AMERICANA.

 

Last Sunday, with great fanfare and weeks of buildup, NBC debuted Kristen Welker as the new host of its flagship weekly news program, “Meet the Press.” And who was the first guest they had on to mark the occasion? Donald Trump — the liar-in-chief who hadn’t appeared on the show since the insurrection of January 6, 2021. As anyone could have predicted, Trump spent the interview repeating one dangerous lie after another, talking over Welker, and making a complete mockery of the entire proceedings.

A morning roundup of worthy pundit and news reads, brought to you by Daily Kos. Click here to read the full web version.

• Maybe Matt Gaetz Is Right

  Maybe Matt Gaetz Is Right, Michelle Cottle, The New York Times
  The dysfunctional dance taking place in the House between Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his right flank has driven me to consider something I never imagined possible: that Matt Gaetz is right.
  
  A House speaker can be successful only with the confidence of the members who put him or her in charge, when he or she can follow through on promises made and concessions extracted. Indeed, there may be no job in American government that calls for crackerjack deal-making skills more than that of speaker: so many egos, alliances and grievances to manage to keep things moving.
  
  Mr. McCarthy, in his desperate pursuit of the speakership last winter, ran around making promises willy-nilly to the House’s small band of right-wingers, and he will now rise and fall on how he handles those commitments and expectations. So far, things are not looking good for Kev — and, by extension, for a functional Congress.

  
  
• New ‘Meet the Press’ moderator Kristen Welker fails to meet the moment as Trump unleashes flurry of lies in debut interview

  New ‘Meet the Press’ moderator Kristen Welker fails to meet the moment as Trump unleashes flurry of lies in debut interview, Oliver Darcy, CNN
  The Kristen Welker era of "Meet the Press" is off to a bleak start.
  
  The high-stakes sit down with disgraced former president Donald Trump was all risk and little reward for Welker as she assumed the esteemed moderator chair of "Meet the Press" for the first time Sunday. Television executives I surveyed before and after the interview were baffled that NBC News and Welker willfully chose to take on such a fraught assignment, given Trump's notorious propensity to lie. As one television executive put it to me, "It was a crazy way to set the tone of what 'Meet the Press' would be under her."

  
  
• Nazi cavorting anti-vaxxer and presidential candidate RFK Jr. is suing Daily Kos for protecting our community. The legal fees are piling up. You can donate $5 here to help us fight back!
  
  
• This is what taking on election deniers really looks like

  This is what taking on election deniers really looks like, Greg Sargent, The Washington Post
  Democrats won a whole lot of elections in 2022, in no small part on their vow to strengthen and defend democracy. But if they hope to turn the issue into a sustained political winner, they have to deliver on that promise by showing voters what a pro-democracy governing agenda actually looks like.
  
  Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro is set to make a big move in this direction by unveiling a big change on Tuesday that will implement what’s known as “automatic voter registration” statewide.
  
  Automatic registration makes getting on the voter rolls something you have to opt out of, rather than actively sign up for in advance. An underappreciated success story, it has been put into effect in two dozen states, mostly by Democrats. It typically works by automatically registering customers at state Department of Motor Vehicles offices (or other agencies) or by automatically extending them that option, while offering an opt-out alternative.

  
  
• We Have Two Medias in This Country, and They’re Going to Elect Donald Trump

  We Have Two Medias in This Country, and They’re Going to Elect Donald Trump, Michael Tomasky, The New Republic
  If the press doesn’t get involved in the civic health of the nation, there may not be a nation in which a free press might reside.
  
  It’s often asked in my circles: Why isn’t Joe Biden getting more credit for his accomplishments? As with anything, there’s no single reason. Inflation is a factor. His age is as well. Ditto the fact that people aren’t quite yet seeing the infrastructure improvements or the lower prescription drug costs.
  
  There is no one reason. But there is one overwhelming factor in play: the media. Or rather, the two medias. It’s very important that people understand this: We reside in a media environment that promotes—whether it intends to or not—right-wing authoritarian spectacle. At the same time, as a culture, it’s consistently obsessed with who “won the day,” while placing far less value on the fact that the civic and democratic health of the country is nurtured through practices such as deliberation, compromise, and sober governance. The result is bad for Joe Biden. But it’s potentially tragic for democracy

• How a Vote to Oust McCarthy as House Speaker May Play Out

• How a Vote to Oust McCarthy as House Speaker May Play Out, Lindsey McPherson, The Messenger
  ‘We would ram it up their rear ends,’ one McCarthy ally said
  
  If a motion to vacate is triggered, there's three main scenarios for how it may play out: McCarthy prevails with the vast majority of Republicans sticking by his side; the Californian survives with a little help from Democrats; or he's removed as speaker but his allies nominate him again in the absence of an alternative speaker.
  
