Let Them Know, Joe!

 

President Biden's speech this evening presented us with good things--policies that will move us forward from the trials and tribulations of the pandemic, the resulting economic damage, and the deep divisions we still feel from the flame-out and attempted insurrection under the former guy, and they were presented with a fervid belief in the possibility and reality of America's greatness. It was a speech that promised to build on the successes of the first hundred days and invited the "other side" to please come along for the ride to do things that would be both really popular and beneficial.

He let us know: we could be creating good-paying jobs for the workers we currently have in a way that uses what we once trumpeted as American ingenuity and the spirit of invention. We could be working to provide cleaner water and safer infrastructure. We could be educating today's kids for tomorrow's jobs. We could be putting our money where our mouths are and invest in the future we want to see--because we believe in America. The ability to pull ourselves up and do better is within our reach, so let's get reaching. 

Joe Biden is in favor of the idea of America and the ideals of America. He just wants to do stuff better. Come on, man. Isn't that what we're about?

And you know what? I applauded the hell out of Biden's vision. He promises tough, vigilant national security and a robust economy--I'm for it. He wants us to reform immigration in a way that is not cruel and tries to confront the realities of migration in terms of the economic, political, and environmental challenges people are facing in their nation of origin. He's a realist, not an ideologue, but he does believe in the liberal tradition and the small "d" democracy that are this nation's great heritage. We are a nation made of an idea. And the idea is really good. We should probably do more of it.

( As a side note: Fuck you, Rich Lowry. We aren't a nation in the sense of people bound by blood, religion, or even a common tongue, and the expansion of this country's borders historically, combined with immigration, make the idea of thinking of us in simple geographical terms ludicrous. What are we? A creedal nation. An aspiration nation. An idea set forth by our nation's forefathers. The blood and soil notion has nothing to do with our historical or current experienced reality--but thanks for playing and demonstrating the limitations of trying to even perform discourse with today's "intellectual" conservatives!) 

Of course Republicans didn't like this speech.

Sleepy Ted Cruz might look like he's just dreaming about Cancun in the picture above, but I think he's really just closing his eyes because the idea of Democrats putting on their work boots to accomplish real things for their constituents while he's just slipping into his clown shoes every morning to do prat falls and seltzer sprays for great culture war justice might almost make him self-aware enough to develop an actual personality instead of just hating libs and calling it a personality. 

And I have nothing, not one damn thing, to say about Tim Scott's speech because there is nothing to say about it. It was a Republican rebuttal to a speech Biden didn't give about an America no one in particular lives in, and Joni Ernst, Bobby Jindal, or Marco Rubio all have done similarly out of touch responses. I am unmotivated by the GOP's message regardless of the face they put on it, because the message is always the same: Blame Democrats for stuff and do basically nothing but tax cuts and culture war. 

Anyway, my takeaway is that the man the Former Guy once called "Sleepy Joe Biden" is wide awake and ready to do stuff for the American people, and Republicans can't do anything but complain about it. And that just figures. And if they can't even do bipartisanship when it's good ideas that create jobs (do they hate jobs?) or provide health care innovations like lowering insurance premiums and drug costs and funding research for cancer and vaccines (so what, are Republicans in favor of high drug costs and cancer?) then fuck'em and let the electorate figure out who's putting in the hours. 

Joe let them know. And I am yet another woman (like Vice-President Harris and House Speaker Pelosi--the historic event of two women behind the president during an address of this nature) happy to stand behind this president and what he wants to do for us--like support VAWA, gun control, equal pay, protections for LGBTQ workers and so much more. 

To echo the sentiment from the last Democratic president: Yes, we can! And I want to believe we will.

Famine of Choices

WATCH: As California farmers make the hard decision to plow through crops no one is buying, analysts say the drop in food supply will be felt in a few months by consumers eager to buy produce at grocery stores https://t.co/F4LVLT5Gct pic.twitter.com/ecrWcGja7c

— Reuters (@Reuters) April 16, 2020

Some portion of my ancestors came to the US because there was, quite purposefully, no food where they came from. The one crop poor people mostly ate, failed. Just about every other kind of food a rich land produced, was exported. If it mattered enough, just a tweak of economics could have saved lives (a million people may have died, maybe a million more were saved by leaving). It wasn't that they couldn't have lived off what the land provided--it's that that nourishment was intended for other paying customers' tables. This sort of thing happens the whole world round. People starve not for a lack of food, but because the political climate doesn't allow it to be on their plates. It's either deliberately withheld, as can happen where the government is oppressive, or because there is no foresight on a government's behalf that food insecurity is a national security issue.

