There are still about 48 days or so before Trump Is inaugurated and for all that time Biden is president. As he demonstrated by his decision to release missiles to the Ukrainians, his actions are not limited by the fact that he is a lame-duck. Apparently Americans owe somewhat more than one trillion dollars on their credit cards. .Does Biden have the authority to transfer any significant amount of that debt to federal agencies with much lower fees? No doubt Trump could cancel that act as soon as he comes to office, but that would be the whole point. Americans would experience a month and a half of debt relief and then perhaps blame Trump for its reestablishment.
For those of you who like myself obsessively watch television news, it is useful to recall that nobody has yet been appointed to anything because Trump is not yet inaugurated.
59 comments:
I don't believe that Biden has any Constitutional power to transfer a private debt to the government. Even though the government is central to the process of student loans, the Supreme Court has pretty well shot down Biden's attempt to ease the burden of those loans.
NYT Guest editorial declares John Rawls the potential savior of democracy.
"In his epoch-defining treatise “A Theory of Justice,” published in 1971, Rawls set out a humane and egalitarian vision of a liberal society, an alternative both to the toxic blend of neoliberal economics and identity politics that has dominated Democratic thinking in recent decades and the pessimistic anti-liberalism that holds sway among some more radical parts of the left. In this time of crisis for liberalism, it offers an unparalleled, and as yet largely untapped, resource for shaping a broad-based and genuinely transformational progressive politics — not just for Democrats but for center-left parties internationally."
The federal government may under the doctrine of “eminent domain” expropriate (with compensation) private property for public use. Disputes in this area usually center on (1) whether the compensation is sufficient and (2) whether the use is sufficiently “public”.
If the debt is actually retired at face value, then there couldn’t be any dispute as to sufficiency of compensation. The “public” use argument is a little more difficult. The large number of people do constitute a “public” and freeing up all this money to be spent on the actual economy would therefore be a public benefit, but we can expect the Fox News right to scream “socialism”! On the other hand, the banks would love it, especially since they would immediately begin the cycle of usury again.
Further, as we learned from the first Trump administration, the use of executive orders are not necessarily limited by liberal timidity (a/k/a “norms”).
But expecting the Biden administration to do this seems like a huge reach. Let’s recall that it was Biden himself who, at the request of the (mostly Delaware-based) consumer lenders, changed the bankruptcy laws to make this kind of debt perpetual. Then again, he seems to have gone completely gaga (what with trying to start WW3 and all) so maybe he won’t remember that.
Just a reminder that Biden was known as the 'Senator from MBNA.' He simply does not care one iota about working people.
As far as I know, eminent domain refers only to the taking of real property, i.e., real estate.
You may be right. Eminent domain nearly always involves realty, but I thought that it covers personalty as well: requisitioning ships in emergencies, that sort of thing.
The real problem with the proposal is that it benefits debtors and creditors both; a proposal that benefits the banks alone would have a better chance of success. A scheme that allows the unlucky or imprudent to escape punishment and humiliation is politically unacceptable. To return to liberal-bashing, I would expect not just reactionaries but especially earnest liberals to take to the NYT to chin-stroke and opine (“regretfully”) on the folly of such a morally hazardous proposal.
First: to mention how 'inflation' is debt relief.
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This, of course, would be part of a 7th Year Relaxation of Debt. Here is the scripture passage:
Deuteronomy 15:1-6
King James Version
15 At the end of every seven years thou shalt make a release.
2 And this is the manner of the release: Every creditor that lendeth ought unto his neighbour shall release it; he shall not exact it of his neighbour, or of his brother; because it is called the Lord's release.
3 Of a foreigner thou mayest exact it again: but that which is thine with thy brother thine hand shall release;
4 Save when there shall be no poor among you; for the Lord shall greatly bless thee in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee for an inheritance to possess it:
5 Only if thou carefully hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy God, to observe to do all these commandments which I command thee this day.
