Month: December 2017

DACA runs into a wall again

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Democratic and Republican congressional leaders will meet on Wednesday with top White House officials as they attempt to hammer out a deal to avert a government shutdown and resolve an impasse on immigration. POLITICO reports, Bipartisan DACA, spending talks set to commence with White House:

The meeting, confirmed by two sources familiar with the planning, was initially expected to include President Donald Trump’s chief of staff, John Kelly, but a White House spokesman said legislative affairs director Marc Short and budget director Mick Mulvaney would represent the president. The meeting comes as President Donald Trump attempts to squeeze Democrats to force action on one of his most iconic, divisive policy proposals: a wall on the southern U.S. border.

Trump has signaled in recent days that he would support a measure to protect undocumented immigrants who arrived in the country as minors in exchange for wall funding and other stiff border security measures that Democrats have ardently opposed.

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House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer brushed off the president’s tweet.

Democrats have repeatedly said they won’t sign on to a government funding bill without striking a deal to protect Dreamers.

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Political Calendar: Week of December 31, 2017

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Progressive_values

Political Calendar for the Week of December 31, 2017:

2018

Monday, January 1: New Year’s Day. Happy New Year!

Monday, January 1, Noon: Democrats of Greater Tucson luncheon, Dragon’s View Restaurant (400 N. Bonita, South of St. Mary’s Road between the Freeway and Grande Avenue, turn South at Furr’s Cafeteria). New price: buffet lunch is $10.00 cash, $12 credit; just a drink is $3.50. No DGT in observance of New Year’s Day. Next Week: No DGT – participating in the January 8 Memorial dedication and bell ringing.

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2018: The Reckoning – Resistance and Renewal

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2017 will be remembered as the year of  “This is not normal.”

A minority of Americans, thanks to the antiquated relic of an electoral college system that remains in our Constitution as a vestige of slavery more than 150 years after the end of the Civil War, elected an insecure man-child conspiracy theorist, reality TV actor,  Twitter troll, grifter and con man president of the United States. A man who suffers from narcissistic personality disorder and delusions of grandeur, and who is a pathological liar. The 47 most outrageous lines in Donald Trump’s New York Times interview;
In a 30-minute interview, President Trump made 24 false or misleading claims. More ominously, he exhibits dangerous authoritarian tendencies. Donald Trump is a demagogue who aspires to be an autocratic strongman like the man he most admires, Vladimir Putin of Russia.

Trump has actively sought to undermine our democratic institutions, political norms and values that have defined America for more than 240 years and to replace them overnight — to “disrupt the status quo” as he calls it — with the crypto-fascism of “Trumpism,” an authoritarian cult of personality.

Trump has been enabled in his undermining of our democratic institutions, political norms and values by a supplicant Tea-Publican Congress which also exhibits authoritarian tendencies in its exercise of one-party rule, and by a fawning propagandist conservative media entertainment complex, and too often, by a cowered mainstream media.

Trump is enabled by a small but significant base of adoring sycophant supporters in his authoritarian cult of personality. For them, he can do no wrong. Their loyalty is to Trump alone, not to the country, not to democratic governance, not to the Constitution. Trump is what metastasized from an existing cancer in the American body politic.

“This is not normal.”

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Rep. Pamela Powers Hannley

Economic Inequality, Access to Care & Workforce Development: A Progressive Roadmap (video)

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Rep. Pamela Powers Hannley
Rep. Pamela Powers Hannley

Economist Dean Baker, of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, recently gave a talk which focused on solving economic inequality. He pointed to five key areas of the economy that keep the rich rich and keep the rest of us in our places:

  • Macroeconomics;
  • Intellectual property rights;
  • Practice protection by highly paid professionals;
  • Financial regulation; and
  • Cooperate governance.

Given this list, can a state legislator like me make a dent in economic inequality? I think so.

I ran on a platform that focused on economic reform and public banking; equality and paycheck fairness; and attacking the opioid crisis.

How does my platform dovetail with Dean Baker’s list? There is quite a bit of overlap—particularly in macroeconomics, intellectual property rights, and practice protection.

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