A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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Inflation is all over the news these days (when Elon Musk isn’t) as the headline consumer price index posted a 6.2% year-over-year rate in October—the highest one-year inflation number since November 1990, 31 years ago. So, the common wisdom is that inflation is here, it’s pervasive, it’s going to persist and we’re in trouble.
Inflation lessens the real value of debt. The median American recently had about $65,000 in debt. Inflation has reduced the real value of this debt by almost $4,000 over the past year.
In 2020, American households had around $14.5 trillion in debt from their mortgages, credit cards, student loans, and other sources. Inflation of 6.2 percent means that the real value of that $14.5 trillion is now just $13.65 trillion in last year’s dollars.
In other words, the inflation over the past year has effectively transferred $850 billion in wealth from creditors to debtors. That’s a lot of money.
Most people are a mixture of creditors (e.g., you have a bank account) and debtors (you have a mortgage and student loans). But overall, this $850 billion has generated a big check written by the tippy-top of the income scale to everyone else. And as you’d expect, the people at the tippy-top don’t like this.
There is one rock that can kill two birds at the same time. The Federal Reserve can raise interest rates. This would slow the economy and increase the unemployment rate, lessening worker bargaining power. Less bargaining power would mean lower or nonexistent raises, which would eventually translate into lower inflation.
That’s what all today’s inflation panic is ultimately aimed at: creating an economy with higher unemployment, lower growth, and more frightened workers
More at https://theintercept.com/2021/11/10/inflation-economy-debt-milk-prices/
Dan Price @DanPriceSeattle
Walmart pays so little that its on-boarding process has info on how to sign up for food stamps and Medicaid. How come the workers are "lazy freeloaders" but Walmart is just a "smart business?"
12:23 PM · Nov 10, 2021·Twitter Web App
https://twitter.com/DanPriceSeattle/status/1458500453004500994
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Donald Trump Is Out. Are We Ready to Talk About How He Got In?
“The First White President,” revisited
I’ve been thinking about Barbara Tuchman’s medieval history, A Distant Mirror, over the past couple of weeks. The book is a masterful work of anti-romance, a cold-eyed look at how generations of aristocrats and royalty waged one of the longest wars in recorded history, all while claiming the mantle of a benevolent God. The disabusing begins early. In the introduction, Tuchman examines the ideal of chivalry and finds, beneath the poetry and codes of honor, little more than myth and delusion.
Knights “were supposed, in theory, to serve as defenders of the Faith, upholders of justice, champions of the oppressed,” Tuchman writes. “In practice, they were themselves the oppressors, and by the 14th century, the violence and lawlessness of men of the sword had become a major agency of disorder.”
The chasm between professed ideal and actual practice is not surprising. No one wants to believe themselves to be the villain of history, and when you have enough power, you can hold reality at bay. Raw power transfigured an age of serfdom and warmongering into one of piety and courtly love.
This is not merely a problem of history. Twice now, Rudy Giuliani has incited a mob of authoritarians. In the interim, “America’s Mayor” was lauded locally for crime drops that manifested nationally. No matter. The image of Giuliani as a pioneering crime fighter gave cover to his more lamentable habits—arresting whistleblowers, defaming dead altar boys, and raiding homeless shelters in the dead of night. Giuliani was, by Jimmy Breslin’s lights, “blind, mean, and duplicitous,” a man prone to displays “of great nervousness if more than one black at a time entered City Hall.” And yet much chin-stroking has been dedicated to understanding how Giuliani, once the standard-bearer for moderate Republicanism, a man who was literally knighted, was reduced to inciting a riot at the U.S. Capitol. The answer is that Giuliani wasn’t reduced at all. The inability to see what was right before us—that Giuliani was always, in Breslin’s words, “a small man in search of a balcony”—is less about Giuliani and more about what people would rather not see.
And what is true of Giuliani is particularly true of his master. It was popular, at the time of Donald Trump’s ascension, to stand on the thinnest of reeds in order to avoid stating the obvious. It was said that the Trump presidency was the fruit of “economic anxiety,” of trigger warnings and the push for trans rights. We were told that it was wrong to call Trump a white supremacist, because he had merely “drawn upon their themes.”
