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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 years

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The political possibility of cities

The coming year feels like an important one. Democrats have the chance to pass the For the People Act, which will reverse decades of right-wing voter suppression, steering the US away from the baked-in antimajoritarian characteristics of its politics

At the same time, a successful vaccine rollout (assuming variants can be controlled) will mean widespread "re-openings," most notably in cities, where we find the highest concentrations of virus-incompatible stuff: mass transit, elevators, theaters and "cozy" cafes.

Cities are of huge political significance. The rise and rise of inequality has been attended by skyrocketing rents in cities, largely driven by money-launderers and speculators who turned housing stock into empty safe deposit boxes in the sky.

Cities were also key to delivering the 2020 election: Biden took major cities by 13m votes, inner suburbs by 4m votes, and midsized cities by 1.5m votes. 80% of Biden's votes came from these three categories.

As Ronald Brownstein writes in The Atlantic, "If you draw an imaginary beltway around almost any major metropolitan area, Democrats are growing stronger inside that circle, while Republicans are consolidating their position outside of it."

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/03/how-biden-could-partner-big-cities-and-suburbs/618294/

Last summer's BLM uprising was a mostly urban affair, but even before then, the GOP was waging war on cities, with Mitch McConnell cutting maintenance and relief funds for cities, and Trump demanding quarter for ICE snatch-squads.

America's urbanization is an unbroken trend, and cities are semi-autonomous, wildly imperfect, young, diverse and economically powerful. They are also politically important, and many of the reddest states would be blue or very purple if cities were given due representation.

Brownstein's account of cities during the Trump years makes the case that a Biden focus on mayors, rather than the deadlocked Congress and Senate, or the fringe ideologues who were crammed onto the Supreme Court, is the key to making real political change.

The deadlocked legislature is not a new phenomenon. Several presidential administrations have focused on executive orders and regulations from the administrative branch to effect change, but these are flimsy political wins. What one exec order can create, another can undo.

Net Neutrality is here, then gone, then (maybe) here again. Without legislation, these policies aren't worth the Federal Register pages they're printed on. But there are methods to durably inscribe policy, and these are primarily urban.

Mostly, we remember the negative ways that this occurs: redlining, driving freeways through Black neighborhoods or skipping over parts of the city when it comes to subway access. Infrastructure is policy - and it's among the most permanent forms of policy we have.

As recent years have demonstrated, the future is a chaotic place, but as Charlie Stross has noted, the elements of the future that are indeed up for grabs are actually pretty narrow: 90% of the future is here today.

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2019/12/artificial-intelligence-threat.html

Most of the homes people will be living in in 10 years are on the road today. Most of the people who'll be alive then are living today. most of the cars that will be on the road are already in service today.

Even sharp discontinuities like the pandemic don't change those facts much (Stross and I did a conference presentation last week where he said that maybe all the chaos of the past five years has reduced the present's share of the future to 80%, still a commanding majority).

Cities are places where administrative policies can inscribe themselves indelibly upon the future. As LA Sustainability Czar Lauren Faber O'Connor told Brownstein, "Every building in the country is basically a shovel-ready project."

A fed solarize/winterize subsidy for buildings makes a difference for decades to come: not just the carbon footprint of the built environment, but also the baseline expectations for decent buildings. It permanently alters the balance between energy companies and the nation.

Every local government could take the feds up on this, but self-owning culture war foolishness predicts that the benefit will accrue predominantly to the large/mid-sized cities and inner burbs that delivered the election to Biden.

Vehicles don't last as long as buildings, but they are remarkably durable. Biden wants to replace the fed fleet with EVs - he could subsidize cities to do the same, creating huge efficiencies of scale for EV production and demand for permanent EV charging infrastructure.

Of course, the future is transit-based, not private-vehicle-based. Just do the math: multiply the number of people who need to go places by the amount of highway a private vehicle operates, and you'll find an inescapable Red Queen's Race.

The more road we need for those private vehicles, the further apart everything gets. The further apart everything gets, the more cars we need. The more cars we need, the more road we need. The more road we need, the further apart everything gets.

If building mass transit is "socialism" then geometry is a socialist plot (and no, you can't fix this by moving cars into tunnels; do the math). Transit permanently alters where people live and work, and what they expect from their cities. A transit subsidy is a no-brainer.

