Don't worry about Bill

#NeverForget pic.twitter.com/5OyfiIkgnt

— Bill Cassidy’s Mardi Gras Beads (@BillGras) October 4, 2020

Oh noooo Bill Cassidy voted to convict Trump in a meaningless gesture where the outcome was foreordained and is getting "harsh backlash" from Louisiana Republicans  

Almost immediately after his vote to convict, Louisiana Republicans blasted Cassidy. Attorney General Jeff Landry said the vote was “extremely disappointing,” calling the impeachment trial unconstitutional. He said Cassidy fell into a “trap laid by Democrats to have Republicans attack Republicans.”

Mike Bayham, the secretary of the LAGOP, said he hopes the Legislature will revamp the state’s election system to hold closed primaries, which he believes will result in more reliable Republican candidates. Currently, all candidates for office appear on the same ballot regardless of party, in what's known as a jungle primary.

“Bill Cassidy is a senator without a party as of today,” he said.

It would be a shame if the Republicans, who do control the legislature after all, decide to scrap the jungle primary over this.  It's one of the few good things about Louisiana's electoral system. But more likely nobody will remember any of this in six weeks, let alone the six years before Cassidy is up for reelection again.  By that time, the ever expanding Republican right wing will have found a new mode of expression beyond the personality of Donald Trump and Cassidy will just as likely be positioned relative to it in a way that rides that wave along with the rest of them. 

Because the thing to understand about the difference between the Republican right wing and the rest of the Republican Party is that there isn't any.  Regardless, wealthy liberals and corporate media institutions are going out of their way right now to pretend that there is some sort of schism between the "educated" Republicans and the crazy ones.  Here, for example, we see Nancy Pelosi repeating and expounding on a line that she has pushed for a few years now and Joe Biden has repeated.  America "needs a strong Republican Party" for some reason. Why? It's probably true that the Democrats enjoy the convenient excuse for not delivering things they promise to their voters.  But the country has had a strong Republican Party for decades and look where that got us. 

Really, though, the Democrats who pine for it are telling on their own class biases.  Here is Pelosi talking about candidate recruitment.  

When we recruit candidates to run for office or we see them self-recruiting, we always say or we see them saying, well I could be the president of my university or the head of my hospital department or this or that so I have to think about whether I have to run for Congress, we always say we don't want people without options that's why we are looking to you to run. Because you have options.

You see, ideally, the republic is guided by university presidents and heads of hospitals as opposed to, say, bartenders or nurses who become civil rights activists. We can't trust those people because their "options" are limited. Remarkably, she's talking there about who the Democrats - the ostensible party of the people - envision for their party's leadership.  Specifically she means to contrast this with the GOP where we are meant to understand that the rubes have taken over.  But this isn't just about Pelosi's hostility toward poor and working class Americans' material stake in or aptitude for engaging with political outcomes. It's about the fundamental lie she and other like minded observers are telling about what's keeping us from enjoying the benefits of a "strong Republican Party" right now.  

A recent New Republic column by Osita Nwanevu written after the House voted to strip Marjoire Taylor Green of her committee assignments, talks about how conspiracy theories like QAnon are frequently mischaracterized as merely a consequence of ignorance on the part of their adherents. 

Of all the “big lies” distorting our politics, one of the largest and most popular—back in 2010 and now—has been the notion that our political divisions are the product of under- or miseducation. The Republican Party’s flight into lunacy, it’s often suggested, has a fairly simple cause. The unwashed aren’t getting The Facts in school or from their media sources, and it’s up to the enlightened to shower The Facts upon them—perhaps, as some “disinformation” experts recently suggested to The New York Times, with a “reality czar” at the White House manning the hose. This was the explanation many turned to as the Trump era began, and it was the explanation many turned to for how it ended. 

But this doesn't actually describe most conspiracy-minded Republicans. Or, at least, according to this Atlantic article Nwanevu cites, it doesn't describe the kind of people who stormed the Capitol in January. 

The average age of the arrestees we studied is 40. Two-thirds are 35 or older, and 40 percent are business owners or hold white-collar jobs. Unlike the stereotypical extremist, many of the alleged participants in the Capitol riot have a lot to lose. They work as CEOs, shop owners, doctors, lawyers, IT specialists, and accountants. Strikingly, court documents indicate that only 9 percent are unemployed.

Looks like more than a handful people who "have options" there. Not that any of this should surprise anyone.  The Republican Party has long been and is still a party of the ruling class establishment.  Its radical movements are not subversive challenges to that establishment, they are establishmentarian reactions to progress.  

Democrats will still occasionally refer to voters' inherent understanding of this when it's convenient for them. But, as Democrats have become more dominated by ruling class interests themselves, those moments are less frequent.  A party that depends on finance capital for its funding and college educated white collar professionals for its electoral strategy is less likely to cast itself as oppositional to the elites in the other party.  Instead, they have to build a classist myth of paper "deplorables" to run against.  Whether or not one finds that strategy effective depends on what we assume are its goals.  If we think the point is to maintain the sinecures and fundraising streams maintained by the career pols and staffers embedded in the party infrastructure, it's been a smashing success. If we think the idea should be to actually halt or even resist slightly the country's inexorable decades long march further and further to the right, then the results have been less good. 

Nwanevu appears to be giving them the benefit of the doubt in offering this advice.

Democrats should try campaigning on the truth: The Republican Party is controlled by intelligent, college-educated, and affluent elites who concoct dangerous nonsense to paper over a bigoted, plutocratic agenda and to justify attacks on the democratic process. That agenda and those attacks are supported by millions of reasonably intelligent voters who will believe or claim to believe anything that furthers the objective of keeping conservatives in control of this country forever. Simply pointing to figures like Greene and hoping the indignation of college graduates will do the rest is a mistake. Instead, Democrats should present voters with a material choice between a party that has nothing to offer the majority of Americans but abuse and conspiratorial flimflam and a party committed to building a democracy and an economy that work for all. If they don’t, the lizard people who run the GOP will be running the government again in no time.

If the Democrats truly were a party "committed to building a democracy and an economy that work for all," they would be well served to take this advice. But assuming this much good faith on their part has become so absurdly fruitless an exercise that even going this far into the act of pointing it out is boring. So forget trying to convince them of anything.  What readers should take away from Nwanevu's analysis, though, is that it is possible for smart, educated people to believe in and pursue evil politics. The "we need a strong Republican Party" wing of the Democrats don't want to acknowledge this because they, too, believe in and pursue evil politics with a different branding. But justifying their kind of evil depends on the false idea that education/expertise automatically equals morality.

