So, read this recently:
We got $1800 under Trump, additional unemployment, temporarily ended student loan payments and an eviction moratorium.
Biden promised $2000 and only gave $1400, ended additional unemployment, eviction moratorium ended and in Feb student loan payments will restart.
— Black in the Empire (@blackintheempir) December 14, 2021
Makes the point pretty clearly, I’d say. Even people I know who hate Trump admit he did more for them than any other President of their life. People who got the additional unemployment, in particular, often had the longest good period of their lives — where they didn’t have to work and had enough money.
Whatever you think of the policy, Trump gave people money or helped with their student loans, and Biden is taking money away from them and leaving them vulnerable to eviction.
I can’t see how there is any way, absent some big surprises, that the Democrats don’t get wiped out in 2022, and it won’t just be “off years, we lose.”
(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)
The problem is that Republicans now feel more populist than Democrats; they appear more willing to just give money or help. It may be true that Republicans and a couple Democratic senators de-railed a lot of the good Biden wanted to do, but that doesn’t matter on the ground. If Biden can’t do good things or doesn’t want to (the truth is both), who cares? The end result is the same if your student loans re-start, your unemployment checks stop, and you get evicted.
Not only isn’t Biden FDR, he isn’t even going to look as helpful as Trump.
Presley
If the Republicans ever became pro-choice – or even just neutral on abortion and birth control – I would probably support them. Until then, I will still vote Democrat (even if I have to hold my nose to do it).
elsewhere
Sorry to say, but this is also something Trump is trying to do for us, with an assist from Biden –
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/11/30/congress-asleep-switch-biden-continues-trump-era-ploy-privatize-medicare
Lex
The larger point is that whether it’s trump or Biden, we receive crumbs. The relative quantity and quality of those crumbs is noticeable but they’re still crumbs. And trump didn’t do it to be nice or good. Which is important. They resent giving us the crumbs. Your point about the Dems stands, of course. They pretend to want to shower us with crumbs, then they don’t, then they blame the voters for their losses.
Z
Well, things are setting up real nice for the two dancing partner parties in 2023. The dems have raised the debt ceiling but instead of raising it enough while they have control of the House and Senate so that they won’t have to revisit it during Biden’s presidency they have raised it just enough so that it will hold only until 2023 when the dems will probably lose the mid-terms and the reps will have control of both the Senate and House. Then there will be austerian compromises that the dems “have” to make in order to the get the reps to raise the debt ceiling and not pull the trigger on their gun supposedly aimed at sending the government into deadly default (((which the reps would never do anyway IMO because it would upset the all-important stock market and therefore the value of their personal stock portfolios))).
Hey, 2023 is looking just like 2011 when The Head PR Man for the Point Zero One Percent Obama’s administration got “forced” into the same position. Imagine that, straight from the same playbook. Funny how Biden and the dems never learn …
What’s next? Another dem invented sequester to further “force” the dems to acquiesce to republicans’ austerity demands in 2023?
Z
js
A lot of Republican states never even GOT the expanded unemployment. It was blocked at the state level, even though the Fed gov was paying for it.
Thomas B Golladay
@Presley
Thank you for demonstrating why we can’t have nice things and the Uniparty runs the country.
Also if you support casual abortion you have no moral compass and reject the Social Contract.
Both parties establishments are scumbags. Republicans however are purging the establishment from their party and getting the old working class base back in power. Democrats went woke, sidestepped the actual working class base, and got them to fight each other.
And with Big Tech’s brazen assault on free flow of information, the Establishment narrative is being exposed as false as alternative platforms that don’t censor get the truth out.
The Great Reckoning is coming. A combined environmental, epidemiological, pharmaceutical, totalitarian overreach, and economic disaster has led to this. When it ends, all the current leadership in power right now with the unscientific and totalitarian lockdowns and vaccine mandates will fall and be forever reviled.
But before we get there, there will be a complete catastrophic system collapse throughout the “Western World.”
So if you haven’t exited the system and prepped, your window of opportunity is rapidly closing.
Z
Too bad Alice Rivlin is no longer available to entice the young-uns by twerking for austerity. Oh, such pleasant memories …
https://www.crfb.org/blogs/can-kicks-back-does-harlem-shake
Z
Z
JS,
I didn’t know that:
It could be, maybe I missed it, but I do know for sure that many republican states ended extended unemployment benefits early which I read that the Biden Administration could have fought them on and forced them not to, though obviously they didn’t even try to probably because President he/bipartisan Biden is a strong believer in the “dignity of work”.
As one can see, Scranton Joe has impressed this ethos upon his son Hunter who is presently probably furiously blowing paint bubbles on canvass for the paltry profit of hundred of thousands of dollars per masterpiece after previously getting paid by Burisma hundreds of thousands of dollars for breathing.
