Bill Maher said he would vote for Sarah Palin before he would vote for a Democratic Socialist. Who is Bill Maher?
James Carville said he would leave the Democratic Party before supporting someone like Michigan primary winner Abdul El-Sayed. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out, James. YOU, and others like you — centrist Democrats —are choking the life out of the Democratic Party.
Democratic Socialists are not communists, and anyone that suggests otherwise is a liar. Are some DSA members communists? Sure, but that’s not the official party position. I, for one, am not a communist.
One more month until the NFL season begins. Will this be the year for my Bengals, also known as the Bungles?
It’s been a rough year for the Cincinnati Reds, mainly due to injuries and malfeasance by the front office. I hope ownership cleans house. Better yet, sell the team to someone who is willing to spend the necessary money to field a winner.
I’ve concluded that tens of millions of Americans love Jesus and hate Muslims. And Blacks. And Mexicans. And immigrants. They hate anyone who doesn’t think and look like them.
High school football starts in less than two weeks. I love high school football, so I’m looking forward to attending as many games as possible this year.
Trump said today that the American economy is booming. Really? Where? Not in rural Northwest Ohio.
Most Americans say they wouldn’t vote for a Democrat Socialist. This is not surprising since most of these people voted for Trump three times. They wouldn’t know a good candidate if their lives depended on it. Way too many ignorant voters in this country.
Monty Fritts, a MAGA Republican gubernatorial candidate in Tennessee, argued that the First Amendment does not apply to state governments. If elected, he plans to ban mosques and non-Christian religions. Go ahead and tell me again why we shouldn’t consider a candidate’s religion when deciding whether to vote for them?
Bonus: God’s Store House Food Bank in Bluefield, West Virginia refused food donations from LGBTQ people. Why? Cuz the Bible says . . .
My God, we live in the land of stupid, and we are getting stupider by the day.
Bruce Gerencser, 69, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 48 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
The Democratic Socialists of America have never been more relevant. And with this rise comes an inevitable backlash—not so much from the voters themselves as the Democratic elites wary of the insurgency and the media organs that, more often than not, reflect their blinkered conception of the world.
Why are Democrats panicking so much about DSA? Why has at least one Atlantic columnist labeled them a “parasite”? This is the price of victory—of becoming, at last, a threat. The socialist left, for almost a century, was nothing more than a footnote on the American political scene. A major force in the Eugene Debs era, with more than a thousand elected officials scattered across the country, the Socialist Party withered in the 1920s and ’30s, a victim of the first Red Scare and attacks from the major political parties. Franklin Roosevelt had weakened them as well, dragging the Democratic Party left and adopting many of the economic policies they had supported. As anti-communism took hold in America, there was no place for any prominent politician using the “s” word, and even when Michael Harrington founded DSA in the early 1980s—unlike the old Socialist Party, his DSA would compete in Democratic primaries—there was little hope that the organization, with just a few thousand members, could decide elections.
The rise of Bernie Sanders changed all that, reinvigorating DSA. Membership boomed. Sanders himself wasn’t a DSA member, but he called himself a democratic socialist. Still, the Democratic establishment could worry only so much. Sanders was defeated twice. DSA members like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did begin to win congressional primaries and a handful of socialists entered statehouses and city councils, but there were only so many of them. A centrist Democrat repeatedly denouncing DSA would have seemed a bit silly. Who really cares about DSA? When Donald Trump was defeated and Joe Biden returned to office, DSA maintained its small foothold but effectively stopped growing, and the Democratic establishment could exhale. The socialist fervor, it seemed, had passed.
Zohran Mamdani changed all that. A socialist winning America’s largest city was a great shock to the establishment Democrats who believed the DSA moment had come and gone. The primaries last month proved that Mamdani’s victory wasn’t an anomaly, a political fad. Darializa Avila Chevalier, Claire Valdez, Melat Kiros, and Chris Rabb are all heading to Congress. DSA is continuing to grow its presence in state legislatures. As in the 1960s, “when a graying Democratic establishment backed the Vietnam War while the youth revolted, many Democrats today clung far too close to Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel and are paying the price. Pro-Palestine sentiment has reinvigorated the left. This success has driven some pundits and political leaders to declare that DSA members should be thrown out of the Democratic Party. Jamie Harrison, the former chair of the Democratic National Committee, said on X not long ago that socialists who “hate the Democratic Party” should not “run for our nomination.” “Don’t use our resources. Don’t rely on our volunteers,” he posted. “Don’t use our infrastructure. Don’t ask Democrats to invest their time, money, and energy in your campaign.” In his “parasite” Atlantic column, Jamie Kirchick argued that the Democrats should be “prohibiting DSA members from joining their party and throwing out the DSA members already honeycombed within it.”
