Somebody is lying as to what is really in President Biden’s COVID stimulus plan legislation, the New York Times:
“A Look at What’s in Biden’s $1.9 Trillion Stimulus Plan”
New York Times, January 14, 2021.
Want to get beyond the media gatekeepers? Read the 591-page bill yourself, here. The list of the bill’s contents alone runs for nine, small print, single-space pages. Here is a sample of the text from page 10 and 11. The rest of the bill is just as crystal clear to the average US voter as this excerpt.
(5) to make payments for necessary expenses
related to losses of crops (including losses due to
high winds or derechos) pursuant to title I of the
Additional Supplemental Appropriations for Disaster
Relief Act, 2019 (Public Law 116–20), as amended
by section 116 of the Continuing Appropriations
Act, 2020 (Public Law 116–59) and as further
Amended by subsection (c) of section 791 of the
Further Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2020
(Public Law 116–94) for crop losses in crop year
2020.
Forget all the previous legislation referred to in this excerpt. One can find and study up on that. But what exactly are “expenses,” “derechos,” and “losses?” Who defines expenses and losses, sets their thresholds, and pegs dollar amounts to them? On what basis? I know what a derecho is but nothing about agricultural losses and expenses. I guess the US Department of Agriculture is left to figure that out.
Or you can do the research. Coincidentally, a friend of mine yesterday sought and read multiple website articles on the bill and came up with the following list outlining the contents of the legislation in basic vocabulary. My friend is not typical of the average American voter in terms of education and research skills. He’s an engineer. It took him about an hour to research and put this table together. American voters, most of whom are less highly educated and have less skills in researching, would likely take much longer assuming they had the will and interest to do. Most don’t.
Catching Up with Your Congressman
Email
March 1, 2021
Dear Friend,
Since the beginning of the pandemic, I have made it clear that any relief funding must be temporary, targeted, and directly tied to recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. It should therefore come as no surprise that over the weekend, I voted against the Democrats’ partisan reconciliation package, which fails on all three counts.
The Democrat’s stimulus plan clearly shows the disconnect that exists between what Washington Democrats want and what the American people truly need. Only nine percent of this so-called American Rescue Plan goes to public health spending, while the other 91 percent addresses partisan progressive spending priorities unrelated to the pandemic, including:
$12 billion
in foreign aid;
$86 billion
to prop up union pension plans;
$200 million
for the Institute of Museum and Library Services;
$135 million
for the National Endowment for the Arts;
$135 million
for the National Endowment for the Humanities;
$112 million
for Nancy Pelosi’s pet project in Silicon Valley; and
$1.5 million for Chuck Schumer’s Seaway International Bridge.
The vast majority of the $130 billion designated for K-12 schools won't even be spent this year and does absolutely nothing to get kids back in the classroom. Under the guise of providing COVID relief to folks who need it, this package pushed by President Biden and Nancy Pelosi wastes precious taxpayer money and resources on a liberal wish list that will only hurt our recovery efforts. One of the most harmful inclusions is a federally mandated $15 per hour minimum wage. In a time of historic unemployment, the government should be helping create jobs, not destroy them.
On top of this provision, which would eliminate 1.4 million jobs, economists across the political spectrum have said this package goes far beyond what the economy currently needs. Many have raised concerns about resulting inflation and the potential for this package to hamper our long- and short-term economic recovery.
During the last Congress, we were able to pass five COVID-19 relief packages - totaling nearly $4 trillion - in a bipartisan manner. However, despite calls for unity, Democrats have abandoned the idea of working with Republicans and rejected hundreds of Republican amendments and any efforts to advance bipartisan solutions. Instead, the Majority chose to go it alone, and the American people will suffer the consequences as a result. After a year of challenges, Americans deserve better.
We should be focused on helping families get back to work, reopening our economies, effectively distributing the vaccine to every corner of the country, and responsibly spending the remaining $1 trillion from previous COVID packages. I stand ready and willing to work with my colleagues to achieve these goals - if only Democrats will come to the table.
In case you missed it, I penned an opinion piece in the Washington Examiner on the partisan process of Biden’s plan, which you can read here.
I also caught up with Cheddar TV to discuss this reckless plan.
Beyond who’s lying, the bigger problem concerning the Biden COVID relief proposal is the journalistic language crafting, legalese of legislation, the trillion-dollar quantity and complexity of government budgetary economics, and the political spin from the Left and Right. As for the money, I personally feel a bit of a heart flutter when I think about and deal with $1,000 or more of my personal funds. $1.9 trillion is beyond my comprehension.
These things are enough to make one’s head spin and forget what problems the proposal was really meant to remedy – addressing the damage COVID has done to US society and citizen’s lives. Listening to Congressman Ferguson you would think the most important issue associated with the relief proposal is the possibility of wasteful government spending, nanny government over-reach, or some moral high ground both political parties must contest and claim. A heroic high ground that neither party, especially the GOP, is willing to share.
