#economic opportunity

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

deAdder

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

August 11, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Aug 12, 2024

Vice President Kamala Harris’s choice of Minnesota governor Tim Walz to be her running mate seems to cement the emergence of a new Democratic Party.

When he took office in January 2021, President Joe Biden was clear that he intended to launch a new era in America, overturning the neoliberalism of the previous forty years and replacing it with a proven system in which the government would work to protect the ability of ordinary Americans to prosper. Neoliberalism relied on markets to shape society, and its supporters promised it would be so much more efficient than government regulation that it would create a booming economy that would help everyone. Instead, the slashing of government regulation and social safety systems had enabled the rise of wealthy oligarchs in the U.S. and around the globe. Those oligarchs, in turn, dominated poor populations, whose members looked at the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few people and gave up on democracy. 

Biden recognized that defending democracy in the United States, and thus abroad, required defending economic fairness. He reached back to the precedent set by Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933 and followed by presidents of both parties from then until Ronald Reagan took office in 1981. Biden’s speeches often come back to a promise to help the parents who “have lain awake at night staring at the ceiling, wondering how they will make rent, send their kids to college, retire, or pay for medication.” He vowed “to finally rebuild a strong middle class and grow our economy from the middle out and bottom up, giving hardworking families across the country a little more breathing room.” 

Like his predecessors, he set out to invest in ordinary Americans. Under his administration, Democrats passed landmark legislation like the American Rescue Plan that rebuilt the economy after the devastating effects of the coronavirus pandemic; the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that is rebuilding our roads, bridges, ports, and airports, as well as investing in rural broadband; the CHIPS and Science Act that rebuilt American manufacturing at the same time it invested in scientific research; and the Inflation Reduction Act, which, among other things, invested in addressing climate change. Under his direction, the government worked to stop or break up monopolies and to protect the rights of workers and consumers.

Like the policies of that earlier era, his economic policies were based on the idea that making sure ordinary people made decent wages and were protected from predatory employers and industrialists would create a powerful engine for the economy. The system had worked in the past, and it sure worked during the Biden administration, which saw the United States economy grow faster in the wake of the pandemic than that of any other developed economy. Under Biden, the economy added almost 16 million jobs, wages rose faster than inflation, and workers saw record low unemployment rates.

While Biden worked hard to make his administration reflect the demographics of the nation, tapping more women than men as advisors and nominating more Black women and racial minorities to federal judicial positions than any previous president, it was Vice President Kamala Harris who emphasized the right of all Americans to be treated equally before the law. 

She was the first member of the administration to travel to Tennessee in support of the Tennessee Three after the Republican-dominated state legislature expelled two Black Democratic lawmakers for protesting in favor of gun safety legislation and failed by a single vote to expel their white colleague. She has highlighted the vital work historically Black colleges and universities have done for their students and for the United States. And she has criss-crossed the country to support women’s rights, especially the right to reproductive healthcare, in the two years since the Supreme Court, packed with religious extremists by Trump, overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.

To the forming Democratic coalition, Harris brought an emphasis on equal rights before the law that drew from the civil rights movements that stretched throughout our history and flowered after 1950. Harris has told the story of how her parents, Dr. Shyamala Gopalan, who hailed from India, and Donald J. Harris, from Jamaica, met as graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley and bonded over a shared interest in civil rights. “My parents marched and shouted in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s,” Harris wrote in 2020. “It’s because of them and the folks who also took to the streets to fight for justice that I am where I am.”

To these traditionally Democratic mindsets, Governor Walz brings something quite different: midwestern Progressivism. Walz is a leader in the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, which formed after World War II, but the reform impulse in the Midwest reaches all the way back to the years immediately after the Civil War and in its origins is associated with the Republican, rather than the Democratic, Party. While Biden’s approach to government focuses on economic justice and Harris’s focuses on individual rights, Walz’s focuses on the government’s responsibility to protect communities from extremists. That stance sweeps in economic fairness and individual rights but extends beyond them to recall an older vision of the nature of government itself.

The Republican Party’s roots were in the Midwest, where ordinary people were determined to stop wealthy southern oligarchs from taking over control of the United States government. That determination continued after the war when people in the Midwest were horrified to see industrial leaders step into the place that wealthy enslavers had held before the war. Their opposition was based not in economics alone, but rather in their larger worldview. And because they were Republicans by heritage, they constructed their opposition to the rise of industrial oligarchs as a more expansive vision of democracy. 

