Trump Goes 100% Dixiecrat: Dems Should Nominate LeBron James in 2020

Trump's political formula is to maintain a hard-shell lily-white, white-supremacist base at all costs. Attacking NFL and NBA stars will simultaneously solidify that base while expanding his opponents core of support.

Ken Belson and Julie Hirschfeld Davis report in "Trump Attacks Warriors’ Curry. LeBron James’s Retort: ‘U Bum’" that

President Trump took aim at two of the world’s most powerful sports leagues and some of their most popular athletes, directly inserting himself into an already fiery debate over race, social justice and athlete activism and stoking a running battle on social media over his comments.

In a speech on Friday and a series of tweets on Saturday, he urged N.F.L. owners to fire players who do not stand for the national anthem, suggested that football is declining because it is not as violent as it once was and seemed to disinvite the N.B.A. champion Golden State Warriors from the traditional White House visit because of their star player Stephen Curry’s public opposition to him.

Speaking in Huntsville, Ala., on Friday, the president used an expletive to describe players who kneel or sit during the anthem to protest police brutality against black Americans and other forms of social injustice.

“Wouldn’t you love to see one of these N.F.L. owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now, out, he’s fired,’ ” the president said at a rally for Senator Luther Strange, who was appointed to the Senate this year and is facing Roy Moore in a Republican primary runoff.

While many fans on social media were supportive of the president, the reaction from many athletes was immediate and impassioned, particularly among African-American football and basketball players who have criticized Mr. Trump on race. Many, including LeBron James, among the best-known athletes in the country, denounced the president.

“U bum @StephenCurry30 already said he ain’t going! So therefore ain’t no invite. Going to White House was a great honor until you showed up!” Mr. James wrote on Twitter.

Mr. James later elaborated in a video on Instagram.

Once again, the only reason a Dixiecrat resides in the White House 70 years after Strom Thurmond won four Dixie states in the 1948 presidential race is the Democrats' continued commitment to a zombie neoliberalism. If the party were to run LeBron James on a progressive platform in 2020, the Dixiecrats would be buried in a landslide.

Black Bloc Brings Down the Confederate Monuments

In this morning's story, "Trump Comments on Race Open Breach With C.E.O.s, Military and G.O.P.," by Michael Shear, Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman, there is evidence that Trump has reached his "At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" moment:

The president’s top advisers described themselves as stunned, despondent and numb. Several said they were unable to see how Mr. Trump’s presidency would recover, and others expressed doubts about his capacity to do the job.

In contrast, the president told close aides that he felt liberated by his news conference. Aides said he seemed to bask afterward in his remarks, and viewed them as the latest retort to the political establishment that he sees as trying to tame his impulses.

Mr. Trump’s venting on Tuesday came despite pleas from his staff, including his daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner. Instead of taking their advice to stop talking about the protest, the president eagerly unburdened himself of what he viewed as political correctness in favor of a take-no-prisoners attack on the “alt-left.”

On Wednesday, even Fox News, a favorite of the president’s, repeatedly carried criticism of Mr. Trump. One Fox host, Shepard Smith, said that he had been unable to find a single Republican to come on-air to defend Mr. Trump’s remarks.

Whether Trump continues to hemorrhage depends on the next couple of days. The dissolution of two industry advisory panels by the White House yesterday, followed by news that Trump is fleeing to the bunker of Camp David, show an administration that is ducking and covering.

We can only hope the spotlight tarries on white supremacy for as long as possible. Charles Blow's column this morning, "The Other Inconvenient Truth," on the op-ed page of The New York Times is that that could appear in CounterPunch:

In 1994 John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s domestic-policy adviser and a Watergate co-conspirator, confessed this to the author Dan Baum:

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or blacks, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

The era Ehrlichman referred to was the beginning of the War on Drugs. Nixon started his offensive in 1971, declaring in a speech from the White House Briefing Room: “America’s public enemy No. 1 in the United States is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new, all-out offensive.”

The object of disrupting communities worked all too well — more than 40 million arrests have been conducted for drug-related offenses since 1971, with African-Americans being incarcerated in state prisons for these offenses at a rate that is 10 times greater than that for whites, according to Human Rights Watch.

In 1970, Nixon’s political strategist Kevin Phillips told The New York Times, “The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans.”