For an anti-socialist liberal, it’s a nice idea. Make the Democrats the party of Rahm Emanuel and Tom Suozzi and leave it there. The trouble for them is the American political system, one that is flawed but does permit quite a bit of grassroots democracy.
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“Harrison’s argument is especially absurd because there are few “resources” or “infrastructure” a centralized Democratic Party deploys for most races. It’s up to candidates themselves to raise money and recruit volunteers.
….
They just understand, as Harrington did, that running in the Democratic Party primary is a much better way to make tangible change than forming a third party and losing more often than not. Ironically, many of the same political leaders and pundits who call for a DSA purge today would be equally livid if they formed a third party tomorrow, contested general elections, and potentially siphoned votes from Democrats.
I’m not running for office. But if I were, these are some of the lessons I’d take away from what happened in NY yesterday.
1. Authenticity is measurable. Voters can smell a focus group from a mile away.
2. Endorsements from the current Democratic leadership now read like warnings. The establishment wing of the party is no longer a sword. It’s a question mark.
3. Conviction beats caution. The candidates who said hard things about rent, about who pays for what, about Gaza, they won. The triangulators lost.
4. Cost of living is everything. Everything else is wallpaper.
5. The middle is not a strategy. It’s an empty room. Voters reached past the establishment to grab someone who actually believes something.
6. Don’t fear the base. Court it. The Democrats who ran from their own voters lost. The ones who ran toward them won.
7. If you want to lead a party you have to be willing to fight inside it. Mamdani didn’t ask permission. He took the field.
The lesson under the lessons: the country is tired of being managed. People want to be led.
— Hunter Biden, son of former president Joe Biden , as reported by Crooks and Liars
Electric vehicles, LED lighting, and recycling will do very little, if anything, to meaningfully combat global climate change.
Bonus: Americans will not do anything unless you make them.
Leave your hot thoughts in the comment section.
Bruce Gerencser, 69, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 48 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
The Labor Department’s Employment Situation report for February included pretty good numbers. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that job totals for the month of February were up significantly from the previous month—up 678,000 for non-farm businesses and government organizations The official unemployment rate dropped two-tenths of a percent to 3.8%. These numbers suggest that January’s fairly good job totals were not a freak of seasonal adjustments. Also, it is clear that the unemployment rate did not fall as a result of more people dropping out of the labor force. The labor force grew by 304,000, employment increased substantially and the ranks of the unemployed dropped by 243,000.
By Sector–Some Recoveries, Some Far From It
The employment situation was a mixed bag. Restaurants and other leisure and hospitality businesses gained 179,000 positions. Open Table reported that reservations had surpassed pre-pandemic levels. Yet there were 824,000 fewer restaurant jobs than in February 2020. It is a plus that pay in leisure and hospitality jobs rose 14% in one pandemic year. But that brings it to just $17.12 an hour, the lowest average wage of any sector.
The endangered retail sector regained enough jobs to surpass pre-pandemic levels. That is hard to believe. Health care employment is 306,000 jobs below its February 2020 level, and local government jobs, including education workers, are 598,000 jobs below the February 2020 level.
Negatives also apply to other sections of the jobs report. As the National Jobs for All Network’s (NJFAN) Full Count shows, Black unemployment was, as usual, two times the white unemployment rate. Fuller employment with good jobs would help here but won’t solve the problem. Racism–institutional, structural, and personal–is deeply rooted, so Black unemployment is always much higher than white. And the official Black rate underestimates the problem. Hundreds of thousands of African Americans are in prison or have prison records—a red flag to employers. Many unemployed Black workers can’t find a reason to look for work. Only an all-out package of solutions will bring Black unemployment levels down to white rates.
The government undercounts unemployed African Americans, and it undercounts total unemployment. Millions of job-wanters aren’t considered unemployed. While the official number of unemployed was 6.3 million, 4.1 million part-timers could not find full-time work, and 5.4 million people wanted a job but had not recently searched for one–at least not in ways the BLS accepts. When these groups are added to the total, NJFAN found that the number of unemployed in February was 15.8 million, not 6.3 million: The real unemployment rate was 9.3%—not the official 3.8%. Perhaps labor demand was not as high as employers claim. Effective demand would include more good jobs.