I hope Hunter is fully vaccinated. His dignity and financial well-being is tied tighter to the health of his lungs than most other proud working class Americans. I’d certainly hate to see him out on the streets hocking his laptops to make ends meet.
Z
different clue
For those who were subsisting on one crumb a day, getting two crumbs a day was twice as much crumbage. They may not look deeper into Trump’s long range motive. ” Don’t look a gift-crumb in the mouth” as the saying goes.
Biden is and will remain a better President than Herbert Hoover was, but not by all that much. And that is a problem. And people who have had their last crumb snatched away ( let’s start evicting people, let’s resume the student loan payback racket) won’t even consider Biden somewhat better than Herbert Hoover.
A really smart President would promise ahead of time to abdicate leadership on the abortion “issue”. He or she would promise to veto any bill about abortion crossing the Big Desk, no matter what the bill wanted to do about it. Force the Congress to agree on something about abortion by 2/3rds. Or force the voting public to elect such a Congress.
Astrid
What kind of moral compass brings children into a world you already admit to be on fire, especially unwanted children who are likely to suffer due to lack of social support?
And what kind of moral compass assumes that people with a very specific set of beliefs deserves to force their world view on strangers who must bear the physical and financial burdens of carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term?
Nonetheless, leaving the gaslighter Dems for the open creep GOP seems, unadvised.
NR
“Casual” abortion is very much not a thing. Any woman who has ever had an abortion will tell you (if they are willing to talk about it at all) that it was a gut-wrenching decision that they agonized over and would have done anything not to have to make. Calling it “casual” is, frankly, disgusting, but unfortunately it’s what we’ve come to expect from Republicans.
Ché Pasa
Republicans don’t care whether you have an abortion or not. They have no interest in your child, dead or alive.
They have no desire that Roe v Wade be overturned by the SCOTUS, but they do want power over women and everyone else who isn’t worthy of holding power (Dems, Black and Brown people, the poors and so on). The issue is always and only power. Power to compel obedience. Power to extract tribute. Power of life and death over The Other.
Did Trump do marginally more for the Little People due to the crises than Biden has indicated he’s willing and/or able to do? Indeed. The difference isn’t a lot given the whole picture, but we’re not talking rational considerations, spreadsheets, charts and graphs. We’re talking emotions, how you feel.
And a lot of folks who felt pretty good all in all back in January or March or even July are starting to feel they’re being punished — even though they’ve done everything right, by the rules, colored within the lines yada yada.
Yet they’re paying an arm and a leg for practically everything, they’re facing higher interest charges on their loans (which practically everyone has to have to live more or less decently), and student loan repayment is to be demanded all too soon, they feel they’re being forced back to work for terrible bosses and wages,
Trump and the split party controlled congress just gave them money, forstalled student loan repayments and briefly cut (child) poverty “in half.”
The Biden regime and Dem congress seems content to ditz and futz around, pull the rug out from under numerous constituencies, and smile through it all.
They know what they are doing, and they know what the likely results will be. Not pretty.
Their need for power apparently doesn’t match that of the Rs, does it?
(And yet we’re informed that the Dem’s core constituency — the ever present and powerful PMC — controls everything! )
Greg T
The Democratic Party has been the party of austerity since Bill Clinton. They pretend to carry on the Roosevelt legacy, but in fact, the party elites despise the New Deal. They reference it to get votes, but they have absolutely no intention of enacting any policy that smacks of New Deal legislation. If anything, the current Democratic Party is pre-Roosevelt, in other words, deeply patrician and very conservative.
Some leftists seem to not understand this. The party is not worth supporting at all. In fact, the Democratic Party is an enemy ; it exists to obstruct egalitarian policies while feigning support for them. Until enough people understand this in their bones, and are willing to act upon it, nothing will change.
Willy
Just because Republicans are casual about their mischaricaturizations of The Others, doesn’t mean they aren’t out to pay off the occasional Other to ruin it for the rest of us. And yeah, Biden could be a bit tougher on those Others. Not saying he’d fare better as a narcissistic demagogue nutjob demanding total loyalty or else, but just by being tougher.
BobbyK
I like to peruse the so-called liberal web sites and you’d think Biden was the second coming of FDR. These sites studiously ignore the fact Biden is screwing people over with extreme prejudice.
someofparts
It was marketing genius to call the temper tantrums of the death god spokespersons pro-life. No one is more hostile to life at any scale, from the planetary to the gynecological. The mentality that thinks a woman should be forced to have more children than she can feed is the same mind that thinks eternal economic growth is essential. Eternal growth is great for tumors, but for human households, not so much.
anon
This affects me directly because I have student loans and have benefitted immensely from the moratorium these last nearly two years. I did not expect Biden to wipe out student loan debt, but I was hoping that he would at least be politically expedient by extending the student loan moratorium through 2022. Americans should also receive more stimulus checks in the new year. This is what any president and political party who wants to win would do. We are still in a pandemic with hundreds of people dying every several days in my state. It’s cruel to force people to try to return to the way things were before the pandemic when clearly we may never return to that life ever again. It’s insulting that Biden and his supporters have likened him to FDR. Biden will never have the courage or convictions to pass legislation that would help Americans on a broad scale.
