#American Social Security Policy

[tessansgp]

As retirement age change sparks protests in France, here’s what could happen in the U.S. [Video]

[ardentperfidy]

.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Darrin Bell, Los Angeles Times

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

February 18, 2023

Heather Cox Richardson

Republican leaders are recognizing that the sight of Republican lawmakers heckling the president of the United States didn’t do their party any favors. It not only called attention to their behavior, it prompted many news outlets to fact-check President Biden’s claim that Republicans had called for cuts to Social Security and Medicare or even called to get rid of them. Those outlets noted that while Republicans have repeatedly said they have no intention of cutting those programs, what Biden said was true: Republican leaders have repeatedly suggested such cuts, or even the elimination of those programs, in speeches, news interviews, and written proposals. Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) told Alexander Bolton of The Hill that Republicans should stick to “reasonable and enduring policy” proposals. “I think we’re missing an opportunity to differentiate,” he said. “Focus on policy. If you get that done, it will age well.” But therein lies the Republican Party’s problem. What ARE its reasonable and enduring policies? One of the reasons Biden keeps pressuring the party to release its budget is that it’s not at all clear what the party stands for. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) refused to issue any plans before the 2022 midterm election, and in 2020, for the first time in its history, the party refused to write a party platform. The Republican National Committee simply resolved that if its party platform committee had met, it “would have undoubtedly unanimously agreed to reassert the Party's strong support for President Donald Trump and his Administration.” So, it resolved that “the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President's America-first agenda.” Cutting Social Security is a centerpiece of the ideology the party adopted in the 1980s: that the government in place since 1933 was stunting the economy and should be privatized as much as possible. In place of using the federal government to regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, protect civil rights, and promote infrastructure, Reagan Republicans promised that cutting taxes and regulation would free up capital, which investors would then plow into new businesses, creating new jobs and moving everybody upward. Americans could have low taxes and services both, they promised, for “supply-side economics” would create such economic growth that lower tax rates would still produce high enough revenues to keep the debt low and maintain services. But constructing an economy that favored the “supply side” rather than the “demand side”—those ordinary Americans who would spend more money in their daily lives—did not, in fact, produce great economic growth or produce tax revenues high enough to keep paying expenses. In January 1981, President Ronald Reagan called the federal deficit, then almost $74 billion, “out of control.” Within two years, he had increased it to $208 billion. The debt, too, nearly tripled during Reagan’s term, from $930 billion to $2.6 trillion. The Republican solution was to cut taxes and slash the government even further. As early as his 1978 congressional race, George W. Bush called for fixing Social Security’s finances by permitting people to invest their payroll tax themselves. In his second term as president in 2005, he called for it again. When Republican senator Rick Scott of Florida proposed an 11-point (which he later changed to a 12 points) “Plan to Rescue America” last year, vowing to “sunset” all laws automatically after five years, the idea reflected that Republican vision. It permitted the cutting of Social Security without attaching those cuts to any one person or party. But American voters like Social Security and Medicare and, just as they refused Bush’s attempt to privatize Social Security, recoiled from Scott’s plan. Yesterday, under pressure from voters and from other Republicans who recognized the political damage being done, Scott wrote an op-ed saying his plan was “obviously not intended to include entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security—programs that hard-working people have paid into their entire lives—or the funds dedicated to our national security.” (The online version of the plan remains unchanged as of Saturday morning.) Scott attacked Biden for suggesting otherwise, but he also attacked Mitch McConnell, who also condemned Scott’s plan, accusing them of engaging in “shallow gotcha politics, which is what Washington does.” He also accused “Washington politicians” for “lying to you every chance they get.” Scott’s venom illustrated the growing rift in the Republican Party. Since the 1990s, Republicans have had an ideological problem: voters don’t actually like their economic vision, which has cut services and neglected infrastructure even as it has dramatically moved wealth upward. So to keep voters behind them, Republicans hammered on social and cultural issues, portraying those who liked the active government as godless socialists who were catering to minorities and women. “There is a religious war going on in this country,” Republican Pat Buchanan told the Republican National Convention in 1992. “It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America.” A generation later, that culture war has joined with the economic vision of the older party to create a new ideology. More than half of Republicans now reject the idea of a democracy based in the rule of law and instead support Christian nationalism, insisting that the United States is a Christian nation and that our society and our laws should be based in evangelical Christian values. Forty percent of the strongest adherents of Christian nationalism think “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country,” while 22% of sympathizers agree with that position. Scott released his 11-point plan because, he said, “Americans deserve to know what we will do when given the chance,” and his plan reflected the new Republicans. Sunsetting laws and tax cuts were only part of the plan. He promised to cut government jobs by 25% over the next five years, “sell off all non-essential government assets, buildings and land, and use the proceeds to pay down our national debt,” get rid of all federal programs that local governments can take over, cut taxes, “grow America’s economy,” and “stop Socialism.” But it also reflected the turn toward Christian nationalism, centering Christianity and “Judeo-Christian values” by investing in religious schools, adoption agencies, and social services and calling for an end to abortion, gender-affirming care, and diversity training. It explicitly puts religion above the law, saying “Americans will not be required to go against their core values and beliefs in order to conform to culture or government.” The document warned that “[a]n infestation of old, corrupt Washington insiders and immature radical socialists is tearing America apart. Their bizarre policies are intentionally destroying our values, our culture, and the beliefs that hold us together as a nation.” “Is this the beginning of the end of America?” it asks. “Only if we allow it to be.” That new worldview overlaps with the extremist wing that is trying to take over the Republican Party. It was at the heart of the far-right challenge to House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA). It informs Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s abandonment of small-government Republicanism in favor of using the power of the state government to enforce a “Christian” vision, including on businesses. It was also behind Scott’s challenge to McConnell for the position of Senate majority leader. McConnell kept his position and then removed Scott and another extremist who backed Scott, Mike Lee (R-UT), from the Senate Commerce Committee. Scott, anyway, is apparently not backing down. The struggle between those two factions is showing up at the Munich Security Conference on global security this week. In the U.S. the extremists have called for cutting our support for the Ukrainians as they try to fight off Russia’s 2022 invasion. Their hatred of the liberal democracy that demands equality for all people has put those extremists on the side of authoritarians like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, both of whom have made attacking LGBTQ people a key feature of their championing of their “traditional values,” a cause the extremists like. But the United States has traditionally backed democracies against autocracies. Today in Munich, Vice President Kamala Harris talked of the war crimes and atrocities the Russians have committed in Ukraine and said: “We have examined the evidence, we know the legal standards, and there is no doubt: These are crimes against humanity.” Mitch McConnell, who does not usually travel to foreign meetings, went to Munich this year along with more than 50 other lawmakers, the largest delegation the U.S. has ever sent, designed to demonstrate U.S. commitment to global affairs. At a private breakfast on Friday, McConnell promised that the Republicans would not abandon Ukraine. One person there told Jack Detsch and Robbie Gramer of Foreign Policy, “To me, the subtext was clear: We’re not the crazies like the small handful of House Republicans you see in the headlines so often.”

