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| Image that accompanied the New Yorker article. |
Far too lengthy
to include on Jackspotpourri is the ‘Letter from Israel’ by David Remnick, New
Yorker magazine editor, who has made several visits to Israel since the Hamas
attack in October. He writes about
whether Benjamin Netanyahu puts his own interests above that of the State of
Israel, and even recalls the Revisionist Zionism of Zev Jabotinsky, in which
Bibi’s father believed and is strongly reflected in Bibi’s present Knesset
coalition that wants nothing to do with a two-state solution.
Sit down and
devote at least half an hour to reading it and learn what difficult decisions
Israel really faces today. Copy and
paste https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/letter-from-israel on your browser line
to read the piece from the Jan. 22, 2024 issue of the magazine or just CLICK HERE.
And this might
be an appropriate time to mention that my ‘two-state’ solution recommended in
the previous posting of Jackspotpourri resulted in only one person asking to be
taken off my list of those receiving alerts of fresh postings.
JL
* * *
Insurance
Advertising
The property and casualty insurance
industry, businesses that collect money, invest, or lend it, making a profit,
and end up paying out more than operating expenses and agents’ commissions ONLY
when their ‘policyholders’ submit property damage or automobile claims (which for most of them is ‘never’) is part of our nation’s conservative financial structure.
They seem to be
ashamed of that, however, because much of their advertising tries to make them
appear to be anything other than ‘conservative.’ Just look at their names. What images do
‘Progressive’ and ‘Liberty’ bring to mind?
And one company (GEICO) is even named after those who hold civil service
jobs, working class people employed by the government. This is the antithesis of being
‘conservative.’
The one that
takes the cake, however, is a very American insurer that appears to be named
after the collectivization of all agriculture in Russia instituted by the
Bolsheviks after they overthrew the Tsar in 1918, replacing individual
enterprises with 'State Farms.’ That
name also has been applied to agricultural activities at what were once called
‘poorhouses,’ orphanages, and prisons run by government agencies. That
explanation of its origin appears to be more ‘conservative’ than the Russian
one.
JL
* * *
Unavoidable
Assholes Among Us
Someone to whom I send emails occasionally has let me know that she is getting some emails that look like they’re from me, but obviously are not.
When you get email, phone calls or text messages from sources that you don't recognize, you risk being 'hacked,' if you respond to them. I usually ignore such communications. Occasionally though, I might answer a phone call from my own area code that I suspect is from a neighbor who is not in my 'contact' list. (I never click on any links in a suspicious email or text message.)
I recently ordered a printer cartridge online directly from the manufacturer of my printer, using its website. Within a day or so, I started receiving obviously amateurish texts directing me to click on a link to clarify my address with the sender who was pretending to be with the USPS. I ignored them, of course, and there was no problem with the delivery of the cartridge. My conclusion is that someone 'hacked' my order. I don't know how I could have avoided this problem.
It is difficult not to be 'hacked' occasionally with your phone number or email address falling into the hands of a robot. Despite the virus protection systems we pay for, and a reasonably cautious approach to communications, such ‘hacking’ is close to unavoidable, particularly when an attachment or an image is involved or an email is sent to many recipients. Just be careful. There are many ‘A.H.’s out there, and not all are robots.
JL
* * *
Some Folks Just Won't Give Joe Credit for Anything
The daily postings of Professor Heather Cox Richardson (Letters from an American) are always worthwhile reading. I recommend that you sign up for them at https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/. They are free, unless you choose to make comments, in which case monthly membership is available.
HCR’s January 19, 2024, posting is particularly noteworthy, and well worth passing on to your friends and relatives. While praising President Biden and his administration, it also warns of dangers to our representative democracy posed by those who oppose it. In its entirety, here is HCR’s posting (the highlighting is mine):
‘President
Joe Biden today signed the continuing resolution that will keep the government operating
into March.