Biden can't force the states to switch to carbon neutral energy sources, but he can subsidize municipal energy facilities' voluntary switchover, again, permanently altering the economics of fossil-fuel power generation.

Red states aren't red: they are gerrymandered purple states that punish and starve their economic and population centers in the name of culture war nonsense and white supremacy. There are opportunities to permanently alter this situation.

For example, the Biden FCC could resinstate the rule banning states from limiting municipal fiber, and then subsidize 100GB/s muni networks, with emphasis on the urban broadband deserts in the majority-minority neighborhoods created by redlining.

Once cities are operating profitable muni networks that connect *everyone* to service that is 1,000-10,000x faster than the aging copper lines that cable monopolists refuse to upgrade, those networks will become permanent facts.

(as with many anti-monopoly interventions, these will do double-duty: the cable companies' lobbying ammo comes from the monopoly rents that they extract from poor people; deprive them of those rents and you cut the supply lines in the war they wage on the public interest)

There's reforms coming to the Affordable Care Act: if one of these is a change to the rule that cities can only get federal health-care subsidies if their states permit it, then cities could opt-in to health care even when their gerrymandered GOP statehouses block it.

America has 50 governors, 435 Congressional districts, 100 senators and 9 Supreme Court justices.

America has 19,000 cities and towns and 3,100 counties. These local governments are far more accountable to the people than the larger political entities.

Officials in cities, towns and counties who deliver tangible improvements to their residents' quality of life will be rewarded with high approval ratings and re-election. The Trump years left the largest of these starved for friendly federal coordination and partnership.

Biden's cabinet already includes three prominent former mayors - Buttigieg, Walsh and Fudge - and the historically intractable task of directly coordinating with thousands of local governments is made far more reasonable thanks to digital technology.

History teaches that presidents can defeat America's antimajoritarian institutions by simply bypassing them.

When the pro-slavery Supreme Court struck down Lincoln's anti-slavery laws, he passed them again...and again...and again: "Let's see whose legitimacy tanks first."

Biden could write humane, sustainable equitable future on the country in indelible ink. He could also make permanent changes in the lives and expectations of people: increasing subsidies to local schools and wiping out student debt is a change that lasts for a generation.

As exciting as this is, it's not enough. The circumstances of rural life are range from bad to terrible, and they're only worsening. Saving the cities will save the vast majority of Americans, but it will still leave nearly 60,000,000 people in desperate circumstances.

This is unacceptable. Good governments look after all people, not just the ones it expects to win re-election from.

Working with local governments is a tactic, not a strategy - a way to erode corporate power and present alternatives.

It's the beginning, not the end.

Image: The Fifth Element/Luc Besson

#pluralistic

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a-secret-bolton-vampire · 3 years

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Brief Thought on Theon in TWOW

Theon has been a huge mystery for me and a lot of people, because his story could go just about anywhere. He's currently held prisoner by Stannis, who plans on executing him (after interrogating him, of course). Although he is to be executed by fire, Asha comes in to tell Stannis to instead execute Theon himself with Lightbringer at the weirwood islet, all the while the caged ravens scream "Theon" and "tree"... hello Bran, hello Bloodraven.

Now, the fact the ravens are screaming about the tree and Asha mentions executing Theon at the tree to me is a clear indication that it is going to be an important location. Now, I don't quite think Theon is gonna die here (see below), but rather Bran is going to find a way to keep him around. He already called to Theon when Theon went to beg absolution in the Winterfell godswood. Summon some ravens to interrupt the execution, maybe even appear in the tree like he did to Theon at Winterfell.

Such a display from the old gods might make the northmen think it is a sign that Theon has paid for his sins. Stannis might not really care, although... if you get a sign like that, I'm not entirely sure what Stannis would think. Regardless, I think Theon is going to survive, and Bran wants him to. Why? Well, I don't actually think Bran is manipulating Theon here. It's been months at this point since we've had a Bran POV, and who knows what he's been doing this whole time. However, if he has been focused on Winterfell, he probably has seen Theon being tormented by Ramsay.

Theon betrayed the Starks. He took Winterfell. He killed two boys and passed them off as Bran and Rickon. He is a traitor and a turncloak and a murderer. But seeing Theon in this light might change Bran's perspective on him. He's suffered so much. He may have deserved execution for his crimes, but the torture he endured from Ramsay was not justice.