The Republican Party wanted the racists. It was strategy, the “Southern Strategy,” and it too has proved wildly successful. From there this cancer took hold.

The party itself has dispensed with public confessions of this inclination — at least until Trump — but the white supremacy still survives and even thrives in policy. The stated goals of the Republican Party are not completely dissimilar from many of the white nationalist positions.

This is all true and an excellent thumbnail sketch of the constant rightward drift of national politics since Kevin Phillips penned The Emerging Republican Majority in 1969. But what Blow leaves out is how this superannuated strategy could still deliver the White House 50 years on. The answer is that the Democratic Party is guided by neoliberalism and militarism. The working class has nothing to support.

Enter Antifa. One could see this coming. With normal channels of political action ossified, anarchism has come back in a big way. It is the willingness of the Black Bloc to engage white supremacists that has prompted the rush to bring down the Confederate monuments. Public officials don't want to preside over the next Charlottesville.

Trump's Big Blunder

Trump made a significant blunder yesterday during his Trump Tower press conference. If you look at the video of the event, Trump is running scared. He declared an equivalence of violence between the white supremacists and the people who came out to protest their presence at Charlottesville.

The blunder is significant because it forces the "fake media" to become less fake. A pillar of the prestige press is to categorically deny any legitimacy, potency, urgency, effectiveness to popular leftist movements, all while inflating rightist power and popularity. To go along with this is the twin pillar of inflating any leftist property damage or scuffles with police during protests (see the Seattle WTO, Occupy Wall Street, etc.) as threats to the foundation of the state.

With Trump's assertion of equivalence between left and right at Charlottesville, the press has begun to debunk one of the great shibboleths of mainstream political discourse. For example, there is Linda Qiu's "Trump Asks, ‘What About the Alt-Left?’ Here’s an Answer":

[T]here is one stark difference between the violence on the two sides: The police said that James Alex Fields Jr. of Ohio drove his car into a crowd and killed at least one person, Heather Heyer. Mr. Fields was charged with second-degree murder.

Comparing Antifa to Mr. Fields’s act is like “comparing a propeller plane to a C-130 transport,” said Brian Levin, the director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino.

“Using the fact that some counterprotesters were, in fact, violent, creates a structural and moral false equivalency that is seriously undermining the legitimacy of this president,” Professor Levin said.

Antifa and black block — the far left of today — engaging in street brawls and property damage, while reprehensible, is “not domestic terrorism,” said J. J. MacNab, a fellow in the Program on Extremism at George Washington University. Similar episodes of extreme violence certainly exist on the left: the recent congressional baseball shooting in Virginia, or the bombing of the North Carolina Republican Party headquarters. 

But overall, far-right extremist plots have been far more deadly than far-left plots (and Islamist plots eclipsed both) in the past 25 years, according to a breakdown of two terrorism databases by Alex Nowrasteh, an analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute.

White nationalists; militia movements; anti-Muslim attackers; I.R.S. building and abortion clinic bombers; and other right-wing groups were responsible for 12 times as many fatalities and 36 times as many injuries as communists; socialists; animal rights and environmental activists; anti-white- and Black Lives Matter-inspired attackers; and other left-wing groups.

Of the nearly 1,500 individuals in a University of Maryland study of radicalization from 1948 to 2013, 43 percent espoused far-right ideologies, compared to 21 percent for the far left. Far-right individuals were more likely to commit violence against people, while those on the far left were more likely to commit property damage.

True, it is just one story. But I can't recall having seen anything like it in the pages of The New York Times. It is a good sign, and a bad one for Trump.

Trump's Hurricane Katrina

How many times can white resentment be resuscitated as a political force? Still potent in terms of controlling Congress, I thought it was dead as a factor determining a national election. I was wrong. The rural crackers came out in droves, to paraphrase Bibi Netanyahu speaking of Arab voters in the 2015 Israeli legislative elections, and cast ballots for Trump.

But this isn't a renascent power returning to occupy the center. This recrudescence of white nationalism is just as much about the failure of the Democrats to inspire mass voter participation. We are left with two major parties that have no broad popular appeal. Trump's political genius -- or is it Bannon's? -- was to recognize that in such a political environment any ideology that can galvanize a segment of the electorate is enough to beat the Democratic Party when it is led by Wall Street.