Willy
BobbyK, we need more details, hopefully backed with credible stats and not lame links to grifter conservatives like Dr. Steve Turley. We see too much of that these days.
someofparts, damn straight. Best I can figure, it’s about white men trying to control the women, or their women wanting other women to be controlled.
different clue
@Ché Pasa,
Is there something you have been able to do in your life, house, yard, etc., to cover yourself with greased teflon against one or another or more of the grasping Republican tentacles of power?
If so, what is it?
different clue
@ Greg T,
There are perhaps two ways to view this.
If the DemParty is now essentiallistically the class enemy right down to its nuclear and mitochondrial DNA, then it can not be worked with but only against. And people who see it that way will have to act ( or not act ) on that understanding.
If the DemParty is under enemy occupation, then people who think they can reconquer it and take it back and make it us’s own instead of them’s own can try to do a Long March through all the institutions, channels and nodes of the DemParty, purging and burning out all the DLC ClintoBama embeds and gladios as they go. If they can exterminate every last single ClintoBama embed gladio from out of the DemParty, then they can make it a New Deal Revival party.
There is perhaps a view from totally “outside” the electoral party system. There may be people who will view the DemParty as “damage” to be “routed around”.
People of whichever view should do ( or not do ) what they most believe might work based on what they understand the problem to be. They will do their best work working on something they believe in. People of whichever view should also leave the people of other views alone to do their best work based on their respective beliefs about what the nature of the problem is.
Z
President he/bipartisan Jo Biden sure is giving the country’s youth and working class plenty to be pissed about coming into the new year:
1. His administration is apparently laser focused on making it as efficient as possible to resume student loan payments. Thanks, Joe! Nice to see what the government focuses their resources on and what they didn’t: making sure that rent assistance, and extended unemployment benefits ran smoothly – you know things that were supposed to benefit the populace and not their donors. This while he has refused to live up to his campaign promise to relieve students debtors of at least some of their debt. This as he is currently sitting on a legal opinion on whether he has the authority to forgive student debt by executive order (((gee, I wonder what that memo tells him – do you think it would be fully redacted if it told him he couldn’t?))), which they are probably burying while they commission a second opinion because the current one didn’t tell them what they wanted it to. Add to this the fact that he is probably more responsible than any other person currently in government that people can’t discharge their student debt in bankruptcy court.
2. The BBB, which he promised progressives that he would push over the line … look in my eyes and trust me … if they gave him a vote on the infrastructure package, is hung up and therefore Child Tax Credits are in danger of expiring and there is no climate change legislation from President Nothing Will Fundamentally Change’s administration.
What a corrupt clown show! I hope the youth in this country refuse to make any more student debt payments en masse. This is how and where they have to make a stand IMO. It’s an easy rebellion, they don’t even have to leave their homes, just refuse to make payments on their student debt and force this criminally corrupt government led by a cognitively challenged clown to pull off their nice guys masks and use their muscle to garnish their wages and see where that all leads.
Z
Greg T
@ different clue
Fair enough.
We diverge into inside or outside strategies. I’m of the opinion that the party should be bled dry. If they want to rely exclusively on oligarchs for funding, then let the oligarchs muster the votes and organization to defeat the Republicans. To me, the idea of taking over the party is fanciful—not realistic. We have twenty years of evidence to see this.
To me, you can’t purge the leadership without also damaging the party. The damage has to be done outside of the party apparatus.
Ché Pasa
@DC
Simple living motto: “Make nice with those you can; stay away from those you can’t.”
Remember we live directly or indirectly under Republican power and authority. Even where Democrats hold elected office, they are under the thrall and power of Republicans who are allowed to determine what can and can’t be done by government and for whom. In my county it’s quite direct: all elected offices and most appointed ones are held by Republicans. Most are “very fine people.” Some, not so much.
But you know what? If Dems had that kind of power, it wouldn’t be much different.
Soredemos
I think any notions that the Democratic Party can be siezed have been thoroughly disproven by this point.
different clue
@ Greg T,
In other words, all non-oligarchs who currently send any money to any DemParty-related thing should send their money to something totally else instead? To let the oligarchs be the “last DemParty funders standing”? To attrit and degrade the DemParty’s revenue stream and/or public image ( ” look who the only people who fund it are”) to where it is too weak to protect itself from eventual efforts to eliminate it from existence?