Bill Cassidy has a lot of education and expertise. He is, in fact, a medical doctor.  Before he cast his meaningless vote to hypothetically convict Trump, he directed that education and expertise toward the defense of the petro-chemical corporations who regularly poison Louisiana residents while funding his campaigns. 

President Joe Biden’s recent utterance of “Cancer Alley” has raised the hackles of Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy. The Baton Rouge Republican said the president’s use of the term, rooted in longstanding concerns about toxic air pollution in the industrial corridor between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, was an insult against Louisiana.

“I'm not going to accept that sort of slam upon our state,” Cassidy said in a call with reporters Tuesday. “It sounds like great rhetoric. But again, I don't accept that slam."

In 2017 Doctor Cassidy's proposed "repeal and replace" scheme for gutting the Affordable Care Act would have resulted in massive cuts in Medicaid care for the most vulnerable patients.

Critics of Cassidy's proposals, though, said that amounts to a substantial cut in the Medicaid funding that would jeopardize care for the elderly, disabled and low-income residents in Louisiana.

Jan Moller, director of the Louisiana Budget Project, which advocates on behalf of low- and moderate-income families in the state, said the cuts in the Cassidy-Graham-Heller bill would leave states scrambling to cover inflating costs.

"This would rip a large and growing hole in our state budget while eliminating all guarantees of assistance for low-income residents," said Moller, whose group has actively opposed other recent Republican proposals to replace the Affordable Care Act.

His 2020 family leave proposal has been described as a "Trojan horse" bill that would push more families into bankruptcy. 

Some policy researchers have criticized this plan as tantamount to a loan that working families will have to pay off with reduced tax credits in the future.

Kathleen Romig notes that this policy will have no actual protections for employees seeking to take time off, so many workers in service sectors would risk losing their jobs entirely. Romig also points out that the details are sparse on how this plan would cover costs for low-income workers. By front-loading the child tax credit, they would be sacrificing their tax credits on income tax returns for years to come.

“The bill thus provides no net new financial help for families,” she wrote in an article for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “In effect, it is a loan that families would repay during some of a family’s most financially crunched years. . . . Families who took this ‘advance’ would have to repay it for ten or 15 years.”

And who could forget Cassidy's most startling breach of the trust we are meant to place in our experts when, during a 2018 Fox News segment, the Senator from Louisiana demonstrated an alarming lack of understanding of how a jambalaya is prepared.  

While Mike Bayham might declare that Cassidy is "a senator without a party as of today," his consistent record of support for conservative causes and hostility toward the poor suggests that six years from now he will probably be as welcome as ever in either party.  Or to put it another way, he's not exactly someone "without options."

We're never coming back from this

Not sure if it's really sinking in for people yet, but "the economy" on the other side of COVID just isn't going to have as many full time jobs as it did before. 

There are still 10.7 million fewer people with jobs than there were in February before the pandemic, although just over half of the jobs lost in March and April have now been recovered. At this rate, it would take the economy another 16 months to gain back those jobs, although economists say that job gains get more difficult for every month that the recession lasts.

All 10.7 million of those jobs are not coming back.  That isn't part of the plan. The bosses have already won the pandemic and are going to be fine without most of us.

We aren't in the early, completely catastrophic early days of the crisis anymore. People making above $60k are basically back to work, according to the Opportunity Insights Data. The group that is still badly struggling is low-wage service workers. pic.twitter.com/XSRhjokFTc

— Jordan Weissmann (@JHWeissmann) October 1, 2020

What's left to do now is for the rest of us to "just get used to" the new slightly shittier normal. Which is why, even today, as the nation woke up the news that the President himself has tested positive for the virus, the push is on to end the emergency and impose a sense that the current state of affairs is just the way we live now and that it's time to get on with that.  

Which is why, despite Nancy Pelosi's performative "optimism" that the Trump diagnosis changes the political dynamic, the thing to understand is that help is not on the way.  The US economy... insofar as what it can produce for the benefit of poor and working class people... slid completely off the edge of help in 2008 and has not been brought back from that.  The pandemic is just another step in normalizing the status to which most of us have been relegated.  We're never coming back from this.  We aren't really even expected to.

If you elect us, we will give you..... ?

Seems like the stimulus deadlock should be a perfect opportunity for Democrats to speak clearly to voters about the stakes of the election.  We want to give you a stimulus check. We want you to have full unemployment benefits. We want to rescue your states and cities.  Elect us so we can tell Mitch McConnell to fuck off and do these things for you. 

Is that their message, though? It doesn't seem that way. 

Speaker Nancy Pelosi was highly pessimistic Thursday about the chances of clinching a coronavirus relief deal with the White House, leaving House Democrats on a path to approve their own stimulus package and head home to run for reelection.

Pelosi cast serious doubt on the likelihood of an agreement during a private call with House Democrats Thursday, stressing multiple times that Republicans don’t “share our values” on the need to provide trillions of dollars in health and economic relief to Americans impacted by the pandemic.

"Republicans don't share our values" sounds like a good start to what they could be saying.  But, next, comes the pitch. Tell voters to get them out of the way so we can help you. But that's not the pitch at all.  Instead, it is this.

Moderate Democrats had been pushing Pelosi for months to put another bill on the floor — one that could be used to further pressure the GOP into negotiations, while also demonstrating to voters back home that they were still seeking compromise with Republicans.

Some members of the caucus grumbled about the end result, arguing that Democrats were simply negotiating against themselves, and that there was no point in approving a bill that included even less funds than the May version. But centrist Democrats argued that it was crucial to demonstrate that their party was still negotiating, while the White House and Senate Republicans were in no rush for a deal.

Voters! We are trying very hard to work with Republicans so we can give you less help! Not sure what that asks voters to do, exactly.  I guess... be less mad about the impotence?

Something about words and actions

There's a saying about that somewhere I know I've heard before.  Maybe it applies here. 

