Mostly Monday Reads: The Press Bends the Knee

“So I’m guessing reducing everyone’s electric bill by half isn’t gonna happen either..” John Buss, @johnbuss.bsky.social

Good Day, Sky Dancing!

I wanted to start this morning with something very normal, American, and positive. Today, President Biden will designate a National Monument in Maine for the late great Secretary of Labor under FDR Francis Perkins. She was the first woman to serve as a Secretary in a President’s Cabinet. She inspired me since she played a major role in economic and labor policy during the Great Depression.  She was appointed in 1933 and served 12 years. She should be known as the Mother of Social Security.  Her role in implementing and determining policy during the New Deal programs cannot be underestimated. She has touched the lives of all of us even though she left office in 1945.

The Hill has an article up today about her tenure and the memorial today.

During Perkins’s tenure, the Labor Department oversaw Immigration and Naturalization Services, a role she used to aggressively lobby to admit larger numbers of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe.

Perkins was considered a stalwart ally of labor unions during her tenure, which included her counseling Roosevelt against breaking a 1934 waterfront strike that shut down much of the West Coast. She also refused to deport Australian-born longshoremen’s union head Harry Bridges for his membership in the Communist Party, which led the House Un-American Activities Committee to introduce an unsuccessful impeachment resolution against her.

Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, arrives for a special meeting, September 16, 1938 Image: Library of Congress ID hec.25045

She claimed to have been radicalized after she witnessed the notorious Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York in 1911, in which 146 garment workers were burned or leaped to their deaths after they were locked inside for the workday.

The national monument will comprise the nearly 60 acres that were once Perkins’s family’s homestead in Newcastle, which her family has owned for nearly three centuries.

The designation comes after Biden earlier in March signed an executive order calling on the Interior Department to identify sites with significance in women’s history in America.

You may read the Biden announcement at this link to the White House.  I found this journal article written about her by Harris Chaiklin, Ph.D. at VCU Libraries Social Welfare History Project. “Perkins, Frances, Change Agent in: Eras in Social Welfare History, Great Depression, People, Recollections. Frances Perkins: She Boldly Went Where No Woman Had Gone Before.”  A wealthy daughter of a wealthy Boston family, she had the type of education that generally sent a woman to ‘spinsterhood.’ Her upbringing prepared her for her role, shaping some of the most strategic and important policies of the time.  Fannie Perkins persisted. She eventually landed in Greenwich Village, where she became a mediator. Her friends included Sinclair Lewis and Robert Moses.

A transforming event occurred while she was having tea with a wealthy friend who lived in Washington Square. Word came that the Triangle Shirtwaist factory was on fire. They rushed to it. The horror they saw there helped forge in Frances a lifelong commitment to worker’s safety and rights. That she was with a wealthy friend is significant. Though not wealthy she knew this life style and associated with wealthy people. Good friends from this group provided a place for her to live at key points in her career when her earnings were not enough to meet her needs.

After the fire there was increasing activity in campaigning for worker’s rights and safety while the social work job continued. Once a social worker who lived in the settlement house with Frances asked for help in getting a teenage boy out of jail because he was supporting his family. Frances went to the Charity Organization Society which after a long investigation deemed him “unworthy.” A friend suggested she try the Tammany Hall in the client’s district. The problem was helped within 24 hours. Her lobbying activities also put her in contact with other machine politicians. She met and struck up a close relationship with Al Smith. Working together they succeeded in getting a bill passed that limited women to a 54 hour work week. It was a compromise and liberals attacked her for giving up too much to get it passed. She knew that without the compromise there would have been no bill and not even the limited protection this bill offered. The lessons in becoming a skilled politician were piling up. In the past she had looked down on politicians but now concluded, “…that venal politicians can sometimes be more useful than upstanding reformers (Downey, 2009,p. 39).” Understanding and accepting the value of working within the political order was one of the secrets of her success.

