Stopping Sinema and Manchin From Electing Donald Trump

with ‘democrats’ like Manchin and Synema, who needs republicans?

You do realize that Manchin represents an area that flipped Republican in 2016 after the Democrats abandoned them in the Obama Era. He was barely elected on his Charisma because he is pro-coal and the Miners remembered he had their back. Now his constituents are pressuring him to leave the Democrats.

Thus Manchin is actually listening to his constituents and trying to win back the Coal Miners to the Democratic Party, but that is hampered by the fascist authoritarian turn the Democratic Party has taken.

Frankly Manchin will just break the caucus with the Democrats by going independent and putting the Senate in Mitch’s hands. As it is the gross mishandling of the Economy by Democratic Leaders will kill more people than the virus will.

Ultimately, the US is in the final stages of a Carthaginian Republic Collapse. The Rome analogies don’t work, US Elites aren’t legitimized warlords with private armies the Late Roman Republic had. And these Warlords actually were competent and had a higher purpose. Their actions did not lead to a fracturing of the state, but instead led to its transformation.

Instead like the Republic of Carthage we have a dysfunctional Deep State of Wealthy Elites and Power Brokers all backstabbing each other and a military rapidly losing combat power and losing on all fronts while being increasingly composed of mercenaries of doubtful combat capability. It also had allies like the US who in the past may have had been powerful, but no longer had the strength they once had.

End result is the US fracturing like Carthage did, not evolving like the Roman Government did.

As a matter of practical politics, Manchin and Sinema are the pointy end of a long stick, the players on the floor of a team with a deep bench. After them, there would be more to take out.

The problem they highlight has another side: the absence of Republican defectors. It has been literally decades since there was a credible possibility of a Republican defecting in these circumstances and more recent experience with, say, Collins from Maine has made the very idea a bad joke.

50%+1 was never a position of political strength — Biden’s program was offered as a political policy program not by a Party desperate to show its relevance but by a System interested in market testing alternative concepts.

someofparts linked to a strangely perceptive interview at the end of the last thread and Che Pasa endorsed it. I am going to bring it here. Fair warning: loads of hipster irony. Che Pasa called it, “insulting”.

https://niccolo.substack.com/p/the-putney-spoons-interviews-malcolm

The kayfabe of partisan politics is dying before our eyes. Look elsewhere.

If it wasn’t Sinema and Manchin it would be some other democrat. Sinema is such an attention whore that she just cut into the front of the line of the democrats’ rotating villain’s carousel. Me me me …

When they had 60 democratic senators with Obama and the ACA the Rubin Administration II put out that they wanted to pass the bill with 70 or 80 votes to be bipartisan. When the democrats did their drag-their-feet ploy on the bill to allow the donor class time to either entice some rotating villains with bribes and/or threaten them with blackmail the democrats were told they didn’t have to compromise with these rotating villains because they could pass it with Reconciliation which the Rubin Administration II vehemently denied. Then after playing to his brand the entire ACA debate by “staying above the fray” Obama came in aggressively to close the deal when they were forced to in fact pass the bill via Reconciliation so that those now, and always, unnecessary compromises couldn’t be walked back.

The democrats are not in opposition to the republicans because, as has been written here many times by many posters: the democrats and republicans both want the same economic policies. The democrats are in fact the republicans’ dancing partners.

Z

LBJ got into politics during the New Deal, and he was a New Deal supporter. There are very few New Deal nostalgiasts or reactionaries in the Democratic Party now. I wish there were more. Perhaps a ” way could be found” to force more New Deal Reactionaries into the Party against the opposition of the DLC Wall Street-Hamilton Project type of Clintobamacrats who own and rule the Party now.

Ian Welsh suggests some tough and mean type approaches which the House DemProgs could take. But they won’t do any of it, because they are neither tough nor mean. What took the toughness and meanness out of the Left of today?

A hypothesis suggests itself to me which I haven’t seen elsewhere. Before the Truman-McCarthy bonfire of the leftists, there were several sub-lefts in the Left. Some were tough and mean. Those were burned out of high visibility politics in the Fifties. What accounts for today’s DemProgs being too nice to do the mean and tough things which would ideally win them some victories, or at least make their enemies suffer and pay? I would suggest spiritual pollution in the form of subhuman pacifist sub-humanism injected into the left by the Quakers and subhuman pacifist Activists like the Pacifists’ great hero A. J. Muste
https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images?p=a+j+muste&fr=sfp&imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Ftodaybirthday.in%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2019%2F06%2FA.-J.-Muste-7infi.png#id=14&iurl=https%3A%2F%2Ftodaybirthday.in%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2019%2F06%2FA.-J.-Muste-7infi.png&action=click

And Joan Baez’z songs of ” love, peace and non-violence” also introduced a lot of pacifist spiritual pollution into the “left”. ( I don’t know if it was she or someone else who wrote a song titled ” What’s so funny about Love, Peace and Understanding?” I wish a talented song-write would write a song of spiritual decontamination and rehabilitation titled ” What’s so funny about War, Hate, and Understanding?”)