Meanwhile, the stock market roared as two
of the three major indexes hit new record highs. The S&P 500, which
measures the value of 500 of the largest companies in the country, and the Dow
Jones Industrial Average, which does the same for 30 companies considered to be
industry leaders, both rose to all-time highs. The third major index, the
Nasdaq Composite, which is weighted toward technology stocks, did not hit a
record high, although its 1.7% jump was higher than that of the S&P 500
(1.2%) or the Dow (1.1%).
Investors appear to be buoyed by the fact the rate of
inflation has come down in the U.S. and by news that consumers are feeling
better about the economy. A report out today by Goldman
Sachs Economics Research noted that consumer spending is strong and predicted
that “job gains, positive real wage growth, will lead to around 3% real
disposable income growth” and that “household balance sheets have strengthened.”
It also noted that “[t]he US has led the way on disinflation,” and it predicted
further drops in 2024. That will likely mean the sort of interest rate cuts the
stock market likes.
The economic policies of the Biden-Harris administration
have also benefited workers. The unemployment rate has been
under 4% for more than two years, and wages have risen higher than inflation in
that same period. Production is up as well, to 4.9% in the third quarter of
2023 (the U.S. growth rate under Trump even before the pandemic was
2.5%).
The administration has worked to end some of the most
obvious financial inequities in the U.S., such
as the unexpected “junk fees” tacked on to airline or concert tickets, or to
car or apartment rentals. On Wednesday the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced a
proposed rule for bank overdraft fees at banks that have more than $10
billion in assets.
While banks now can charge
what they wish if a customer’s balance falls below zero, the proposed rule
would allow them to charge no more than what it cost them to break even on
providing overdraft services or, alternatively, an industry-wide fee that reflects
the amount it costs to deal with overdrafts: $3, $6, $7, or $14. The amount
will be established after a public hearing period.
Ken Sweet and Cora Lewis
of the Associated Press note that while the average overdraft is $26.61, some
banks charge as much as $39 per overdraft. The CFPB estimates that in the past
20 years, banks have collected more than $280 billion in overdraft fees. (One
bank’s chief executive officer named his boat “Overdraft.”) Over the past two
years, pressure has made banks cut back on their fees and they now take in
about $8 billion a year from those overdraft fees.
Bankers say regulation is
unnecessary and will force them to end the overdraft service, pushing people
out of the banking system. Biden
said that the rule would save U.S. families $3.5 billion annually.
The administration has also addressed the student loan
crisis by reexamining the loan histories of student borrowers. An NPR
investigation led by Cory Turner revealed that banks mismanaged loans, denying
borrowers the terms under which they had signed on to them. Rather than
honoring the government’s promise that so long as a borrower paid what the
government thought was reasonable on a loan for 20 or 25 years (undergrad or
graduate), the debt would be forgiven, banks urged borrowers to put the loan
into “forbearance,” under which payments paused but the debt continued to
accrue interest, making the amount balloon.
The Education Department
has been reexamining all those old loans to find this sort of mismanagement as
well as other problems, like borrowers not getting credit for payments to count
toward their 20 years of payments, or borrowers who chose public service not
receiving the debt relief they were promised.
Today the administration
announced $4.9 billion of student debt cancellation for almost 74,000
borrowers. That brings the total of borrowers whose debt has been canceled to
3.7 million Americans, with an erasure of $136.6 billion. Nearly 30,000 of
today’s relieved borrowers had been in repayment for at least 20 years but
never got the relief they should have; nearly 44,000 had earned debt
forgiveness after 10 years of public service as teachers, nurses, and
firefighters.
Biden has been traveling the country recently, touting
how the economic policies of the Biden-Harris administration have benefited
ordinary Americans. In Emmaus, Pennsylvania, last
Friday he visited a bicycle shop, a running shoe store, and a coffee shop to
emphasize how small businesses are booming under his administration: in the three years since he took
office, there have been 16 million applications to start new businesses,
the highest number on record.
Biden was in Raleigh, North Carolina, yesterday to
announce another $82 million in support for broadband access,
bringing the total of government infrastructure funding in North Carolina
during the Biden administration to $3 billion.
On social media, the administration compared its
investments in the American people to those of President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s, which were enormously popular.