Her experiences in these activities taught her another valuable lesson. A politician told her that men trusted women who were motherly and not seductive sirens. Downey says, “She began to see her gender, a liability in many ways, could actually be an asset. To accentuate this opportunity to gain influence she began to dress and comport herself in a way that reminded men of their mothers, rather than doing what women usually like to do which is making themselves more physically attractive to men (Downey, 2009, p. 45). At this time she was 33 years old. Up to then the papers had characterized her as “perky” “pretty” “dimpled.” They now began to label her as “Mother Perkins” a name she disliked only a little less than being called “Ma Perkins.” Such was the price for shaping herself into a highly effective politician. In these activities Frances was aware of her limitations as a woman and avoided places where women did not usually go. She did her lobbying in hallways and not bars. This too became a lifelong skill. When people were brought together to work out differences she stayed in the background. Others often got credit for her greatest accomplishments. Who today identifies her as the moving force behind achieving Social Security?

Well, me.  I know what it took to get that kind of great change written into law and policy. You may read more at the link.

And, unfortunately, we have the antithesis to her and the people she worked with and for today. This is from Mark Jacob’s writing on his blog Stop the Presses. “Here’s what we WON’T do when Trump takes over. We won’t shut up and give up – we’ll stand up and power up.”  This is necessary since we have learned yet another big Media outlet has caved to President-Eject Incontinentia Buttocks.  The brilliant suggestions continue past this bit.

As democracy defenders, we’re facing hard times when authoritarian Donald Trump takes office Jan. 20. But what will we do about it? For now, I’m focusing on what we won’t do:

We won’t shut up.

We won’t retreat from the news.

We won’t lose our ability to be outraged.

We won’t be duped by a fake “crisis” that serves as a pretext to send the military against American citizens and turn our country into a police state.

We won’t sit on our couch and watch protests on TV when we should be out protesting in front of the TV cameras.

We won’t tolerate abuse of women simply because the person who won the last presidential election is a sexual predator.

We won’t get exhausted. Instead, we’ll pace ourselves, find ways to relax and enjoy life, and be ready to go at the crucial moments.

We won’t accept the notion that “all politicians lie.” More politicians lie when the news media and public accept lying and thus make it advantageous to lie.

We won’t forget to be kind.

We won’t expect the New York Times, the Washington Post and the TV networks to wake up and seriously confront the threat of fascism when they didn’t do it before the election.

We won’t forget that Trump won by just 1.5 percentage points — not a mandate, and certainly not a statement that most Americans want to surrender their rights to him.

The little tomboy girl I was who wanted to do everything boys do and do it better is still in me.  Not backing down.  Nope.  Not gonna do it. Wouldn’t be prudent at this juncture.  This is from Lisa Needham at Public Notice. ABC was never a station we watched much as my Dad was a big fan of Huntley-Brinkley. Also, George Stephanopoulos has never been on my list to receive any news or advice.  This disappoints me but doesn’t surprise me at all. “ABC bends the knee. Corporate media is surrendering already.”  That’s exactly what a stumbling despot wants on his way to power. He wants control of the media.  Wouldn’t want the truth sneaking out while you’ve got that propaganda thing going.

Since the election, plenty of the richest among us have rushed to curry favor with Donald Trump by showering him with cash.

Meta’s Mark Zuckerburg is giving Trump $1 million for his inauguration, as is OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Amazon, which will also stream the ceremony on Prime. But perhaps even more galling is ABC’s move to settle an absurd defamation lawsuit brought by Trump over George Stephanopoulos’s completely defensible on-air statement that Trump had been found liable for rape.

ABC will donate $15 million to Trump’s presidential library — a thing that has not yet been built and currently exists only as a website maintained by the National Archives. The network also agreed to pay $1 million toward Trump’s lawyer fees, continuing Trump’s streak of never paying for his own legal bills. And ABC and Stephanopoulos pledged to make a statement saying they “regret” the remarks.

It’s a bad omen for mainstream media coverage of Trump 2.0 and speaks to the importance of independent outlets that won’t be so easily intimidated.

Trump’s lawsuit rested on the incredibly flimsy argument that it defamed him to say he was found liable for the rape of E. Jean Carroll when he was actually found liable for forced digital penetration. But Stephanopoulos’s comments were consistent with how the presiding judge described the case.