I think today’s DemProgs grew up in a political culture very much degraded and polluted by subhuman pacifist subhumanism. It is part of their basic emotional outlook. They could never do the things Ian Welsh suggests. They would consider it to be spiritually violent bullying, and not peaceful, loving, or understandignfull at all.
So they won’t do any of it.

I would. I would do all of it if I were there. But I don’t have the energy or drive to go into politics.

What we need is a few Leftie Gingriches.

Bruce,

Always remember to forget the fighter in the blue trunks took a dive in the last bout. And the fight before. And the one before that. And the …

Z

The corruption of the Congressional Republicans works as follows: they vote as a block and as long as they continue to do so they will benefit from the legal bribery in our political system but they won’t have anyone crawling up their ass to try to find grounds to blackmail them unless they’re a House or Senate leader like Hassert or McConnell who gives directions to the Republican block. For instance, there’s probably glory-hole cams installed in every interstate truck stop between Lexington and DC for Let Them Eat Shit Mitch’s chin reverberating sexual adventures.

The corruption of the Congressional Democrats works like this: they are balkanized against acting in the interests of the U.S. working class and poor because they had the bribery and blackmail brothers, and Centerview business partners, Rahm Emanuel and Robert Rubin working their carrot-and-stick dark magic within the party. Emanuel worked in Congress and the executive office and probably used private Israeli intelligence companies and the Mossad to dig up and use dirt against democratic politicians and troublesome federal staff to blackmail them while Robber Rubin worked the kinder bribery side of their operations with all his Wall Street contacts. The Fed and financial markets are dominated by forces that ally themselves with Rubin and Emanuel.

Put the dynamics of the two parties together and there is absolutely nothing pro-worker of any significance that will ever pass through Congress that will benefit the vast majority of U.S. citizens and remove the heavy boot of capital and debt off of our necks. At least not before the country falls apart due to infrastructure breakdown and global warming.

Z

2021 isn’t 2010

But the results are somehow the same: legislation that places the greed of the donor class over the needs of the rest of the country.

Z

The original Democratic plan had $6 trillion in spending. This went to $3.5 trillion plus $1 trillion for “infrastructure.” The $3.5 trillion Build Back Better reconciliation bill is now somewhere south of $2 trillion. With the infrastructure added, it will come out to a little less than half their initial ask.

In the past, the way this would have worked is that Manchin and Sinema would have gotten some extra money and projects for their states, the bill would have passed, and we would be talking about something else. It’s been clear pretty much from the start that this wasn’t Manchin and Sinema’s game. Progressives should have wrapped both bills around Manchin and Sinema’s necks and walked away. They could then run ad campaigns in both Arizona and West Virginia letting voters know who they could thank for the lost of all that money and projects benefitting them.

Progressives really need to have exit strategies for these kinds of political brawls, and stumbling, bumbling, and settling for crumbs ain’t it. Go in with a plan, make reasonable, explainable deals, and execute it. If you can’t, make sure the lasting impression is that you stood for something, fought for it, and that was better than the crap sandwich you were being offered.

I would also like to point out that in September 2021, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported 42,300 coal mining jobs. That’s the whole industry in the whole country. Coal mining jobs have been declining for decades. In May 1985, they were at 177,500. Utilities have been switching away from coal in recent years, but this has had little to do with the loss of jobs in the industry. Instead it has been mountaintop removal. Instead of miners going into the mountain to extract coal, the top layers of the mountain are blown off until the coal seams are exposed and then these are strip-mined. It takes almost no one to do this kind of work.

As for West Virginia, it has a population of about 1.79 million. That is about 40th in population size and about 0.55% of the whole country. Manchin is 74 now and would be 77 when he was up for re-election in 2024. I think it is important to look at with him and Sinema, there may be no endgame here. They may just be zombie politicians, running the same old scams for the millionth time because that’s all they know. That they are doing this on principle … they wouldn’t know a principle if they were hit by one.