California’s governor Gavin Newsom, for example, has announced he has “no time for climate change deniers” despite approving some forty-eight new fracking permits since April (fracking having been strongly linked to an increase in global emissions). Nancy Pelosi, having derisively dismissed the Green New Deal (“The green dream or whatever they call it”), blames climate change for both her home state’s raging wildfires and last month’s hurricane on the Gulf Coast.

Barack Obama, in characteristically elliptical fashion, took to Twitter to declare: “The fires across the West Coast are just the latest examples of the very real ways our changing climate is changing our communities. Protecting our planet is on the ballot. Vote like your life depends on it—because it does.” During Obama’s two terms at the head of the most powerful office in the world, US gas production increased some 35 percent while production of crude oil grew by an astonishing 80 percent — a fact the former president has actually taken to boasting about.

These examples, and many others like them, underscore the need for a new understanding of climate change denial that goes beyond mere acknowledgment of scientific reality. The fact is, while more US politicians than ever now pay lip service to the basic conclusions of environmental science, the leaders of both parties continue to preside over a consensus of complacency determined to dismiss transformative prescriptions like the Green New Deal as utopian or too expensive.

It's been a busy month thanks to... *gestures at all of everything*... so I haven't had time to finish writing about the Democratic and Republican conventions. But one theme the Democrats pushed relentlessly was Joe Biden's capacity for "empathy."  In Zoom video after dimly lit Zoom video, speakers testified about the times Joe personally had reached out to someone to let them know how well he understood their trauma, how much he cared about and validated their pain.  Almost nothing was said about what he planned to do about any of it.  In fact, one may have come away from the convention with the impression that nothing can be done.  It's a strange thing to offer to voters but it does seem to be in line with the Democratic brand.

Taking it coming and going

It's not enough that the fed can print trillions of dollars and just hand it over to the banks. That insulting little $1200 scrap you thought you were getting in return for letting them do that, yeah well the bank can take that too.

This week, the $1,200 CARES Act payments Congress approved in response to the coronavirus crisis will begin to appear in Americans’ bank accounts. The funds will be wired to eligible recipients who previously authorized the IRS to post their refunds (or Social Security payments) through direct deposit. This will speed relief far more quickly than having the IRS mail a check, which could take up to five months.

But the money may not make it into the hands of those who need it to pay bills, buy food, or just survive amid mass unemployment and widespread suffering. Individuals might first have to fend off their own bank, which has just been given the power to seize the $1,200 payment and use it to pay off outstanding debt.

Do we know how profoundly fucked we are? Has it even begun to sink in a little bit?

I really don't think it has.  This week, the news is still trying to get you to focus your hopes on the "Phase 4" relief bill.  Ooh maybe they'll finally get it right this time!  If there even is a  Phase 4, they definitely will not get it right. All of this is just play acting.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer said Monday that they won’t agree to the Trump administration’s insistence on more money for small business loans unless their demands are met for additional funding for hospitals, state and local governments and food stamp recipients.

But Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the Democrats’ demands should wait for another day, while the small business program needs more money now.

“We’ve committed to small businesses. We should top up that program now,” Mnuchin said at a briefing of the White House coronavirus task force. “I know the Democrats want to talk about more money for hospitals and states. Right now, we’re just sending the money out to the hospitals and states. They haven’t come close to using that money.”

The time for Pelosi and Schumer to fight for those things was before they gave the Republicans everything they wanted in the "CARES Act" bailout. Instead they got nothing and now they have nothing to bargain.  Mnuchin is asking to "fix" the SBA program (which does need fixing!) but that isn't something Republicans are going to make a deal with you over. Certainly not over anything that matters.

As far as the right is concerned, they are "winning" the COVID disaster.  The corporate-financial sector can print as much money as it ever needs or wants forever while scores of Americans are about to be force-marched back to work under the most precarious and dangerous conditions they've faced in a long time with no expectation of relief from anyone in power.  Mitch McConnell isn't about to bargain that away.  The time to force him to do that was before you gave him everything he wanted up front. 

If Democrats actually wanted the stimulus to be better they would have fought for a better stimulus. But, really, Democrats only want to appear as though they would have liked a better stimulus. The game now is have a fake fight over a bill that might not even happen so they can say later that they "fought" for you.

Prospects for resolving the congressional standoff are unclear as there appear to be few if any negotiations occurring between the two sides.

“Small businesses, hospitals, frontline workers and state and local governments across the country are struggling to keep up with this national crisis. They need more help from the federal government and they need it fast — our nurses, doctors and health-care workers need it as much as anyone else,” Schumer and Pelosi said in their statement.

“Further changes must also be made to the SBA’s assistance initiative, as many eligible small businesses continue to be excluded from the Paycheck Protection Program by big banks with significant lending capacity,” they said. “Funding for Covid-19 SBA disaster loans and grants must be significantly increased to satisfy the hundreds of billions in oversubscribed demand.”

Pelosi and Schumer had demanded an additional $150 billion for cities and states, $100 billion for hospitals and health-care systems and an additional 15 percent increase in benefits for food stamp recipients.

In truth, though, they don't give a shit.  Otherwise they wouldn't be trying to open negotiations at $150 billion for states and cities when the National Governor's Associations is already (all nice and bi-partisanly) asking for $500 billion. 

Nevermind that, though. In a few weeks, we will have "reopened the economy" and the conversation will already be about how soon we can cut off everyone's unemployment and force them back to work. And while that's happened we'll still be asked to thank Nancy and Chuck for having tried so hard to help.

Needless to say, this is not how you "go big"

Every single thing is on fire.  We have to choose, right now, whether we are going to fight the fire on behalf of every single person or if we are going to allow predators move about and swallow up the vulnerable during the chaos.  Mitch McConnell is a predator.

The 247-page McConnell CARES Act puts the leader’s imprint on opening talks with Democrats in Congress as lawmakers prepare to work through the weekend to fast-track perhaps the most urgent legislative undertaking since the 2008 financial crisis.

The negotiations are certain to encounter difficulties ahead, despite the pressure on Washington to act. Trump’s Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and economic adviser Larry Kudlow will meet behind closed doors with Senate leaders. Democrats say the Republican plan does not go far enough and some Senate Republicans object to certain provisions.

“We are beginning to review Senator McConnell’s proposal and on first reading, it is not at all pro-worker and instead puts corporations way ahead of workers,” said a joint statement from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer.

"McConnell CARES" They keep trying to tell us irony is dead but it's still very much our leading cultural product.  Just look at this shit.