One hopes that after four years of brown children in cages; of attempts to invalidate the will of Black voters in Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Detroit; of hearing Trump tell congresswomen of color to go back where they came from; of claims that Joe Biden would turn Minnesota into “a refugee camp”; of his constant invocations of “the Chinese virus,” we can now safely conclude that Trump believes in a world where white people are—or should be—on top. It is still deeply challenging for so many people to accept the reality of what has happened—that a country has been captured by the worst of its history, while millions of Americans cheered this on.
The temptation to look away is strong. This summer I watched as whole barrels of ink were emptied to champion free speech and denounce “cancel culture.” Meanwhile, from the most powerful office in the world, Trump issued executive orders targeting a journalistic institution and promoted “patriotic education.” The indifference to his incredible acts was telling. So much for chivalry.
The mix of blindness and pedantry did not plague merely writers, but also policy makers and executives. “The FBI does not talk in terms of terrorism committed by white people,” the journalist Spencer Ackerman wrote in the days after the January 6 riot at the Capitol. “Attempting to appear politically ecumenical, a recent bureaucratic overhaul during an
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Inflation is all over the news these days (when Elon Musk isn’t) as the headline consumer price index posted a 6.2% year-over-year rate in October—the highest one-year inflation number since November 1990, 31 years ago. So, the common wisdom is that inflation is here, it’s pervasive, it’s going to persist and we’re in trouble.
Inflation lessens the real value of debt. The median American recently had about $65,000 in debt. Inflation has reduced the real value of this debt by almost $4,000 over the past year.
In 2020, American households had around $14.5 trillion in debt from their mortgages, credit cards, student loans, and other sources. Inflation of 6.2 percent means that the real value of that $14.5 trillion is now just $13.65 trillion in last year’s dollars.
In other words, the inflation over the past year has effectively transferred $850 billion in wealth from creditors to debtors. That’s a lot of money.
Most people are a mixture of creditors (e.g., you have a bank account) and debtors (you have a mortgage and student loans). But overall, this $850 billion has generated a big check written by the tippy-top of the income scale to everyone else. And as you’d expect, the people at the tippy-top don’t like this.
There is one rock that can kill two birds at the same time. The Federal Reserve can raise interest rates. This would slow the economy and increase the unemployment rate, lessening worker bargaining power. Less bargaining power would mean lower or nonexistent raises, which would eventually translate into lower inflation.
That’s what all today’s inflation panic is ultimately aimed at: creating an economy with higher unemployment, lower growth, and more frightened workers
More at https://theintercept.com/2021/11/10/inflation-economy-debt-milk-prices/
While somebody who is responsible with money and has zero debt is being fucked at both ends.
Maybe I'll have kid and cross over into Mexico and see if they'll give me a $450,000 check.
Quote:
Dan Price @DanPriceSeattle
Walmart pays so little that its on-boarding process has info on how to sign up for food stamps and Medicaid. How come the workers are "lazy freeloaders" but Walmart is just a "smart business?"
12:23 PM · Nov 10, 2021·Twitter Web App
https://twitter.com/DanPriceSeattle/status/1458500453004500994
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
This is news is hardly new. This goes back to at least 2014 (when I was working at KMart and first heard about it). It probably went on for a long time before that too.
KMart paid even less than WalMart did and KMart couldn't even be bothered to inform their employees of these benefits at all.
After I'd gotten tired going to the grocery store and buying $25 of essentials only to see women with 3 kids in tow and a shopping cart so full it was spilling onto the floor pay with a SNAP card and go out to their Cadillac, I had applied for food assistance and was amazed to see that I qualified for the max benefit for a single person. At that time, it was double my property taxes over a full year.
That's when I started asking around and only one person on the night shift was getting them before I did. After that, I got a lot of people started on the process and had them bring in any paperwork for me to look over while we were on break and I got 6 others on food stamps that didn't even know they were eligible or how to even start the process.