There is the class thing that the elite and rich use their position to get special treatment for their kids, and the kids using the wealth and power of their parents to the same end.

Hunter is 51. He’s been playing the child of the privileged game all his life. Not sure how much Joe is involved, or needs to be involved, in his son’s scams. Just as children can’t choose their parents, there is a point where parents can’t control their children. And at 51, Hunter hasn’t been a kid for decades.

I thought the Progressive Caucus did have a plan: reconcliation passes the Senate first and then the highway bill passes the House. Both together.

Will the Progressive Caucus sink the Highway Bill. Clearly no one believes it.

None of this matters – this spending will not make an iota of difference in the trajectory of our economy and will only make the majority relatively poorer, the money will flush through the economy and settle in the accounts of the already wealthy, but new debt will contribute to raising inflation. Contrary to what a majority of commenters on this blog believes, FED purchases of treasuries and real estate debt directly from the banks have not increased inflation, but FED direct lending to everyone + forcing banks to make more loans + now governmental debt in the context of ‘rust’ in the supply will.

Look at this chart: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=I6uO
For a very long time and until ~2010, M2 money stock = commercial bank credit, and the slope of federal debt is about the same as the slopes of M2 and bank credit (because credit that commercial banks make, including credit to the government, is our M2, that’s how our money are born). I take growth in M2 as an indicator of inflation, ie, inflation here is a sustained growth in the stock of money readily accessible to consumers, businesses and governments (local and federal) to spend. Federal gov debt is not all financed by issuing new M2, foreigners (China, Japan) buy gov debt too, thus recycling money that we spent on stuff made abroad. If you zoom in the 1980s-1990s, you can see a rise in M2, followed by a flat line 1990-1995 that coincides with a steep increase in money velocity (ie, how many time each dollar changes hands on average in a year – you can also see it here: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=I6N8). Flatlining M2 and increasing money velocity to compensate for fewer dollars — that’s your Paul Volcker’s success in fighting inflation. But then M2 growth resumes at about the same pace as before 1990. An inquisitive mind among you might wonder — well, if M2 growth resumed, why didn’t CPI-inflation come back? – Well, before 1990, M2 went into workers’ salaries, who then spent these M2 on stuff and drove prices of the CPI items up; after 1995, M2 went to the already wealthy who drove up prices of non-CPI items (ie., prestigious education, big houses, etc, the stuff wealthy buy) but mostly saved cash in money market funds, this saving of the cash by the wealthy can be seen in collapsing money velocity after 2000. CPI increased drastically in the 1980s then grew at the same rate until 2020 (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL). So, inequality is needed to prevent CPI-inflation!

But I diverged, looking at the very first figure, can someone see how FED purchases of treasuries and mortgage-backed securities from banks before 2020 are reflected in M2 or CPI? I can’t. That’s because our monetary system is a dual circulation system with two types of money. Bank reserves are not part of M2, and contrary to what many people believe, banks do not want to lend as much as they can — at least not after 2008, when some of these banks blew up. According to the Centralized Private Sector Planning doctrine, the Central Planning Core (CPC) consists of a dozen or so major financial institutions that effectively run the economy by both controlling overall economic activity as well as determining which industry will develop and which will not through issuance of credit. And furthermore, businesses may not want to borrow: Business Roundtable has a statement on its website: “At some point companies may run out of opportunities with growth potential to justify deploying profits. In such cases, they often return money to shareholders via buybacks or dividends.” You see – not only they do not want borrowing money, they can’t find uses for their profit — US has no growth potential! For 2021 — “Flush with trillions of dollars in cash, U.S. companies are on pace this year to pencil in another milestone: $1 trillion worth of corporate stock buybacks.” That’s what is driving stock market.

But I diverged again, around 2011, M2 became higher than bank credit — that’s your bad real estate debt that was incinerated inside the FED — loans were made/money were created, but then defaulting loans were taken off the books of the banks by the FED –> M2 money are out there, but the loans are not on the books anymore –> M2>bank credit. But then in 2020, M2 exploded upward and is now on a much steeper trajectory than bank credit. That’s your FED lending directly to corporations (Primary Market Corporate Credit Facility PMCCF, SMCCF and CPFF), small and mid size businesses (e.g., paycheck protection program, PPP), non profits, states, etc. The FED relaxed regulatory requirements and put banks under pressure to lend — there is an uptick in bank credit, but a majority of M2 increase in the first half of 2020 came from FED (~1.4 trillion out ~2.4 trillion increase in M2). Since then, a majority of M2 is still coming from the FED. If now we add to this FED M2, M2 coming from the government (which is hot money going directly to the consumers and not to the bank reserves) CPI-inflation is baked in the cake.