Under the plan, the government would provide households an early tax rebate worth up to $1,200 for an individual or $2,400 for a married couple, with an extra $500 for each of their children. (So far, so good). The payments will be based on a household’s 2018 tax return, or if it didn’t submit one, their 2019 filing.

But the checks will shrink for both low and high earners. Americans with little to no tax liability (aka, poor folks) will only receive a minimum payment of $600, unless they earned less than $2,500, in which case they get zilch. Low-wage workers who don’t have a federal tax return for 2018 or 2019—adults generally aren’t required to file one they if earn less than the standard deduction—also won’t qualify for the early rebate. (They could still get it next year if they file taxes for 2020, but by that time it will be a bit late.) Meanwhile, the payments phase down for workers who make more than $75,000 and drop to zero for those making $99,000 and above (double those numbers for joint filers).

This is absolutely brutal. Friday, the state of Louisiana announced it received 47,000 new unemployment claims this week. A one time $1200 check helps absolutely none of these people. The nascent depression is said to be a "service-led" event. It is hitting waiters, cooks, bartenders hotel workers, performers, and so-called "gig economy" and informal cash economy workers first. The great majority of these workers are not eligible for severance or sick leave so they do not benefit from the emergency leave measures prioritized in congress earlier in the week.  Likely most of these people will fall within the "little to no tax liability" category which means they get even less direct aid than the targeted "middle class" recipients. In the midst of a crisis that is falling hardest on the poorest Americans, this is a bill that further punishes the poor.

Who will protect them?  We'd love to sit here and tell you the Democrats can do this. We know they've been advised by Rep. Maxine Waters as to how they should proceed.   The Waters memo (it's a policy memo and not yet incorporated into a bill) proposes substantial direct aid to individuals ($2,000 per month) with bailouts for state and local governments, Americans with student debt and the homeless.  McConnell wants to give poor and working class Americans almost nothing while handing multi-billion dollar bailouts to airlines and oil companies.

But so far the Democrats haven't moved on Waters' proposals. Instead they've been doing everything they can to help pull the process in McConnell's direction. In fact, the first voice raised in favor of limiting and "means testing" cash payments to workers wasn't McConnell's. It was Nancy Pelosi's.

In technical economic jargon, Pelosi wants to "means test" cash aid in response to coronavirus: Don't give the checks to everyone, but target them to the poorest people, by at least scaling up the checks for people further down the income ladder, or most likely phasing them out completely for Americans above a certain income threshold. Pelosi's deputy chief of staff, Drew Hammill, fleshed this point out further in a tweet: "The Speaker believes we should look at refundable tax credits, expanded [unemployment insurance] and direct payments — but MUST be targeted."

Means testing may seem reasonable. But it's actually not a great idea even in the best of times. And in a crisis situation like the social and economic lockdown necessitated by the coronavirus, direct and universal cash aid is one of the best single policy responses available. The fact that Pelosi had the chance to lead this charge a week ago and demurred, insisting on means testing as a condition, is blinkered and insane, on both the politics and the policy merits.

There are obvious positions the Democrats can take to claim the moral high ground. The Waters memo outlines some of it.  I think also everyone should listen to this interview with Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and economist Stephanie Kelton this week about the scope of what's happening and what the scale of the response should be. Here is AOC answering a question about whether the Democratic response has been sufficient.

MH: No, I was gonna say, Congresswoman, do you sign on to all of that? And also a follow up. Katie Porter, your fellow freshman Democrat from California came out in the Atlantic yesterday and said she disagrees with Speaker Pelosi is focused on “refundable tax credits” over direct cash payments. She says that’s too slow. Do you agree with Katie Porter? Is the Pelosi/Schumer way just too slow given how fast the economy is going downwards right now?

AOC: Yes, I completely agree. I sit with Katie Porter on the Financial Services Committee and she’s absolutely right. And I agree with Professor Kelton. I think one thing that’s important to underscore when Professor Kelton is talking about well, we want to look, last time we only have one bite at this apple, there won’t be appetite. We have to examine why there wasn’t political appetite to do more in 2008. And the reason for that was because there was a package that was entirely designed to favor corporations, to bail out Wall Street that was more concerned with stock prices than wages and the health of Wall Street than the actual healthcare system. And that’s why there wasn’t political appetite to do more because we passed out billions of dollars and then the CEOs came in flying in on their private jets, asking for more. And so that was the core of why Americans rejected doing more after the first package.

Now is a very different time. If we focus our package on immediate bailouts for everyday people, making sure that we’re issuing things like mortgage and rent and student loan debt moratoriums, making sure that we’re getting cash into people’s hands, ensuring the fact that if they have to go to the hospital, coronavirus related or not because as we know this can trigger a series of other health issues, that you will be financially okay. And that is the number one thing that we need to do right now. We need to be introducing stabilizers to working families. And Katie Porter is absolutely right on the point of tax credits. You know, I think sometimes with all due respect to my colleagues, we get into this, you know, there’s a lot of like this 90s wonkery going on where if we do a backdoor tax credit, oh, that’s a clever way of helping people. But it doesn’t address the core issue, which is that people are experiencing a shock right now. We need to get checks into people’s hands. If you’re concerned about it being means-based, tax it on the other end. Get everyone a check right now. And then if you want to make sure that the millionaire’s don’t get 1,000 bucks, do an extra, you know, tax them on the other end of that and make sure that they can’t wriggle out of that.

People are in trouble. Just give people money.  "How do we pay for it?" STFU! Here is Rep. Rashida Tlaib's plan to mint trillion dollar coins to pay for it.  We can shoot the money cannon at people to help them out right now. This is what needs to happen.

To see why, one need look no further than New Orleans' City Hall where Friday afternoon Mayor Cantrell appeared once again to lecture New Orleanians on their failure to adequately observe social distancing directives.  Unfortunately, the mayor's message, no matter how loud she makes it, continues to be mixed.

In a fiery press conference Friday, Mayor LaToya Cantrell issued her strongest demands to date that residents stay home and shut down non-essential businesses to slow the spread of the deadly coronavirus in the city, where cases have grown to more than 300 since March 9.

Cantrell doubled-down on restrictions the city put in place earlier this week with a "stay at home mandate." But despite her forceful rhetoric, the mandate does not include any significant new restrictions on businesses or residents and aligns with what other communities are doing around the country.

