has already eaten up $2 trillion in tax dollars, not to mention the 2,300 US military deaths, 3,800+ contractor deaths, and 43,000+ civilian deaths in Afghanistan alone.

Ending the forever war in Afghanistan isn’t just a priority of the antiwar left — it’s a sentiment shared by both Democrats and Republicans, and especially by veterans and their families. In 2018, the conservative Charles Koch Institute (funded by the last living Koch brother), in conjunction with RealClearPolitics and YouGov, found that a majority of Americans and veterans think the Afghanistan war is pointless and that troops should come home (emphasis mine):

According to the survey, 53 percent of Americans, and nearly 60 percent of military veterans, do not think the United States has a clear strategic objective in Afghanistan. Only 15 percent of all respondents and 23 percent of military veterans said the government does have such objectives. Fifty-one percent of respondents say that it either is time to decrease Afghanistan troop levels or to remove all troops from the country in the next 12 months. Even more Americans feel this way when asked about troop levels over the next five years. Fifty-seven percent of Americans, including 69 percent of military veterans, said they would support a decision by the president to remove all troops from Afghanistan.

Americans do not deem the conflict a win for the U.S. Two in three Americans, including 73 percent of military veterans, cannot say the war has been a success. Specifically, 36 percent of Americans, including 40 percent of veterans, said the war has been unsuccessful while 30 percent (33 percent of veterans) said it has been neither successful nor unsuccessful.

Veterans’ opposition to the Afghanistan War has only grown since then. An April 2020 poll conducted by Concerned Veterans of America — which the Military Times described as a “conservative activist group” showed that nearly three quarters of veterans, and roughly 70% of their families, supported a full withdrawal of all troops from Afghanistan.

Americans’ opposition to the war itself has also remained steady for nearly a decade. In 2012, a New York Times/CBS News poll found that 69% of Americans were opposed to remaining in Afghanistan, and 68% of those polled believed the war was going “somewhat badly” or “very badly” for the United States. As commander-in-chief of the United States military, Joe Biden could unilaterally order a troop withdrawal starting in January, and get major brownie points from both Democrats and Republicans in the process.

4. Legalizing marijuana

The full-scale federal legalization of marijuana should be a no-brainer by now, given that 15 states and Washington DC have already legalized it for both medicinal and recreational purposes, including deep-red states like Alaska, Montana, and South Dakota. In 2019, Pew Research found that 67% of Americans — including 55% of Republicans — supported making marijuana fully legal.

Many other states have already decriminalized small amounts (typically one ounce or less) of marijuana, and this week, the US House of Representatives voted for the first time in history to decriminalize marijuana. The bill — cosponsored by far-right Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) — passed with nearly all Democrats voting in favor of it, along with five Republicans and Rep. Justin Amash (L-Michigan).

As President, Joe Biden could authorize his Attorney General to remove marijuana from the Drug Enforcement Agency’s list of Schedule I controlled substances, and issue immediate pardons for all federal inmates incarcerated for nonviolent marijuana-related offenses. But despite his repeated calls for bipartisanship, Biden remains obstinately against marijuana legalization.

5. Breaking Up Big Tech Monopolies

This week, 48 Attorneys General, led by New York Attorney General Letitia James, sued Facebook, alleging its acquisitions of social media apps like Instagram and WhatsApp constituted a violation of federal antitrust laws established to prevent monopolies from forming.

The fact that 48 Attorneys General joined the lawsuit (46 states plus Washington, DC and Guam; Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and South Dakota were the only states to not sign on) is proof that the desire to break up big tech monopolies is shared by leaders of both parties. Even the Trump administration joined in, with the Federal Trade Commission filing its own complaint against the social media giant’s monopolization tactics.

Even some of America’s most conservative Attorneys General joined James’ lawsuit. Most of the 17 Attorneys General who recently joined Texas’ baseless lawsuit seeking to overturn election results in the swing states of Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. While Attorneys General like Ashley Moody of Florida and Ken Paxton of Texas may think it’s okay to throw out thousands of ballots without providing any proof of wrongdoing, they still don’t think it’s fair for Facebook to corner the social media market. This is proof that the Biden administration can and should pursue the breakup of other big tech companies like Amazon and Google if it wants to be bipartisan.