Extended and increased unemployment benefits have ended in most states, the FED stopped doing most but not all of the direct lending (PPP is still around) and is ‘on track’ for tapering asset purchases (which should reduce commercial bank lending). So, we are getting money growth under control. Still, M2 seems to grow faster than bank credit. Pandemic M2 will settle eventually in the accounts of the wealthy, and Musk will become the first trillionaire, which we all should be proud of, because we will be the first and the only country in the world with a trillionaire. But further M2 creation needs to stop. A 3-trillion debt from the government will only increase CPI-inflation pressure, send numerous families into deeper poverty and eat into our savings. It will give Musk a second trillion, which we could be proud of, except it will also impoverish a lot of people. Economic growth and recovery will begin only when the CPC finds the will to growth, until then nothing will change.

Let us know when you’re serious and tell the American people why you hate them and don’t want them to have nice things and decent lives.

I seriously doubt this is the intent and substance of this legislation. NL’s take is closer to reality.

It’s always funny and predictable that spending money on ordinary Americans to better their lives is turned on its head and gets portrayed as some kind of dangerous disaster.

Universal healthcare and livable wages are spending money on people, but that’s not what this legislation proposes. Not by a long shot. Instead, it proposes free daycare, amongst other goodies. This is spending for the wealthy elite, not for the unwashed. It allows slaves to watch slaves’ children as the slaves slave away all the live long day at their essential jobs for unlivable wages and effectively no healthcare considering the subsidies the government provides them for their marketplace healthcare go to what is effectively catastrophic insurance that can’t be used and thus the insurance executives and the shareholders pocket the subsidy as pure profit.

Every good Harbarist worth their weight in lies fervently defends the Federal Reserve with any sophistry bs they can can up with because the Fed is the beating heart of JZM (Jewish Zionist Mafia) power since the Fed pumps out the lifeblood (liquidity) to our corrupted financial markets per JZM’s demands that allows the JZM to rig the markets and maintain and enhance their power in the U.S.’s, and the rest of the world’s, economic and political systems.

*Note: The JZM is a tiny subset of Jewish people and the vast majority are not JZM members nor Hasbarists and many Jewish people are in fact are fighting the hardest against the JZM’s power. I believe that most Jewish people are good people and many have also contributed mightily to the good of this world.

How do you think the JZM bribes our politicians? Sure, there’s the backdoor bribes where they pay them for services rendered while in office but once the politician leaves office the benefit of the bribery largely expires. The most valuable bribes are the ones that require the least amount of work, have the least uncertainty, are the least traceable, and have the greatest robustness. And that comes in the form of “stock tips” and for some reason our politicians seem to be very good at growing their wealth while in office and then they, for some reason, don’t want to leave office. You can’t give reliable stock tips to politicians unless you control the financial markets and the reason the JZM controls the markets is that they control the Federal Reserve and their unlimited liquidity creation capabilities.

For over 30 years, from 1987 to 2018, we had three Fed heads and each were JZM members. What is the chance of that happening by random from a group of 2% of the population? That’s one card in a deck of 52 and we’re supposed to believe that in a game of three card poker with each card dealt from a separate deck that if one player gets dealt three Ace of Diamonds we shouldn’t consider who might be doing the dealing. Then think about the Committee to Save the World and then arguably the three people who were most involved in the COVID Wall Street bailouts (Mnuchin, Schumer (D-Wall Street), and Fink) that involved the Fed basically hooking up its money spigot straight into BlackRock which Larry Fink runs with Stanley Fisher (former head banker of Israel and Yellen’s former number two at the Fed – apparently it’s so hard to find good central bankers these days in the U.S. that we have to rely on dual citizens). Then take into consideration that Wikileaks exposed that Robber Rubin basically handpicked the economic team for the Head PR Man for the Point Zero One Percent Obama and remember how that all went and ask yourself why is it that such a small subset of a group that only consists of 2% of the population is always stirring around the Fed and devising ways to “support” the financial markets when they’re in danger of collapsing and the power structure that’s dependent upon those markets is threatened?

There’s no other way that such a small subset of a group of people that comes from 2% of the U.S. population has this much economic and political power over the population unless they work together. They’re not that special or qualified and they do nothing that benefits anyone but themselves. They raped what was left of the USSR (The “Harvard” Boyz), they brag about how they sunk Corbyn and thereby damaged the UK working class, and they also used the DNC they own to ruin the U.S.’s only slight chance out of this mess as well: Sanders.