In the early 1870s the Granger movement, based in an organization originally formed by Oliver H. Kelley of Minnesota and other officials in the Department of Agriculture to combat the isolation of farm life, began to organize farmers against the railroad monopolies that were sucking farmers’ profits. The Grangers called for the government to work for communities rather than the railroad barons, demanding business regulation. In the 1870s, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Illinois passed the so-called Granger Laws, which regulated railroads and grain elevator operators. (When such a measure was proposed in California, railroad baron Leland Stanford called it “pure communism” and hired former Republican congressman Roscoe Conkling to fight it by arguing that corporations were “persons” under the Fourteenth Amendment.)

Robert La Follette grew up on a farm near Madison, Wisconsin, during the early days of the Grangers and absorbed their concern that rich men were taking over the nation and undermining democracy. One of his mentors warned: “Money is taking the field as an organized power. Which shall rule—wealth or man; which shall lead—money or intellect; who shall fill public stations—educated and patriotic free men, or the feudal serfs of corporate capital?” 

In the wake of the Civil War, La Follette could not embrace the Democrats. Instead, he and people like him brought this approach to government to a Republican Party that at the time was dominated by industrialists. Wisconsin voters sent La Follette to Congress in 1884 when he was just 29, and when party bosses dumped him in 1890, he turned directly to the people, demanding they take the state back from the party machine. They elected him governor in 1900.

As governor, La Follette advanced what became known as the “Wisconsin Idea,” adopted and advanced by Republican President Theodore Roosevelt. As Roosevelt noted in a book explaining the system, Wisconsin was “literally a laboratory for wise experimental legislation aiming to secure the social and political betterment of the people as a whole.” La Follette called on professors from the University of Wisconsin, state legislators, and state officials to craft measures to meet the needs of the state’s people. “All through the Union we need to learn the Wisconsin lesson,” Roosevelt wrote.

In the late twentieth century, the Republican Party had moved far away from Roosevelt when it embraced neoliberalism. As it did so, Republicans ditched the Wisconsin Idea: Wisconsin governor Scott Walker tried to do so explicitly by changing the mission of the University of Wisconsin system from a “search for truth” to “improve the human condition” to a demand that the university “meet the state’s workforce needs.” 

While Republicans abandoned the party’s foundational principles, Democratic governors have been governing on them. Now vice-presidential nominee Walz demonstrates that those community principles are joining the Democrats’ commitment to economic fairness and civil rights to create a new, national program for democracy. 

It certainly seems like the birth of a new era in American history. At a Harris-Walz rally in Arizona on Friday, Mayor John Giles of Mesa, Arizona, who describes himself as a lifelong Republican, said: “I do not recognize my party. The Republican Party has been taken over by extremists that are committed to forcing people in the center of the political spectrum out of the party. I have something to say to those of us who are in the political middle: You don’t owe a damn thing to that political party…. [Y]ou don’t owe anything to a party that is out of touch and is hell-bent on taking our country backward. And by all means, you owe no displaced loyalty to a candidate that is morally and ethically bankrupt…. [I]n the spirit of the great Senator John McCain, please join me in putting country over party and stopping Donald Trump, and protecting the rule of law, protecting our Constitution, and protecting the democracy of this great country. That is why I’m standing with Vice President Harris and Governor Walz.”

Vice President Harris put it differently. Speaking to a United Auto Workers local in Wayne, Michigan, on Thursday, she explained what she and Walz have in common. 

 “A whole lot,” she said. “You know, we grew up the same way. We grew up in a community of people, you know—I mean, he grew up… in Nebraska; me, Oakland, California—seemingly worlds apart. But the same people raised us: good people; hard-working people; people who had pride in their hard work; you know, people who had pride in knowing that we were a community of people who looked out for each other—you know, raised by a community of folks who understood that the true measure of the strength of a leader is not based on who you beat down. It’s based on who you lift up.”

—

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[consuetudinari0]

The Legacy of Manifest Destiny in American History

Manifest Destiny: The Birth of American Expansionism The term Manifest Destiny first appeared in the July-August 1845 issue of the Democratic Review, in an article titled Annexation by journalist John L. O’Sullivan. It was a concept that came to define a crucial moment in American history, encapsulating the nation’s drive for expansion. O’Sullivan argued that it was the United States’ “manifest…

[kinialohaguy]

No Tax On Tips

Aloha kākou. Follow me back through the Wayback machine with Mr. Peabody and Sherman. It’s the year 2020 just a few months before the reelection of President Trump. When Pedo-Hitler Biden and the Marxist democrats rigged the election. Queue Intro: Back in 2020, when the Covid Scamdemic first broke out, the painful decision to shut down the country, indeed the world, for two weeks to flatten the…

[nationwidechildrenshospital]

"My favorite part about working with the financial program for teens is the opportunity to influence the financial trajectory of an entire generation. Educating teens on topics I had little to no knowledge about at their age is incredibly rewarding and feels like a full circle moment for me."