At the end of ADWD/beginning of TWOW, Theon is pretty resigned to dying. He wants to die, and he feels immense guilt for what he did. Bran is tapping into the power of the old gods and communicates to a broken Theon at Winterfell. Even though Theon has prayed to the old gods (really praying to Bran) and gotten some sort of reply, he doesn't know what it means. If Bran stays Theon's execution, that's a huge change for Theon. He believes he deserves to die for what he did.

If the old gods show some sort of presence that stops Theon from being killed, that changes everything for him. If the gods don't want him to die, what is his purpose now? What reason is there for him to be around? Does he truly deserve to be killed? Can he redeem himself? Part of the reason why I don't believe Theon is going to be executed here is because I think there is much more rich narrative and thematic depth to explore than him simply resigning to his fate and getting it.

As for what he will do in TWOW, apart from the theories that he simply just dies, some people also believe he might stay Stannis's prisoner, or be used by Asha to undo the kingsmoot on the Iron Islands. The latter theory is based on the mention of Torgon the Latecomer, by Rodrik Harlaw and later Tristifer Botely.

"When you put your name before the captains you submitted yourself to their judgment. You cannot go against that judgment now. Only once has the choice of a kingsmoot been overthrown. Read Haereg."

Archmaester Haereg wrote History of the Ironborn. And what was this one time the kingsmoot was overthrown? Well, Tris explains it the very chapter Asha has this memory of Rodrik.

"Torgon Greyiron was the king's eldest son. But the king was old and Torgon restless, so it happened that when his father died he was raiding along the Mander from his stronghold on Greyshield. His brothers sent no word to him but instead quickly called a kingsmoot, thinking that one of them would be chosen to wear the driftwood crown. But the captains and the kings chose Urragon Goodbrother to rule instead. The first thing the new king did was command that all the sons of the old king be put to death, and so they were. After that men called him Badbrother, though in truth they'd been no kin of his. He ruled for almost two years." Asha remembered now. "Torgon came home …" "… and said the kingsmoot was unlawful since he had not been there to make his claim. Badbrother had proved to be as mean as he was cruel and had few friends left upon the isles. The priests denounced him, the lords rose against him, and his own captains hacked him into pieces. Torgon the Latecomer became the king and ruled for forty years."

This is often used as evidence that Asha will use Theon in a similar manner; since he was presumed dead but is actually still alive, he did not put his claim forth, and thus the kingsmoot is invalid, as is Euron's ascension to the Seastone Chair. Theon the Latecomer will be Euron's undoing. While Theon is in no fit enough state to even be considered king, perhaps his presence will be enough to assuage Euron's control on the Iron Isles.

I think that the fact this is mentioned is important, and something like this might happen. Personally, I think that when the battle of ice turned against Stannis's favour, Theon escaped with the help of Asha and her supporters, and they grouped together at Torrhen's Square, which is held currently by Dagmer Cleftjaw, master-at-arms at Pyke, whom Theon had a close relationship with. And the idea will be to use Theon as a tool to invalidate the kingsmoot and Euron's role. Also, it would be very neat to see Theon reunite with Dagmer after all he's been through, since Dagmer was an important figure in his childhood.

The problem is that I don't think Theon Latecomer is going to change anything. For one, although he doesn't need to be king, just be used as a way to invalidate the kingsmoot because he never pressed his claim, what is that going to change? Is Theon really going to press his claim? And if he did, he would be laughed out. He has no interest in kingship, and he is not in any state to rule as one. So he's definitely not going to be elected. Who does that leave?

Well, Victarion is away in Meereen. Asha might have supporters but her gender works against her. Perhaps old Erik Ironmaker might try his hand again, but I doubt that will work any better. Aeron is supposedly in hiding (although really he's being tortured by Euron). Gylbert Farwynd wanted to sail beyond the Sunset Sea and see what lands lie west of Westeros.

Meanwhile, Euron is bringing the Old Way back to the ironborn in a way Balon never accomplished. He took the Shields and gave lordships to the raiders there. He has been sending ships up and down the Mander, in the Whispering Sound, even sacking the Arbor. He is giving the ironborn a great deal of wealth. What's even more, it appears that some of the things he wouldn't have dared before are a lot safer to do now. For instance, at the kingsmoot, he put on his facade as doing everything for the Drowned God. Now look at how his captains talk about the Drowned God in The Forsaken:

"Your curses have no power here, priest,” said Left-Hand Lucas Codd. “The Crow’s Eye has fed your Drowned God well, and he has grown fast with sacrifice. Words are wind, but blood is power. We have given thousands to the sea, and he has given us victories!”