6 For the Lord thy God blesseth thee, as he promised thee: and thou shalt lend unto many nations, but thou shalt not borrow; and thou shalt reign over many nations, but they shall not reign over thee.
Comparing Trump's proposed economic appointees (somewhat reasonable) with the law enforcement/national security/diplomatic ones is interesting and disturbing. Seems Vlad, Jared, and Bibi have had some input.
Biden has no interest in people with credit card debt. His only interest is pardoning his corrupt tax-evading son. Let's get real. Biden is better than Trump, but the fact that he's better than Trump does not mean that he's a particularly admirable human being or that we can expect anything positive from him.
My idle thought: here's something Biden could do that would strike a blow for justice, is within his power and is irreversible, at the same time that it would brighten what otherwise will be a terribly sad legacy: pardon Leonard Peltier.
The son is a political target, so I'm not having this bad reaction to the pardon. The New Republic is calling it the worst form of corruption, not even Hunter Biden's crimes are remotely the worst form of corruption. Or 'crimes' -- tax evasion, though trumped up, he didn't owe any money, and gun charges, over a gun that he owned for several days -- never loaded. Felony charges over this? Seems ludicrous. I mean, maybe we have some sort of standards about who to pardon but I'm not sure exactly what they are -- this pardon can be construed as 'justice'.
I stumbled on an article in the World Socialist Web Site on the pardon, and which gives a bit of historical context. The article unsurprisingly treats it as part of "the decay and crisis of the US political system". There's a nice phrase characterizing Biden welcoming Trump to the White House as "a mixture of servility and senility". The last paragraphs document the (hitherto unknown to me) great decline in the number of presidential pardons: Biden's doled out 26, whereas in the 20th century through Truman 1000-2000 was typical: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/12/03/oylu-d03.html
Hear, hear.....
Lucian Truscott in Salon
"Joe Biden has his work cut out for him. He should empower an entire staff in the White House to begin working on blanket pardons for all the people mentioned above, plus members of the House of Representatives and the Senate who were involved in the two Trump impeachments and the House Jan. 6 committee.
"The Biden pardon team should also take a serious look at the many reporters, columnists, and television news hosts who have stood up to Trump over the last eight years. That is another long list of people that Donald Trump has threatened to prosecute for simply doing their jobs as reporters, commentators, and cable news hosts.
That old aphorism “when they go low, we go high” was bullshit when it entered the political lexicon, and it’s a guarantee of a prison sentence at this point. There is no high road in the age of Donald Trump and his MAGA team of toadies and lackeys who are sworn to carry out the campaign of retribution Trump demands.
"The Democratic Party isn’t just a political party anymore. It is an association of Americans who are under attack merely for their political beliefs. Loyalty to the Constitution and swearing to uphold its rights and guarantees of freedom has been turned into a crime by Donald Trump. People like Elon Musk and Leonard Leo are probably adding names to the list of enemies they would like to see behind bars for committing various “crimes” that aren’t crimes at all.
Nobody is safe. Trump has promised to build internment camps for undocumented immigrants he has declared war against. You won’t have to lack an American passport or work permit to be ushered into the walls of those camps once they’re built.
"Trump has gone to war against the America we have known. We don’t need to ask ourselves what this country has done to deserve the war Trump has planned against us. Biden needs to deploy his pardon power as a weapon in that war, and the Democratic Party needs to start recruiting not only followers but fighters. This is going to be an ugly four years, and it is way past time to prepare ourselves."
Far, far less than 50% of those voting for Trump were hard core MAGA. Let him try and arrest and politically prosecute and jail everyone he wants. Appeasing MAGA gains him nothing, and he will lose the House and Senate in '26, '28, and the '28 Presidency.
Trump is either going to be a fascist dictator or not. If he is a fascist dictator, whether or not Biden pardons anti-Trump journalists has no importance because he'll arrest them anyway. Fascist dictators don't give a shit about the law. If he's not a fascist dictator, he's not going to arrest your favorite NYT columnists.
Indeed!