Dee Ballantine, Program Coordinator, Economic Opportunity, Community Wellness

[chronically-ghosted]

day before a 5 day holiday weekend. office empty. got me thinking thoughts.

[bloodpen-to-paper]

I'm realizing now how reasonable the economics and paywall system might seem from the Koreans' perspective in comparison to our older members. Acau and Jungryeok from what I know play a lot of vanilla, where something like the warpstone system isn't even available. The fact that it exists here is already a huge buff, so having to work for it doesn't take away from that. The members who had it for free before feel cheated, but the new members see a reasonable opportunity they haven't had before

[kittykatninja321]

Bruce Wayne 🤝 Jason Todd

Crime Alley killed their parents

[firefighter-diazbuckley]

yk it’s bad enough that we could say that the erie canal was influential in starting the civil war but i truly believe you could make the argument that it also led to the great migration

[hussyknee]

Why is my stupid idiot brain sunk to the very bottom of the sea bed like whale fall. I'm on extra strength medication, I'm staying off social media, I'm surrounded by kittens. And yet. My anxiety has turned into full blown agoraphobia and I'm so depressed that getting out of bed is a feat I only achieve because my cats need feeding.

It's been almost seventeen years of being bipolar but I still can't internalise that mood disorders are actual illnesses that disable and debilitate as much as any physical disease. Clearly the only thing wrong with me is that I'm not trying hard enough to crawl out of this. If I really wanted to get better I'd fight through my anxiety and back pain and sensory hell and do stuff like go to therapy, eat healthy, exercise and get a job.

To make matters worse, my brain keeps hollering that I'm 37 this year and no closer to joining the rest of the job-having, rent-paying, independent adult world. The fact that I've been in a consistently worsening mental health crisis since 2020 to the point that I was in greater danger than I've ever been of committing suicide the first six months of last year is clearly irrelevant. Somehow.

Tbh, if it wasn't for my rescue kittens, I'd be regretting that I didn't just go through with it. Not enough to go through with it now, but regretting it all the same. But I do have my kitties so I can't regret it. Instead, I'm just resigning myself to the fact that having something to live for, even when I don't want to, is the best I'll ever get.

[starbuck]

HATE when i’m taking a class that i KNOW would be a piece of cake for people who are fans of objective definitions with no exceptions and unexamined moral outrage…

[eregarden]

at the core of it, i am just so profoundly sad with how my life turned out. i think thats why no matter what i do or what meds i take, it never gets better. i’m going to be almost 30. my younger self would be so ashamed of me. of what i ended up being able to get. this wasn’t how it was supposed to be. i think sometimes you do just fall so behind that a decent life becomes unrecoverable.

[nationwidechildrenshospital]

"The most rewarding part of the Nationwide Children's Hospital tax clinic program is working directly with families across central Ohio and being able to provide a great service for free. I love to see the excitement expressed on our clients faces as I review their tax return and refund amounts. It is equally as rewarding helping community members work through unique challenges on their tax return and providing them education that will help on future tax returns."

Samuel Ricks, Economic Opportunity Project Manager, Wellness Initiatives

[between-the-kola-and-the-sea]

Sometimes in this discourse, we fall into a game of who betrayed who. Did the Arab Jews betray the Arab world by emigrating to Palestine? Or did the non-Jewish Arabs betray Arab Jews by enabling Zionist and nationalist ideology and turning on the local Jewish community?  We can continue playing these games of who hurt who. Or we can choose mutual healing and solidarity. The fight against Western colonialism and imperialism is still pervasive in the Arab region, as the movement to free Palestine is critical. Will we allow it to divide us by internalising the narrative of Jews vs. Muslims or will we be able to build the unity we need to combat colonialism together?  I place myself in an anti-colonial struggle that refuses to fall into the colonial mindset of erasing Jewish history in the Arab region, and I hope you do too. - Hadar Cohen, Arab Jews should not be forgotten

[kramlabs]

.

[chussyracing]

highly controversial opinion: i'm glad the application didn't go through YET because the current regs aren't ready for another team, let alone one building on a green field (unlike audi buying an existing team) and starting out with alpine slash renault power units wouldn't be beneficial either. now they can shift their focus to the 2026 f1 regulations and strenghten the relationship with general motors to enter the competition with them in 2028.

[poligraf]

The aggregation of the spiritual life from the practical life is a curse that falls impartially upon both sides of our existence. A society that gives to one class all the opportunities for leisure, and to another all the burdens of work, dooms both classes to spiritual sterility.

— Lewis Mumford