  McCarthy this week admitted he’s “frustrated” with the demands from his right flank. In an angry outburst, he dared his GOP critics to trigger a vote on his ouster. big>

  As always, my many thanks to all my good readers.  

BIDENOMICS .......

 

Continue reading the main story SUPPORTED BY September 6, 2023

By David Leonhardt

Good morning. We’re covering the shift in the Democratic Party’s economic policy — as well as the Proud Boys, Spanish women’s soccer and college dining halls.

President BidenKenny Holston/The New York Times

Undoing inequality

Bill Clinton and Barack Obama both ran for president promising to reinvigorate the economy for ordinary Americans. And both enacted laws that helped millions of people. Clinton expanded children’s health care and tax credits for low-income families. Obama accomplished even more, making it possible for almost anybody to afford health insurance.

Yet neither Obama nor Clinton managed to alter the basic trajectory of the American economy. Income and wealth inequality, which had begun rising in the early 1980s, continued to do so. So did inequality in other measures, like health and life expectancy. Polls continue to show that most Americans are frustrated with the country’s direction.

Note: Income is pretax. | Source: World Inequality Database | By The New York Times

In response, a growing number of policy experts aligned with the Democratic Party have decided in recent years that their party’s approach to economic policy was flawed. They concluded that Democrats had not gone far enough to undo the revolution that Ronald Reagan started in the 1980s — a revolution that sparked the huge rise in inequality.

These Democratic experts have grown skeptical of the benefits of free trade and Washington’s hands-off approach to corporate consolidation. They want the government to spend more money on highways, technological development and other policies that could create good-paying jobs. The experts, in short, believe that they had been too accepting of the more laissez-faire economic agenda often known as neoliberalism.

This turnabout is the central explanation for President Biden’s economic agenda, which White House aides call Bidenomics and will be core to his re-election campaign. He has signed laws (sometimes with bipartisan support) spending billions of dollars on semiconductor factories, roads, bridges and clean energy. He has tried to crack down on monopolies. He has encouraged workers to join unions.

The best description of this shift I’ve yet read appears in “The Last Politician,” a new book about Biden’s first two years in office by Franklin Foer of The Atlantic. Foer tells the story partly through Jake Sullivan, who helped design Biden’s domestic agenda during the campaign and then became national security adviser.

Sullivan was nobody’s idea of a left-wing populist: He is a Rhodes Scholar with two Yale degrees who was a close aide to Hillary Clinton before Biden. But the financial crisis and then Donald Trump’s victory led Sullivan to reflect on Americans’ frustration, and he decided that elites like him had not done enough to address its underlying causes. (Here’s a 2018 article in which I described his shift.)

“An entire generation of young Democratic wonks, with a similar establishment pedigree, found itself in the same brooding mood, tinged with fear,” Foer writes. These wonks built alliances with the more progressive parts of the party — those represented by Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — during Trump’s presidency. That’s why several Warren protégés, like Bharat Ramamurti, work in senior White House roles today.

Biden himself embodies the shift, too. Although he has long emphasized his humble background in Scranton, Pa., he supported his party’s more neoliberal agenda in the 1980s and 1990s. Recently, he has returned to some of the populist themes that he used to launch his political career a half-century ago. He has lamented the Democratic Party’s drift from working-class families toward college-educated professionals.

New terrain

Much of the 2024 presidential campaign will revolve around the economy’s short-term performance, and both Biden and his Republican critics will be able to cite evidence to make their case. Republicans will note that inflation remains uncomfortably high and that Biden’s pandemic relief spending played a role (albeit a secondary one, as my colleague German Lopez has explained). Biden’s campaign will counter that job growth is solid, and wages have risen across the income spectrum. His investments, in semiconductors and more, seem to be playing a role.

But I would encourage you not to lose sight of the bigger picture during the back and forth of the campaign. The biggest picture is that the post-1980 economy failed to deliver the broad-based benefits that Reagan and his allies promised. So did several economic policies, like expanded global trade, that many Democrats favored.

Biden represents a response to these unfulfilled promises, as do the small but growing number of Republicans pushing their party to change. Whatever happens with the economy over the next year or with Biden’s presidency, the policy debate has shifted.

“Bidenomics sounds banal when plastered as a slogan across the backdrop of a presidential stump speech,” Foer told me. “But it’s more than a set of positive economic indicators. It’s a shift in ideology. For a generation, Democratic presidents were inclined to be deferential to markets, basically uninterested in the problem of monopoly, and lukewarm to unions. Biden has gone in the other direction.”