But the biggest problem of all is that most of the electorate does not have the vocabulary, mental skills, specialized knowledge, or time to sort through it all. That is, the complicated and carefully crafted information in the media, the technicalities of the bill, and the B.S. in the Romanesque oratory of the politicians’ media releases. Who among us can adequately sort through and digest it all, then come up with a clear, unequivocal factual basis for supporting the proposed legislation, or not? My engineer friend cited above can. Most of us cannot and will not try.
Contemporary complex industrial society cannot have a true democracy when the electorate does not really know the true principles of those they vote for, and what in plain language those they elect propose as legislation. We cede power to specialists who have become separated from us in terms of language, knowledge, skills, and priorities.
Between the US electorate and those who govern stands a dense fog. An obscuring mist that grew out of the rapidly ever-increasing techno-economic complexity of “modern” life, and that an impenetrable bureaucracy has deliberately helped create. Consequently, US citizens do not democratically vote for their leaders based on a deeply reasoned understanding of their proclaimed stand on the issues, or an objective consideration of the practical merits of the legislation they propose.
We vote for politicians based on what we dimly perceive to be their principled stands, and their legislation based on very unclear understandings. We vote in response to our politicians’ abilities to distract, divert, deceive, and gussy up, and at the same time, soothe us. In short, we herald our being democratic based primarily on our confused blissful ignorance. We vote based on our perceptions, not reality. Yes, this is true of all the decisions we make. But the further away from our personal lives the actions of our leaders become, the less we truly know about what they are doing. Modern political and economic governance has become the epitome of that estrangement and disenfranchisement we initially succumbed to at the gates of Mesopotamia’s cities.
How did the wealthiest and most powerful country founded on Enlightenment principles, the US, end up like this? Simple. Those who command language via mass media, and those who wield or want power and wealth, have used our political system to their advantage, and elevated their desires over the greater needs of the greatest number of their fellow citizens. They have used our so-called democratic system to take power unto themselves and cleverly convinced the citizenry that what they, our elected representatives, are doing is best for all. And they do so all the while convincing us we really have a say in managing our society’s operation and that they are listening to us.
We don’t and they don’t. We vote for political pigs in a poke, and approve of, from a position of near total ignorance of the details, the legislation they excrete. We are sheep led by media sheepdogs and sated with consumer goods. Then driven with laws and regulations from shearing to shearing and ultimately deposited into for-profit nursing home slaughterhouses by the wealthy and powerful shepherds of commerce and government.
US society is too top heavy to remain indefinitely sustainable. Its foundational Enlightenment principles and institutions have been perilously damaged and weakened by the political and economic ruling classes. The center and bottom of society cannot continue to hold indefinitely. Reform fails because it exists in a state of grasping, unfounded hope, and in ignorance of our true powerlessness. So, things fall apart, a little at a time, until one day this house of cards teeters and collapses or implodes from revolution.
It is not a problem we can fix. I and many others nevertheless find hope knowing the Democrats are more humane and egalitarian in terms of their principled stands and legislative proposals than those on the Right. They stand in contrast to contemporary Republicans who favor a non-human animal hierarchy that began among our pre-human primates. A form of social organization based on a hierarchy of dominance, not an egalitarian society based on liberty, equality, and brotherhood. A most rudimentary and unenlightened form of social organization that continued to the advent of settled agriculture, through various monarchies and the plutocracies of Ancient Greece and Rome, and on until the dawn of the modern era around 1500. What we now have in the US are Social Darwinian Republicans who by any other name remain powerful and committed to a survival of the fittest morality within a political dominance hierarchy, controlled by a plutocracy. The following essay outlines this historical development.
“Conservatism’s Hollowness and the Ruse of the Political Spectrum”
Benjamin Cain
February 24, 2021, Medium
Most social animals distribute their power over each other unequally as befits their natural differences, using cues to mark their rank in the hierarchy, which spares them from a self-destructive war of all against all. This is just the so-called law of oligarchy* in action. Thus, in the animal pecking order, alphas rule over the rest of the group, enjoying while they can their privileged access to food and to mates.
…
All policies and political philosophies that entail that people should renounce that creativity and live like animals (as governed by pecking orders) are “conservative” or “right-wing,” their rhetorical obfuscations notwithstanding. All the others that celebrate the creativity that makes us people rather than animals are humanistic (historically “modern,” liberal, progressive, socialistic, or otherwise aligned with the anomaly of our anti-natural “nature”).
Scruton is correct to emphasize the extent to which conservatism is just an instinct rather than a system of thought: conservatism reduces to social Darwinism and to the renunciation of the creativity of personhood for the sake of a return to animal tyranny in its human guises.
…
Why, then, don’t conservative intellectuals advocate directly for the mode of society that’s entailed by their principles? Why do they camouflage the plutocratic effects of their “free market” economics and pretend that capitalism is compatible with the egalitarian priorities of modern humanism? Why do these conservatives run for office in conservative parties when their Darwinian economics enables the capture of democracy in toto by the predatory monopolies that arise in the private sector?