—

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[from comments]

Hope Lindsay

It amazes me how some folks drum up their own morality while toting their ill-gotten gains to the bank. Looking at you, Rick Scott, TFG, the flying monkeys of the House of Representatives, et al. As an acquaintance once said, "When someone tells me they are a Christian businessman, I hold onto my wallet and run." From Rupert Murdoch to Putin to the Christian Nationalists, when will they see that, despite calling us socialists and worse, they delude themselves most of all.

[oliveflr]

Should the Internet be regulated?

I'm working on an international research study about whether people feel the internet should have regulations (from the government, individual platforms, or if these decisions should be made by users themselves).

The survey is super quick (~6 min) and completely anonymous. If anyone is willing to take it, I would truly appreciate it! All opinions and ideologies are welcome!

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Joan McCarter at Daily Kos:

With all this attention on the dangerous, radical plan, more and more people are trying to find out what it’s all about. Navigator Research, a consortium of progressive polling firms, has the goods on how we should talk about it with friends and family, and what Democrats need to be saying about it on the stump as the election heats up. On Wednesday, Navigator released the third and final results from its latest survey about Project 2025. Conducted June 20-24, the survey found that the most salient and message about Project 2025 is that it “is an unprecedented, extreme Republican plan that will fundamentally alter the American government making Trump even more dangerous in a second term by granting him presidential powers like no president before him has ever had.” 

According to Navigator, the most effective messages focused on the impact rather than on political consequences. The message that worked best for Democrats and independents was that Project 2025 would "roll back and eliminate Americans’ constitutionally protected rights and freedoms," while the message that worked best for non-MAGA Republicans—i.e., Republican voters who did not self-identify as supporting the MAGA movement—was that it would "hurt hard-working American families and seniors." “Nearly 9 in 10 Democrats (87%), 7 in 10 independents (70%), and about half of non-MAGA Republicans (48%) believed it would have a negative impact on them and their families after exposure to Project 2025’s policies and messaging,” Navigator found.  There’s plenty in the authoritarian plan to worry Americans. It seeks to end no-fault divorce and  restrict access to birth control—even condoms! It demands cuts to Social Security—raising the retirement age from 67 to 70—and wants to privatize Medicare. Then there are the proposals to curtail food assistance, eliminate Head Start, restrict help to disabled veterans, and roll back overtime pay requirements for hourly workers.

A new poll from Navigator Research conducted between June 20th and 24th reveals that many parts of Project 2025 are very unpopular with the electorate.

[batboyblog]

What Joe Biden has Done for LGBTQ+ People

I wanted to list out everything The Biden Administration has done for Queer people in the last 3 and a half years, but according to GLAAD it'd been 337 moves (and I noticed they missed a few things...) there was just no way to list every ground breaking first Queer person ever nominated to fill this or that job, every ally with a historic LGBT rights record nominated for a top job, every beautiful statement of support, every time he tried to get Congress to pass the Equality Act (support it!) So I've gone through and done my best to pick the ones I think were the most important, but everyone should check out the full list!