1. Hunter Biden's prosecutions were clearly politically motivated as well as demonstrating Garland's incompetence as AG and Biden's in nominating him as AG.
2. Arrests and prosecutions aren't necessary. "Investigations" will bankrupt most folks.
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Biden shd have bowed out of the '24 pres. race sooner than he did, but his accomplishments in domestic policy are fairly significant. CHIPS Act and infrastructure bill will both have beneficial long-term effects for U.S. manufacturing.
His foreign policy, wrt I/P and Gaza etc. in particular, was considerably less good.
Btw I happened to buy the current (Dec.) issue of The Atlantic in a bkstore, and there is an interesting (and, for a change, somewhat hopeful) piece on I/P: Samer Sinijlawi, "How to Build a Palestinian State: There's Still a Way."
Samer breathes a breath of fresh air for the future of Muslim liberal activists & writers. He makes a good point when he says two female Jewish college students and two female Palestinian college students will put away their differences to work together to get their class assignments completed. Educated Muslim women are the biggest threat to the Conservative movement in the Muslim world. When the U.S. scuttled out of Afghanistan, the first thing the Taliban did was shut down higher education for women in their country. That's how much they fear women and education put together.
As Noble winner Malala Yousafzai said: "Education is the only solution!"
Off topic, but I wanted to let the professor know (hopefully he still reads some of these comments) that to distract myself from all the awful election news, I have been going back through the First Critique alongside his YouTube lecture series. I followed along when they were first released 2016, and now that we are all staring down a second Trump term it seemed like a good time to return to them. Then as now they have provided a stimulating and clear guide through the text, and I wanted to thank him for sharing them. As Hannah Arendt once said, it is always better to spend time with Kant.
In Counterpunch Gerald Sussman places Biden's paternal pardon in the context of his war crimes. Kant would blanch at the crookedness of this timber: https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/12/12/joe-biden-a-resume-of-war-crimes/
My god, still with this silly nonsense about fascism? Trump is Trump and his movement is all its own - has nothing to do with fascism, historical or otherwise.
Counterpunch needs better editors - Sussman makes an obvious error in the first sentence. Objections by elected Dems are likely performative - there is no way Biden would (or should) allow his only remaining son to be vulnerable to a Trump DoJ (Gaetz, Bondi, Patel, and "accidents" do happen in prison). Then there's this:
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/12/12/politics/david-weiss-fbi-informant-alexander-smirnov-plea/index.html
Typical, just typical. An assertion about "an obvious error in the first sentence"--but it must be very obscure, or else I'm going blind. And then nothing. No coming to grips one way or another with what follows in the piece you're supposedly responding to, except to insinuate that the criticising Democrats mentioned in the opening paragraph obviously didn't mean it. And the Smirnov piece referred to doesn't, again, deal with the subject matter of the Counterpunch piece, which has to do with a whole lot of other Biden moral lapses. That's not just typical, it's mendacious.
Off topic: I do not know if the professor is reading the comments but I would like him to know that here, in Brazil, a young philosopher teacher is watching his videos about Marx. My many many regards, professor.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) is facing likely defeat in her candidacy to lead the Democratic minority on the House Oversight Committee, after previously building momentum for the role — because Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has been working behind the scenes to thwart it.
This "backroom sabotage" is not a healthy development for Democrats, wrote Alexander Sammon for Slate — and it's a reflection not of legitimate debate over who is best to lead the committee, but a yearslong vendetta Pelosi is unable to let go of, and a reluctance to truly pass the torch to a new generation of leaders.
"After November’s drubbing, House Democrats signaled that they were prepared to accept a changing of the guard atop some of the important House committees," wrote Sammon, including Reps. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) and Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) stepping aside for relatively younger leaders.
But when Ocasio-Cortez stepped up for Oversight, and began to attract support, things changed.