They were popular, that is, until those opposed to
business regulation convinced white voters that the government’s protection of
civil rights, which came along with its protection of ordinary Americans
through regulation of business, provision of a basic social safety net, and
promotion of infrastructure, meant redistribution of white tax dollars to
undeserving Black people.
The same effort to make sure that ordinary Americans
don’t work together to restore basic fairness in the economy and rights in
society is visible now in the attempt to attribute a recent Boeing airplane
malfunction, in which a door panel blew off mid-flight, to diversity, equity,
and inclusion (DEI) efforts. Tesnim Zekeria at Popular Information yesterday
chronicled how that accusation spread across the right-wing ecosystem and onto
the Fox News Channel, where Fox Business host Sean Duffy warned: “This is a
dangerous business when you’re focused on DEI and maybe less focused on
engineering and safety.”
As Zekeria explains, “this narrative has no basis in
fact.” Neither Boeing nor its supplier, Spirit AeroSystems, is
particularly diverse, either at the workforce level, where minorities make up
35% of Boeing employees and 26% of those at Spirit AeroSystems, or on the
corporate ladder, where the overwhelming majority of executives are white men.
Zekeria notes that right-wing media figures have also erroneously blamed last
year’s train derailment in Ohio and the collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank on
DEI initiatives.
The real culprit at Boeing, Zekeria
suggests, was the weakened
regulations on Boeing and Spirit thanks to more than $65 million in lobbying efforts.
Perhaps an even more transparent attempt to keep ordinary
Americans from working together is the attacks former Fox News Channel
personality Tucker Carlson has launched against Vice President Kamala Harris,
calling her “a member of the new master race” who
“must be shown maximum respect at all times, no matter what she says or does.”
Philip Bump of the Washington
Post noted yesterday that this construction suggests that
Harris, who identifies as both Black and Indian, represents all nonwhite
Americans as a united force opposed to white Americans.
But Harris’s actions
actually represent something else altogether. She has crossed the country since
June 2022, when the Supreme Court overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision
that recognized the constitutional right to abortion, talking about the right
of all Americans to bodily autonomy. That the Supreme Court felt able to take
away a constitutional right has worried many Americans about what they might do
next, and people all over
the country have been coming together in opposition to the small minority that
appears to have taken over the levers of our democracy.
Driving the wedge of racism into that majority coalition
seems to be a desperate attempt to stop ordinary Americans from taking back
control of the country.’
JL
* * *
Dammit! They
Were Legitimately Elected!
And before we
leave Professor HCR for the day, her January 22 posting led me to post this
comment on ‘Letters from an American.’
‘HCR quotes President Biden, who in referring to women's reproductive
rights, used the words 'Because
of Republican elected officials.' Those five words are the
key to most of the problems challenging America today.
American voters, for a variety of reasons, continue to elect enough Republicans, especially on the State level, whose agendas are rarely in their interests, throwing sand into the gears of our government. That's how we end up with the DeSantis's, the Tubervilles, the Gaetz's, the Roys, the Jordans, the Abbotts, etc. in public office, our defeated and indicted former president, likely to run again, being the best example of all.
History will not reflect
kindly on the way the misuse of our representative democracy resulted in this
happening. Although it's the best system that has come along in many centuries,
it continues to be hampered by its Achilles Heel, which we must not ignore.’
JL
* * *
Voting by Mail
Florida voters have gotten used to voting by mail. It’s safe and simple. But just because you might have done it in the past does not mean you can automatically continue to do so. Current State election laws require you to renew your ‘voting by mail’ status before the next election in order to receive a ‘vote by mail’ ballot.
If you vote in Palm Beach County, do it right
now by visiting https://www.votepalmbeach.gov/Voters/Vote-By-Mail or by clicking here For those who do not want do it online, they
can sign up for vote-by-mail by calling (561) 656 6208. In other Florida counties, visit the website of
your Supervisor of Elections or call them.
JL
* * *
Do Americans Still Trust Democracy?
There are plenty of reasons NOT to vote for Donald Trump for any office whatsoever, let alone a return to the White House. Here’s a brief summary:
·
He committed massive, decades-long financial
fraud, proven in New York’s civil courts which also, in another case, labeled
him to be a ‘rapist.’