Day 1: Signs executive orders banning discrimination and ordering a full review of all federal agencies policies to better include and support LGBT people

Pete Buttigieg becomes the first openly gay person nominated and confirmed for a cabinet level post as Secretary of Transportation

Revokes Trump’s 2018 ban on transgender military personnel

Department of Housing and Urban Development implements LGBTQ protections in housing, becoming first federal agency to implement Pres. Biden’s executive order

First President to recognize and proclaim Trans Day of Visibility

Department of Justice Civil Rights Division issues an official memo that the Supreme Court's Bostock decision against LGBT workplace discrimination also applies to education through Title IX

HUD withdraws a Trump Administration proposed rule change, and reaffirms trans people's rights to seek shelters matching their gender identity

HHS announces the withdrawal of Trump Administration rules that allowed discrimination by healthcare organizations against LGBT people.

The State Department and later Homeland Security announce babies born to Queer couples overseas will be American citizens if one parent is American, in the past the child only qualified if they were genetically related to the American citizen parent.

The Justice Department files against a West Virginia law banning trans students from school athletics

Department of Veterans Affairs announces it will offer gender confirming surgery for transgender veterans. There are an estimated 134,000 transgender veterans in the U.S. and another 15,000 transgender people serving in the armed forces.

President Biden Signs a law making the Pulse Night Club a national memorial

The State Department creates an X gender marker for passports and other documents, allowing gender affirming identification for non-binary and intersex people for the first time.

The Census Bureau for the first time issues a Survey with questions about sexual orientation and gender identity

On the 10th anniversary of the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, Veterans Administration announces that soldiers discharged for homosexual conduct, gender identity or HIV status qualify for veterans' benefits

Dr. Rachel Levine becomes the first trans person confirmed by the US Senate when she was nominated to be Assistant Secretary for Health, she also became the first trans flag rank officer when she was sworn in as a 4 star Admiral for her job as head of the Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, his makes her the highest ranked trans person in government

Holds the first ever vigil in the White House for Transgender Day of Remembrance

HHS announces rule change to reinstate and expand protections against discrimination in the Affordable Care Act, including denying coverage for gender-affirming care.

Social Security Administration reverses a Trump Administration policy and allows benefits claims by surviving partners in same-sex relationships, whose partner died before marriage equality was legal

President Biden signs the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act (a bill he helped originally craft in the Senate) which for the first time has grant programs dedicated to expanding and developing initiatives specifically for LGBTQ survivors of domestic violence

The TSA announces new technology and policy shifts to improve the customer experience of transgender travelers who have previously been required to undergo additional screening due to alarms in sensitive areas.

The Social Security Administration allows people to edit their gender and name on records for the first time without legal and medical documentation

The US Air Force announces it'll offer medical and legal aid to any personnel families affected by state level anti-trans youth bills.

Karine Jean-Pierre becomes the first Lesbian to serve as White House Press Secretary

on 50th anniversary of Title IX The Department of Ed strengthens protections for Students against sexual harassment and discrimination

Veterans Affairs announces survivor benefits now extended to partners from relationships before marriage equality was legalized in 2015

President Biden signs the Respect for Marriage Act into law enshrining protections for marriage equality for same-sex and interracial couples

The Department of Ed announces new rules around athletic eligibility under Title IX, declaring blanket bans on trans students violate the law and setting up strike standards for schools

The White House announced a suit of new protections for LGBTQ people, including a new job at the Department of Ed to combat book bans, a joint DoJ Homeland Security effort to combat violence and threats and HHS evidence-based guidance to mental health providers for care of transgender kids

President Biden signs an Executive Order directing HHS to protect LGBTQI+ youth in the foster care system, a rule they later passed requiring Queer foster children to be placed in affirming homes

The Biden administration joins families of transgender youth in Tennessee and Kentucky in petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court to review and reverse a circuit court ruling allowing a ban on mainstream health care to be enforced

President Biden Signs a EO expanding on past EO on equality and helping underserved communities

The Department of Education's Civil Rights office opens an investigation into the death of Nex Benedict. President Biden in his statement said: "Every young person deserves to have the fundamental right and freedom to be who they are, and feel safe and supported at school and in their communities. Nex Benedict, a kid who just wanted to be accepted, should still be here with us today. Nonbinary and transgender people are some of the bravest Americans I know. But nobody should have to be brave just to be themselves. In memory of Nex, we must all recommit to our work to end discrimination and address the suicide crisis impacting too many nonbinary and transgender children.”

[teh-tj]

Greenbelt Maryland. Or, how America almost solved housing only to abandon it.