Related: Some people mistakenly think that “working class” is a euphemism for “white working class.” It isn’t. The American working class spans all races, and the Democratic Party has also lost ground with voters of color, especially those without a four-year college degree. You can read more from my colleague Nate Cohn. A good and explicit article  about the actual Biden economics and how it's slowly transforming America to the better and to more futuristic economical and social stability . My, as always, many thanks to all.

U.N. Secretary-General's remarks at the BRICS summit

24 August 2023

Secretary-General's remarks at the BRICS summit

Antonio Guterres

Distinguished Heads of States and Governments,

Excellencies,  

Ladies and gentlemen, 

Let me begin by thanking President Cyril Ramaphosa.

We take great inspiration from the Rainbow Nation’s extraordinary path to unity through action and justice.

That is what our world needs.

Unity for action. And unity for justice.

We are confronting existential challenges.

The climate crisis is spiraling out of control.

A global cost-of-living crisis is raging.

Poverty, hunger, and inequalities are growing against the objectives of the Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development.

New technologies are raising red flags, without a global architecture to deal with them.

Geopolitical divides and conflicts are multiplying with profound global implications, especially the impacts from the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Excellencies,

We are moving towards a multipolar world, and that is a positive thing.

But multipolarity in itself is not enough to guarantee a peaceful or just global community.

To be a factor of peace, equity, and justice in international relations, multipolarity must be supported by strong and effective multilateral institutions.

Look no further than the situation in Europe at the dawn of the last century.

Europe was multipolar – but it lacked strong multilateral mechanisms.

The result was World War I.  

As the global community moves towards multipolarity, we desperately need – and I have been vigorously advocating for – a strengthened and reformed multilateral architecture based on the UN Charter and international law.

Today’s global governance structures reflect yesterday’s world. 

They were largely created in the aftermath of World War II when many African countries were still ruled by colonial powers and were not even at the table. 

This is particularly true of the Security Council of the United Nations and the Bretton Woods institutions.

For multilateral institutions to remain truly universal, they must reform to reflect today’s power and economic realities, and not the power and economic realities of the post Second World War .

In the absence of such reform –– fragmentation is inevitable.

We cannot afford a world with a divided global economy and financial system; with diverging strategies on technology including artificial intelligence; and with conflicting security frameworks.

The IMF estimates that such a fracture could cost 7 percent of global GDP – a cost that would be disproportionately born by low-income countries, mainly in Africa.

And so I have come to Johannesburg with a simple message: in a fracturing world with overwhelming crises, there is simply no alternative to cooperation.

We must urgently restore trust and reinvigorate multilateralism for the 21st century.

This requires the courage to compromise in the reforms that are necessary for the common good.

It requires full respect for the UN Charter, international law, universal values, and all human rights – social, cultural, economic, civil, and political.

And it requires much greater solidarity.

Of course, none of this is easy.

But it is essential.

And is essential especially for Africa.

The African continent, a historic victim of slavery and colonialism, continues to confront grave injustices.

On average, African countries pay four times more for borrowing than the United States and eight times more than the wealthiest European countries.

And African countries account for just four per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, but is an epicentre of climate chaos suffering disproportionally impacts of climate change.

Looking ahead, I see two priorities for action and justice.

First, on the economic front. 

Redesigning today’s outdated, dysfunctional, and unfair global financial architecture is necessary, but I know it won’t happen overnight. 

Yet we can – and must – take practical action now.

The Sustainable Development Goals’ Stimulus I have proposed, an effective debt workout mechanism, and other steps necessary to multiple the resources available for developing countries are vital for sustainable development in Africa and to give options to African governments to support the development of their peoples.

We must also drastically step-up climate action and climate justice.

I have put forward a Climate Solidarity Pact in which developed countries provide financial and technical support to help emerging economies – in Africa and beyond – to promote an equitable and just transition to renewable energy.

And I have presented an Acceleration Agenda to boost these efforts – with developed countries committing to reach net zero emissions as close as possible to 2040, and developing countries as close as possible to 2050.

Developed countries must also finally keep their promises to developing countries:  by meeting the $100 billion goal, doubling adaptation finance, replenishing the Green Climate Fund, and operationalizing the loss and damage fund this year.

As a matter of justice, Africa must be considered a priority in all these efforts.

Excellencies,

We will not solve our common challenges in a fragmented way. 

Together, let us work to advance the power of universal action, the imperative for justice, and the promise of a better future.

Thank you.

And yes, I thank you as well, an impressive speech by the UN secretary-general, worth publishing for more audiences.