Coronavirus is dangerous. Every day we learn more about how dangerous it can be, even to those who may not have considered themselves part of the "at risk" population.  But, really, there is only one population of humanity. If any part of it is "at risk" then we all are. That's the whole point behind the "flatten the curve" idea in the first place.  Everyone has to have everyone else's back. Which is why, in order to ensure that workers stay home to protect the vulnerable, we have to assure them they will be taken care of too.

But Cantrell, and the tourism business owners who advise her, know only how to use a crisis to intimidate their employees into submission.  As long as people are afraid they have no choice but to go to work they are going to leave the house and go to work. If you give people no support, if you give them no money, if you give them no reason to expect that they will have a job when the crisis ends unless they keep putting themselves at risk, if, in fact, you subsidize their bosses for staying open right now, then you have no right to get on TV and scream at people for not "staying home" like they're supposed to.  

The only way to protect workers from this kind of avarice is to give them money and security. Except no one in the Democratic leadership is working to make it happen.  Instead their reflex is to retreat into "90s wonkery" as AOC puts it. Some of this is because they, too, are corrupt defenders of criminal capitalism.  But, from a pure public messaging standpoint, the problem is the Democrats have no idea what is happening anymore. They are fighting shadows of what the Republican political message used to be.

This is what people are talking about when they say Trump has "outflanked" the Democrats to their left. The actual Republican legislation may be as cruel and as slanted toward the wealthy as ever. But on TV, in the place where the political perception happens, the public face of their party isn't denigrating "welfare queens" anymore. He's promising to "GO BIG" with checks for everybody. Democratic leaders should counter by embracing the suggestion of members of their own party that we GO EVEN MORE BIGLY with checks for everyone every month until the crisis has ended and we've built a better more stable social safety net altogether. Instead they are proposing means tests and worrying about the deficit. All of which is why despite Trump's utter denial and bungling of the crisis that has endangered countless lives, polls are now showing that Americans approve of the way he's handling it. By failing to "go big" for real, Democrats are losing to the worst con-man in history at the worst possible moment and they have only themselves to blame.

Every state and local government is in an austerity trap

Some of that is because state houses are full of reactionary conservatives and city halls are steeped in public-private neoliberal ideology. But there is also a major structural factor that makes all of that seem sort of rational.

The problem is that unlike the federal government, nearly all state and local governments face balanced budget rules for their current activities, with most needing to pass bond referenda for specific projects in order to borrow money.  So when the revenues fall short, which they shortly will start to do for all these state governments, they will face the choice of cutting spending and laying off workers or raising taxes on populations facing sharply reduced incomes and employment.  The sooner the federal government recognizes this and starts to do something, the better, although probably for now natonal politicians are hoping this will all be over before too much damage happens to the local governments, to the extent they are thinking about this at all, which I doubt.

In a crisis this forces local officials to make drastic decisions that threaten their own workforce and cripple their future capacity to serve the public.  A lot of them feel like they're doing the right or only thing. But that's because they're working with a limited concept of normal operations.  These are not normal times.  It is time to imagine a much better world with a wider range of possibilities.

Maxine Waters is trying to do that.

Waters' proposal, described in a memo to House Democrats, calls for direct cash payments — larger and longer lasting than in other proposals — and suspension of nearly all consumer and small business debt payments, supported by reimbursements to creditors through the Federal Reserve.

It calls for billions of dollars in grants to small businesses, boosting emergency homelessness assistance funds by billions, cutting all federal student loans by $10,000, and pumping $100 billion into public housing to kickstart the economy after the COVID-19 pandemic passes.

Waters, D-Calif., is calling for $2,000 a month in cash payments to most adults, and $1,000 a month for each child, for the duration of the pandemic. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has floated a $500 billion direct cash injection, but as a one-time offer, not the continuing monthly payments Waters proposes.

The Waters memo.. you can read it here... should be the standard by which all policy response is measured. It enumerates relief efforts that put people first. It offers real support to the scores of laid off. Instead of the narrow focus on sick leave or means-tested tax credits for middle class workers or massive bailouts for corporate criminals, the Waters memo considers the whole economy of part-time workers, gig workers and people who depend on informal cash only arrangements.

It also recognizes the dire situation that local governments find themselves in and offers immediate help.  These provisions would stand up cities that are already starting to furlough workers and cut services.

20.Support State, Territory, and Local Government Financing. This provision would authorize a program that requires the Federal Reserve to support state, territory, and local debt issuance in response to the coronavirus outbreak given the critical role these governments are playing.

21.Waive Matching Requirements for Municipal Governments. This provision would waive the requirement that state, territory or local governments first obtain matching funds prior to receiving certain federal grants.

There are provisions in the Waters plan beyond this that empower cities to rebuild their economies through small business aid and housing grants.  Everything is on fire right now. The Waters plan not only moves immediately to douse those fires it shows us the fastest and most equitable route to recovery.  It needs to happen and it needs to happen like yesterday. Call your congresspeople today and tell them that.

Dispatch from the doom: Every single thing is on fire

Where to even begin today?

Let's try here.

With the coronavirus crisis having already affected large swaths of American culture and the economy, there's no real reason to think that the world's largest retailer will be spared. Amazon is facing pressure from three different sides: Increased demand from consumers, the very real potential of coronavirus spreading through a warehouse, and supply chain interruptions.

Ports that receive goods from overseas have seen major slowdowns as the Chinese stall manufacturing. While Trump’s European travel ban does not currently include trade, imports from Europe could come to a halt if things change as they already are overnight. Already, Amazon is seeing shortages of basic supplies like toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and disinfectant wipes.

Every single thing in the world is on fire now and it's only beginning to sink in.  The American luxury consumer life runs on extracting maximum value out of poor people on a global scale while ignoring the misery imposed by that system.  The pandemic interrupts all of this.  It has a power that workers have long been deprived of. The power to shut it all down.  Perhaps you are tempted to think this is an "opportunity" to build a better world. It isn't. The virus, having no agenda beyond self replication, hasn't stopped the world to make demands. Like all preceding disasters of the 21st Century, this one only promises to bring new hardships.

