American Politics from 2019 on

[Tero]

from today's post:
"it’s a refrain we heard over and over during the campaign. prices are so high right now. eggs are a milliontyskillion dollars because there’s a big lever in the Oval Office that says ‘prices’ on it, and neither Sleepy Joe nor Kamabla will pull that lever, because they’re communist fascist marxists who hate America. vote for Donny, and I’ll pull that fucking lever so hard, they’ll be paying YOU to take the eggs.’"
link in the first comment below —>

elderly golfer admits he can’t do shit about lowering prices
https://www.jefftiedrich.com/p/elderly- ... he-cant-do

[Sean Hayden]

Good. But those voters ain't that dumb, and your point won't survive their bringing up all the Democrats promises that turned out to be just "too hard" after they got elected. No that doesn't mean they're just as bad. That does suggest an interesting question though: does the bias of your bullshit matter? I say yes.

[Sean Hayden]

Elizabeth Warren:

The senator Elizabeth Warren will introduce a bill in Congress on Wednesday aimed at shifting corporations away from “maximizing shareholder value” and towards giving more support to workers and other stakeholders.

The Accountable Capitalism Act proposes a series of reforms to increase corporate responsibility, strengthen the voices of workers and others in corporate decisions and shift companies away from their focus on shareholders.

...

The bill would mandate corporations with over $1bn in annual revenue obtain a federal charter as a “United States Corporation” under the obligation to consider the interests of all stakeholders and corporations engaging in repeated and egregious illegal conduct can have their charters revoked.

The legislation would also mandate that at least 40% of a corporation’s board of directors be chosen directly by employees and would enact restrictions on corporate directors and officers from selling stocks within five years of receiving the shares or three years within a company stock buyback.

All political expenditures by corporations would also have to be approved by at least 75% of shareholders and directors.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... enate-bill

You'd think she'd be more popular.

[L'Emmerdeur]

Goddam fascist communist is what she is. Should be deported at least.

[Sean Hayden]

[pErvinalia]

from today's post:
"it’s a refrain we heard over and over during the campaign. prices are so high right now. eggs are a milliontyskillion dollars because there’s a big lever in the Oval Office that says ‘prices’ on it, and neither Sleepy Joe nor Kamabla will pull that lever, because they’re communist fascist marxists who hate America. vote for Donny, and I’ll pull that fucking lever so hard, they’ll be paying YOU to take the eggs.’"
link in the first comment below —>

elderly golfer admits he can’t do shit about lowering prices
https://www.jefftiedrich.com/p/elderly- ... he-cant-do

He'll blame the Democrats, and his dumb supporters will buy it.

[JimC]

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-12-14/ ... /104726026

President-elect Donald Trump has called for drones to be shot down as the FBI receives thousands of tips over mysterious sightings in several US states.

Several unmanned aerial vehicle (UAS) sightings across New Jersey, New York and other US states have prompted concern and calls for an official investigation.

Earlier this week, an FBI official told Congress that the bureau had received over 3,000 tips from the public about these incursions, according to CBS.

Something a little weird is happening...

[pErvinalia]

Russia.

[Brian Peacock]

They've appeared over US bases in the UK too. The US military isn't commenting. They have flashing navigation lights. Mostly likely night time military surveillance drones...


...or aliens

[Tero]

elsewhere:
I realized long ago that America wouldn't reach the heights of Star Trek's Federation in my lifetime, but I really didn't expect it to slump backwards into the nineteenth century. Yet here we go!

[Tero]

"Spending" appears to be debt etc. not federal workers.

Hold on a sec
In those 40 years of explosive population, spending and debt growth, the size of the federal workforce – this is actually kind of shocking – has stayed pretty much the same, confounding the popular presumption that the number of federal workers must have skyrocketed with federal spending.

“The number of federal employees have skyrocketed over the past four years, especially the number that are working from home and not even coming to work,” the House Oversight Committee chairman, Rep. James Comer, told CNN’s Pamela Brown on Thursday, expressing that view.

In fact, the number of full-time federal workers has been relatively static, within a few hundred thousand civilians, since the 1960s.

Even a drawdown of the size of the military and Pentagon during the George H.W. Bush administration and of the federal workforce by hundreds of thousands during the Clinton administration did not markedly change the size of the federal workforce, which has hovered within a few hundred thousand of 3 million workers for decades.

In some agencies that Republicans have said they want to shutter, there are relatively few employees – such as the smallest Cabinet-level agency, the Department of Education. It employs about 4,400 employees, according to OPM. The largest federal agencies, like Veterans Affairs and the Pentagon, employ hundreds of thousands of workers.

...She told me it’s important not to view the US government as one monolithic thing, but rather as “essentially a giant holding company.”

“It’s doing everything from training pilots to fly advanced aircraft to tracking down cryptosporidium in your hamburger meat to cutting checks for retired people,” she said.

Firing only the most recent hires, as may be suggested by Musk and Ramaswamy, would have the added impact of scaring away future hires, as well as displacing people hired for specific roles, such as to implement the bipartisan infrastructure law passed during the Biden administration.

But Comer said people hired for specific roles and programs funded once have a tendency to stick around.

“The problem now in government, it’s been the problem for decades … is that you create a government program or create a government agency, it never goes away, even when it becomes obsolete or inefficient,” Comer told Brown on CNN.

....the intersecting system of companies and local officials clamoring for federal dollars represents their own form of a deep state....

The citizens of the real deep state stoke nonstop federal deficit spending on everything from Medicare to missiles. They steer funding through intentionally maze-like federal programs. They use federal tax dollars to privately employ millions of people. They are behind the ‘waste, fraud, and abuse’ that everyone typically blames on ‘bureaucrats’ who are mostly mere grant and contract managers in a workforce that has not grown since the 1960s.

....Comer said Musk and Ramaswamy, who will take a year and a half to make recommendations, could recommend trying to claw back unspent funds.

“There has been some pressure over years to not increase head count, and that usually leads to greater contracting,” Morrissey said, although there’s evidence that contractors frequently end up costing the government more money.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/14/politics ... index.html

[Sean Hayden]

The problem seems to only ever be that I want something and you're (the feds) in the way. Just tell the American people the truth: you don't care, you, the American public, have never lost a single night of sleep over the DOE. You people don't care. So why are you even talking about it today, to the degree that you are? Because somebody else, somewhere else, needs something they think will be easier to get with either a new DOE or no DOE.

[Tero]

Will they mothball the right DOE? They might get education and energy mixed up.

[Sean Hayden]

It would be nice if we had enough agreement across the country to make this type of politics impossible. It’s sad that it feels normal: like democracy means never settling on ideals and hiring the right people to pursue them. Nah, democracy is just how powerful interests with disparate values handle disputes right? It’s just a zero-sum conflict that has replaced violence with a disinterested public used as dice to settle who gets what, right?. —bs— We have the possibility of democracy, and the powerful who can’t stand it.

[Brian Peacock]

I don't understand. Why would billionaires want to destroy democratic institutions, hamstring the govt, and wipe away decades of incremental regulations? It just doesn't make sense, unless... the billionaires are really the Anarchists!!