**I AM NOT AN EXPERT! I AM JUST AN ENTHUSIST! DO NOT TREAT MY OPINIONS/SPECULATION AS EDUCATION!**

During the Depression America faced a housing crisis that rhymes with but differs from our own. It’s different in that there wasn’t a supply issue, there were loads of houses in very desirable areas, but they were still unaffordable as people’s incomes collapsed causing a deflationary spiral. While the housing supply subtly grew and succeeded demand, people simply couldn’t pay the meager rents and mortgages. Herbert Hoover failed to manage the Depression, while his inaction is greatly exaggerated, his policy of boosting the economy with works projects and protecting banks from runs failed and the depression only got more pronounced in his term. In comes Franklin Roosevelt, a progressive liberal much like his distant and popular cousin/uncle-in-law Teddy. Franklin’s plan was to create a large safety net for people to be able to be economically viable even if they’re otherwise poor. These reforms are called the New Deal and they did many controversial things like giving disabled and retired people welfare, giving farmers conditioned subsidies to manipulate the price of food, a works program to build/rebuild vital infrastructure, etc. One of these programs was the USHA (a predecessor of America’s HUD), an agency created to build and maintain public housing projects with the goal of creating neighborhoods with artificially affordable rents so people who work low-wage jobs or rely on welfare can be housed.

In this spirit, the agency started experimenting with new and hopefully efficient housing blueprints and layouts. If you ever see very large apartment towers or antiquated brick low-rise townhouses in America, they might be these. The USHA bought land in many large and medium-sized cities to build “house-in-park” style apartments, which is what they sound like. Putting apartment buildings inside green spaces so residents can be surrounded by greenery and ideally peacefully coexist. Three entire towns were built with these ideas outside three medium-sized cities that were hit hard by the depression; Greenbelt outside DC, Greenhills outside Cincinnati, and Greendale outside Milwaukee. The idea was to move people out of these crowded cities into these more sustainable and idyllic towns. There were many catches though, the USHA planned for these towns to be all-white, they used to inspect the houses for cleanliness, they required residents to be employed or on Social Security (which basically meant retired or disabled), they also had an income limit and if your income exceeded that limit you were given a two-month eviction notice, and you were expected to attend town meetings at least monthly. While the towns didn’t have religious requirements they did only build protestant churches. Which is an example of discrimination by omission. While a Catholic, Jew, Muslim, etc could in theory move into town they also couldn’t go to a Catholic church, synagogue, or Islamic center without having to extensively travel. Things planned communities leave out might indicate what kind of people planned communities want to leave out. Basically, the whole thing was an experiment in moving Americans into small direct-democracy suburbs as opposed to the then-current system of crowded cities and isolated farm/mine towns. This type of design wasn’t without precedent, there were famously company towns like Gary and Pullman which both existed outside Chicago. But those lacked the autonomy and democracy some USHA apparatchiks desired.

The green cities were a series of low-rise apartments housing over a hundred people each, they were short walks from a parking lot and roads, and walking paths directly and conveniently led residents to the town center which had amenities and a shopping district. Greenbelt in particular is famous for its art deco shopping complex, basically an early mall where business owners would open stores for the townspeople. These businesses were stuck being small, given the income requirements, but it was encouraged for locals to open a business to prove their entrepreneurial spirit. Because city affairs were elected at town meetings the city was able to pull resources to eventually build their own amenities the USHA didn’t originally plan for like a public swimming pool or better negotiated garbage collection.

These three cities were regarded as a success by the USHA until World War II happened and suddenly they showed flaws given the shift in focus. These towns housed poor people who barely if at all could afford a car, so semi-isolated towns outside the city became redundant and pointless. The USHA also had to keep raising the income requirement since the war saw a spike in well-paying jobs which made the town unsustainable otherwise. During the war and subsequent welfare programs to help veterans, these green cities became de facto retirement and single-mother communities for a few years as most able-bodied men were drafted or volunteered. Eventually, the USDA would make the towns independent, after the war they raised the income limit yet again and slowly the towns repopulated. As cars became more common and suburbanization became a wider trend these towns would be less noticeably burdensome and were eventually interpreted as just three out of hundreds of small suburban towns that grew out of major cities. They were still all-white and the town maintained cleanliness requirements; after all they lived in apartments it just takes one guy’s stink-ass clogged toilet to ruin everyone’s day.

By the 1950’s these towns were fully independent. Greendale and Greenhills voted to privatize their homes and get rid of the income limit all together so the towns can become more normal. Greenhills, Ohio still has many of these USHA-era houses and apartments, all owned by a series of corporations and private owners. Greendale, Wisconsin property owners have demolished most of these old houses and restructured their town government so most traces of its founding are lost. But Greenbelt, Maryland still maintains a lot of its structure to this day. Greenbelt has privatized some land and buildings, but most of the original USHA apartments are owned by the Greenbelt Homes, Inc cooperative which gives residents co-ownership of the building they live in and their payments mostly go to maintenance. Because Greenbelt was collectively owned the House Un-American Activities Committee would blacklist and put on trial most of Greenbelt’s residents and officials. Though they didn’t find much evidence of communist influence, the town was a target of the red scare by the DMV area, residents were discriminated, blacklisted, and pressured into selling their assets. While Greenbelt did commodify some of the town, the still existing co-ownership shows the town’s democratic initiative to maintain its heritage. The green cities desegregated in the 50’s and 60’s depending on state law, Greenbelt was the last to desegregate under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, while discrimination persisted for years by the 1980’s the town would become half non-white, today the town is 47% black and 10% Asian.