It's not just in light of the above story I consider that--it's a painful thing for farmers to produce good food and watch it go to waste and also know that it isn't just money they are out for their labor, but that the demand exists (people still need fed), it only needs a different path to the ultimate consumer. It's in light of images like this:

image of the line of cars waiting for food aid. Surely, they has to be a way for other plans to be made for more produce to be canned, dairy to be powdered, etc. possibly by an act of government, to make food more available for the people temporarily in want? The logistics for such a thing must exist. I know when I was a kid, people talked shit about government cheese (but it was good for grilled cheese) but that was a staple. We need the USDA to get it's top game on.

I'm not a logistics kind of person that knows exactly how to translate not plowing crops under into filling the bellies of people who just need tiding over until this virus crisis is licked, but taking inspiration from folks like Chef Andres, I know if the will existed we could find a way to do it.

That's the kind of thinking we should want in government. And the sort of thing I think government can make happen on a meaningful scale--but which shouldn't stop food relief groups, local governments, etc. from trying to manage, because I think the crisis is still unfolding, and future food shortages could drive inflation and just some really fucked-up realities. Basically, capitalism Venezuela. I could be wrong about that part, but I am not wrong about feeding the people and subsidizing the farmers. We all need to eat and we all need to take care of one another when things are rough. We are all in this together.

That is what makes a nation great.

The Post-Pandemic

As is sometimes the case, regular commenter Formerly Amherst got me to thinking a bit on a different tangent. I don't like the idea of prognostication where serious events are concerned all that much, for the most part, because I think people have a tendency to ascribe their own meanings and desires on things. Where the coronavirus is concerned, I've already noticed with distaste that some people are viewing it in "cleansing" terms--always a bad sign. I don't think much of people who imagine that a random RNA replicant was sent by some fate to rid the planet of, well, you name it. Old folk. The sick. The poor. The Blue State liberal menace. The Red State conservative menace. The people of XYZ religion. The lousy secularists. To give us something greater than war to worry about. To wipe out the lesser virus, humans, who have been mucking the planet up. Etc. It's a very ugly game some people play--and the only way to win at being human is not to play.

I also don't like the habit of thinking that a sufficiently tragic episode of history will necessarily be didactic. The idea that "Now people will--(do the thing I've always really hoped they would)" is natural, but people often do carry multiple, mixed, and even muddled messages away from events. There is a logic to assuming that people will, after a massive worldwide healthcare crisis, come away with dramatically different opinions about how health care is managed, such as incurring an interest in truly universal "free" (as in "provided as a fully-funded right of all planetary citizens") healthcare--but logical assumptions seem to have little to do with actual human behavior. The human mind has a weird trick of using current events to reinforce one's own priors, even when counter-intuitive.

We're talking monkeys. If that sounds like I'm shrugging at the business of guessing what folks will do--bingo. Look at the differing responses people are having right now to the potential for disaster staring them in the face. The aftermath won't look much different. Fingers of blame will be pointed, but it will be spread around enough to be thinned out. Some people will look back, after a plausible or even implausible interval, to say "Things weren't even all that bad."

President Obama Has An Economic Legacy

One of the things that bothers me about Obama criticism is that the dismissal of what Barack Obama has done as president seems to rest on an idea that one president, in one or two terms, can unfuxxor a Great Recession, while trying to win assorted foreign conflicts aginst terrorism, and get nothing but good press and approbation along the way. Despite opposition to things he might have been able to do to help more. Although the success of the recovery isn't an absolute success--many good things have happened. The rebound of full-time employment, while part-time jobs stayed stable--is part of the picture.  Full-time jobs are awesomesauce, they have bennies and security--and that they are the jobs gained in the economy as opposed to a boost in part-time employment is significant--but again--that's just part of the picture--I want to tell a whole story in numbers.

So, the thing I want to specifically address in this post is whether the Obama economy is a problem for Hillary Clinton as a kind of beneficiary of some sort of economic mojo--or whether she has a lot of positive opinion for Democratic economic performance to work with.