Right now the entire economy is seized up.  This seizure is different even from the 2008 financial meltdown where a speculative market based on creating fake value out of whole cloth could be propped back up by inserting trillions of newly printed fake dollars.  But to be clear what "propped back up" means, the fake dollars went right to the bankers who caused the problem in the first place and allowed scores of criminals to cash themselves out of their schemes while leaving ordinary Americans ruined for decades. So hurray for that.  The crisis we're looking at now is and will be... worse. The response to this needs to be immediate. It needs to be massive. And it needs to be directed to people and not to banks or corporations. Unsurprisingly it is taking American politics a very long time to figure this out.

A relief package in the House supposedly aimed at providing American workers with sick leave will, in fact, cover only about 20% of them. Tuesday morning we read that Nancy Pelosi, after scolding reporters about the importance of means testing things, has negotiated with the Trump Administration to further scale back the scope of bill. Kamala Harris is tweeting out a previous plan of hers to give *some* people virtually nothing.  The presumptive Democratic nominee for President said during a debate on Sunday that free health care is still a bad idea because countries that have it also have the virus. Democrats are so corrupted by their corporate donors and confounded by their own resigned ideology of better-things-aren't-possible have none of the tools necessary to deal with the problem realistically.  They can't even make hollow promises that capture anyone's attention anymore.

This makes them quite different from the huckster Donald Trump, unfortunately, who is all too happy to step in with Great Big Checks For Everybody.

WASHINGTON — President Trump called on Congress on Tuesday to quickly approve a sweeping economic stimulus package that would include sending checks directly to Americans within weeks, as large sections of the economy shut down in the face of the coronavirus pandemic.

“We want to go big,” Mr. Trump said at a news conference at the White House, adding that he had instructed Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, to introduce measures that would provide more immediate economic support over the payroll tax cut holiday that he had been promoting.

Thank goodness they've talked him out of the payroll tax thing... for now.  It's a terrible idea that a) won't help anybody who is not receiving a paycheck and b) is a direct stab at Social Security, Medicare and what remains of the federal social safety net that most of us are going to have to rely on now more than ever.  Ultimately we know the Republicans will come back for all of that. But right now they are outflanking the Democrats to the left which is something that should never happen in the midst of a worldwide crisis when there is also a national election pending.

Sure, we all know that Republicans are going to insist on ridiculous corporate bailouts for the airlines, for the oil industry, and for anyone who puts money in their, or especially Trump's, pocket. On Friday, Trump presided over a nightmare scene at the Rose Garden where he presented the CEOs of Walmart, CVS, Target as well as medical industrialists including, of all people, disgraced former Louisiana head of Health and Human Services Bruce Greenstein to talk about the "public-private partnerships" by which they all expect to get rich off of the pandemic disaster. Senate leader and greatest villain of the 21st Century, Mitch McConnell is saying it will take "significant and bold new steps" to pass the next relief bill. That doesn't necessarily bode well either.

In the meantime, there is an election to win. So Trump is going to send everyone a much needed relief check (it won't be enough but it will be welcome) and cruise to a win over the guy who has spent his whole career trying to cut your Social Security. The punchline is, afterward, Trump will then come back and cut your Social Security.  Because the "liberal" party is so helplessly moribund, the only direction for the country to go now is further into a populist fascism. Offer people some bread up front, turn the whole state over to the oligarchs next.

It didn't have to be like this. If only Democrats could have backed a campaign proposing a major overhaul of the entire US economy based on eliminating stifling debts, expanding social services like health care and mobilizing all resources to fight climate change. If only they didn't mobilize their entire corrupt party infrastructure to stop that from being their platform.  Unfortunately some people were mean to some well to do liberals on Twitter and so now this is what we get. Seems fair.

Hey speaking of oligarchs, meanwhile in New Orleans....

Mayor LaToya Cantrell's director of economic development, Jeff Schwartz, led a Monday morning conference call with about 40 leaders from business and economic development organizations, including the Business Council of New Orleans, New Orleans Business Alliance, GNO Inc., economic agencies from parishes in the metropolitan area, as well as the black, Hispanic and other chambers of commerce.

The problem in New Orleans, much like the problem in Washington, is the people who will have the ear of government leadership throughout and after the crisis are the ownership class. This is why, for example, the rules for keeping bars and restaurants open the mayor issued Sunday were written by the Louisiana Restaurant Association's lobbyists. Those rules were quickly obsoleted by the Governor's subsequent shutdown order. But it's clear where the local policy is being drawn up.

In the same way Trump's policy is directed by cronies like those assembled in the Rose Garden last week, Cantrell's is dictated by the "business and economic development organizations" like those listed above as well as the tourism promotion entity known as New Orleans and Company which, along with the Convention Center, pulls down something like $20 million dollars a year in public funds.

The tourism cabal has more than $200 million in surplus sitting around in a slush fund recently legitimized by Cantrell's #FairShare deal. Given the current state of the tourism market, they will be needing exactly zero of those dollars for any of their pet projects. It should all be spent on emergency relief for displaced hospitality workers.  Of course that isn't what's happening. Instead the interchangeable plutocrats who populate all of these organizations have set up "philanthropic" funds like this one run by the New Orleans Business Alliance. Its conditions are absurdly restrictive and its expected benefits are miserly. But all the right people get to manage it and cover themselves in glory in the process. They've thrown in $100,000 so far so congrats on that.

But it's not only a corrupt deference to ruling class influence that parallels Cantrell's emergency response with Trump's. She's also continues to emulate his authoritarian sneer in her rhetoric.  On Sunday, she took time out from her aggressive lecturing of everybody about the "social distancing" directives to also yell at the news media for... asking her questions in order to confirm information?

Cantrell is now talking about journalism. "Quality journalism matters," Cantrell said. She's upset about journalists calling the office trying to get confirmation about what sources have said.

— Della Hasselle (@dellahasselle) March 15, 2020

The context of that was never explained. It was bizarre to say the least.  The next day, she bristled at a reporter's perfectly reasonable question about whether or not NOPD should be throwing people in jail for non-violent offenses given the health hazards of crowding into confined spaces. The public defender's office has already asked them to cease such arrests in a letter this week. If you watch the presser you can hear the contempt in Cantrell's immediate response, "Uh no."  She then invited Police Chief Ferguson to give everyone a brief lecture about "law and order."

Today it was announced that future press conferences won't have any press at all. Instead the mayor will retreat to a bunker and send out a recorded message.