Nothing New: Too Many Lousy Jobs
Wage levels are one index of job quality. We have heard a lot about worker shortages and employers lifting pay to attract people. It’s true that the dollar amounts an average employee sees in her pay packet have increased. But so has inflation. For most workers, after-inflation pay has not grown steadily during the pandemic. From January 2020 through January 2021, real hourly pay advanced 4%. From January 2021 through January 2022, real hourly pay fell 1.3%. There was a net gain in real pay, but not by much, especially if we widen our lens for a minute. The history of real pay is a dreadful tale. How much did the purchasing power of hourly pay increase from 1972 through February 2022? The answer: 4%. That’s the total increase in the purchasing power of an hour of work for an average employee over half a century.
Even prior to the pandemic, employers normally had an adequate supply of labor. And that is despite the fact that the U.S. has relatively low labor force participation rates (people working or looking for work). The aging of the population plays a role here. But more oldsters would work if compensation and conditions were better. And even if we focus on prime working ages (25-54), we find that the participating share of the population fell from 85% to 81% between 2000 and 2015. (It rose again and is currently at 82.2%.)
Some prime-age people are not participating due to sickness, disability, and child care issues. Many are staying out because there aren’t enough jobs with livable wages, good benefits, and supportive bosses. Conservatives like to think the reason is that government benefits are too rich for the working class (but never rich enough for the super-rich). But benefits can be very low. For example, if you have a long-term illness or disability and you receive a monthly disability benefit of $1200, you won’t be getting more than you’d earn working 30 hours a week in a low-wage state for $10 an hour. Why not raise pay instead of cutting benefits?
We do not precisely know what labor markets will look like if COVID becomes less consequential. We can expect that more people who are rejecting lousy jobs will have to go back to work. Fewer people will quit their jobs, and the number of job vacancies will fall at a rate of millions a month from their historic highs. Without a union surge, without higher minimum wages, without federal good-job programs, and without truly affirmative action, the lousy job situation will continue. More people will be back at miserable jobs. We hope more will be organizing for collective action at the workplace. Some already are.
Bruce Gerencser, 69, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 48 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
The liberal Christian would almost certainly be a better fit with my stance on most political issues than the conservative atheist. That would be a compelling reason to select them. But of course, the conservative atheist would not be a victim of the sort of superstition afflicting the liberal Christian. That would be appealing, especially considering how rare this is. So who would I choose if I had to pick one?
My answer to this question reveals something about my priorities. Were I to say that I’d pick the conservative atheist, it might mean that atheism was more important to me than most political issues. And picking the liberal Christian might mean that atheism was a lesser priority for me than these political issues. I suppose there could be other explanations for these decisions that wouldn’t necessarily support either of these interpretations.
So which candidate would I pick? I’d pick the liberal Christian. It might not be an easy decision, especially if this was someone who seemed to be actively promoting Christianity during the campaign. But I think I’d be much more likely to pick the liberal Christian because I’d be a lot more interested in how the person would govern than what they believed about gods.
I’m with Jack on this one. As a liberal/progressive/socialist/pacifist, I am always going to vote for the liberal or progressive candidate. Currently, I am a registered Democrat, having voted for Democratic candidates since 2000. From 1976 to 2000 I always voted Republican, except in 1976 when I voted for born-again Democrat Jimmy Carter.
These days, I am what I call a disaffected Democrat. It remains to be seen how I will vote in 2022 and 2024 — if I am still alive, that is. If I am dead, I will leave it to Polly to cast my vote. 🙂 I am somewhat of a reactionary voter. I voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020 for one simple reason: they weren’t Donald Trump. Neither were my first, second, or third choice. I voted both times in the primary election for Bernie Sanders.
I am a dues-paying member of the Democratic Socialists of America. It is with this group my affections lie. That said, I am a pragmatist. Until we overthrow our broken, dysfunctional two-party system, there’s no chance we will elect a socialist. (And no, neither Joe Biden nor Barack Obama is a socialist. If you say they are, you are a fucking idiot who has zero understanding of socialism.)
How would you answer the question posed by Jack? Please leave your answer in the comment section.
Bruce Gerencser, 69, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 48 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
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