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      Sanders' minimum-wage effort looks doomed as Covid bill hits roadblocks

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      A fiery speech and last-ditch effort by Bernie Sanders to secure a place for a federal minimum wage hike in the $1.9tn coronavirus relief package appeared as good as doomed on Friday, following a day that saw the flagship legislation hit grinding delays in the Senate.Senate leaders and moderate Democratic senator Joe Manchin struck a deal late on Friday over emergency jobless benefits, breaking a nine-hour logjam that had stalled the bill.The compromise, announced by the West Virginia lawmaker and a Democratic aide, seemed to clear the way for the Senate to begin a climactic, marathon series of votes and, eventually, approval of the sweeping legislation.The Senate next faced votes on a pile of amendments that were likely to last overnight, mostly on Republican proposals that are virtually certain to fail.More significantly, the jobless benefits agreement suggested it was just a matter of time until the Senate passes the bill. That would send it back to the House, which was expected to give it final congressional approval before whisking it to Biden for his signature.Progress on the bill slowed to a crawl on Friday afternoon, signaling that the legislation might not pass until the weekend, with Republicans still expected to introduce many amendments, all of which must see votes.Despite delays, the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, said the chamber would finish its work.“The Senate is going to take a lot of votes. But we are going to power through and finish this bill, however long it takes,” Schumer said. “The American people are counting on us and our nation depends on it.”A job in the United States of America should lift you out of poverty, not keep you in itIf, as expected, the Senate passes the bill, it will then have to return to the Democratic-controlled House for final approval before being forwarded to Biden.Earlier on Friday, Sanders had, almost certainly in vain, implored Congress to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour within this piece of legislation, calling it “disgraceful” that lawmakers have allowed tens of millions of American workers to live on “starvation wages”.“Nobody in America can survive on $7.25 an hour, $9 an hour or $12 an hour,” he said. “We need an economy in which all of our workers earn at least a living wage … A job in the United States of America should lift you out of poverty, not keep you in it.”Last week, the Senate parliamentarian determined that a provision raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour was inadmissible under the rules of a special budgetary procedure Democrats are using to pass the $1.9tn coronavirus relief bill on a party-line vote.Sanders, backed by many progressives in the House, has called on Democrats to “ignore” the decision.During his remarks, Sanders also made a forceful case for enacting the relief bill, which is expected to pass with only Democratic support.“This is a bill which will answer a profound question: are we living in a democratic society where the US Congress will respond to the needs of working families rather than just the wealthy and large corporations and their lobbyists?” he said.Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) gives forceful speech on his proposed amendment to raise the federal minimum wage to $15/hour:“This is a bill which will answer a profound question: Are we living in a democratic society … ?” pic.twitter.com/qrz4LjQFWq— The Recount (@therecount) March 5, 2021
      Debate, voting on amendments, and backroom horse-trading began in earnest on Friday, a day after the vice-president, Kamala Harris, broke a Senate tie to allow the chamber to take up the bill.Following Sanders’ speech, eight Democrats joined all Republicans to vote against the minimum wage proposal, suggesting that progressives vowing to continue the effort in coming months will face a difficult fight.The 8 senators:• Joe Manchin (West Va. )• Jon Tester (Mt.)• Jeanne Shaheen (N.H.)• Angus King (Maine)• Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.)• Tom Carper (Del.)• Chris Coons (Del.)• Maggie Hassan (N.H.) https://t.co/uEd1famnIv— Axios (@axios) March 5, 2021
      Though Sanders’ amendment was poised for defeat, the vote remained open as Democrats scrambled to hammer out a deal on unemployment benefits.The version of the relief bill passed by the House provides $400 weekly emergency unemployment benefits – on top of regular state payments – through August.But in a compromise with moderates revealed earlier on Friday, Senate Democrats said that would be reduced to $300 weekly but extended until early October. The plan, sponsored by Senator Tom Carper of Delaware, would also reduce taxes on unemployment benefits by making $10,200 of individuals’ benefits tax exempt. The White House also said it supported the amendment.But by midday, lawmakers said Manchin was ready to support a less generous Republican version. That led to hours of talks involving White House aides, top Senate Democrats and Manchin as the party tried finding a way to salvage its unemployment aid package.The compromise announced Friday night would provide $300 weekly, with the final check paid on 6 September, and includes the tax break on benefits.The day’s lengthy standoff underscored the headaches confronting party leaders over the next two years and the tensions between progressives and centrists as they try moving their agenda through the Congress with their slender majorities.With power in the Senate split 50-50 between the two parties, just one Democratic defection is needed to block legislation or stall voting along the way if no Republicans cross the aisle.“I feel bad for Joe Manchin. I hope the Geneva Convention applies to him,” said the No 2 Senate Republican, John Thune of South Dakota, to reporters.The overall bill, aimed at battling the killer virus and nursing the staggered economy back to health, will provide direct payments of up to $1,400 to most Americans.There is also money for Covid-19 vaccines and testing, aid to state and local governments, help for schools and the airline industry, tax breaks for lower-earners and families with children, and subsidies for health insurance.Despite deep political polarization and staunch Republican opposition, the legislation has garnered broad public appeal.Apoll by Monmouth University found that 62% of Americans approve of the stimulus package, including more than three in 10 Republicans.That is something Republicans hope to erode, by portraying the bill as too big and representing wasteful public spending for a pandemic that’s almost over. Biden and federal health experts this week, however, told states rushing to ditch mask mandates and reopen businesses completely that the move was premature and they risked creating a fourth deadly surge of disease. More

