•Is the United States done with nation building? David Amaya, in the left column, and David Iwinski, in the right column, debate the issue ahead of a Braver Angels debate, on our home page at https://thehustings.news.
•Former President Bill Clinton has been released and is heading home to New York after spending six days in an Orange County, California, hospital for a non-COVID infection, NPR reports.
•Jury selection begins in Georgia today in the trial of Greg McMichael, his son Travis McMichael and neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan for the February 2020 shooting of an unarmed Black jogger, Ahmaud Arbery, in their suburban neighborhood. Jury selection could take weeks, and location for the trial may be moved to a different region of Georgia, WaPo says.
Two Weeks in Washington – Prepare for two weeks of tortuous negotiations between progressive and moderate Democrats on Capitol Hill as the two sides haggle over how to cut President Biden’s Build Back Better program, the $3.5-trillion budget reconciliation bill, to about $2 trillion, The Hill previews.
On Saturday The New York Times reported that Sen. Joe Manchin III, D-WV, told the White House he “strongly opposes” a $150-billion provision in the bill to quickly replace coal- and gas-fired powerplants in the U.S. with wind, solar and nuclear energy. Biden travels to Glasgow in two weeks for a United Nations summit on climate change, and Manchin’s demands to remove the $150 billion provision will make it difficult to convince the rest of the world that the U.S. is serious about the problem, the NYT notes.
Another point of contention to be hashed out in two weeks is a provision in the bill, also championed by progressives, to reduce the cost of prescription drugs. It faces opposition by Sens. Bob Menendez, D-NJ, and Krysten Sinema, D-AZ, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Note: While conventional wisdom on Capitol Hill says that Congress loves deadlines and will work all this out in two weeks, these points of contention appear to be more of a power struggle between the two sides of the Democratic Party than simply differences in political philosophy. The $1.2-trillion infrastructure bill has been under threat since House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-CA, agreed to connect its passage to the budget reconciliation bill, and now the U.S.’s already poor image on climate change seems likely to suffer, too, as Donald J. Trump’s GOP watches Biden’s presidency fail under the weight of his own party.
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Buttigieg Says Supply Chain Won’t Be Fixed Soon — “A lot of the challenges that we have been experiencing this year will continue into next year,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said on CNN’s State of the Union, regarding the global supply chain. As for what the Administration can — or can’t — do, he said on NBC News’ Meet the Press, “Nobody wants the federal government to own or operate the stores, the warehouses, the trucks or the ships or the ports. Our role is to try to make sure we’re supporting those businesses and those workers who do.”
Note: Those last comments would qualify Buttigieg for hurrahs from the traditional Republican party, were such a thing still in existence.
One of the things that somehow seems to get overlooked when there are discussions of the broken supply chain is the fact that there has been a global pandemic since March 2020. Had all the countries in the world gotten after it when it first started spreading rather than, in some cases we are familiar with, thought it would go away on its own through some magical thinking, it would not have the magnitude that it has — and will continue to have. Sick workers can’t make microchips.
In addition to which, it is worth recognizing that this is a global problem, and not something that is the consequence of Joe Biden’s presidency.
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China’s Economy Stalls – China’s economy grew 4.9% over the last year, The Wall Street Journal reports, and while this may seem positive by the standards of the world’s largest economy (yes, the U.S. is still number-one), for number-two, it’s not that good. The Chinese economy is up this year only in comparison with the nadir from the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, and even then it pales next to China’s annual increases during the last decade that were typically in the 8-10% range.
Compounding the poor economic outlook are a.) reports of electricity outages across China due to energy shortages and b.) the expected collapse of Evergrande, the country’s most indebted real estate developer. Companies like Evergrande have overbuilt real estate in China for decades, resulting in “ghost” buildings and even “ghost” cities according to numerous reports.
Note: China’s dominance of the global economy may not be quite the threat we thought, though Evergrande’s fate will affect the U.S. economy as well. More troubling is how China’s economy could continue to affect the supply chain for computer chips and electronic devices, and how it might affect the urgency of China’s urgency in retaking control of Taiwan.
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Obituary: Former Secretary of State Colin Powell – Colin Powell, the four-star general who became the first Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, under President George H.W. Bush, and the first Black secretary of state under President George W. Bush, died Monday from complications of COVID-19. Powell was once considered a potential candidate for president, though he declined to run. As Bush 43’s secretary of state, Powell launched war against Iraq to prevent Saddam Hussein’s government there from using “weapons of mass destruction” (WMDs), that were later revealed to not exist. Powell, 84, was awarded the Congressional Medal of Freedom twice. He was fully vaccinated, his family said in a Facebook post. (From reports by Politico and NPR’s Morning Edition.)
--Edited by Todd Lassa and Gary S. Vasilash