The reason is that conservatism is a sham. Yes, we have the conservative instinct to protect our possessions, because in addition to being people we’re animals. … But that protective instinct doesn’t make for any conservative philosophy or system of thought, just as the impulse to rape or to murder doesn’t make for a philosophy of rape or of murder.
When conservatives try to play the humanistic, progressive game of conceiving of a worldview to justify their crude instincts, that is, their animal prejudices, they erect only a house of cards.”
For thousands of years, most human societies were likewise natural, which is to say they were governed more by natural instincts than by applications of reason. These were unenlightened but stable kingdoms, empires, tyrannies, and other adaptations of the dominance hierarchy, because they were founded on mammalian fears and preoccupations that had been honed over millions of years. – Benjamin Cain (2021)
This is a human existential problem. It began when ever-increasing critical masses of humankind gradually found themselves inside the gates and behind the walls of the agrarian-based earliest urban settlements. This happened first in Mesopotamia beginning about 12,000 years ago, and thereafter independently a half dozen times elsewhere in the world. The founding of this new form of settlement and economy is the beginning of the grand story of humankind becoming “civilized.”
Essentially, it is the story of our abandonment of a politics and economy of interpersonal reliance and accountability, and the beginning of a detached impersonal politics supported by mass labor farming. A form of social organization led by specialists with expertise in ideology (tribal exceptionalism and religious covenants), writing (law and record keeping), law enforcement (political power, police, and military), and autocratic mass labor control (economy). The process proceeded apace as a constantly growing number of humankind left their “savage” hunting-gathering ways behind and began to “arrive.” We would later proudly proclaim that during this period we had become “civilized!”
Sound familiar? This system of autocratic dominance social organization is still a powerful ideology today despite the intellectual advances made beginning in the modern era. It continues to exist and garner large numbers of adherents despite the Enlightenment’s call for the granting of more human individual dignity, liberty, and self-determination through implementing more rational and humane ways of being human individually and socially.
What we are experiencing in the US today is more than a culture war. It is the most recent pivotal stage in our species’ protracted sociocultural evolution. It is not a contesting of equally valid means of social organizing and governing. It is an evolutionary struggle to improve the way we govern ourselves within our groups. A search for a better way, one beyond the brute hierarchy control of a plutocratic elite that perversely convinces many of us their way will make us freest and most flourishing.
We are approaching a crucial turning point in our social and cultural evolution. A showdown between conservatives who favor a plutocratic dominance hierarchy in the guise of freedom for their chosen ones on the one hand, and progressive liberals who favor real freedom, equality, and fraternity for all on the other.
Essay 52 – Two Greatest Inventions
From the Unknown into Uncertainty: Essays and Commentary on the Origin, Evolution and Future of Humankind (2020)
James E. Lassiter
Historically, various political organizations have tried to end this showdown and permanently put their preferred form of politics and economy into effect. None have fully succeeded so far. Democracy at this point will either give way to autocracy or evolve into democratic socialism. More muddling reform is unsustainable in the long term.
The insatiable desire of wealth and the neglect of all other things for the sake of money-getting was the ruin of oligarchy. And democracy has her own good, of which that same insatiable desire brings her to dissolution. What good? Freedom, which, as they tell you in a democracy, is the glory of the State -- and that therefore in a democracy alone will the freeman of nature deign to dwell. The insatiable desire of this [liberty] and the neglect of other things introduces the change in democracy, which occasions a demand for tyranny.
When a democracy which is thirsting for freedom has evil cupbearers presiding over the feast and has drunk too deeply of the strong wine of freedom, then, unless her rulers are very amenable and give a plentiful draught, she calls them to account and punishes them, and says that they are cursed oligarchs….
Now, in such a State, can liberty have any limit? Certainly not. By degrees the anarchy finds a way into private houses…. The last extreme of popular liberty is when the slave bought with money, whether male or female, is just as free as his or her purchaser…. And above all, and as the result of all, see how sensitive the citizens become; they chafe impatiently at the least touch of authority and at length, as you know, they cease to care even for the laws, written or unwritten; they will have no one over them. Such, my friend, I said, is the fair and glorious beginning out of which springs tyranny.
The ruin of oligarchy is the ruin of democracy; the same disease magnified and intensified by liberty overmasters democracy. … The excess of liberty, whether in States or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery. And so, tyranny naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme form of liberty. – Plato (360BCE)**
* Iron law of oligarchy, a sociological thesis according to which all organizations, including those committed to democratic ideals and practices, will inevitably succumb to rule by an elite few (an oligarchy). The iron law of oligarchy contends that organizational democracy is an oxymoron. Although elite control makes internal democracy unsustainable, it is also said to shape the long-term development of all organizations—including the rhetorically most radical—in a conservative direction. - Britannica
** My abridgement of the thoughts of Socrates expressed to Glaucon and Adeimantus, as related by Plato in The Republic (360BCE).