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      Scramble on to replace Neera Tanden after nomination met perfect storm

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      Sign up for the Guardian’s First Thing newsletterNeera Tanden’s decision to withdraw from consideration to serve as Joe Biden’s budget director marks the first major loss for the still young Biden administration, and sets off a scramble between various political factions to push through a new nominee.Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress thinktank, decided to withdraw her candidacy on Tuesday, in the face of a lack of support among senators needed to advance her through the confirmation process.“Unfortunately, it now seems clear that there is no path forward to gain confirmation, and I do not want continued consideration of my nomination to be a distraction from your other priorities,” Tanden wrote in a letter to Biden released by the White House. Tanden added that she appreciated “how hard you and your team at the White House has worked to win my confirmation”.Tanden was the first of Biden’s cabinet nominees to fail to make it through the confirmation process. New presidents don’t usually see all of their cabinet picks confirmed.But Tanden’s path was always more precarious than the rest. She is well known throughout the Democratic party as a combative figure who often engaged in Twitter fights and criticized both Republicans and Democrats. After her nomination she deleted over 1,000 tweets and in her hearings she said she regretted those criticisms, which included calling Senator Susan Collins of Maine “the worst” and tweeting that “vampires have more heart than Ted Cruz”, the Republican senator from Texas.But Tanden, a staunch Hillary Clinton ally, had also warred with prominent members of the progressive wing of the Democratic party and once allegedly punched Faiz Shakir, who would eventually become Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign manager. Tanden has said she “pushed” him.Sanders, the chairman of one of the committees charged with handling Tanden’s nomination, also questioned large corporate and foreign donations to the Center for American Progress.But the lion’s share of critical questioning by senators was about Tanden’s various attacks.“Of course, your attacks were not just made against Republicans. There were vicious attacks against progressives, people who I have worked with, me personally,” Sanders said during the hearings.Tanden did have her fair share of support. Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, said the White House was “fighting our guts out” to get Tanden confirmed and the US Chamber of Commerce backed her as well. Behind the scenes, Democratic officials continued to lobby senators to support her, even after Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a Democrat, announced his opposition to Tanden, citing her tweets and past conduct.Manchin has emerged during the Biden administration as, at times, the deciding figure on matters before the Senate. Other conservative Democrats, like Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, held back from announcing how she would vote. That decision did not inspire confidence in Tanden’s chances and illustrated the influence any senator – especially a conservative one – has in a Senate split 50-50 with Vice-President Kamala Harris as the tie-breaker.Republicans at moments seemed to revel in highlighting Tanden’s past tweets. Tanden’s allies argued that they were motivated by a mix of extreme hypocritical partisanship (where were they, Tanden’s allies grumbled, when Trump was tweeting?) and racism. Tanden was born to immigrant parents from India.But those senators also expressed eagerness to support one of the potential replacements – Shalanda Young, a veteran Hill staffer who is Black.“You know I’m going to vote for you,” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the ranking Republican on the Senate budget committee, said on Tuesday during Young’s hearing to serve as deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget. “You’re highly qualified and I’m going to support you,” Graham added before pressing her on immigration policy.Similarly John Kennedy of Louisiana, one of the Senate’s more bombastic members, said at one point “you may be more than deputy. You may be the sheriff. I don’t expect you to comment on that.”Democratic senators stuck to their support of Tanden during Young’s hearing but after her nomination was pulled lawmakers began lobbying for Young.“We have worked closely with her for several years and highly recommend her for her intellect, her deep expertise on the federal budget and her determination to ensure that our budget reflects our values as a nation,” the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, majority whip, Jim Clyburn, and majority leader, Steny Hoyer, said in a statement on Wednesday. “Her leadership at the OMB would be historic and would send a strong message that this administration is eager to work in close coordination with members of Congress to craft budgets that meet the challenges of our time and can secure broad, bipartisan support.”Other names have been floated as possible OMB nominees and the Senate budget committee is now waiting for the White House to pick someone else. The names floated include Sarah Bianchi, a former director of policy for Biden; Gene Sperling, a former director of the council of economic advisers; Ann O’Leary, the former chief of staff to Governor Gavin Newsom of California.Whoever the White House nominates is poised to have an easier confirmation process than Tanden. More