"Not one to let a young person ascend quietly, Nancy Pelosi entered the fray," wrote Sammon. "The patron saint of Democratic gerontocracy, 84-year-old Nancy Pelosi is supposedly retired from leadership, but this month, she actively threw her weight behind 74-year-old Virginia Rep. Gerry Connolly, who was just diagnosed with throat cancer. Now, Pelosi is whipping votes for Connolly, whose potential promotion would cap off this 'changing of the guard' by replacing a 61-year-old with a guy in his mid-70s. And because Pelosi suffered a fall in Germany and had to have her hip replaced, she’s essentially whipping votes from a hospital bed."
ALSO READ: Billionaire newspaper owner slaps major new restrictions on anti-Trump editorials: report
Ocasio-Cortez's outspoken progressive record has made some more centrist lawmakers uneasy, Sammon noted, but she is arguably perfect for this role: "During a second Trump presidency, Oversight will be one of the most important bully pulpits to expose and interrogate the incoming administration’s flagrant corruption," and AOC, who already serves on Oversight, has repeatedly gone viral demolishing Trump allies in that committee. "Her ability as an explainer is top-notch, and her penchant for conveying outrage and injustice is sorely lacking in the party’s upper echelons."
Connolly has extensive experience on the committee, said Sammon, with "a positive reputation for his work beating back Republican witch hunts during the Barack Obama years" — but "it’s pretty obvious which one of these representatives has a bigger megaphone to explain what’s going on. Ocasio-Cortez has 8.1 million followers. Connolly has 4,600."
From The Daily Beast (The Democrats are fucked)
Pelosi, Sammon noted, was instrumental in building the consensus to force President Joe Biden out of running for a second term — but those same tactics are "harder to justify when an eminently qualified rising star — who, whether Pelosi likes it personally or not, is widely known to be a cornerstone of the party’s future — pushes for a simple promotion."
This:
https://apnews.com/article/alexander-smirnov-guilty-plea-biden-informant-fbi-62a3b7acce0345303f812ca6d0206b10?taid=67606582a1361c00013e0d14&utm_campaign=TrueAnthem&utm_medium=AP&utm_source=Twitter
reminded me that R McD had an objection to an earlier post of mine. The author of the Counter Punch article got the charges seriously wrong and his editor failed to catch it. He also repeated the now discredited Burisma charges as well as understanding that a majority of Ukrainians rejected a Russian stooge and didn't consider themselves Little Russians. The author of the article seems not to understand that hobbling Ukraine and facilitating Palestinian genocide stem from the same failed policies.
Also Musk just tweeted his support for this party:
https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did:plc:of56nmyuqzvjta7qlf7gwht6/bafkreifgmef7oqz76yf4rjcprcomrmyvbc4rkntjmrb3qedc7qxmxumlte@jpeg
My objection, as I recall, was that you, aaall, made an accusation, yet I couldn't see what precisely it was that you were objecting to. I still don't know what it was you took to be seriously wrong. And what are the Burisma charges?
Somewhat confused. Burisma is covered (inadequately) in the CP article which is a bog standard tankie take on past and present US foreign policy which reads worse the second time around. Have you read the article?
P.S. That the son also rises is universal SOP.
LFC: Biden shd have bowed out of the '24 pres. race sooner than he did, but his accomplishments in domestic policy are fairly significant.
And Mussolioni made the trains run on time.
Biden will be remembered for perpetrating a genocide.
"'We're killing civilians there who are then counted as terrorists,' [a senior IDF officer who has served three reserve rotations in Gaza] says. 'The IDF spokesperson's announcements about casualty numbers have turned this into a competition between units. If Division 99 kills 150 [people], the next unit aims for 200.'
These accounts of indiscriminate killing and the routine classification of civilian casualties as terrorists emerged repeatedly in Haaretz's conversations with recent Gaza veterans.
'Calling ourselves the world's most moral army absolves soldiers who know exactly what we're doing,' says a senior reserve commander who has recently returned from the Netzarim corridor. 'It means ignoring that for over a year, we've operated in a lawless space where human life holds no value. Yes, we commanders and combatants are participating in the atrocity unfolding in Gaza. Now everyone must face this reality.'
...