So, since I seem to be going all economist on you these days, let me just say that I love Paul Krugman’s substack.  I’m glad he left the New York Times, even though he really didn’t state a reason other than it was time.  Here’s today’s offering at Krugman Wonks Out. “Crypto is for Criming. It’s not digital gold — it’s digital Benjamins.” You can write me down as a crypto hater.  I will never know how this Ponzi scheme took root, but then I can’t explain the appeal of President-Eject Incontinentia Buttocks to me either. I have decided that some folks just want to be lied to if it feeds their raging ID and be told lies and sold a bill of goods just to think they may have something going for themselves and take a breather from their anger and resentment.

‘The tech bros who helped put Trump back in power expect many favors in return; one of the more interesting is their demand that the government intervene to guarantee crypto players the right to a checking account, stopping the “debanking” they claim has hit many of their friends.

The hypocrisy here is thick enough to cut with a knife. If you go back to the 2008 white paper by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto that gave rise to Bitcoin, its main argument was that we needed to replace checking accounts with blockchain-based payments because you can’t trust banks; crypto promoters also tend to preach libertarianism, touting crypto as a way to escape government tyranny. Now we have crypto boosters demanding that the evil government force the evil banks to let them have conventional checking accounts.

What’s going on here? Elon Musk, Marc Andreesen and others claim that there’s a deep state conspiracy to undermine crypto, because of course they do. But the real reason banks don’t want to be financially connected to crypto is that they believe, with good reason, that to the extent that cryptocurrencies are used for anything besides speculation, much of that activity is criminal — and they don’t want to be accused of acting as accessories.

You may take the Good Doctor’s Monetary Theory lecture at the link.  I can’t believe Milton Friedman would have anything positive to say about this development at all.  He wrote the book on money and was awarded a Nobel Prize in Economics. And I also am having a huge hissy over the potential targeting of the FDIC.  I worked in banking. I’ve worked for the Fed.  This is my bailiwick.  My daughter, the finance guru, didn’t fall for crypto, so I must have done something right. Don’t fall for this, either! This is from Reuters. “Trump’s floated idea to shutter FDIC would be political heavy lift, say analysts.”  Fannie Perkins would really be in the fray on this one. How could they forget the Great Recession?  It started with financial overreach in the banking industry too.  CEOs and their marketing execs are more interested in becoming bigger than running an effective business.

U.S. bank stocks were unfazed on Friday after a report that President-elect Donald Trump’s team had floated the idea of shrinking or eliminating a top banking regulator, with analysts saying such a plan would not win the necessary political backing.

In recent interviews with bank regulator candidates, Trump advisers have asked whether the incoming president could abolish the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp (FDIC) and move its deposit insurance function into the Treasury Department, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter.

Officials from the newly founded Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which has been tasked with finding major government savings, participated in the interviews, the WSJ said.
However, while the current system comprising three federal and multiple state bank regulators is complex, a major restructure would struggle to garner the political support needed to get through Congress, which is also expected to be tied up on tax reform and crypto legislation next year, analysts and academics said.

“It would require congressional action and despite the Republican party majority in both the Senate and the House, it would require support from the Democrats which remains very unlikely,” ING sector strategist Marine Leleux wrote in a note.

Bank stocks were little changed on Friday.

The Trump transition team has been interviewing candidates for financial agency roles, including the bank regulators, in recent days, said two people with direct knowledge of the matter. DOGE officials have been involved in some of those interviews, one said

I cannot see Senator Elizabeth Warren being quiet about any of this.  However, the ink of the press is focused on the man with the most responsibility for this mess.  Senator Mitch McConnell is objecting a lot now that he’s an ineffective backbencher.  Look, he doesn’t like Polio! He wants the vaccine still!   Look, he’s got something to say about how wonderful the Bush years were because we tried and failed to bomb “American Exceptionalism” into the Middle East, but it’s good policy!.  But just because we know better doesn’t mean Legacy Media does.   This is from MSNBC and Steve Benen, which means I assume Rachel saw this, too. “Why Mitch McConnell’s latest clashes with Trump matter. Despite his recent partisan history, Mitch McConnell has thrown a lot of brushback pitches in Donald Trump’s direction lately.”  WTAF?

It was hard not to wonder how Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a polio survivor, would respond to the news. As it turned out, we didn’t have to wait too long to find out.