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      Bernie Sanders: US sick of subsidizing 'starvation wages' at Walmart and McDonald's

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      US taxpayers should not be “forced to subsidize some of the largest and most profitable corporations in America”, Bernie Sanders told a Senate hearing on Thursday.As Congress debates the first rise in the minimum wage in over a decade, the Vermont senator said he had “talked to too many workers in this country who, with tears in their eyes, tell me the struggles they have to provide for their kids on starvation wages” even as the chief executives of companies including McDonald’s, Walmart and others take home multi-million dollar pay packages.Executives from Walmart and McDonald’s were invited to the hearing, titled Should Taxpayers Subsidize Poverty Wages at Large Profitable Corporations?They declined to appear.The senators heard from low-wage workers from McDonald’s and Walmart. Terence Wise, a McDonald’s employee from Kansas City, Missouri, said his low pay had led to his family becoming homeless.“My family has been homeless despite two incomes. We’ve endured freezing temperatures in our purple minivan. I’d see my daughter’s eyes wide open, tossing and turning, in the back seat. Try waking up in the morning and getting ready for work and school in a parking lot with your family of five,” said Wise.“That’s something a parent can never forget and a memory you can never take away from your children. You should never have multiple jobs in the United States and nowhere to sleep.”Sanders cited a government accountability office (GAO) report that found nearly half of workers who make less than $15 an hour rely on public assistance programs that cost taxpayers $107bn each year.Walmart spent $8.3bn on stock buybacks in 2017, the Walton family, the chain’s founders, are worth over $200bn and have increased their wealth by $50bn since the start of the pandemic, said Sanders. And yet the company “cannot afford to pay its workers at least $15 an hour”.“If Walmart thinks they’re going to avoid answering that question because they’re not here today, they’re deeply mistaken. The American people are sick and tired of subsidizing the wealthiest family in America,” said Sanders.The hearing comes at a tense moment for minimum wage advocates. Joe Biden campaigned on a pledge to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour from its current level of $7.25. The proposal is part of his $1.9tn Covid stimulus package.But that package faces stiff opposition from in the Senate with the Republican minority set to vote against it and some Democrats opposing the wage rise.A recent Congressional Budget Office concluded 27 million Americans would be affected by an increase in the minimum wage to $15, and that 900,000 would be lifted out of poverty. But the CBO also said the increase would lead to 1.4m job losses and increase the federal budget deficit by $54bn over the next 10 years. The Economic Policy Institute, and others, have called the report “wrong, and inappropriately inflated”.Republican Senator Mike Bruin told the hearing that an increase would be unfair on states with a lower cost of living and would hurt small businesses.“We need to slow it down,” he said. “The main result is you are going to hurt Main Street,” he said. More

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      US minimum wage activists face their toughest foe: Democrat Joe Manchin

