Week 4 in Helena — update from Big Sky 55+!
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Week 4 in Helena — update from Big Sky 55+!
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[publish draft]
Wednesday, February 1st, 7:30 am via Zoom, Danny Choriki will lead a discussion about engaging moderate Republican voters
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The MOFE has a great newsletter/email list on education-related bills moving through the legislature. I’m sharing the link to that here in case anyone would like to sign up: Montanans Organized for Education (mofeactionfund.org)
Thanks, all!
Montana House and Senate Democrats
🚨Action Alerts🚨
*hearing dates and times are being regularly rescheduled, if a hearing has changed, it will be indicated with a yellow highlight
WEDNESDAY
What: HB 317, Provide for the Montana Indian Child Welfare Act
Position: SUPPORT
When: Wednesday, February 1st @ 3 pm
Where: House Human Services Committee – Room 152 – Sign up to testify or submit written comment
Goal: 5+ in person/zoom, unlimited calls/emails
Talking Points:
The Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) is integral to protecting the best interests and well-being of American Indian children in Montana.
In 2020, American Indian children made up 9% of the state’s child population and 35% of the children in foster care.
HB 317 is essential for protecting Indigenous children in Montana and tribal sovereignty.
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The news today illustrates a dramatic difference between governing and garnering votes. President Joe Biden was at the Baltimore and Potomac Tunnel in Baltimore, Maryland, today to celebrate the bipartisan infrastructure law, passed in November 2021, that is investing about $1.2 trillion in fixing our highways, bridges, internet access, and so on. In Maryland it will devote about $4 billion to fixing and expanding the 150-year-old Baltimore and Potomac railroad tunnel, which has become a bottleneck for the 9 million commuters who pass through it as they travel the vital link between Philadelphia and Washington.
January 30, 2023
The news today illustrates a dramatic difference between governing and garnering votes. President Joe Biden was at the Baltimore and Potomac Tunnel in Baltimore, Maryland, today to celebrate the bipartisan infrastructure law, passed in November 2021, that is investing about $1.2 trillion in fixing our highways, bridges, internet access, and so on. In Maryland it will devote about $4 billion to fixing and expanding the 150-year-old Baltimore and Potomac railroad tunnel, which has become a bottleneck for the 9 million commuters who pass through it as they travel the vital link between Philadelphia and Washington. The law is formally known as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and Biden noted that fixing the tunnel is expected to create 20,000 jobs over the next ten years. He also announced that it, along with all the Amtrak developments on the Northeast Corridor, would be built by union labor. Tomorrow, Biden will speak at the West Side Rail Yard in New York City to talk about how funding for the Hudson Tunnel Project from the bipartisan infrastructure law will improve reliability for the 200,000 passengers a day who travel through it on Amtrak and New Jersey Transit. The passage of the measure in late 2021 took months of careful negotiations even as former president Trump—whose own inability to pass an infrastructure measure became a running joke—tried to scuttle the talks. Biden’s victory lap is not undeserved. The administration today also called attention to the effects of its new border enforcement measures providing migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela a legal path to obtain a two-year visa so long as they have a U.S. sponsor and a thorough background check. The new system will admit up to 30,000 migrants a month. New data shows that the number of migrants from those four countries has dropped 97% since the program went into effect. Overall, migrant encounters at the border have dropped by half, although migration from Ecuador and Peru, which are growing unstable, has increased. The administration has asked Congress repeatedly to fix our outdated immigration system, but Republicans derailed the effort in the previous Congress when they objected to a path to citizenship for so-called dreamers: people brought to this country as children. Now almost twenty states led by Republicans say the administration’s new program violates the law, and they are suing to stop it. In charge of the House, Republicans plan to hold hearings on what they call Biden’s border crisis. Today the White House called out “some elected officials” for “trying to block the Administration’s effective measures because they would rather keep immigration an issue to campaign on than one to solve. If those elected officials succeed,” the press office said, “their actions will lead to more illegal immigration." Actually governing is a lot harder than talking about it. On December 30, House majority leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) promised that the House Republicans would “hit the ground running to do what we promised on the border, crime, energy, inflation, Life, taxpayer protection & more.” He outlined eleven bills the party would bring to the floor in the first two weeks of the new Congress. Half have indeed been voted on by now—the fifth week of Congress—but they were only for show. They will never pass the Senate, and no one is trying to negotiate to pass them. The other half aren’t on the calendar. Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin noted today that the Republicans have turned to investigations, abortion, threatening the national debt, and trying to defund the Internal Revenue Service rather than dealing with the issues they insisted were vital in 2022: crime and inflation. She also noted that at the very time the Republicans were hyping those issues, both crime rates and inflation were actually falling. More demonstrations for the extremist base appear to be coming. As Amy B. Wang noted today in the Washington Post, the Republican National Committee is urging lawmakers to “go on offense in the 2024 election cycle” on antiabortion measures, although since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, voters have made it clear they want abortion rights protected. Nonetheless, as party leaders have done repeatedly when voters reject their increasingly extremist stands, the RNC suggests that the party did poorly in 2022 not because their stand was too strong but because it was too weak. Candidates were not clear enough about their opposition to abortion. The RNC wants them to demonstrate their conviction by passing strict laws that outlaw abortion at six weeks, before many people know they’re pregnant. House speaker Kevin McCarthy has, however, backed off on Republican suggestions that they will not agree to raise the debt ceiling without cuts to Social Security and Medicare. On Face the Nation yesterday, he said the party was committed to “strengthening” the programs. In fact, the only proposal on the table right now to strengthen the programs is from the far-right House Republican Study Committee, which calls for strengthening Social Security and Medicare by, among other things, raising the age at which people become eligible for them. I’d love to hear McCarthy explain how that plan is not a cut in the programs. Finally, today, former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro has applied for a six-month U.S. tourist visa. Bolsonaro entered the United States when he was still president, two days before his successor took office and a little more than a week before his supporters attacked the government and tried to reinstate him. That timing means he came to the U.S. on an A-1 visa restricted to heads of state, which had to be replaced as soon as he was no longer president. Bolsonaro’s lawyer told Reuters reporter Daphne Psaledakis that Bolsonaro wants "to take some time off, clear his head, and enjoy being a tourist in the United States for a few months before deciding what his next step will be.” In fact, the right-wing leader has made it clear he is afraid of the many investigations underway in Brazil for fraud and now for inciting the attack on the government that might end up putting him behind bars. — Notes: https://apnews.com/article/biden-baltimore-rail-tunnel-project-191caf5db5cbd4facceb4f3369f0c72f https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/10/us/politics/infrastructure-bill-passes.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/07/us/politics/republicans-infrastructure-bill.html In December incoming House Republican Majority Leader Steve Scalise announced 11 bills the GOP majority would "bring to the House Floor in the first 2 weeks." Half haven’t gotten votes yet, and none are on the schedule for the current week, which is Week 5 of the 118th Congress 🚨 Sent a letter to my colleagues outlining bills the GOP Majority will bring to the House Floor in the first 2 weeks. We’re ready to hit the ground running to do what we promised on the border, crime, energy, inflation, Life, taxpayer protection & more. https://t.co/fL82h0jjQH https://t.co/0FZi3Sp8Cz |
From the reporters, editors & supporters of MTFP in Helena and far-flung Montana.
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Keeping track of the Montana State Legislature is more important than ever.
The Yellowstone County Democrats are working to more effectively and efficiently track what is going on at the legislature and soon after following the federal legislature. Here is what we are working on.
For more on the fundraiser for the FastDemocracy.com campaign for Yellowstone County Democrats.
To donate to the FastDemocracy campaign.
Stay tuned for updates on this project.
Among the top priorities for Yellowstone Democrats in 2023 are:
To advance these goals, the Yellowstone County Democrats want to purchase a two-year, professional version of FastDemocracy.com.
The following is from their website.
Great Question. It is a great free tool for any citizen to simply and easily keep tabs on any state legislator as well as the US Congress. It also provides a great set of professional tools to organize the effort, maximize the impact, and contribute to future organizing efforts.
Sign up for a free citizen’s account. This description is from their website.
“FastDemocracy was built because we believe that everybody deserves to know what their governments are doing. That’s why we provide basic bill tracking for free while giving Government Relations Professionals the most intuitive and powerful legislative platform out there.
“FastDemocracy Free is for politically interested individuals who want to casually follow along with legislation and want to contact their legislators.
“FastDemocracy Professional is for Government relations professionals, nonprofits, advocacy groups, businesses, law firms, associations, legislators and journalists. Basically, for anybody who needs the best legislative tools and information to succeed with their advocacy goals.”
Fast Democracy Website, 7 Dec 2022
With the professional version, we can coordinate and track the efforts of all our members who are using FastDemocracy Free to keep tabs of their important issues. This allows us to coordinate efforts and send out and publish specific calls to action on bills, hearings, votes, etc.
Help us raise $5,000 for the license for the FastDemocracy Professional license. This lasts until the beginning of the next session. A little bit more ($500) covers the credit card fees and other administrative costs.