It's not "the Drowned God" but "your Drowned God". They don't care anymore. They don't care if it's different or against their traditions. Euron has been giving them victories and riches and glory, and that's all that matters. This is something that is easy to see in the real world too (just look at what Donald Trump did in office and how the GOP reacted to his actions). Euron has taken the bulk of the Iron Islands military strength with him, and is living up to what he's promised so far. Why would they want to go back?

However, the most important part, for me anyways, is that ultimately, Euron doesn't care. He doesn't care about the Iron Isles. His goal is Westeros and the Iron Throne. The islands mean nothing to him. He loses some people there, so what? What's there for him to use? He's gonna try to become a god-king anyways so the Iron Islands aren't important.

In the end, even if Asha wanted to use Theon for these purposes, it won't do anything. The ironborn are in southern Westeros having the time of their lives, why would they return here? Now, if this is doomed to do anything against Euron, then why mention Torgon? Why have Theon go through that? I think it's all part of his internal journey of identity and allegiance.

He's always been stuck between Greyjoy and Stark. He didn't feel like he belonged with the Starks, but he wanted to. When Balon rebelled against Robb and insulted him, Theon wanted to prove himself to his father, so he betrayed the Starks. He was outsmarted and captured by Ramsay, however, and now regrets doing what he did. But he still hasn't chosen, Greyjoy or Stark. He wants to simply die.

I think that this journey for him is him recovering from Ramsay and finally finding his true self again. Theon has been a puppet of Ramsay's, and is poised to become a puppet for Asha and her followers. It's time he start to make his own decisions. I think this journey as Theon Latecomer (whether he literally returns to the isles or not) is him dealing with his own internal struggle, before finally resolving it. My theory is that he will decide to choose the Starks, because they are his true family, and there is nothing for him that he wants or can do with the Greyjoys.

#theon greyjoy #bran stark #the winds of winter predictions #asoiaf meta #euron greyjoy

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eeattherich · 4 years

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We are much closer to facism than most people would think

(from leftnortheast)

This is from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

[the slide includes a picture of poster that reads: early warning signs of facism in big print. Beneath it it lists the warning signs: powerful and continuing nationalism, disdain for human rights, identification of enemies as a unifying cause, supremacy of the military, rampant sexism, controlled mass media, obsession with national security, religion and government intertwined, corporate power protected, labor power suppressed, disdain for intellectuals and the arts, obsession with crime and punishment, rampant cronyism and corruption, and finally fraudulent election]

Each early warning sign is here in present-day America.

1) Powerful and Continuing Nationalism

both presidential candidates are relying strongly on nationalism to make their case for the Oval Office. Trump’s nationalism (“Make America Great Again/Keep America Great”) is much more obvious, but Biden’s emphasis on “fighting for the soul of our nation” and the like appeals to voters who want to restore their sense of American exceptionalism lost under Trump.

2) Disdain for Human Rights

there are ICE concentration camps at the US-Mexico border where many have died from awful conditions, gone missing, or have been separated from their families. The United States has destabilized, bombed, and invaded dozens of countries in the Middle East and the global south in the name of corporate profit. Millions are homeless and without healthcare in the richest country on the planet, and recently President Trump has proposed numerous transphobic pieces of legislation

3) Identification of Enemies as a Unifying Cause

the Cold War and the War on Terror are the most prominent examples of this “common enemy” tactic used to rally public opinion. In recent weeks, Trump and the GOP have used Antifa, which isn’t even a real organization, as a scapegoat for the protests and riot, despite leaked FBI documents showing there was zero evidence found of Antifa involvement in the George Floyd protests. The Democrats have also used the “common enemy” tactic, most often with Trump himself. The corporate owned DNC was able to justify nominating a centrist candidate whose policy measures do nothing to address the poverty and systematic poverty the majority of American people face

4) Supremacy of the Military

one of [leftnortheast’s] recent posts goes into detail about how much we spend on our military. Not only is it vast amounts of funding completely contrary to what Americans need, out military is used primarily by our politicians to install and maintain corporate-friendly governments in third world countries

5) Rampant Sexism

Donald Trump has dozens of rape allegations and was caught on tape saying he grabs women “by the pussy” to get them to sleep with him. Joe Biden has a number of allegations of inappropriate behavior himself, as well as an extremely credible rape accusation from Tara Reade