Though these towns largely integrated with a privatized and suburbanized America, they do stand as a memorial to an idea of American urbanism that died. They were designed for walkability and were planned to be more democratic and egalitarian towns, with the conditions that came with segregation and government oversight. You can’t ignore the strict standards and racism in their history, but you can say that about many towns. How do you think America would be different if more cities had green suburbs that were more interconnected and designed for community gatherings?

[sayruq]

Yemeni, Iranian, and Palestinian authorities have spoken out in support of US university students and faculty members who have been targeted by brutal police repression for the past two weeks during mobilizations calling for an end to the genocide in Gaza. The leader of Yemen's ruling Ansarallah movement, Abdul Malik al-Houthi, said during a speech on 25 April that the US government “does not respect their laws, their constitution, or any headlines they raise and brag about,” stressing that there is a “concerted effort” from Washington to silence a movement that “has begun to wake up to the horror of what is happening in occupied Palestine.” “With the demonstrations and sit-ins at prominent US universities, the US support for the Israeli enemy became clear, as authorities dealt with the demonstrations and protests … in a bad manner that goes beyond all considerations,” the Yemeni resistance leader added.

Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian also condemned the crackdown witnessed across several universities. “The suppression and violent treatment of the American police and security forces against professors and students protesting the genocide and war crimes of the Israeli regime in various universities of the United States is deeply worrying,” Iran's top diplomat said via social media, adding that this repression is an extension of “Washington's full-fledged support for the Israeli regime and clearly shows the double standard policy and contradictory attitude of the American government towards freedom of expression.”

In Palestine, officials from Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), as well as student organizations in the Gaza Strip, issued statements supporting the grassroots movement that has taken over about two dozen university campuses in the US. “We, the students of Gaza, salute the students of Columbia University, Yale University, New York University, Rutgers University, the University of Michigan, and dozens of universities across the United States who are rising in solidarity with Gaza and to put an end to the Zionist–US genocide against our people in Gaza,” a statement from students organizations in Gaza reads. “From here in Gaza, we see you and salute you. Your actions and activism matter, especially in the heart of the empire, in the United States … It is clear that a new generation is rising that will no longer accept Zionism, racism, and genocide and that stands with Palestine and our liberation from the river to the sea,” the statement adds. For their part, the PFLP called on Palestinian and Arab students to “rise for Gaza following the example of American universities.” “Palestinian and Arab universities must take the initiative and break the barrier of silence, following the example of American universities which have ignited an intifada within the campus for the victory of the blood of our Palestinian people, and in rejection of the continuing American support for the zionist entity,” the PFLP statement reads. In a similar vein, Hamas politburo member Izzat al-Rishq said that the government of US President Joe Biden “violates individual rights and the right to expression, and arrests university students and faculty members because they reject the genocide that our Palestinian people are subjected to in the Gaza Strip at the hands of the neo-Nazi Zionists, without the slightest feeling of shame about the legal value represented by the students and university professors.” “The Biden administration, which is a partner in the brutal war on our Palestinian people, does not want to acknowledge that [the US public has] discovered the truth about the Nazi entity and is siding with human values and standing on the right side of history. Today’s students are the leaders of the future, and their suppression today means an expensive electoral bill that the Biden administration will pay sooner or later.”

[kcinpa]

TL;DR Project 2025

Project 2025 has crossed my dash several times, so maybe tumblr is already informed about the hellish 900-page takeover plan if Trump wins office again. But even the articles covering Project 2025 can be a LOT of reading. So I'm trying to get it down to simple bulleted lists…

Navigator Research (a progressive polling outfit) found that 7 in 10 Americans are unfamiliar with Project 2025. But the more they learn about it, the more they don't like or want it. When asked about a series of policy plans taken directly from Project 2025, the bipartisan survey group responded most negatively to the following:

Allowing employers to stop paying hourly workers overtime

Allowing the government to monitor people’s pregnancies to potentially prosecute them if they miscarry

Removing health care protections for people with pre-existing conditions

Eliminating the National Weather Service, which is currently responsible for preparing for extreme weather events like heat waves, floods, and wildfires

Eliminating the Head Start program, ending preschool education for the children of low-income families

Putting a new tax on health insurance for millions of people who get insurance through their employer

Banning Medicare from negotiating for lower prescription drug costs and eliminating the $35 monthly cap on the price of insulin for seniors

Cutting Social Security benefits by raising the retirement age

Allowing employers to deny workers access to birth control

Laurie Garrett looked at the roughly 50 pages within Project 2025 that deal with Health and Human Services (HHS) and other health agencies, and summarized them on Twitter/X in a series of replies. I've shortened even more here:

HHS must "respect for the sacred rights of conscience" for Federal workers & healthcare providers and workers broadly who object to abortions, contraception, gender reassignment & other issues - ie. allow them to deny services based on religious beliefs

HHS should promote "stable and flourishing married families."

Require all welfare programs to "promote father involvement" – or terminate their funding for mothers and children.

Prioritize adoptions via faith-based organizations.