My joke about KMart was "I work at KMart, so I can't afford to shop at KMart."
Getting SNAP didn't change the way I spent my money on food, so the nearly $200 per month was more than I needed and I was able to bank the extra. In Indiana, after 6 months of unemployment (if the unemployment rate gets under 5%, you are under 56 years old, and you don't have any kids), you are cut off of food stamps unless you w
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Quote:Republicans oppose SNAP:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Getting SNAP . . .
Trump has made ending food stamps a Republican cause -- September 18, 2019
When he decided to take aim at food stamps by announcing cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, perhaps it shouldn’t have come as a surprise.
Earlier this summer, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced it would terminate broad based categorical eligibility (BBCE) for SNAP recipients, a move that would cut nutritional assistance for an estimated 3.1 million of the 36 million Americans currently enrolled in the program.
This is not the first time Trump has set his sights on slashing SNAP. His proposed 2018 budget cut almost 25% of the program’s funding over the course of a decade. The measure failed. So, when the Farm Bill came up for reauthorization, as it does every five years, Trump moved to terminate BBCEs and tighten work requirements within the sweeping legislation that encompasses US policy on agriculture, food safety, trade, subsidies, and nutrition programs.
The measures once again failed in Congress and the Farm Bill passed without them. And the president decided once again to circumvent legislators and let the USDA announce his plan without Congressional approval.
Except for the handful of Republicans that joined a group of 70 mayors speaking out on the measure, conservative leadership has remained quiet about any misgivings surrounding the proposal.
Much more at https://qz.com/1707804/trumps-cuts-to-snap-concerns-republicans-too/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Republicans oppose SNAP:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Getting SNAP . . .
Trump has made ending food stamps a Republican cause -- September 18, 2019
When he decided to take aim at food stamps by announcing cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, perhaps it shouldn’t have come as a surprise.
Earlier this summer, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced it would terminate broad based categorical eligibility (BBCE) for SNAP recipients, a move that would cut nutritional assistance for an estimated 3.1 million of the 36 million Americans currently enrolled in the program.
This is not the first time Trump has set his sights on slashing SNAP. His proposed 2018 budget cut almost 25% of the program’s funding over the course of a decade. The measure failed. So, when the Farm Bill came up for reauthorization, as it does every five years, Trump moved to terminate BBCEs and tighten work requirements within the sweeping legislation that encompasses US policy on agriculture, food safety, trade, subsidies, and nutrition programs.
The measures once again failed in Congress and the Farm Bill passed without them. And the president decided once again to circumvent legislators and let the USDA announce his plan without Congressional approval.
Except for the handful of Republicans that joined a group of 70 mayors speaking out on the measure, conservative leadership has remained quiet about any misgivings surrounding the proposal.
Much more at https://qz.com/1707804/trumps-cuts-to-snap-concerns-republicans-too/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
SNAP shouldn't need to be a thing, just like building a physical wall shouldn't need to be a thing.
Both of these are just band-aids on Cancer.
Both of these are also much more closely related than the media would ever acknowledge.
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Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."
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Quote:SNAP exists because America has unmarketable food surpluses and widespread unemployment.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
SNAP shouldn't need to be a thing, just like building a physical wall shouldn't need to be a thing.
Both of these are just band-aids on Cancer.
Both of these are also much more closely related than the media would ever acknowledge.
https://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/short-history-snap
Everywhere I go, except in the United States, I've been asked by men with guns who I am and why I am in the country. Republicans think America needs a wall because Republicans don't think they should be asked who they are and why they are in the country.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:SNAP exists because America has unmarketable food surpluses and widespread unemployment.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
SNAP shouldn't need to be a thing, just like building a physical wall shouldn't need to be a thing.
Both of these are just band-aids on Cancer.
Both of these are also much more closely related than the media would ever acknowledge.
https://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/short-history-snap
SNAP has nothing to do with unemployment. There are people who work all of their lives and receive SNAP that entire time.
Depending on which state you live in, your not going to get SNAP benefits very long at all if you're not working. Indiana being one of them.