6) Controlled Mass Media

90% of American media is owned by five corporations. As [leftnortheast] talked about in [their] recent #MediaMonday post, these corporations are beginning to censor smaller, dissenting political voices

7) Obsession with National Security

after 9/11, the government passed the Patriot Act, and now out government (through the NSA, FBI, etc.) now have completely stripped Americans of their privacy by monitoring phone calls, messages, emails, etc. In fact, immediately following the first wave of George Floyd protests, an overwhelming bipartisan majority voted to give Trump increased survelliance powers, something that’s been done before. There were also credible reports of spy planes monitoring peaceful protests.

8) Religion and Government Intertwined

Trump’s bible photo-op was probably the most egregious example of this, but it’s not hard to find this. “In God we trust” remains the United State’s official motto, and “one nation, under God” remains in our Pledge of Allegiance. “God Bless America” is another one of Trump’s favorites.

9) Corporate Power Protected, Labor Power Suppressed

[leftnortheast] combined these two, as they are both untrusting to a capitalist economy— the two classes have conflicting interests and need to stymie the other’s in order to succeed. Corporate power is protected by the state, because the capitalist class uses lovbying, corporate media, and campaign donations to ensure politicians serve their interests and not those of the people, the working class.

10) Disdain for the Intellectuals and the Arts

Public schools and colleges across the country have cut arts and humanities programs at an alarming rate

11) Obsession with Crime and Punishment

Despite only making up 4% of the global population, the United States accounts for 20% of the world prison population. The US has the most people in prison per capita of any country on a Earth.

12) Rampant Cronyism and Corruption

For 2018, the median net worth of members of Congress was $511,000. The richest Congressional members are worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

13) Fraudulent Elections

There is more than enough evidence to conclude the Democratic Party rigged the 2016 presidential primary in favor of Hillary Clinton. Documents have been released revealing the DNC was working jointly with Hillary Clinton while the primary was still happening, and emails brought to the public show how the DNC would work with the media to manufacture smear campaigns against Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Mass voter suppression is prevalent throughout this country.

After the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed, voter suppression, which targets BIPOC and low income communities especially, was declining. By 2012 for example, 90.2% of eligible Black voters in Mississippi were registered to vote, compared to less than 10% prior to it’s passage. However, in 2013, the Supreme Court ruled that the Voting Rights Act was unconstitutional. Since then, thousands of polling places have been closed around the country, many of them in predominantly Black neighborhoods, and other obstacles target transgender, low income, BIPOC, and/or young voters like voter ID laws have become increasingly popular.

For example, in 2016, a voter ID law in Wisconsin had blocked around 27% of the systems Black population from voting, which the Republican Attourney General would later brag had helped Donald Trump win Wisconsin

Final Slide: If the working class is not aware that it is the flaws of capitalism and the actions of the bourgeoisie that has forced them into a poor material state, they will often misdirect their hatred, which is why a lot of fascist states scapegoated specific groups of people.

This was evident in many of the 20th century fascist states in Europe.

In times of economic strife, the bourgeoise are more likely to endorse a fascist revolution, because it will quell the working class and allow them to maintain their assets and power.

“Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism, because it is the merger of state and corporate power” - Benito Mussolini

#facism #antifa #anti facism #anti facist #antifacist #antifacism #donald trump #trump #joe biden #biden #democrat #republican #us politics #american politics

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striving-artist · 4 years

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From @fjordtoughtexblade on this post about Biden’s Student Debt Plan

You can call me progressive as though that’s some form of insult, but I still think that they should commit to just eliminating it all together, all payments and all debt accrual via education, the whole kit and caboodle.

Banks renegotiate the terms of loans all the time, that doesn’t make them bastions of class equality. Reworking the current educational debt structure doesn’t do away with what the ACTUAL problem is: the designation of education as the sole province for the rich.

Is Biden better than Trump? Yeah, in the sense the being killed quickly is better than being killed slowly. What I mean is, this whole situation is a pile of horse shit, and to sell it as anything else is, at the least, disingenuous.

@striving-artist Joe Biden is a right-of-center moderate, and he’s *barely* that. In most other western countries he would be a true believing, dyed in the wool conservative. Reworking the loan structure is the barest of bare minimums that a government could do to incentivize the continued participation of millennials and gen z in a workforce that soon going to need to prop up the failing economy of a nation about to navigate the largest and most deadly ecological disaster in the history of mankind.