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      Hopes that the US will finally increase the federal minimum wage for the first time in nearly 12 years face a seemingly unlikely opponent: a Democrat senator from one of the poorest states in the union.Joe Manchin of West Virginia, the state’s former governor and the Democrats’ most conservative senator, has long opposed his party’s progressive wing and is on record saying he does not support increasing the minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 an hour, the first increase since 2009. “I’m supportive of basically having something that’s responsible and reasonable,” he told the Hill. He has advocated for a rise to $11.None of this has found favor with some low-wage workers in a state where an estimated 278,734 West Virginians lived in poverty in 2019, 16% of the population and the sixth highest poverty rate in the US.Last Thursday Manchin reaffirmed his stance during a virtual meeting with members of the West Virginia Poor People’s Campaign (WVPPC), a group pushing for an increased minimum wage and other policy changes that would benefit the working class.That meeting was closed to the media but at an online press conference immediately afterward, participants said Manchin refused to budge. “He was kind of copping out,” said WVPPC member Brianna Griffith, a restaurant worker and whitewater rafting guide who, due to exemptions for tipped workers, only makes $2.62 an hour.As a result of her sub-minimum wage job, Griffith received only $67 a week in unemployment benefits until that ran out in August. She lost her house and was forced to move in with her grandmother. Although she has now returned to work, business is slow and she estimates tips have fallen by 75%.When Griffith told Manchin about her plight on Thursday, she said he asked about the $600 stimulus check approved by Congress in December. “He seemed to think that $600 … was enough to get me by,” she said. “I feel like he’s got his head in the clouds and he doesn’t understand what’s happening to poor people in West Virginia.”Despite Manchin’s insistence on an $11 minimum wage, according to MIT’s living wage calculator, even a $15 minimum wage would only provide a living wage for single West Virginians without children. For a West Virginia family with two working parents and two children, both parents would need to be making at least $20.14 an hour to make ends meet.Griffith said if the minimum wage was increased to $15 an hour, “I could afford to live on my own. I could afford a car that’s not 25 years old.”The Rev Dr William Barber, co-chair of the national Poor People’s Campaign, was in last week’s meeting and said Manchin agreed the current $7.25 minimum wage was “not enough”.But Barber said he was “amazed” Manchin could hear from people like Griffith and still oppose increasing the minimum wage to $15.“What he is suggesting would just further keep people in poverty and hurting,” he said.Raising the minimum wage was a key part of Democrats’ 2020 platform. The former presidential candidate and now Senate budget committee chairman, Bernie Sanders, has referred to the current $7.25 rate as “a starvation wage”.The wage hike, formally known as the Raise the Wage Act of 2021, is now part of a proposed $1.9tn Covid-19 relief bill. The measure would incrementally raise the minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 over the next four years.With only a razor-thin majority in the Senate, all 50 Democrat senators need to be onboard for the bill to pass. But in addition to Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona has told Politico she does not want the minimum wage increase to be part of the Covid relief package.There are some reasons to be hesitant about increasing the minimum wage. A Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report detailing the economic impact of the Raise the Wage Act has estimated the legislation would eliminate an estimated 1.4m jobs and would swell the national debt by $54bn over the next decade.But the report also estimates a $15 minimum wage would lift 900,000 people out of poverty nationwide and inject $333m into the US economy.Other economists have disputed the CBO report. Estimates by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute predict 32 million US workers would benefit from the minimum wage increase, which includes a quarter-million workers in Manchin’s home state of West Virginia.WVPPC member Pam Garrison was also on Thursday’s call with Manchin. Garrison is 55 years old and says she has earned minimum wage her entire working life and makes ends meet by taking side jobs cleaning houses. She spoke of the mental, physical and emotional toll that living in poverty has on people like her.“You’re just frazzled,” she said. “If you’ve never lived in poverty, you have no idea what it does to you.”If you’ve never lived in poverty, you have no idea what it does to youGarrison said Manchin ‘heard our side” but is reluctant to embrace a $15 minimum wage because he is worried small businesses could not absorb the increased labor costs. But she said giving low-wage workers more money would also benefit small businesses.“If you give us a decent pay, we’re going to put the money back into the economy [and] we’re going to be able to feed our families,” she said.Members of the WVPPC plan to continue lobbying Manchin on the Raise the Wage Act despite his seeming unwillingness to change his stance on the legislation.The group will hold a masked, socially distanced rally outside his office in Charleston, West Virginia, on Monday. A similar rally will be held at . Sinema’s office in Pheonix, Arizona.Manchin’s office denied multiple requests for comment.Zack Harold is a freelance writer and radio producer in Charleston, West Virginia. He is a regular contributor for West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Inside Appalachia and formerly served as the Charleston Daily Mail’s entertainment editor and managing editor for WV Living, Wonderful West Virginia and WV Focus magazines More