Redefine sex, eliminating all forms of gender "confusion" regarding identity and orientation.

Eliminate the Head Start program for children, entirely

Ban all funding of Planned Parenthood

Ban birth control services that are "egregious attacks on many Americans' religious & moral beliefs"

Deny pregnancy termination pills, "mail-order abortions."

Eliminate Office of Refugee Resettlement; move all refugee matters to the Department of Homeland Security

Healthcare should be "market-based"

Ban all mask and vaccine requirements.

Closely regulate the NIH w/citizen ethics panels, ensuring that no research involves fetal tissue, leads to development of new forms of Abortions or brings profits to the researchers.

Redirect the Office of Global Affairs to promoting "moral conscience" & full compliance w/the Mexico City policy

The CDC should have no role in medical policies.

"Because liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism," HHS should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence & by what method.

I'm still looking for a good short summary of the environmental horrors that Project 2025 would bring if it comes to fruition…

[transmutationisms]

the idea that 'science' is an unmitigated and inherent social good---a politically neutral and universally beneficial process of accumulating knowledge---is wildly ahistorical and dangerously, wilfully ignorant of the role that science and its purveyors / practitioners have played in imperial and colonial expansion. warwick anderson went so far as to say that colonial medicine was better understood as a discourse of settlement than one of health promotion, & we can see this quite easily in, for example, french doctors' use of the nostalgia diagnosis to guide colonial policy in algeria in the 1830s, attempting to securely settle a french population there; or in the development of a science of 'water cures', spa treatments considered to mitigate the insalubrious effects of foreign (particularly tropical) environments, for which the french army by the 1890s granted routine medical leave because the 'health' of its soldiers was not a matter of individual interest but a state resource.

but medicine is in many ways an easy case when it comes to the relationship between science and the state; all too often we still seem reluctant to acknowledge, for example, the pursuit of economic botany and animal / plant breeding in the early modern period as contributors to discourses of acclimatisation and proto-eugenics, sciences that were given state financial support on these utilitarian grounds & not for any high-minded general pursuit of 'knowledge'; or the development of navigational instruments and knowledge from the 14th century or so onward as a project explicitly funded and intended to permit faster, cheaper, more reliable colonial exploration and travel; or the sheer amount of research in physics and chemistry that has been and is devoted to weapons development or natural resource extraction; or the promise of space travel as a further possibility for obtaining raw materials as well as for settlement---often marketed in terms and visual rhetoric explicitly comparing the 'space colony' to its terrestrial precursor: 'the final frontier', depicted as both lush tropical paradise & as rugged american west, waiting to be conquered & brought to heel.

i am of course not hostile to 'science' in any totalising way; this would be as indefensible a position as the automatic 'defence' of all such practices; they're not monolithic or intrinsically doomed to serve state interests. but it is simply irresponsible to pretend that the scientific inquiry into something---describing it, measuring it, taxonomising it---is inherently a social good, or that the pursuit of 'knowledge' is ever an apolitical endeavour. knowing, seeing, & measuring the world grant immense power; states and empires know this. scientific inquiry is not tangentially related to imperial and colonial expansion; often it is a critical piece of the machinery by which these processes occur. wilful ignorance of this fact in favour of an optimistic conception of science as a universal social good is not just inaccurate but propagandistic & an advancement of state & imperial interests.

[covid-safer-hotties]

Also preserved on our archive

Last night during a town hall with the Spanish-language news network Univision, Vice President and presidential nominee Kamala Harris received a question from a person with Long COVID who applied for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) three years ago and still hasn’t received a decision on her case.

Martha, who is 62, had a heart attack in 2020 and was later diagnosed with Long COVID, “which will disable me for the rest of my life,” she said. The disease has caused her to lose her job and become homeless. She asked Harris how disabled people could better access disability insurance.

Harris responded with a lengthy answer that advocates and many people with Long COVID said was inadequate. While the Democratic presidential nominee cited that she helped recognize Long COVID as a disability under the Americans with Disability Act (ADA), the ADA only provides protection for people requesting accommodations and does not apply to benefits programs. Many criticized her for failing to answer the question or offer any immediate plans or policies that would expedite SSDI cases, fund Long COVID research, or prevent more cases of the disease.

A new National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) report on Long COVID as a disability, which we covered earlier this year, will allegedly be used by the Social Security Administrion (SSA) to improve their processes for Long COVID-related applications.

Mother Jones reporterJullia Métraux wrote about Martha’s question and Harris’s response today, pointing out that over 30,000 people died on waiting lists for SSDI decisions in the fiscal year 2023.

The Sick Times and The 19th reached out to the Harris campaign for comment on how the campaign will recognize and address Long COVID response but did not receive a response.

[mariacallous]

In late October, President Joe Biden issued an apology for the U.S. Indian Boarding Schools program, a century-long concerted effort by the federal government to destroy Native American culture and assimilate Native children through a network of residential schools. This apology—the first of its kind by a sitting U.S. president—comes in the wake of the Department of the Interior publishing the second and final volume of its Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative investigative report, which quantified the scope of the economic, social, and human impacts of one of the most destructive assimilation policies in American history.  