An officer in Division 252's command recalls when the IDF spokesperson announced their forces had killed over 200 militants.... 'Of those 200 casualties, only ten were confirmed as known Hamas operatives. Yet no one questioned the public announcement about killing hundreds of militants.'
...
One of the concepts [Gen. Yehuda Vach] introduced was declaring anyone entering the kill zone a terrorist conducting reconnaissance. 'Every woman is a scout, or a man in disguise,' an officer explains. 'Vach even decided anyone on a bicycle could be killed, claiming cyclists were terrorists' collaborators.'"
from Haaretz, Yaniv Kubovich, Dec 18, 2024
"To adapt the White House around the needs of a diminished leader, they [Biden's closest aides and advisers] told visitors to keep meetings focused. Interactions with senior Democratic lawmakers and some cabinet members—including powerful secretaries such as Defense’s Lloyd Austin and Treasury’s Janet Yellen—were infrequent or grew less frequent. Some legislative leaders had a hard time getting the president’s ear at key moments, including ahead of the U.S.’s disastrous pullout from Afghanistan....
This account of how the White House functioned with an aging leader at the top of its organizational chart is based on interviews with nearly 50 people....
The president’s slide has been hard to overlook. While preparing last year for his interview with Robert K. Hur, the special counsel who investigated Biden’s handling of classified documents, the president couldn’t recall lines that his team discussed with him. At events, aides often repeated instructions to him, such as where to enter or exit a stage, that would be obvious to the average person....
If the president was having an off day, meetings could be scrapped altogether. On one such occasion, in the spring of 2021, a national security official explained to another aide why a meeting needed to be rescheduled. 'He has good days and bad days, and today was a bad day so we’re going to address this tomorrow,' the former aide recalled the official saying."
"How the White House Functioned With a Diminished Biden in Charge"
WSJ Dec 19, 2024
Eric, Biden and whoever is running the show is responsible not only for the genocide in Gaza, but also for Israeli aggression against Lebanon and now Syria. Israel has become Washington's 007, James Bond with a license to kill and to kill and to kill. Biden has been the worst U.S. imperialist and warmonger since Bush 2. I realize that Trump is horrid, but what I don't understand is why folks who saw through Biden back in 2020 and enthusiastically supported Sanders now have idealized this sickening proponent of Amerikan exceptionalism and of "we own the world-ism".
While the U.S. certainly bears some considerable responsibility, the persons primarily responsible for Israel's actions are Netanyahu and his cabinet. Had the U.S. cut off weapons early in the Gaza war, Netanyahu likely still would have had enough to cause a fair amount of destruction.
I don't think anyone here is idealizing Biden; at any rate I'm not.
Btw I've put up a short-ish post on the 400th anniversary of Grotius's On the Law of War and Peace, which occurs in 2025. (In case anyone is interested. I realize it's not a hot current topic.)
P.s. It's an open question to what extent Biden could have stopped arms shipments, esp. given Repub and some Dems in Congress who wd have opposed it. He cd have delayed some for sure, which he only did once.
It's interesting that the comments here about Biden ignore the context of a Congress and a political class very tied to the U.S.-Israel alliance, which as aaall has pointed out before, has even been enshrined to some extent in the U.S. Code. Worth recalling that a President has considerable power but operates in a constraining context.
Ah, yes. Just as with Harris' campaign. She has been a key figure in of all the good that the Biden admin has accomplished, but you can't blame her for any of the bad stuff because she wasn't the one making the final decisions.
Biden's accomplishments on the domestic front are fairly significant (no mention of Congress), but you can't really expect him to change course in Palestine because the president is limited by congressional constraints.
I guess I'm just much too old to understand what now counts as clever verbiage. Have a very pleasant day. r mcd
We're about to see, I suppose, just how much the US executive can be constrained. I suppose it's too late to shut the barn door on executive authority--that horse has been bolting down the road for several generations now. I guess it was in 1966 that I first heard a liberal Democrat politician argue against his anti-war primary opponent that he couldn't go against his "commander -in-chief." Not "President," mind you, but rather the military figure.