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      Sanders confident of raising minimum wage as part of $1.9tn Covid package

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      Bernie Sanders said on Saturday he was confident Senate Democrats will be able to raise the US minimum wage to $15, a step firmly opposed by Republicans but a key part of the Biden administration’s $1.9tn coronavirus relief package.In a statement, the Vermont independent who caucuses with Democrats and chairs the Senate budget committee said he was “very proud of the strong arguments our legal team is making to the parliamentarian that raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour is not ‘incidental’ to the federal budget and is permissible under the rules of reconciliation”.Reconciliation allows legislators to bypass the 60-vote majority needed for most Senate legislation, for items linked to spending and taxation. When Donald Trump held the White House, Republicans used it to force through tax cuts. Under Barack Obama, Democrats used it to help pass the Affordable Care Act.Sanders is championing moves to more than double the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour, its level since 2009, over a five-year period. The move is a key part of the Biden coronavirus relief package, meant to tackle the devastating impact of a pandemic in which nearly 500,000 have died and unemployment has rocketed.“Half of our workers are living paycheck to paycheck and millions of people are working for starvation wages,” Sanders wrote on Twitter on Friday. “We need the minimum wage to be a living wage and that’s why we’re going to raise it to $15 an hour.”Public opinion is heavily in favour of the rise but Republicans are ranged against it, arguing that it would damage small businesses. Sanders counters that the gradual rise over five years should allay such concerns.The Vermont senator is an experienced operator. After a coordinated if symbolic Republican move against the wage rise earlier this month, one Sanders staffer said: “This isn’t Bernie’s first rodeo … we can still try to pass minimum wage through the reconciliation bill.”In his statement on Saturday, Sanders referred to two Republican priorities under Trump which could not reach 60 votes but which were pursued through reconciliation.“The [Congressional Budget Office] has found that the $15 minimum wage has a much greater impact on the federal budget than opening up the Arctic national wildlife refuge to oil drilling and repealing the [ACA] individual mandate penalties,” he said, “two provisions that the parliamentarian advised did not violate the Byrd rule when Republicans controlled the Senate.”The Byrd rule is named for Robert Byrd, a long-serving Democratic senator from West Virginia who died in 2010. According to the non-partisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, or CBPP, it “allows senators to block provisions of reconciliation bills that are ‘extraneous’ to reconciliation’s basic purpose of implementing budget changes”.The Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, is the first woman to interpret and manage the rules of Senate procedure. She must decide if a minimum wage raise can be pursued through reconciliation.On Saturday, Sanders said he was confident McDonough would do so next week. More

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      A Woke Reading of a Politician’s Mittens

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      A high school teacher in California has earned her half-hour of fame by stepping up to expose an act of flagrant hypocrisy that took place in broad daylight during US President Joe Biden’s inauguration. Ingrid Seyer-Ochi was the first to notice the duplicity. After boldly raising the awareness of the students in her class, she captured the attention of the surrounding community when the San Francisco Chronicle published her op-ed.

      Seyer-Ochi exposed what the rest of the population failed to notice, even though the event had been broadcast to the nation. She acuity alone penetrated through the veneer to identify the shameful act perpetrated by a well-known politician. The foul deed occurred on Capitol Hill a mere two weeks after a rabid mob, whipped into a frenzy by Donald Trump, notoriously occupied the Capitol and threatened lawmakers’ lives to protest a stolen election.

      What was the shameless deception her probing eyes had unveiled? Who was the guilty party? And how did this person get away with such a vile act?

      Unchanged or Unchained: What’s in Store for the JCPOA?

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      The answer to those questions surprised most of the readers of her op-ed. Seyer-Ochi exposed a dangerous adept of the now well-known sin of privilege, not just of white but also male privilege. The guilty party was none other than Senator Bernie Sanders. The former presidential primary candidate, according to the teacher’s reading, had set up the scene to dupe the masses, gullible enough to fall for his brazen attempt to cultivate an image of the folksy elder of the traditional American family. 

      By covering his hands with the archaic symbol of hand-knitted woolen mittens in a homage to traditional craftsmanship (if not craftswomanship or perhaps craftspersonship), Sanders’ attire signified his identification with the dominant white, wealthy elite that has consistently stoked endemic racism for the past 400 years. Sanders was also guilty of dressing too casually and failing to respect the solemnity of the historical enthronement of the first female vice-president of black and South Asian descent.