... Moving forward, future City Hall news conferences will be videoed with a single pool camera. Copies will be distributed to all media.

— Tegan Wendland (@TeganWendland) March 17, 2020

But that will be the case after one last hurrah today where Cantrell appeared, flanked by CAO Gilbert Montano and representatives of the NO & Co brain trust to announce that the tourism related businesses were getting a tax holiday.

Despite worries about the city’s bottom line, Cantrell announced on Tuesday that the city would waive all penalties for late sales tax payments from businesses for the next 60 days. That measure is intended to make sure businesses have the money on hand to keep paying their employees while state and city closures are in place during the height of the outbreak.

Cantrell, again in her now standard aggressively condescending tone, emphasized that these tax breaks, which, realistically, can only be expected to keep some businesses afloat for a few weeks at best, were being granted in the full knowledge that they will drastically alter the way the city operates for months and years into the future.

Decisions on how to cut government expenses could be made in the coming days, Cantrell said. That could include everything from cutting contracts or other expenses to furloughs or layoffs for city workers, she said.

“We’re looking at how this will impact the city and our operations, we’re looking beyond not just the next six months but the next 12 months,” Cantrell said. “The impact to our bottom line will be significant and will be felt even a year from now.”

This is a deliberate structural change intended to affect the way the city operates in the years after the virus crisis has passed. By that time, the current crop of hospitality workers Cantrell falsely claims to care about will have been long fired and displaced.  But the ownership class will remain largely intact. And at that point they will be expected to support even fewer of the paltry services the city can offer residents on its current shoestring budget.  It's a classic austerity strategy written up by the very owners who will benefit from it.  "Shock Doctrine" seems like such a cliche at this point but, once again, here we are. No crisis ever goes to waste.

When asked by a reporter why, given the entire history of everything, why anyone should expect to trust that just handing over more money and power to the already rich and powerful with no accountability will work out well for everybody this one time, Cantrell was again characteristically curt. 

Asked about concerns that businesses would simply pocket the money, not turning it over to their workers or to the government, Cantrell said she choose to look at the situation from an optimistic perspective.

“I’m not being negative at all and thinking that our businesses or employers will not do the right thing,” Cantrell said. “This is all with the expectation that they’ll do the right thing.”

In Cantrell's impossibly small conception of politics, if there is ever economic or class based conflict at all, it is forever subsumed by the greater imperative of personal deference. The worst offense is "being negative" enough to ask that authority be held to account.

The corona crisis is already a staggering calamity. But it's the authoritarian quality of our local and national governments that makes it uniquely dangerous. Every shock of the past twenty years has left the changed world a few degrees harsher in its wake. But this is the one that really feels as though it threatens to break us. It's already broken so much. 

No one can produce anything. No one can consume anything. The world economy is shuttered. The grifters are picking apart its bones. We are all holed up in isolation. The oceans are rising. The city of New Orleans is physically sinking into the sea. The system has glitched out. And our concluding communication, the clanging yawp of our death reflex is a stream of recommended local eateries spammed out from the social media of our office holders.

It's comforting to know that when a global crisis pushes civilization to the very brink local government converts to spam advertising mode pic.twitter.com/F8yJrvD6iT

— skooks (@skooks) March 18, 2020

 

We can't sustain ourselves like this. Nobody has any money. Nobody has any answers. Stop asking the mayor for any. She will only yell at you.

Just impeach the MFer already

There is still plenty time left for them to do it. They obviously don't want to do it but that only underscores their own selfish cowardice. But we talked about this already a few months ago.

Who is afraid of racist grandma

This is not "3-D chess" or whatever. It is just stuff that racist grandmas say.

Although he did not specify to whom he was referring, the president appeared to be referencing the group of four freshmen women of color known as "the squad," which includes Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan.

"So sad to see the Democrats sticking up for people who speak so badly of our Country and who, in addition, hate Israel with a true and unbridled passion. Whenever confronted, they call their adversaries, including Nancy Pelosi, 'RACIST.' Their disgusting language and the many terrible things they say about the United States must not be allowed to go unchallenged. If the Democrat Party wants to continue to condone such disgraceful behavior, then we look even more forward to seeing you at the ballot box in 2020!" Trump wrote in a pair of tweets on Sunday evening.

He literally just watches FOX News and yells racist grandma bullshit back at it.  There's no strategy. It is just rage. Maybe there is something to be said for paying less attention to it... much as one would tune out a racist grandma. But the Grandma Administration is also running baby cage camps so you can't ignore it altogether.

The problem with Democratic leadership is Trump says this stuff and they all think, "Oh no now we will lose the racist grandma vote!" Which is why, instead of filing impeachment articles, they are performatively lecturing their own members for getting yelled at by Grandma in the first place.

I guess they must think that's a bad thing?

It took me a while to figure it out yesterday but the general consensus out there is that this NYT article was intended as a criticism of single-payer health care. It's confusing because, of course, we ought to guarantee health care to every person as a basic human right. Only a monster would think otherwise.  All they're really pointing out here is doing that will be hard for us because there is so much wealth tied up in.. not doing it.

But doing away with an entire industry would also be profoundly disruptive. The private health insurance business employs at least a half a million people, covers about 250 million Americans, and generates roughly a trillion dollars in revenues. Its companies’ stocks are a staple of the mutual funds that make up millions of Americans’ retirement savings.

Such a change would shake the entire health care system, which makes up a fifth of the United States economy, as hospitals, doctors, nursing homes and pharmaceutical companies would have to adapt to a new set of rules. Most Americans would have a new insurer — the federal government — and many would find the health insurance stocks in their retirement portfolios much less valuable.

And, okay, that's a fair point. Single-payer healthcare (currently branded as "Medicare For All") is a revolutionary project in scope.  It is a call to break up entrenched institutions controlling vast stores of wealth and power.   The CEO of United Healthcare makes 298 times as much per year as its median employee salary. That sounds like an industry in profound need of disruption. But NYT is saying that like it would be a bad thing. 


It's true that fulfilling this moral imperative to free people from the fear and debt machine that is private health insurance, not to mention save hundreds of thousands of lives in the process is going to be a heavy lift. It's such a heavy lift, in fact, that Hillary Clinton's admonition that it was "never ever" going to happen, as cynical and hopeless as it sounds, is still the most sober assessment.  That's no reason not to try, of course. It's just that doing the right thing in politics almost always means failure and Hillary has had a very long and successful career in politics.  