It’s a bet hedged against our better futures. Designed to *look* appealing to liberals while *being* appealing to conservatives. But the blowback’s gotta go somewhere, and it hits us right in our future. He could have committed to completely erasing the structure of paying for knowledge, college and vocational training would be free and freely available, and the US could have one of the most highly educated, most highly trained workforce in the world to help guide us through the shitstorm that everyone know’s is coming, but instead we kowtow to the desires of a few ultrawealthy people, and knowledge is inaccessible to the lower classes.

So, please, spare us all the unenthusiastic explanation of a truly, and deeply disappointingly transparent capitalist attempt at an olive branch between the right and the “left.” Thinking about it just makes me sad.

sorry to pull this into a new thread, but I cannot bring myself to reblog that full wall of text again. Unfortunately this is also a very long post, but, I wanted to cover a couple things. OP is tagged bc it felt rude to quote them and not tag.

These kind of responses (and I’ve gotten about a dozen or so out of 9k reblogs) are as far to the left of Center in America as the Tea Party is to the right. They’re ridiculous, and they’re damaging to their own cause. I am a progressive, and these responses annoy me.

This is like walking into an ice cream shop, and being pissed that they won’t sell you a burger. There are no burgers on the menu.They’ve never sold burgers. But maybe, If you and all of your friends show up, time and again, week after week, and support the ice cream shop, while continuing to ask for burgers, maybe, eventually, they’ll add burgers to the menu. But if you walk in once, throw a fit, write a yelp review and think you’re done, they’re gonna ignore you. They should. You’ve proven your demand is performative, and nothing more.

You wanna know why the Tea Party became accepted as a thing and the far left hasn’t? because y’all keep leaving yelp reviews and going home. The Tea Party moved the Overton gap to the Right. The Far Left threw a fit and weakened their support when Obama had to compromise to get progressive bills passed.

And this idea that you can measure American Politicians on other countries’ scales, is absurd. That’s not how anything works. But if you do, make sure you look at the full spectrum. There are places that make Trump look like a flaming liberal. But see, we live here, and have to deal with our political scale.

The options currently on the menu are the only things we can choose from and expect to receive, and there is no version of the future where we flip a switch and instantly get the future we want. Go ahead, order a burger, you aren’t going to get one.

There is no version of American politics where a guy gives a magical speech in congress and the clouds part and the light shines down and the conservatives suddenly decide to enact a wealth tax, ban all guns, and commit to a socialist lifestyle.

Oh, wait, or were you planning for armed revolt instead? Have fun facing the US Military, they’re disgustingly overfunded, but I’m sure you’ll be fine. Enjoy your coup.

You wanna fix things? You wanna move The Overton Window until talking about fully wiping loans is a real debate in congress? Until we’re talking about not just taxing the income of the wealthy, but taking back and redistributing the mountains they’ve gathered? So do I. Do you have a plan? Not just wanting the electorate to miraculously shift left, but an actual plan to move them? No? Do you have anything other than whining and pie-in -the-sky dreams? Cause right now, there is only one way we move towards our goals. We find the best option we’ve got, and we remind them constantly that we want more.

It is slow, it is painful, it is the work of years, we have to compromise, we’re going to lose some battles, and the rewards are incredibly rare. It is easier to give in, give up, and surrender to whatever the right wants this week. We keep ourselves going by celebrating what we can.

So how dare you tell people they’re aren’t allowed a moment to be happy when something goes our way? This plan isn’t enough, but even this would change my life, and that’s true for millions of people. For the space an hour one night, my future looked a little less terrible, and I was excited, because the work during the primaries had done something. Biden’s plans are further left than any major presidential candidate in history. Hands down. But I’m not allowed to be happy about that?

Fine. Sure. you wanted a burger, I get that. A burger sounds nice. But every time this attitude shows up, I’m reminded why the GOP has so thoroughly trounced the democrats in so many elections. The far right always votes with them, because they can see that incremental improvement is better than incremental loss. Meanwhile the dems have the far left, which has people like this, sitting at home, writing pissy yelp reviews about the fact they wanted a burger.

I’m genuinely sorry this group has decided to live their life in a way where they’re not allowed to be happy until everything is perfect, because they’re never going to be happy. I can’t live like that. So yeah. I’m gonna keep celebrating the small victories.