      Yahoo editor David Knowles described this significant teaching moment in these terms: “Seyer-Ochi’s objection was to the “privilege, white privilege, male privilege and class privilege.” The teacher “addressed the topic with her students, who she said were also upset by what they saw as the implicit message being delivered by Sanders’s choice of outerwear.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Outerware:

      The visible clothing people wear not to keep warm or protect them from the elements but to advertise which class or caste they belong to

      Contextual Note

      The new woke culture in the US, specializes in the art of canceling people who fail to live up to its real or quite as often imaginary standards. It relies on the ability of its practitioners to detect “implicit messages.” These woke academics believe (utterly mistakenly) that they are applying the insights of continental philosophers like Michel Foucault, or what is called “French Theory.” But woke theorists owe more to the great American puritanical tradition that, since the 17th century, has tasked its adepts with the office of exposing the moral failings of other members of the community.

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      One of the reasons Foucault and other French thinkers would never have approved of this application of theory is that the practice of délation (denunciation to the authorities) during the Nazi occupation of France in the Second World War is to this day vilified as one of the most heinous acts people can engage in. It was a behavior encouraged by the Nazi-controlled Vichy regime that encouraged good Frenchmen to denounce Jews and members of the Résistance.

      But beyond that, Foucault simply saw no interest in condemning individuals or ostracizing specific behaviors. His intellectual art consisted of teasing out relationships between different sets of ideas and cultural practices in particular societies and relating them to the institutions that constitute their power structure. Foucault described what amount to symbiotic relationships. To some extent, he admired their coherence, even when they manifested themselves in ways that were clearly at odds with his own personal values. Foucault, the radical, gay, atheistic questioner of Western institutions, for example, declared his deep sympathy for Ruhollah Khomeini’s revolution in Iran.

      Historical Note

      What is now commonly referred to as wokeness or even “wokeism” is a recent trend of academic behavior. It traditionally pledges allegiance to French philosophers such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, but it unconsciously applies an approach opposite to theirs. Instead of teasing out subtle relationships, in the quest to understand how complex elements coexist and support one another within a society at a certain moment of its history, the wokeist methodology focuses on unearthing anecdotal evidence of isolated acts serving to expose what they deem to be a suspect power relationship. That is precisely what Ingrid Seyer-Ochi has done to impress her students and get an op-ed published in the San Francisco Chronicle.

      Having absorbed the lessons of structuralism (Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Lévy-Strauss), Foucault explored what he called “L’archéologie du savoir” (the archeology of knowledge), an approach that seeks to discover how cultures are constructed and the play of forces that hold them together. It seeks out phenomena that explain historical continuity and discontinuity. In the process, it may reveal sources of injustice, but its aim is to layer knowledge and understanding rather than exercise moral judgment. 

      This divergence of approach tells us something about how intellectual tools produced by one culture — in this case, French intellectuals — may be distorted by a different culture (US academics) that borrows them for a totally different purpose. In recent decades, woke analysts and activists have neglected the job of understanding complexity and increasingly focused on rooting out acts that they can demonize as instances of “cultural appropriation.” Woke critics take particular pleasure in playing the role of inquisitors whose powers of observation and careful detective work allow them to accuse an individual or a group of insensitively using for illicit purposes cultural attributes considered the inalienable property of another group of people. One typical outcome of this vital research is the engaging and deeply instructive practice of critiquing celebrities’ choice of Halloween costumes.

      If they had been infected by the same obsession with the injustice of cultural appropriation, the French theorists of the 20th century might have ended up accusing their woke followers in the English-speaking academic world precisely of that sin. They might equally have pointed out that the very idea of cultural appropriation can only exist in societies in which the notion of private property as the foundation of social life is considered axiomatic. Anthropologists and cultural historians have long understood that the elevation of private property to the status of a fundamental human right is a modern Western invention. It belongs to a specific time and place in human history.

      Embed from Getty Images

      This phenomenon helps to illustrate a fundamental difference between the cultures of Europe and North America. When Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung traveled to New York in 1909 to introduce psychoanalysis to Americans, Freud remarked to Jung, “They don’t realize we’re bringing them the plague.” 