In a statement to NBC News, the Kentucky Republican — who’ll soon step down from his GOP leadership post — didn’t mention Kennedy by name, but the longtime senator said anyone seeking a confirmation vote must be specific about their intentions related to the polio vaccine.

“Anyone seeking the Senate’s consent to serve in the incoming Administration would do well to steer clear of even the appearance of association with such efforts,” McConnell wrote. He added that “efforts to undermine public confidence in proven cures are not just uninformed — they’re dangerous.”

It was a notable brushback pitch from a key GOP official, but it was also part of a recent pattern: McConnell has thrown a lot of these pitches at Trump and his team lately.

• In an interview with the Financial Times, published last week, McConnell warned about the dangers of isolationism, which he seemed to tie directly to his party’s incoming president. “We’re in a very, very dangerous world right now, reminiscent of before World War II,” the senator said, adding, “Even the slogan is the same. ‘America First’ — that was what they said in the ’30s.”
• McConnell has a newly published essay in Foreign Affairs magazine, warning against the “right-wing flirtation with isolation and decline.” Referencing a signature phrase from Trump, the Kentucky Republican added, “America will not be made great again by those who simply want to manage its decline.”
• The senator’s written piece echoed a speech he delivered earlier this month, rejecting his party’s isolationist wing.
• In Congress last month, Matt Gaetz’s bid to become the next attorney general collapsed in the face of opposition from GOP senators. While there was no official tally on the scope of the Republican opposition to the former Florida congressman, The New York Times reported that McConnell was among those staunchly opposed to his prospective nomination.

When political observers take stock on Capitol Hill, looking for Republicans who might be a thorn in the president-elect’s side, they tend to focus on members such as Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski and Maine’s Susan Collins. But what if McConnell — who’s expected to retire at the end of his term, and who doesn’t appear to have anything to lose by standing up to Trump — unexpectedly joins the faction of Trump skeptics?

To be sure, it’d be a mistake to get one’s hopes up.

These folks are the heirs of Edward R. Murrow?  Seriously?   Let me just leave you with a quote from the guy that covered the NAZIs running rampant over Europe and didn’t mince words.  Extra points if you know this was his sign-off!

Good Night and Good Luck!

“Surely we shall pay for using this most powerful instrument of communications to insulate the citizenry from the hard and demanding realities that must be faced if we are to survive”

Edward R. Murrow

So here I am at the keyboard, your nerdy friend. We don’t have the same number of folks reading us that we used to back in the day when we were one of the top 25 Political Blogs.  But we’re here, and we’re still fearless. It is actually nice to see the country’s public intellectuals doing the Old School Blog thing these days on Substack. Throw them some bling if you can!  I started out on Fire Dog Lake way back in the day. I know BB was at The Daily Kos until the anti-Hillary stuff flared.  We’re here because we don’t like one-sided stories. We like to find the facts.

We’ve had terrible technical trouble with WordPress since they seem to have turned something that can’t figure out how to let people comment.  Half the time, I can’t even comment on my posts here.  I have to dive behind the front page to the dashboard. But, you know what … there’s a lot of stuff here from many people, and it’s still in the files. It’s been very close to 20 years now, too.  I’m unsure how to get it to any place safer now.  So, we’re here. We won’t shut up.  We’re a Refuge.

I have one more thing to share with you.  It’s important.  Please read it.  This is the Methodist church I want to remember. It’s also a story I’m familiar with.  Our neighbors from south of our border were here helping us clean up after Katrina when everyone else wasn’t.  I still want a taco truck on every corner, and we’re a lot closer to that down here in New Orleans than we used to be.  It just occurred to me that I likely wrote a lesson plan for my high school students when I was in my 20s, and my heart was an open book. I actually taught civics then.  Can you believe it?   This story is important.

In a world full of Kari Lakes, be a Francis Perkins. In a world full of George Stephanopoulos, be an Edward Murrow.

My church kept ICE from deporting our neighbor Jose. The Bible told us so.President-elect Donald Trump has plans to end a policy that generally restricts ICE from arresting undocumented people at or near so-called sensitive locations. http://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnb…

— Democracy Skies in Blueness – Resist (@democracyblue.bsky.social) 2024-12-15T14:10:26.674Z

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