The JZM is not the only problematic entity in the U.S. and the world, they’re not responsible for every ill in the world obviously, but since they collude and rally around the cause of all-blessed Israel … and some U.S. politicians will actually brag that they have more loyalty to Israel than their own country … they have a controlling interest in the U.S.. What that means is that they can’t get 100% of what they want but they can prevent a 100% of what they don’t.

But we’re not supposed to notice it … and especially talk about … because if we do we’re anti-semitic like Corbyn …

Z

Z, I am absolutely Ok when a person who writes “the Fed is the beating heart of JZM (Jewish Zionist Mafia)” does not read ​my posts. Obviously, my posts are not for anti-Semitic audience.

But the sequence of posts above just now demonstrates clearly the usage of anti-Semitism by the apologists for the wealthy to mislead and conceal the true state of affairs. A relative well argued post based on real FED data comes out and at least a little bit enlightens the debates and shows what is actually going on. Immediately a blowhard anti-Semite jumps in with a) exposing emotional anti-Semitism and b) attacking the poster, commanding and threatening the audience not to read the original well-argued post. And that’s how it works…

Everything written here assumes that Biden really wants what he has proposed. Many of his corporate paymasters don’t really want what’s in the bill. Sinema and Manchin could be doing him a favor.

From NL (who calls me an apologist for the wealthy) with amore to Elon:

Pandemic M2 will settle eventually in the accounts of the wealthy, and Musk will become the first trillionaire, which we all should be proud of, because we will be the first and the only country in the world with a trillionaire.

Z

Different Clue,

I can’t wait! I’m rooting for Musk. I’ve always been a huge fan of his.

When we finally get our first trillionaire … the anticipation has been killing me … it’s going to be so gratifying to the billions of working class and poor who have made this possible by sacrificing food, shelter, medical care, drinkable water, etc. so that we could get to this moment in time. It’s going to particularly warm the homeless’s heart.

They say the U.S. isn’t what it used to be. Ha! We put the first man on the moon and we’ll be the first to put one in the trillionaire stratosphere too!

Z

The anti-semitic blowhard has never heard of sarcasm and comedic intermission…

But it is also true that Musk or Bezos or one of them (or maybe we already have one deeply hidden) will become a trillionaire after the pandemic M2 washes through the economy, then gets concentrated in the financial system, increasing asset prices, separating the top from the rest even more and then settling down in money market accounts of the wealthy. It is just the way things are.

Or maybe it was not all sarcasm regarding the first trillionaire. We do love money, and we do aspire to wealth, and when we get there, we will likely be just as the wealthy who are wealthy now are. And some of us will be proud to have the first trillionaire. Just as some of us are proud to see private citizens travel to space. I can’t really fault anyone for that. I am personally rooting for Bezos. He had a humble origin, a son of teenagers, went to a public high school, studied STEM — clear evidence of early talent. What he has become since then is a different story and is not completely his fault. We love capitalism, our way of life.

@Zzzzzz……
A couple weeks ago a JZMer stole my wallet. Then a few days later a JZMer had a large pizza delivered to my home, but of course I couldn’t pay for it so I starved to death. Sad!

But nowhere near as sad as you.

Hugh — “it is the cycling of cheap money through its programs which is the big story because it is how the Fed guarantees whole asset classes at inflated prices to the tune of many tens of trillions of dollars.”

Nonsense! You have probably never heard of CDs of different duration, from 3 months to 5 years. Depositors pick a duration that suits them best, depending on their liquidity needs and risk tolerance (with longer CDs being more risky in the way that interests on CDs could increase in the longer term). Or the US treasury offering bills and bonds, of different duration. So, cycling of money through short term lending facilities is perhaps of some significance to money management at banks but not to the overall economy.

Don’t forget that the FED does not merely lend, it lends for collateral, which is certain commercial paper. In this way, it takes something that is not money and gives you a type of money (reserves). Let’s say you have a CD in a bank but don’t have enough cash to pay for rent this months before payday. You could sell your CD at a penalty and ‘crash’ a bit the CD marker or, if you could access FED, you would borrow from the FED to pay your rent using the CD as a collateral, when the payday comes, you give FED the borrowed money and get your CD back — you still lose a bit of money on the interest, but not as much as if you sold the CD. And that is how the FED supports whole assets classes.

Of course, the FED outright buys treasuries and mortgage-backed securities and now lends directly to corporations, gov and non-profits. But those are different stories.