Frustrated that Kamala Harris hasn't yet submitted to media interrogations, the Reich media (like the WSJ, Newsmax, FOX) has been barking nonstop about its own takes on her positions. All wrong. For example, the irrepressible WSJ stooge Holman Jenkins Jr. in a weekend piece (Aug. 10-11), yapping about Harris "adopting Trump's plan to stop taxing tips." As I corrected the clown in my Aug. 16 post she didn't copy it she created her own REAL version to benefit working people, e.g. waitresses, busboys, casino assistants etc.
Trump's version, as Robert Reich pointed out last Monday ('Last Word') would in reality benefit Hedge Fund operators, investment bankers and private equity honchos who'd use his mutation to justify "tips" for their assorted machinations, selloffs, buyouts, what not.
Then there was the WSJ editorial appearing Aug. 17-18 (p. A12);
Kamala Harris Endorses Nixonomics - WSJ
'She Wants Price Controls on Groceries, Venezuelan-Style'
Trying to portray Harris's vow to combat price gouging (made in her NC appearance last Friday) as being "price fixing". No, it wasn't!. She is committed to stop all the price gouging that one beholds in the super market aisles, not "fixing" prices by mandate.
Price controls, on the other hand, is something I saw in Barbados in the early 1970s, when the Errol Barrow administration imposed a list of set prices on grocers, supermarkets. The array of targeted goods included: eggs, chicken, plantains, cucumbers, bananas, bread and cereals. For example, eggs had to be reduced from any arbitrary grocer pricing (usually above $5 Bds - or $2.50 U.S.) to a flat $2 a dozen. Chicken had to be reduced from prices usually in the realm of $4.50 /lb. to $1.50/lb. Bread had to come down from $4 a loaf on average to $2. Needless to say the grocers and supermarkets were not happy and many workers were laid off.
But this is not what Kamala was proposing. But maybe the anti-Kamala WSJ spin gurus forgot that in 2023 PepsiCo had become a prime example of how large corporations cynically used the pandemic-supply template to increase costs, and then some. Hugh Johnston, the company’s chief financial officer, actually went on record in February, '23 saying that PepsiCo had raised its prices by enough to buffer further cost pressures in 2023. At the end of April, the company reported that it had raised the average price across its snacks (e.g. Doritos) and beverages (Gatorade) by 16 percent in the first three months of the year.
According to Albert
Edwards, a global strategist at Société Générale, referring to profit margins,
quoted in a WSJ piece in April, 2023 (check it out, WSJ editors):
“Companies are not just
maintaining margins, not just passing on cost increases, they have used it as a
cover to expand margins."
So Kamala definitely has an unimpeachable policy position to run on, as well as others, including expanding the child tax credit - which of course the reactionary Right will spin as "socialism". But let's bear in mind these yahoos back in the 1930s were yelping that Social Security was socialism and in the 1960s that Medicare was one jump from communism. The point? The Rightists will always bleat and whine about any policy position Harris gives that benefits working or middle-class families, like increasing the child tax credit to $6,000. (It will revert to $1,000/yr. by 2026 - likely under a Trumper administration.)
All of which means she needs to take care and only parcel them out a bit at a time. As Michelle Obama noted in her terrific speech at the DNC last night, "they (right media) will find a way to lie about Kamala". And indeed they have! In the same editorial spieling nonsense that "the Biden-Harris inflation has made homes unaffordable for most young families". Failing to note it was supply side issues in labor and construction materials - during the pandemic which began under Trump - that ushered in the inflation later.
The WSJ editors then have the gall to ding Harris' proposal to provide $25,000 for first time home-buyers, calling it "a brainstorm of more subsidies." Of course, because these nattering nabobs would prefer the money go to another round of trillion dollar tax cuts for billionaires and corporations - in case enough dummies put the orange fungus back in office.
All of which suggests to me Kamala needs to take care and only parcel her plans and proposals out a bit at a time. Because whatever she offers, the reactionary yappers will either misrepresent them, or put them under the "socialist" rubric.