      But it was Freud who failed to realize that the Americans, always ready to exploit someone else’s asset, found a highly productive use for Freud’s plague. Instead of undermining what Freud deemed the uncultivated superficiality of US culture, the Viennese doctor’s intellectual heritage led to the consolidation and accelerated development of the consumer society. Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, played an important role in that operation. Instead of showing concern about the destructive impulses of their id, Americans ended up employing Freud’s insights productively, by harnessing the dark energy of the unconscious for profit. Freud’s plague produced both Madison Avenue and the atomic bomb.

      Freud saw his mission as one of unveiling the disturbing truth about how our minds work: how the unconscious betrays our conscious intentions. Appropriated by Americans, Freud’s doctrines were used not to illuminate people’s understanding of how their minds work, but to orientate them toward types of behavior useful to the propertied elite and the barons of industry. The age of propaganda was already underway. Propaganda became the foundation of the hyperreality in which people have now accepted to be enclosed.

      Postscript: A practitioner of theory should have noticed a likely correlation between Seyer-Ochi’s attack on Bernie Sanders and the establishment Democrats’ permanent campaign to brand the senator a male supremacist because he dared to run against Hillary Clinton in 2016.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in US Politics

      Crochet artist turns viral Bernie Sanders image into a doll that sells for $20,000

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      Bernie Sanders is widely beloved for his crotchety public demeanour, making it fitting that a crocheted doll of the 79-year-old Vermont senator – wearing chunky mittens and hunched cross-legged against the cold at Joe Biden’s inauguration last week – added no less than $20,300 to charitable efforts featuring the much-memed image.Sanders said merchandise featuring the image had raised nearly $2m for charities including Meals on Wheels, which brings food to isolated older people.Last week, the picture of the be-mittened and socially distanced senator rippled across the internet. Users were gleefully “placing” the Vermont democratic socialist everywhere from the Yalta conference in 1945 to the video for Gangnam Style, and in the pattern on Melania Trump’s resort wear-style dress when she and Donald Trump arrived in Florida instead of attending the inauguration.And in Corpus Christi, Texas, Tobey King got down to work on her own three-dimensional wooly manifestation of the senator in his earthen hues.“It’s mind-blowing because I knew Bernie was trending, because of that picture, and I already had a Bernie pattern and a Bernie doll,” she said. “So, I just went and got that and I modified that super quick.”Recreating Sanders’ mittened and masked look took about seven hours of crocheting, she said, adding: “The mittens are not that hard – it’s just some colour changing, a special stitch.”By Saturday, she had posted the doll on eBay, where its auction price soared. Funds raised would be donated to Meals on Wheels America, King said, adding: “This is my new path. This is a new way of helping people in a way that I’ve never been able to do before.”King, 46, said more than 30,000 people had bought a Sanders doll crochet pattern from her Etsy store, and said she hoped the senator approved.“I really hope that he thinks this is something cool and that I’m doing something good,” she said.It seemed likely Sanders would. Last Sunday, Jen Ellis, the Vermont elementary school teacher who made the senator’s mittens from old sweaters and recycled plastic bottles, said he had called “to tell me that the mitten frenzy has already raised an enormous amount of money for Vermont charities … Thank you!! Generosity brings joy.”She also said she could not possibly fulfill a flood of orders from mitten-smitten Sanders supporters.Sanders said he and his wife, Jane, “were amazed by all the creativity shown by so many people over the last week, and we’re glad we can use my internet fame to help Vermonters in need.“But even this amount of money is no substitute for action by Congress, and I will be doing everything I can in Washington to make sure working people in Vermont and across the country get the relief they need in the middle of the worst crisis we’ve faced since the Great Depression.”Among other actions, the new chair of the Senate budget committee is seeking to overcome Republican opposition to a $15 minimum wage. More

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      in Elections

      How to make Bernie Sanders’ inauguration mittens

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      Feel the Bern, not the cold, with your own pair of winter-proof hand warmers – here’s how to stitch them at homeWhile it was Michelle Obama’s hair that brought the glamour to Joe Biden’s inauguration day, it was Bernie Sanders’ mittens that delivered the memes. Sitting at the event in a winter coat and mittens, arms and legs crossed, he was the yin to the rest of the Capitol’s sharp-suited yang – and promptly Photoshopped into Edward Hopper paintings, scenes from Glee and the vice-presidential debate, replacing the fly atop Mike Pence’s head. Continue reading… More