Quote:
Everywhere I go, except in the United States,
You don't go anywhere.
Quote:
I've been asked by men with guns who I am and why I am in the country. Republicans think America needs a wall because Republicans don't think they should be asked who they are and why they are in the country.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
If we made it clear that there was nothing for illegal aliens or their children if they come here, that shit would stop overnight. Absolutely no need for a physical wall.
Biden* giving away lotto tickets to criminals isn't helping matters.
--------------------------------------------------
Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."
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The following is an excerpt from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s October 2017 cover story, “The First White President.” You can find the full essay here: https://web.archive.org/web/20211104070621/https://www.theatlantic.com
/magazine/archive/2017/10/the-first-white-president-ta-nehisi-coates/537909/
It is insufficient to state the obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white man who would not be president were it not for this fact. With one immediate exception, Trump’s predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of whiteness—that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them. Land theft and human plunder cleared the grounds for Trump’s forefathers and barred others from it. Once upon the field, these men became soldiers, statesmen, and scholars; held court in Paris; presided at Princeton; advanced into the Wilderness and then into the White House. Their individual triumphs made this exclusive party seem above America’s founding sins, and it was forgotten that the former was in fact bound to the latter, that all their victories had transpired on cleared grounds. No such elegant detachment can be attributed to Donald Trump — a president who, more than any other, has made the awful inheritance explicit.
His political career began in advocacy of birtherism, that modern recasting of the old American precept that black people are not fit to be citizens of the country they built. But long before birtherism, Trump had made his worldview clear. He fought to keep blacks out of his buildings, according to the U.S. government; called for the death penalty for the eventually exonerated Central Park Five; and railed against “lazy” black employees. “Black guys counting my money! I hate it,” Trump was once quoted as saying. “The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.” After his cabal of conspiracy theorists forced Barack Obama to present his birth certificate, Trump demanded the president’s college grades (offering $5 million in exchange for them), insisting that Obama was not intelligent enough to have gone to an Ivy League school, and that his acclaimed memoir, Dreams From My Father, had been ghostwritten by a white man, Bill Ayers.
It is often said that Trump has no real ideology, which is not true — his ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power. Trump inaugurated his campaign by casting himself as the defender of white maidenhood against Mexican “rapists,” only to be later alleged by multiple accusers, and by his own proud words, to be a sexual violator himself. White supremacy has always had a perverse sexual tint. Trump’s rise was shepherded by Steve Bannon, a man who mocks his white male critics as “cucks.” The word, derived from cuckold, is specifically meant to debase by fear and fantasy — the target is so weak that he would submit to the humiliation of having his white wife lie with black men. That the slur cuck casts white men as victims aligns with the dicta of whiteness, which seek to alchemize one’s profligate sins into virtue. So it was with Virginia slaveholders claiming that Britain sought to make slaves of them. So it was with marauding Klansmen organized against alleged rapes and other outrages. So it was with a candidate who called for a foreign power to hack his opponent’s email and who now, as president, is claiming to be the victim of “the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history.”
In Trump, white supremacists see one of their own. Only grudgingly did Trump denounce the Ku Klux Klan and David Duke, one of its former grand wizards — and after the clashes between white supremacists and counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August, Duke in turn praised Trump’s contentious claim that “both sides” were responsible for the violence.
To Trump, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, T
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I couldn't make it through the first paragraph of that racist tripe.
No thanks.
--------------------------------------------------
Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."
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Quote:I have heard actual Ku Klux Klan members say the same, plus that they weren't racists. Then I would laugh. Then they would ask in all seriousness, "What's so funny?" which would make me laugh again. Then I'd say never mind, but I'd be thinking how these guys are too stupid to live long. Those Klan members are dead, before they were 60. They actually were too stupid about themselves and what they truly are to live long lives. Keep smoking, 6ix. Scientists are lying about the health hazards of smoking. Cigarettes will make you live longer, not shorter. And scientists are lying about vaccinations, too. Vaccination for Covid-19 will harm you.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
I couldn't make it through the first paragraph of that racist tripe.
No thanks.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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