The downside to this strategy is that it is only a matter of time before sunshine appears and people react with revulsion. Charlottesville appears to be that moment. It's Trump's Hurricane Katrina. Voters don't want Gerald L.K. Smith as president.

Statues of Confederate heroes are coming down. Bannon is being made to walk the plank. This from today's Situation Report:

Bannon in Limbo. NYT: “Rupert Murdoch has repeatedly urged President Trump to fire him. Anthony Scaramucci, the president's former communications director, thrashed him on television as a white nationalist. Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, the national security adviser, refused to even say he could work with him.

"For months, Mr. Trump has considered ousting Stephen K. Bannon, the White House chief strategist and relentless nationalist who ran the Breitbart website and called it a 'platform for the alt-right.' Mr. Trump has sent Mr. Bannon to a kind of internal exile, and has not met face-to-face for more than a week with a man who was once a fixture in the Oval Office, according to aides and friends of the president.”

If Bannon goes Trump is left without his mix master; he'll be the star of The Apprentice sitting in the Oval Office with very little hope, other than that provided by the incompetence of the Democrats, that he can remain there after 2020.

Back to Where We Started: Boehner Will Have to Go Against His Caucus

The confidence that caused an increase in the Dow on Friday quickly disappeared over the weekend when a Paul Ryan brokered deal to end the government shutdown/debt ceiling standoff fell through.

Republicans are loudly blaming Democrats. Strange stuff since Republicans are the ones that initiated the shutdown and are the ones threatening default.

Apparently the fault lies with the Democrats because they're unwilling to throw the Republicans a bone; in other words, the government shutdown is going to continue and the the world financial system is going to have to get work on building a new foundation because Democrats will not reward Republican blackmail.

As Krugman says in his column this morning, "The Dixiecrat Solution":

[O]ur current state of dysfunction looks like a chronic condition, not a one-time event. Even if the debt ceiling is raised enough to avoid immediate default, even if the government shutdown is somehow brought to an end, it will only be a temporary reprieve. Conservative activists are simply not willing to give up on the idea of ruling through extortion, and the Obama administration has decided, wisely, that it will not give in to extortion.

U.S. Treasury bills can longer be viewed as a completely safe. Republicans want a bone tossed to them so they can maintain extortion as a weapon to enhance their minority status. A potentially catastrophic default on U.S. sovereign debt, one would imagine, renders this weapon inoperable for future use. This is why Democrats are correctly refusing to offer any concessions. Concessions mean we go through this all over again the next time we butt up against the debt ceiling or the government needs to be funded.

The deal being worked on in the Senate is under the care of Susan Collins, Republican of Maine. Jonathan Weisman describes the Collins plan this morning in his story, "Spending Dispute Leaves a Senate Deal Elusive":

The Collins plan would maintain sequestration-level spending through Jan. 15, when formal budget negotiators would be required to complete a House-Senate agreement on spending and taxation over the next decade. That date was already a concession. Ms. Collins, along with Senators Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, both Republicans, initially wanted to finance the government for six months at those levels. The initial proposal by Ms. Collins would also have extended the debt ceiling only to Nov. 15, but at the request of Senate Democratic leaders, she and Mr. McConnell pushed it back to Jan. 31.

Having embraced this proposal, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell is presumably using it as the basis for talks with Senate majority Harry Reid. As of now Democrats want the reduced spending of the sequester to last only through mid-November, not into the new year as Collins proposes.

It's hard to see how the Tea Party controlled House passes the Collins plan. So we're back to where we were at the beginning. Speaker of the House Boehner is going to have to go against the majority of his caucus and release whatever emerges from the Senate for an up-or-down floor vote. This is Krugman's conclusion, and it basically repeats the dynamic from the fiscal cliff negotiations last New Year's Eve.

Senate Democrats need to stand firm. They are who will determine if the neo-Dixiecrat rump will continue to dominate the federal government.

The GOP, a Neo-Dixiecrat Party

Proof of the neo-Dixiecrat nature of the GOP is found in the latest NBC-Wall Street Journal poll. This from a decent story by John Harwood in today's paper, "Deep Philosophical Divide Underlies the Impasse":

The survey showed 50 percent of Americans approve of Mr. Obama’s job performance. Only 29 percent expressed a positive view of the Republican Party. 