Beyond laying bare the devasting impact of the boarding school program on Native communities and children, the Interior Department report also issued an explicit call for the federal government to pursue policies that help Indigenous communities heal, while raising awareness about the lasting impacts of the boarding schools on Native welfare. However, the report made it clear that well-intentioned policymaking and awareness initiatives will be insufficient in addressing the harms done to Native people. The federal government must also commit itself to investment in Indian Country commensurate with the scale of the trauma, economic harms, and social harms the boarding schools levied onto Native people and communities.  

With President-elect Donald Trump set to retake office in January, it is imperative that the steps President Biden and the Interior Department have taken do not wither on the vine. Given the destructive legacy of Trump’s last term for Indian Country—as well as the anti-diversity, assimilation-centric rhetoric he and his proxies expressed on the 2016, 2020, and 2024 campaign trails—it will be essential for congressional, state, philanthropic, and private sector actors to take steps to secure future investment and policy change to promote Native American welfare, prosperity, and self-actualization. 

This analysis provides a brief overview of the federal Indian boarding school system as well as current federal investments targeting Native American education, and proposes several complementary policy actions for holistically supporting Native individuals and communities. It also outlines some of the ongoing barriers to public awareness about the long-term impacts of federal abuse toward Indian Country, and how the historic and modern lack of public awareness creates barriers to new investment in tribal education and cultural revitalization. 

[chippewa]

Indigeneity, Agenda 47 (Project 2025), and Social Security

Update: I think our best hope is that these plans aren't really implemented. Maybe people will become aware and there will be pushback from other elected officials to stop it. Trump's administration didn't go through with its entire 2016 plan. Maybe we'll dodge a bullet this time too.

This affects all Americans.

If you're in the US, you should be aware that the Trump administration plan includes reducing and/or shutting down Social Security which includes SSDI ("disability") / SSI ("welfare"), Medicare / Medicaid, along with EBT / SNAP ("food stamps").

This could also disband Tribes and take our remaining homelands. This could be the Termination Era coming back.

A lot of people voted for him having no idea that they may have voted to end their own healthcare, financial and food assistance in the coming year.

A lot of vulnerable people are at risk in the next year.

Insulin rationing is already happening to Americans (there's a common lie that "insulin was capped at $35!" when that only applies to seniors on a specific Medicare plan, which may be going away) even with the bare minimum social safety net that is Social Security / Medicare / Medicaid.

People are already going hungry even with SNAP / EBT food cards.

If you know anyone who relies on Social Security, or is "on disability" SSDI, or lives in poverty "on welfare" SSI, or needs Medicare or Medicaid for their healthcare and prescriptions, be very aware that you might see scary things happen in 2025, as part of "Agenda 47" (Project 2025).

The campaign had a fake website with nameless AI-generated "Native people" declaring support for the Project:

Zoom in on the hand and the strange sign meme text:

None of these people have names. They don't exist.

This is a project that may include disbanding our remaining Tribes, taking our remaining land and selling it to the highest international bidder.

They could do the same to all "federal land", like National Parks which Trump began doing in 2016 with Bears Ears National Monument a place that used to be protected, with ancient Native petroglyph rock art that now has ATV trails and RV parking, and is open for uranium mining:

From the fake site with AI generated "Native people" telling you we support this plan:

The "community-based self-reflection on how we identify as Native people of the United States" is a return of the Termination Era, where all Tribes are disbanded and we "become Americans" or cease to exist as Native people. Our nations are older than the US. The Trump administration has no right to force yet another assimilation policy on us.

This is a land grab, a theft of public resources, and will rob from the poorest people in the US including your neighbors.

This will affect everyone, Native or not.

I don't have any solution. This is just a warning.

[robertreich]

Biden vs. Trump: Whose Economic Plan Is Better for You? 

Trump failed to deliver on his number one campaign promise:

President Trump presided over a historic net loss of nearly 3 million American jobs, the worst jobs numbers ever recorded under an American president.

This is no fluke. America’s economy has almost always done worse under Republican presidents. A New York Times analysis found that since 1933, the U.S. economy has grown nearly twice as fast on average under Democrats.

Now Trump’s defenders claim it’s not his fault that the economy collapsed under his watch. It was the pandemic. But there are two big things wrong with this.

First, the pandemic recession was as bad as it was because of Trump. His failure to lead with any national strategy left America in chaos throughout 2020, long after other nations had developed coordinated testing, tracing, and social distancing plans that allowed them to reopen their economies.

But secondly, even before the pandemic, Trump failed to deliver on his economic promises. Job growth slowed under Trump.

America added more jobs in President Obama’s last three years than in Trump’s first three.

Even before the pandemic most middle-class American households saw their incomes go down under Trump.

Trump’s major economic policy was cutting taxes on the rich and big corporations. He promised it would result in $4,000 annual raises for workers. How did that work out? Did you get a $4,000 raise?