She's mostly out of the way for now but that doesn't mean there aren't other successful Democrats on hand to waver on Medicare for All and whittle away its purpose.  

House Democrats plan to unveil health-care legislation on March 26 aimed at lowering costs and protecting people with pre-existing conditions, according to an advisory from the office of Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

The bill, broadly timed to coincide with the 9th anniversary this weekend of Obamacare being signed into law, would “reverse the Trump administration’s health-care sabotage, and take new measures to lower health premiums and out-of-pocket costs for families,” according to the statement.

The measure is set to be proposed as more than 100 Democrats in the House back a “Medicare for All” bill introduced in February by Progressive Caucus co-chair Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington state. The legislation, which right now has no chance of becoming law in a divided Congress, would create a universal, single-payer health program. Pelosi and a number of party moderates have resisted the idea.

Strictly speaking, this proposal to patch up some of the holes the Republicans have blown in Obamacare in recent years doesn't have to be at cross purposes with the larger project of passing single-payer. Not immediately, anyway.  Eventually the latter measure should render the former moot, though. So it's fair to assume that Democrats who are not among the 100 cosponsors of Jaypal's bill but do support more insurance-friendly bill's like what Pelosi is introducing tomorrow are making an explicit choice to support the industry over the needs of patients.

Cedric Richmond is the only Democratic member of the Louisiana congressional delegation. Which side is he on? 

Speaker Richmond?

CNN Exit poll says maybe let's not give the gavel back to Nancy.

The Democratic Party has slightly higher favorability than the Republican Party in preliminary data from CNN's national exit poll. About half of voters said they had a positive view of the Democratic Party, while the Republican Party is upside down, with slightly more than 40% saying they had a positive view of the Republicans.

 

The downside for Democrats is an extremely low favorable rating for Nancy Pelosi, the woman who would like to again be Speaker of the House if Democrats win control of the House of Representatives. Only about three-in-10 voters had a positive view of Pelosi and more than half had an unfavorable view. In fact, more voters had an unfavorable view of Pelosi than had an unfavorable view of President Trump, according to preliminary results.

He's downplaying it this week, but you can see the possibilities here for Cedric Richmond. 

Richmond said he would consider running for a leadership post should the House flip to Democratic control. But any position he might seek will depend on the moves of his colleagues, particularly his longtime friend Assistant Democratic Leader James Clyburn, of South Carolina.

Clyburn has said he would likely run for speaker of the House if former Speaker U.S. Rep Nancy Pelosi declines to do so. For his part, Richmond said he would support Clyburn if he were to make a bid for the gavel.

Richmond said he would defer to Clyburn before running for several available spots. Any position in the Democratic leadership, however, would help Louisiana's relatively junior delegation punch above their weight. Richmond would also be in line to lead a subgroup of the House Judiciary or House Homeland Security committees on which he now serves, he said.

Okay so probably Cedric isn't going to be Speaker. But he's clearly going to be in a top leadership position. Theoretically this is "good" for us down here in his district.  At least it would be if there were more money on the table for local government in Washington right now.  But the current mood there is still predisposed toward austerity and privatization.  And that isn't likely to change just because the Democrats hold a slim majority in the House.  It's better for us than the current situation. But not great.

Also there are other issues with Cedric.  I'd love to expound on this but I'm going to be geeking out on election returns for the next few hours. So, instead, let's see what the DSA election guide had to say about our guy.

Cedric Richmond is concerned that the Democratic Party might be moving too far to the left. Shortly after Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s primary victory over establishment Democrat Joe Crowley in New York this spring, Richmond told the New York Times he worries that while figures like Cortez and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders are “fighting for [their] principles on what direction the party should go, we don’t really have anybody doing it on behalf of moderates and other Democrats. It has become a one-sided conversation.”  We here in the midst of the leftist insurrection think Cedric is exaggerating our influence just a tiny bit. But we are pleased to see him take notice. What we’ve noticed is Richmond has put in more than his share of “doing it on behalf of moderates.”

Richmond has resisted calls to abolish ICE telling us, “The men and women of ICE are federal employees who do their jobs admirably.”  He also said the Baton Rouge police crackdown on Black Lives Matter protesters after the 2016 murder of Alton Sterling was “very reasonable.” Richmond’s own response to that incident, in fact, was a “bi-partisan solution” to help police buy more surplus military equipment. He has not signed on as a sponsor to John Conyers’ Medicare For All bill and has instead chosen to support a hybrid “consumer” driven buy-in scheme that preserves the private for-profit health care system.  Richmond has also gone out of his way to defend Scalise from criticism, which suggests to us his commitment is to solidarity with the political elite classes he circulates in rather than with the poor and working class people of the district he represents.

Interestingly, in the wake of Ocasio-Cortez’s win, Richmond also garnered comparisons to Crowley as the sort of conservative Democratic machine politician who might one day be vulnerable to grass-roots leftist opposition. Such an opposition campaign doesn’t exist this year. In the meantime, the best we can hope for is for Richmond to continue to be aware of the possibility and lend a more attentive ear to leftist concerns as he moves up the seniority ladder in the House.

So.. not great. But certainly more.. um.. persuadable than a Speaker Scalise would have been.  That's the hope, anyway. 

Meanwhile back at the not-at-all liberal Democratic Party

Nancy Pelosi doesn't want the banksters to worry.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) disagrees with Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-Mass.) notion that the Obama administration is too soft on Wall Street.

While Warren has been a vocal critic of how some of President Obama’s top lieutenants policing Wall Street have done their job, Pelosi cast her perspective as an outlier among her colleagues.

When asked in a CNBC interview if the president is too soft on Wall Street, Pelosi replied, “The financial industry doesn’t agree with that.

“There may be a couple people who say that, but that is not the consensus in our party,” she added.

Warren has been a thorn in the side of the Obama administration on all things financial. She led the charge to scuttle a top Treasury Department nominee over his extensive ties to the financial sector, and earlier this month, she detailed her perceived failures in Mary Jo White, the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

But Pelosi was quick to caution anyone from taking Warren’s argument and applying it to the entire Democratic Party.

“People will express themselves the way they do. That doesn’t mean they speak for the whole party,” she said.

 What the hell are they even any good for?