Among demographic groups, the only one viewing Mr. Boehner’s party more positively than negatively was white Southerners (by just 39 percent to 35 percent at that). More than twice as many Americans credited Mr. Obama, as compared with Republicans, with emphasizing themes of bipartisan unity.

Democrats Need to Return to the "50-State Strategy"

Eventually Democrats will have to come to the realization that they need to remain constantly mobilized on a national campaign footing; Howard Dean's fifty-state strategy but with resources if not at par at least in the ballpark of a presidential campaign. What are the chances that this will happen? Slim. Obama gets it; in January it was announced that Obama for American would turn into Organizing for Action, a 501(c)(4) issue-advocacy non-profit able to raise unlimited amounts of money. But chances are that it will be another Change To Win -- a reshuffling of chairs on the Titanic.

A reading of today's paper is all one needs to understand why a full-tilt Democratic mobilization is required. First, from Ashley Parker's frontpage story on Boehner's refusal to bargain on the sequester, "Boehner Halts Talks on Cuts, and House G.O.P. Cheers":

“We asked him to commit to us that when the cuts actually came on March 1, that he would stand firm and not give in, and he’s holding to that,” said Representative Steve Scalise, Republican of Louisiana and chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee. “I think Friday will be an important day that shows we’re finally willing to stand and fight for conservative principles and force Washington to start living within its means. And that will be a big victory.” 

Representative Mick Mulvaney, a South Carolina Republican who was elected on the 2010Tea Party wave and has had his differences with the speaker, was similarly complimentary toward Mr. Boehner. 

“He’s doing exactly what he said he was going to do, and I think it’s working to our favor and to his,” Mr. Mulvaney said. “I get the feeling that our party is probably more unified right now than it has been at any time in the last several months.” 

Mr. Boehner, in some ways, finds himself the leader of the House Republicans with nowhere to actually lead. 

Among those who placed him in his post and could conceivably remove him, the test of his leadership seems to be how little action he takes. In a closed-door meeting and subsequent news conference this week, Mr. Boehner said the House was done negotiating over spending cuts until the Senate “begins to do something.” 

Mr. Boehner began the new Congress on shaky footing, a seemingly chastened man. Speculation swirled that he might not be able to hold on to his speakership (he did), and he was forced to pass two major pieces of legislation — a last-minute New Year’s Eve deal to avert automatic tax increases, and a Hurricane Sandy relief bill — without the support of the majority of his conference through the help of Democratic votes. On Thursday, Mr. Boehner again moved a piece of legislation through the House without majority support from his rank and file — the Violence Against Women Act. 

The result showed that conservatives seem willing to give him some running room on social issues as long as he holds firm on the fiscal front. 

Amid clamoring from his more conservative members, Mr. Boehner eventually reaffirmed his own conservative principles, abandoning even the pretense of reaching a bipartisan solution on the spending cuts. He argued that the president had gotten his desired tax increases in the earlier showdown. And he promised no more one-on-one negotiating sessions meetings with Mr. Obama, whose political fortitude he questioned publicly and privately.

It's the Tea Party triumphant. The Tea Party is calling the tune and Boehner is dancing the jig. There is where we're at. Birchers run the show. They're safe in gerrymandered districts, districts which could soon be multiplying if the Roberts Court scraps Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Charlie Savage outlines the devastating impact of losing Section 5 in a story, "Decision on Voting Law Could Limit Oversight," that appears alongside the sequester coverage:

J. Gerald Hebert, who formerly handled voting rights litigation for the Justice Department and is now in private practice, said that losing Section Five would be “devastating to protecting voting rights” because the costs of a lawsuit are so steep. Jon Greenbaum, the legal director for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said it would mean that the bulk of changes that now receive automatic scrutiny by the federal government could take effect without any review, eliminating a deterrent against mischief.

Minus a full-tilt mobilization this is our present and our future. The nation is run by neo-Dixiecrat, John Birch Society conservatives. Their power base is the House of Representatives, thanks to the gerrymander and corporate cash, which has been and will continue to be augmented by their other base of power, the Supreme Court.