Re: Eric's post of the WSJ article on the diminished Biden and s. wallerstein's 'Biden and whoever is running the show': I was just now reading Martha Nussbaum's piece in the NYRB on Matthew Scully's Fear Factories, another book on the horrors of U. S. abattoirs and the Land of the Free's extreme systematic cruelties in its animal 'husbandry'. Nussbaum notes that "By far the most frequent home for Scully's trenchant and no-holds-barred work, however, has been the National Review, a journal I blush to say I had dismissed as biased." I once asked my buddy Julia Friedman why she published her art pieces in the NR, and she replied "Because they don't censor" (unlike the bog standard 'liberal' art publications, who won't tolerate her criticisms of identitarianism). And Alexander Cockburn likewise used to say that the WSJ didn't censor his columns. So I glanced on-line at the current National Review; aside from celebrating in advance the upcoming centenary of William Buckley's birth, much of it seemed to be running with the WSJ article, showing how that revealed the great scandal of 2024 to be not Trump's lunacy about Haitian pet-eaters, but rather Biden's diminishment, together with the media's lack of interest in/cover-up of his condition. Perhaps the upshot is to recall the sense of alternate realities in the various ideological alignments of 'news' sources, and that 'Biden' is for the most part a corporate entity.
could you give a link to your post on Grotius?
The Lord (or whatever spirit guides history) works in mysterious ways. Bad people can do good things. Eliminating Nasrallah and Sinwar were coups. This isn't the best of all possible worlds, but better without them. By far. They are Eblis. The Ayatollah better be ready to meet his maker, just like Haman met his.I bet someone will dress up as Nasrallah on Purim. It will be hilarious
I should have mentioned Congress in connection with the domestic accomplishments, of course.
Anonymous @ 3:33 p.m.
Link to Grotius post:
https://surmisesandsuspicions.wordpress.com/2024/12/21/four-hundred-years-since-on-the-law-of-war-and-peace-grotius/
Tobias Barrington Wolff posted this on Facebook last night: "I will be flying to North Carolina tomorrow. My Dad has been having a difficult time and went into the hospital last Monday. I waited to post about it until we knew more. He had a surgical procedure yesterday morning that went well and his recovery appeared to be on track initially, but things have turned in a less good direction today. It is too soon to say what may happen but it is important for me to be there. My brother is flying out from San Francisco as well. I will share more when the time seems right. Dad has been remarkably strong and resilient through all this and hope remains. Keep him in your thoughts."
sorry to read that medical report--and thanks, JR, for passing on the information
Sorry to hear this.
An update from TBWolff on Facebook: "Dad is in the ICU, where he was moved yesterday. He is battling a bad case of COVID that he almost certainly caught in the Emergency Room a week ago when he first came in for help. He is stable but the situation is serious given his severely weakened state. I will write more later about what has been happening and why the trajectory of his recovery turned the wrong way and required this hospital visit."
Thank you, John Rapko. Please please post each update here for those of us who do not have Facebook! So very concerned!
I also want to thank John Rapko and express my concern about Professor Wolff's medical condition.
All my best wishes to Professor Wolff, Tobias and Patrick.
"...that he almost certainly caught in the Emergency Room..."
I came across this a couple of days ago:
https://jabberwocking.com/americans-have-given-up-on-the-covid-vaccine/
Given the HHS and CDC nominations I assume this will get worse. Vaccines protect others as well as the recipient.
Best to the Prof. and his family.
An update from TBWolff on Facebook: "The news about Dad today is guardedly positive. It is too soon to say what direction things will ultimately go but he remains stable and his fundamentals are slowly getting stronger. We think he was experiencing a fair amount of delirium today, not unusual given all he is going through, and that combined with the challenges communicating with him right now was stressful and frustrating. But there is every reason to hope that will pass if he can get through this illness and today moved the needle a bit in the right direction, which is not how things looked 36 hours ago."
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