Still, I am confident, that as the next few weeks pass, more voters will become aware of the rank malarkey the Wall Street Journal and its TV cousins at FOX News are trying to peddle, i.e. that Kamala Harris plans to go the "Venezuela" route in advancing socialism merely because she wants to help more working class Americans survive in the supermarket aisles, as well as in the restaurants, as service staff.
What we need is for voters this year to be more alert as well as more intelligent and critically thinking. So they know immediately when they see images or videos of women with 'Swifties for Trump' T-shirts, it is all AI -generated horse shit, e.g.
Because no real American woman of any integrity or sense - especially a Taylor Swift fan - would so debase herself as to be willingly associated with the serial rapist, and female genital grabber Trump.
Well, with one sad exception. A kook named Jenna Piwowarczyk caught wearing a "Swifties for Trump" t-shirt at a Trump rally in Racine, Wisconsin, on June 18, and posted to X by Wisconsin Right Now.
But fortunately, such females with brains in their behinds remain in the minority. Meantime, we sorely need Taylor Swift to come out by the last night of the DNC and endorse Kamala Harris, to show she's on the side of the angels. As well as dispelling the AI-fabulism that any such entity as Swifties for Trump' exists in any serious capacity.
See Also:
by Maya Boddie | August 21, 2024 - 6:19am | permalink
Since President Joe Biden dropped his reelection bid last month, Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign has raised $500 million, according to CNBC News.
CNBC reports, Harris' "political operation raised $310 million in July alone, with more than $200 million of that sum coming in after Biden’s withdrawal."
Furthermore, the campaign expects to see the cash haul reach $600 million by the end of this month.
Additionally, Punchbowl News' Jake Sherman reported via X that of the $105 million the House Democrats super PAC "House Majority PAC" raised in July, billionaire Mike Bloomberg donated $10 million, and Fox News' Rupert Murdoch's daughter-in-law Kathryn Murdoch contributed $750,000.
And:
by Amanda Marcotte | August 21, 2024 - 6:04am | permalink
I'm old enough to remember when the sexist stereotype of feminists was that they're "humorless" and "shrill." So it never fails to make me smile to hear Donald Trump, in ever-shriller tones, rant and rave about how much he hates Vice President Kamala Harris' laugh. Her guffaws haunt him. We cannot doubt he's kept up late at night, dwelling on his fear that a woman might be enjoying herself. At a rally in Asheville, North Carolina last week, Trump could not stop babbling furiously about Harris's laugh.
"That’s a laugh of a person with some big problems," Trump said, projecting his deep psychological issues onto his opponents, as usual. He insisted it's "the laugh of a crazy person."
The Harris campaign was unfazed, following the speech with an email that read, "Donald Trump delivered what was supposed to be a speech focused on his economic plan but ended up resembling more of one unhinged man’s public airing of grievances."
And:
by Heather Digby Parton | August 20, 2024 - 6:15am | permalink
All the attention is going to be on the Democratic Convention in Chicago this week but it's pretty clear that for the next few weeks, the center of gravity in American politics is going to be in Pennsylvania. All the strategists and political pundits tell us that both the Harris and the Trump campaigns see it as a must-win and according to the latest polls, it's a tight race there. Already both candidates and their running mates have held events in the Keystone State, with no doubt many more to come.
I recently spent some time in southern Pennsylvania, as I often do, visiting friends in the late summer and was struck by the fact that unlike 2016 and 2020 there were far fewer Trump signs out in the rural areas. For years they had kept their tattered big blue Trump flags flying even long after the elections but this year they seem to be few and far between. Sure there were some yards covered with signs and trucks festooned with bumper stickers but it's much rarer than it's been in the past. What that means, I can't say definitively but something has changed and it's fair to guess it has something to do with enthusiasm. It feels as though some of the air has gone out of the Trump balloon. ( I'm not the only one who sees that.)
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