Paul Krugman's column this morning is a good one, "Ben Bernanke, Hippie." In it he compares those who argued against invading Iraq during the Bush-fomented war hysteria in late 2002, early 2003 to those who have been arguing against implementing austerity during a global recession. In both cases critics of elite groupthink were dismissed as Hippies. Krugman's point is that Bernanke's energetic defense, during an appearance before the Senate on Tuesday, of government action to stimulate a depressed economy has turned him into a Hippie.

Is there a better way to wrap things up here on Friday morning than a track off one of my all-time favorite Hippie albums? Here's "The Poor Ditching Boy," from Richard Thompson's Henry the Human Fly (1970):

Neo-Dixiecrat Push to Scrap Section 5

This is the key paragraph from Adam Liptak's story today about Wednesday's arguments on the Voting Rights Act of 1965 before the Supreme Court:

Should the court strike down the law’s central provision, it would be easier for lawmakers in the nine states [now covered by a federal preclearance requirement] to enact the kind of laws Republicans in several states have recently advocated, including tighter identification standards. It would also give those states more flexibility to move polling places and redraw legislative districts.

The conservative justices indicated by their questions that they were in favor of scrapping Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. The problem that they're grappling with is how to turn a neo-Dixiecrat GOP into a majority party. Their first bold move was the fast-tracked Citizens United ruling equating money with speech. Conservatives were frightened by the amount of money Obama raised in small amounts online during the 2008 campaign. But the Super PACs, which resulted from Citizens United, spectacularly underperformed for the neo-Dixiecrat GOP in 2012. Large swaths of the citizenry are immune to attack ads. Certain kinds of people have to be kept from voting. There are various ways to do this -- identification requirements, moving polling locations and limiting their hours of operation -- which were tried by Republican-controlled states. But the Department of Justice intervened in those states covered by Section 5 and told them to stop. This from today's unsigned editorial in the New York Times, Congress’s Power to Protect the Vote:

Congress found that, in general, the problems of voting discrimination were much worse in the covered areas than elsewhere in the United States. A recent study by Morgan Kousser of the California Institute of Technology confirms that: “five-sixths or more of the cases of proven election discrimination from 1957 through 2013 have taken place in jurisdictions subject to Section 5 oversight.” The Justice Department used Section 5 last year to block and change discriminatory voter ID laws in Texas and South Carolina, for example, and to block a discriminatory Florida law that limited early voting.

If the conservative majority votes in a bloc to strike down Section 5 it would do so on the basis that the formula used to determine covered jurisdictions is out of date. Congress would be tasked with updating the formula. This, as Liptak points out, will not happen; hence, a de facto ban:

Should the court strike down the coverage formula when it decides the case, Shelby County v. Holder, No. 12-96, Congress would be free to take a fresh look at what jurisdictions should be covered. But Congress seems unlikely to be able to agree on a new set of criteria, given the current partisan divide, meaning the part of the law requiring federal pre-approval of election changes would effectively disappear.

This is Republican road map for neo-Dixiecrat domination: massive amounts of corporate cash, a gerrymandered permanent majority in Congress and restrictive voting laws.

The Sequester

The column inches are beginning to pile up on the latest budget standoff. It's the sequester this time. It has been over four weeks since the Boehner-led House voted to raise the debt ceiling on January 23. So we've been spared for a month, allowing us to concentrate on other matters.

If you're just starting to dip back in a good place to start is today's lead unsigned editorial in the New York Times, "Why Taxes Have To Go Up." The answer? The lasting damage of the Bush tax cuts and an aging population:

Contrary to Mr. Boehner’s “spending problem” claim, much of the deficit in the next 10 years can be chalked up to chronic revenue shortfalls from the Bush-era tax cuts, which were only partly undone in the fiscal-cliff deal earlier this year. (Wars and a recession also contributed.) It stands to reason that a deficit caused partly by inadequate revenue must be corrected in part by new taxes. And the only way to raise taxes now without harming the recovery is to impose them on high-income filers, for whom a tax increase is unlikely to cut into spending. 

Raising taxes at the top is neither punitive nor gratuitous. It is a needed step, both to achieve near-term budget goals and to lay the foundation for a healthy budget in the future. As the economy strengthens and the population ages, more taxes will be needed from further down the income scale, both to meet foreseeable commitments, especially health care, as well as unforeseeable developments, from wars to technological challenges. But there will never be a consensus for more taxes from the middle class without imposing higher taxes on wealthy Americans, who have enjoyed low taxes for a long time.