·
He incited an insurrection attacking the US Capitol
and tried to end American democracy, acts which have resulted in Federal and
State indictments for attempting to change the results of a presidential
election.
·
He stole America's secrets, lied to the FBI,
shared them with others and betrayed the country, resulting in a Federal
indictment.
·
He and his family have taken billions from
foreign governments, while in office, a violation of the Constitution’s
‘emoluments’ provision.
·
He ended Roe v Wade, severely limiting
women’s reproductive rights with three right-wing anti-abortion SCOTUS
appointments, justices who also close their eyes to the deaths resulting from
the senseless proliferation of guns in our communities.
·
He has pardoned convicted criminals whose
crimes were connected to his presidency.
Why then would anyone even think of voting for him? Well, Martin Gurri, right-wing scholar, quoted on Wednesday in Bari Weiss’ ‘Free Press’ blog, seems to think that many Americans, even aware of the litany of offenses listed above, have lost faith in our democratic process that gave us Donald Trump and despite them, and are willing to turn to him again. Gurri, who apparently believes that America’s elite has given up on the nation’s voters recognizing Trump’s massive flaws, wrote:
“Trump appears to act as a sort of funhouse mirror on which the
progressive elites who run most institutions, including the federal government,
see themselves reflected in the most monstrous and frightening light, … The
malady now exposed is this: the elites have lost faith in representative
democracy. To smash the nightmare image of themselves that Trump evokes, they
are willing to twist and force our system until it breaks.”
I strongly disagree with Gurri who sees authoritarianism
by Democrats where there is none. The
‘Executive Branch’ is only doing what it is supposed to do: carry out the laws
passed by the ‘Legislative Branch.’
The significant percentage of
registered Republicans who voted for Nikki Haley in the New Hampshire G.O.P.
primary, while a distinct minority, were saying ‘no’ to Trump’s candidacy and may
be reluctant to even vote in November.
Except for Haley (and probably Chris Christie) most of the would-be Republican alternatives to him
are now dutifully, hypocritically, and shamelessly, falling in line behind him, willing to trade in traditional Republican conservatism for a 'fuhrer.'
Republicans who decide to stay
home on Election Day, together with the nation’s Democratic and independent
voters, will lead President Biden to re-election in November, but it will not
be easy. Some ‘elites’ may have given up
on democracy, as Gurri suggests, but I don’t think the country is willing to
trade it in for authoritarianism.
Answering my own question, ‘Do
Americans Still Trust Democracy?’ I say ‘yes.’
JL
Housekeeping on
Jackspotpourri
Email Alerts: If you are NOT receiving emails from me alerting you each time there is a new posting on Jackspotpourri, just send me your email address and we’ll see that you do. And if you are forwarding a posting to someone, you might suggest that they do the same, so they will be similarly alerted. You can pass those email addresses to me by email at jacklippman18@gmail.com.
Forwarding Postings: Please forward this posting to anyone you think might benefit from reading it. Friends, relatives, enemies, etc.
If you want to send someone the blog, exactly as you are now seeing it, with all of its bells and whistles, you can just tell folks to check it out by visiting https://jackspotpourri.blogspot.com or by providing a link to that address in your email to them. I think this is the best method of forwarding Jackspotpourri.
There’s another, perhaps easier,
method of forwarding it though! Google Blogspot, the platform
on which Jackspotpourri is prepared, makes that possible. If you click on
the tiny envelope with the arrow at the bottom of every posting, you will
have the opportunity to list up to ten email addresses to which that blog
posting will be forwarded, along with a comment from you. Each
will receive a link to the textual portion only of the blog that
you are now reading, but without the illustrations,
colors, variations in typography, or the 'sidebar' features such as access to
the blog's archives.
Either way will work, sending
them the link to https://jackspotpourri.blogspot.com, or
clicking on the envelope at the bottom of this posting, but I
recommend sending them the link.
Again, I urge you to forward this posting to anyone you think might benefit from reading it, particularly if they are a registered voter.
JL
* * *
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