Anything up to $8,000 will be a one-time contribution for help organizing the effort, rewards for volunteers, and possibly some merchandising!
Once we have reached our bottom target of $5,500, we will order the professional version and start organizing our efforts. Until then, please sign up for the free version and start tracking areas and bills that are of concern to you.
And while you are at ActBlue be sure to set up a monthly sustaining donation to help fund our ongoing organizing efforts.
Here are the differences between the two versions of FastDemocracy.
FastDemocracy Professional Features
“It’s the economy, stupid.”
James Carville, 1992.
Writer's Note: For a fuller explanation of the concepts of anomie, one great starting place is the personal website (https://soztheor.de) of Prof. Dr. Christian Wickert who adapted his class curricula to create the pages. The links below are to his content. Further reading is available on Prof. Wickert's website. Or comment below and I'll see what I can find. There are a number of basic and moderately advanced videos on this topic at YouTube.
The original concept of Anomie (“a-nuh – mee”) comes from Émile Durkheim, a French sociologist of the late 19th Century. Durkheim was trying to explain the increase in suicide as the early stages of industrialization swept France. A modern way of looking at Durkheim’s theory is that as technology changes impact the lives of individual people, it creates economic shifts that make societal changes. The old ways no longer work and individuals become desperate as they watch the economic and social deterioration of their lives.
In the 1930s, the American sociologist, Robert Merton, expanded the concept from a focus on the individual to a focus on social structures. Society has “rules” or “norms” or expectations of behavior. In return for following these norms, the individual has a meaningful life.
When this social contract or the “collective consciousness” is no longer in sync with the social and economic reality, people’s lives are disrupted. This creates tension in the life of the individuals. As that tension grows, the willingness, even the ability to adhere to the past’s social norms melts away.
In the academic field of criminology, a major branch of sociology, anomie in the United States is being tied to economic inequality and perhaps more telling, the significant decrease in upward economic mobility.
By the 1980’s Robert Agnew added another dimension to the related theories of anomie. Specifically the role of an individual’s stress in General Strain Theory. Agnew also ties together a number of threads of thought including the psychology of stress and emotions, and methods of social control.
These theories from the social sciences give us a structural framework to understand the rising discontent in western civilization and especially in the United States. It explains rising suicide rates, addiction rates, violence in the homes, and increasing criminality in our streets. It explains individual isolation and the breakdown of the sense of community.
The answer to this politically is, it isn’t society’s fault that bad things happen. It is the responsibility of the individual who made bad choices. We need to help these bad people from making bad choices by increasing the consequences for doing bad things.
And so the argument about what is wrong with America goes back and forth. It’s illegal immigration. It’s drugs. It’s poor parenting. It’s gen K’s fault. It’s healthcare. It’s the deficit. It’s socialism. It’s capitalism. It’s guns. It’s bad cops. It’s lazy kids. It bad education. And on an on ad nauseum.
The reality is that it is bad policy. Policies that have killed the “American Dream” during the past two generations. Policies that destroyed hope, not just for a better future for “my “our” children, but policies that destroyed hope for a better future, period.
We need to correct the policies that destroyed the middle class here in the United States.
It’s the economy, stupid.
Anomie explains the breakdown of social morality and the shared sense of community when important implicit social promised are not fulfilled. Is it really any wonder that with the death of the American middle class dream, that people are upset? To the point to trying to do something about it?
Of course not.
Happy people do not start revolutions.
There is no single cause of this mess we call our daily lives. But if we want our civilization to survive our lifetimes, we need to start making investments into the future.
MSU Billings students doing a self created and produced skit called Under the Blankets. Its about teen suicide. Part of a larger project started in Miles City where students use the dramatic arts to talk about the social and personal stresses of life growing up in these United States.
There is nothing as harsh as self judgment backed by a little bit of social validation. Those voices, oh those voices in my head. They never stop. The voices. They never stop. They never stop. Until you do.
And so it ends. The four young women in the skit are all dealing with different aspects of the issue. From survivors to manic depression.
Yeah. There are monsters that kill under those blankets.
Personally, the line that bugs me the most is "snap out of it." As if.
Post presentation conversation. I get why the advocates for mental health want to get people to this about mental illnesses as a health issue and I agree with one caveat.
Happy people don’t kill themselves. People living in supportive environments, people comfortable with who they are, people with roles they enjoy, these are the things that make people happy. So yes, some of it is the scripts we play in our minds, but some of it is collateral damage from an economic system that doesn’t care.