In today's offering, "Sequester Of Fools," Krugman says that Congress should repeal the sequester:

The right policy would be to forget about the whole thing. America doesn’t face a deficit crisis, nor will it face such a crisis anytime soon. Meanwhile, we have a weak economy that is recovering far too slowly from the recession that began in 2007. And, as Janet Yellen, the vice chairwoman of the Federal Reserve, recently emphasized, one main reason for the sluggish recovery is that government spending has been far weaker in this business cycle than in the past. We should be spending more, not less, until we’re close to full employment; the sequester is exactly what the doctor didn’t order.

And he warns against the false equivalence being peddled in the media (for a fine example one can cast his glance to the left of the opinion page and read David Brooks' column, "The D.C. Dubstep"). Krugman says,

As always, many pundits want to portray the deadlock over the sequester as a situation in which both sides are at fault, and in which both should give ground. But there’s really no symmetry here. A middle-of-the-road solution would presumably involve a mix of spending cuts and tax increases; well, that’s what Democrats are proposing, while Republicans are adamant that it should be cuts only. And given that the proposed Republican cuts would be even worse than those set to happen under the sequester, it’s hard to see why Democrats should negotiate at all, as opposed to just letting the sequester happen.

This is a political problem the source of which is Republican intransigence. Why do we have this problem? To find the answer all one has to do is consult the reporting of the excellent Jonathan Weisman. In a story yesterday, "GOP Resisting Obama on Tax Increase," Weisman, as always, lets his readers know that Republicans don't feel they need to compromise because they are politically invulnerable due to gerrymandering:

But House Republicans say they are feeling invulnerable in the current clash. Not only can they point to last year’s bills to replace the cuts, but redistricting has made most of them immune to political threats and entreaties. For many representing conservative districts where the president holds little sway, an attack by Mr. Obama is a badge of honor, senior Republican House aides say.

This is the neo-Dixiecrat GOP, a rump party holed up in the House of Representatives with majority status for the foreseeable future thanks to a radical Supreme Court hellbent on shredding all campaign finance law.

States Slashing Unemployment Insurance

North Carolina joins a growing number of states that have reduced unemployment benefits since the 2008 meltdown. According to today's story by Robbie Brown, the states besides North Carolina that have cut benefits to the unemployed are Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, Missouri and South Carolina. All except Illinois, I would guess, are under Republican control. What makes North Carolina's new unemployment compensation bill, passed by a Republican-controlled legislature and soon to be signed into law by Republican Governor Pat McCrory, the most draconian is not the 35% reduction in the maximum weekly benefit from $535 to $350; nor is it the fact that North Carolina has the fifth highest unemployment rate in the country, at 9.2% when the national average is 7.9%; rather, it is the drop in the maximum number of weeks for collecting benefits below 26:

The bill also disqualifies 170,000 unemployed people — 39 percent of the 438,000 jobless — from federal emergency extended benefits because it reduces the number of weeks people can receive benefits to below 26. The federal government has set 26 weeks as the national requirement for receiving federal funds.

“Families struggling to secure their place in the middle class will suffer a grievous blow, and the state’s economy will lose $780 million in federal funds that are vital to reducing North Carolina’s high unemployment rate,” said Seth D. Harris, the acting labor secretary.

The reduction of the maximum number of weeks for collecting benefits to between 12 and 20 seems designed to prevent unemployed workers from tapping into the federal Emergency Unemployment Compensation (EUC) money -- another GOP-hatched scheme, among myriad other plots, to pauperize the working class; to return us to a Jim Crow, Dust Bowl, pre-Wagner Act America, the fevered fantasy of the neo-Dixiecrat Republican politician of today.

Life on unemployment is not a luxurious one of idle splendor. Having been laid off twice in the last decade and living in a state with good unemployment insurance, I still had to reduce my expenses substantially and supplement the weekly check from employment security by drawing down my savings account. Finding work is a brutal process. The weeks wash away quickly. I think six months, 26 weeks, the established baseline for eligibility, is fair; it assumes one is looking diligently in a regular job market. But in a new, difficult environment where we're dealing with 8% unemployment that appears almost structural, 26 weeks is not enough. EUC is vital.