Republicans keep claiming that if we just cut enough taxes on the rich, the wealth will “trickle down.” But it never works. Wage growth slowed after Reagan’s tax cuts for the rich and big corporations. And the Bush and Trump tax cuts didn’t trickle down either.

These giveaways to the wealthy came at the expense of investments in infrastructure, education, and health care, making life more expensive and difficult for everyone who isn’t rich.

They also exploded the debt and deficit. Reagan oversaw a 186% increase in the national debt — the biggest percentage increase in over 70 years. The Bush and Trump tax cuts, that mostly benefited corporations and the rich, are the main reasons why America’s debt is growing faster than the economy.

Republican presidents have led us into the three worst economic crises of the last century, and Democrats led us out of them.

Republicans talk about running the country like a business, but they want to run it the way Trump ran his businesses: with massive debts, a string of failures, and payouts for the folks at the top, while workers get shafted again and again. Given Republicans’ track record, why would any hard-working American put their financial security in the hands of a Republican president ever again?

[madlori]

the issue with kamala is shes a genocidal fucking maniac like every single other candidate available. dont pretend like shes going to do any good, who fucking cares about any of her other policies. what matters is she advocates the killing of children in the middle east just as much as anyone else. vote for her but dont pretend like shes the best. i hate liberals

Yes. She's definitely 100% in favor of killing children. She loves it. Can't get enough of it. That's definitely the most logical interpretation.

It can't be as simple as that our treaties with Israel cannot just be ignored. It can't be that we don't actually have any direct control over what Israel does. You can take issue with those things but to suggest that she - or Biden, for that matter - just CAN'T WAIT to murder children is stupid.

No, it's that she's foaming at the mouth EAGER to murder Palestinian children.

If you believe that you're just as propagandized as the Trumpsters.

Because yeah, who CARES about protecting reproductive rights? Queer rights? Immigration? The housing market? Minumum wage? Healthcare? Protecting social security and the ACA? Those things don't matter at all.

I got news for you. Every election any American has ever voted in - in the last 100 years at least and probably more - has been in support of a government that's complicit in some kind of atrocity. Because the US has been in the business of being complicit in atrocities for the entirety of its existence. Not that we're alone in that. It's true of all the world powers. And a lot of countries that AREN'T world powers. I dunno, maybe Monaco has clean hands, but I doubt it. We have to do the best we can with what we have.

"They're all genocidal maniacs" is not a useful position. Despair and disengagement is not the way to achieve change.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Lois Beckett at The Guardian:

Attacks targeting American public schools over LGBTQ+ rights and education about race and racism cost those schools an estimated $3.2bn in the 2023-24 school year, according to a new report by education professors from four major American universities. The study is believed to be the first attempt to quantify the financial impact of rightwing political campaigns targeting school districts and school boards across the US. In the wake of the pandemic, these campaigns first attempted to restrict how American schools educate students about racism, and then increasingly shifted to spreading fear among parents about schools’ policies about transgender students and LGBTQ+ rights.

Researchers from UCLA, UT Austin, UC Riverside and American University surveyed 467 public school superintendents across 46 US states, asking them about the direct and indirect costs of dealing with these volatile campaigns. Those costs included everything from out-of-pocket payments to hire to lawyers or additional security, to the staff member hours devoted to responding to disinformation on social media, addressing parent concerns and replying to voluminous public records requests focused on the district’s teachings on racism, gender and sexuality. The campaigns that focused on public schools’ policies about transgender students often included lurid false claims about schools trying to change students’ gender or “indoctrinating” them into becoming gay. This disinformation sparked harassment and threats against individual teachers, school board members and administrators, with some of the fury coming from within local communities, and even more angry calls, emails and social media posts flooding in from conservative media viewers across the country.

In addition to the financial costs of responding to these targeted campaigns, the study revealed other dynamics, the researchers said. “The attack on public officials as pedophiles was one I heard again and again, from people across extremely different parts of the country: rural, urban, suburban. It speaks to the way that this really is a nationalized conflict campaign,” said John Rogers, an education professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the lead author of the study. The frequency with which both school board members and school superintendents were “being called out as sexual predators – it was really frightening”, Rogers said. Superintendents from across the country told the researchers how these culture battles had affected their schools, and cut into resources they would have preferred to spend on education.

[...] While disagreement, debate and dealing with angry parents are a normal part of local public school administration, the researchers noted, the political campaigns that schools have faced in recent years have been anything but normal. Many of them have been driven by “a small number of active individuals on social media or at school board meetings”, and fueled by misinformation. The school-focused campaigns, which started with claims that elementary and middle schools were harming white students by teaching critical race theory and later shifted to attacks on schools’ policies for transgender students, were nationally organized, with “common talking points” that could be traced back to conservative foundations and rightwing legal organizations, and were intensely amplified by rightwing media coverage, Rogers said.

Public schools across the US burned up nearly $3.2BN worth of money fending off right-wing culture war items such as book bans, anti-LGBTQ+ extremism, anti-student inclusion, and anti-racial equity policies.

See Also:

The Advocate: U.S. public schools lost $3.2 billion fighting conservative culture wars: report