#us politics #rant #long post #again #sorry about that followers #I'm usually less shouty #but we're two weeks out #and this kind of purity politics nonsense is how Clinton lost #and how we got trump #so I'm gonna have to keep yelling for the next few weeks #and then walk into the ocean and become chthullu if he wins again #and as always #if anyone has an actual plan to light switch shift us so Bernie is considered a centrist #I'd love to hear it

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seymour-butz-stuff · 3 years

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Ohio has at least 90 things going against it: Gov. Mike DeWine, 25 state senators, and 64 state representatives are Republican officials with a majority control of the state. That isn’t simply a facetious bit of business. These legislators seem hell-bent on hurting Ohio citizens’ health and pocketbooks. The public health experts GOP representatives bring into chambers to speak are snake-oil charlatans, and even the former Republican speaker has been expelled for outrageous levels of apparent corruption. The corruption in question led to an unpopular $170 million bailout of failing nuclear and coal power plants, at the expense of renewable energy initiatives.

On June 9, a new $75 billion budget passed through the GOP-led Ohio Senate. Members of the Ohio House have criticized the Senate’s handling of the budget, saying it was done haphazardly, without taking into account all of the work and negotiations done by the House. Senate Democrats say that the House plan, created by a still-majority GOP body of state reps, was considerably more acceptable. With cuts to education, Medicaid administration, and rural broadband grants, the Ohio Senate bill cuts $874 million from the budget while the House bill cut $380 million. But “tucked inside” of the Senate bill are all kinds of predictably screwed up things like backdoor women’s health restrictions on abortion, and doing away with municipal-created broadband infrastructure.

Cleveland.com reports that these “Ohio Republican lawmakers” are proposing to put the brakes on a $190 million state-funded expansion of high-speed internet that would help underserved areas of the Buckeye state. The bill would in essence kill “the 30 or so municipal broadband programs in Ohio—including in cities such as Fairlawn, Hudson, Medina, and Wadsworth—would not be allowed to operate so long as there is a private-sector company operating in the area, as there are in most, if not all of the cities.” The proposed GOP budget would also stop municipalities from accepting federal money for the same purpose. This is a we won’t pay for it and no one else can pay for it either proposition being promoted by the Republican party. How about that for “policy?”

ArsTechnica explains that the trick here is an amendment in the Senate budget that changes the definition of the term “unserved.” The law would define areas with access to speeds of 10Mbps and upload speeds of 1Mbps to be considered “served.” Changing this standard would suddenly create a spreadsheet that posits more than 98% of Ohio households covered by acceptable internet access, and as such, there is no need for municipal broadband networks.

According to law firm Ice Miller, the language of the bill would also put existing programs in need in jeopardy: “Certain existing and already capitalized multi-jurisdiction/agency combined networks being used throughout Ohio for public safety, remote health care, regional economic development, and transportation initiatives would be required to cease operation due to the fact that all or many of the existing participating jurisdictions will be required to abandon their individual system components.”

To top it all off, no one is exactly sure where all of this language came into the Senate budget bill. Or at least, “officials won’t say.” But considering big telecoms like AT&T have a long history of spending hundreds of millions of dollars to make sure Americans cannot demand affordable broadband access with real competition in the marketplace, we can all speculate.

The places where municipalities have gone ahead, fought years of litigation against big telecoms, and created broadband networks all seem to have miraculously forced telecoms to magically offer up more affordable high speed internet options. These are the affordable options at high speeds that companies like Spectrum, Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, and others have always said were pipe dreams. They only seem to be pipe dreams when telecoms have monopoly or duopoly control over areas.

Fairlawn Mayor William Roth told the Akron Beacon Journal that the city’s successful municipal broadband FairlawnGig, (one of the fastest internet providers in the entire country) which was developed for only $10 million, is jeopardized by this secret piece of GOP work. "This isn't a partisan issue. This is for the good of the whole. ... This will be devastating, not just for now, for the U.S. in the future." Roth is a Republican, by the way. Roth also says that if passed, there will be litigation and he is confident that the courts will see it as an overreach by the state legislators.

BIllable hours are going up in so much of the country and the people who are paying for them are taxpayers, due to pet projects of Republicans who were bribed into writing unconstitutional legislation by corporations like AT&T and Comcast.

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