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Happy Wednesday and welcome back to On The Money. Im Sylvan Lane, and heres your nightly guide to everything affecting your bills, bank account and bottom line.

See something I missed? Let me know at slane@thehill.com or tweet me @SylvanLane. And if you like your newsletter, you can subscribe to it here: http://bit.ly/1NxxW2N.

Write us with tips, suggestions and news: slane@thehill.com, njagoda@thehill.com and nelis@thehill.com. Follow us on Twitter: @SylvanLane, @NJagoda and @NivElis.

THE BIG DEALBiden wins America's economic engines: President-elect Joe BidenJoe BidenBrewery launches new Biden beer described as 'inoffensive and not too bitter' Deb Haaland says 'of course' she would serve as Interior secretary under Biden State Department won't give Biden messages from foreign leaders: report MOREs victory last week came on the strength of his performance in the strongest parts of Americas economy, the latest sign of a growing economic and cultural divide thats increasingly shaping the nations political debate.

That chasm will make reconciliation between bitter partisans all the more difficult in the years ahead. The Hills Reid Wilson tells us why here.

The growing divide: The partisan gap between the nations economic powerhouses and its laggards has widened dramatically over the last two decades.

Why its happening: The growing Democratic advantage is a reflection of the evolution of an economy that was once based on agriculture and manufacturing but is now dominated by services and information.

That shift has concentrated economic power in big cities and among younger, more diverse and better-educated workers all groups that favor Democrats over Republicans.

LEADING THE DAY

Progressives praise Biden's picks for economic transition team: President-elect Joe Biden is earning praise from progressives for tapping a wide range of government veterans and academics to help form an economic team that will be tasked with trying to advance Democratic policies in a deeply divided Washington.

While Biden has not announced any Cabinet nominees, the scholars and economists he picked to lead agency review teams included familiar names in progressive circles. I explain why here.

The transition team:

Biden has also enlisted leading experts on racial economic disparities and discrimination within the financial system, such as University of California Irvine law professor Mehrsa Baradaran and Michigan State University economics professor Lisa Cook.

I think some of this reflects that this administration, for the next two years, will likely rely heavily on administrative reform to help redirect the priorities of the nation and push more fairness and more economic reach for working families and families of color, said Michael Calhoun, president of the Center for Responsible Lending.

Restaurants go seasonal with winter shutdowns during pandemic: Congressional inaction on COVID-19 relief combined with rising coronavirus cases is prompting more restaurants to close up shop for the winter and go into hibernation until warmer weather returns.

Shutting down a restaurant temporarily is never going to be a perfect or elegant solution. There is still going to be workers or suppliers that rely on that restaurants operations that are going to be left short, said Sean Kennedy, executive vice president of public affairs at the National Restaurant Association.

The Hills Alex Gangitano has more here.

GOOD TO KNOW

See the original post:
On The Money: Biden wins America's economic engines | Progressives praise Biden's picks for economic transition team | Restaurants go seasonal with...

Editor: A graceful, triumphant delivery made Joseph Bidens victory speech a success in providing some finality on the elections vexing four-day, vote-counting conclusion. Instead of giving a victory speech on immediate actions to be anticipated from a Biden administration, Biden chose to deliver a unity-minded speech, which primarily served to celebrate the moment.

Bidens speech spoke mostly to the division and tension in America growing and amplified during the coronavirus and the 2020 election.

Instead of using time to bolster the message of a young and evolving coalition, Biden spent his time paying fan service to conservatives, who actively supported an administration disgracing America on the international level. Bidens speech included many remarks specifically tailored to embraced to conservatism, rather than shut the door on it.

Biden promised several actions on climate change, yet his speech did not include special attention to the issue of the climate crisis and solutions. Biden, whose support of the movement remains dubious, has signaled his support for fracking jobs.

Medicare-for-all, which is overwhelmingly popular among progressives and Americans in general, received utterly no attention. This is something Biden and ranking Democratic Party members are loath to move forward, despite its popularity.

Another takeaway of Bidens speech was its failure to address uncertainty about a commitment to combatting income inequality. Biden recycled lines about the importance of a rebuilding a strong middle class and the dignity of work, yet refused to use progressive rhetoric. Sen. Elizabeth Warren had no problem during her own presidential campaign in calling out reckless investments and criminal behavior by leaders in the financial sector; therefore, a newly minted President-elect, deriving his power from the people, should have the veracity to call out the behavior of the 1% in his victory speech.

Aidan Finnerty

Wilkes-Barre

The rest is here:
Biden ignored progressive ideas in his victory speech - Wilkes-Barre Citizens Voice

Topline

Moderate Democrats expressed frustration and, at times, fury on a House caucus call Thursday that several reporters listened in on, arguing the party should immediately break with progressive messaginglike defund the policeafter disappointing House and Senate results.

A participant holding a Abolish Police sign at a protest on Aug. 28, 2020 in Brooklyn, New York. ... [+] (Photo by Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images)

House Majority Whip Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) reportedly said on the call that if we are going to run on Medicare for All, defund the police, socialized medicine, we're not going to win.

Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) expressed outrage with the left, reportedly telling fellow Democrats, dont say socialism ever again while warning that if the party continues moving left that in 2022 we will get f***ing torn apart.

Spanberger appeared to narrowly fend off a Republican challenger for her Virginia Congressional district, as Democrats struggled in competitive districts around the country amid GOP attack ads saying they supported defunding the police and were against law and order.

According to Politico, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) pushed back against Spanbergers characterization of this election as a failure, saying we did not win every battle, but we did win the war.

Democrats appear poised to win the presidency by a slim margin and it seems like a long shot they will take control of the Senatea disappointing reality for many in the party, who were expecting a hefty win over President Donald Trump and flipping many more Senate seats held by Republicans. Led by Trump, the GOP throughout the campaign railed against Democrats, making false claims that they supported rioters in the streets but also attacking Democrats for positions that are becoming more popular in the partynamely, defunding the police and an embrace of the term socialism. Those attacks seemed to especially connect in places like the swing state of Florida, where Trump won by three points and Republicans flipped U.S. House seats in the southern part of the state.

Control of the Senate seems that it could come down to two racesboth in the state of Georgia, thanks to a special election for one of the states Senate seats, with both potentially going to runoffs on Jan. 5. If leaders in uncalled Senate races hold on to win, that would mean Democrats would have to win both of those Georgia seats to potentially take control of the Senate. But that would only be possible if Joe Biden and running mate Kamala Harris are also elected, which they appeared well-positioned to do as of Thursday afternoon. In that scenario, the Senate would be a 50-50 tie between the Democratic caucus and Republicans, with Harris able to serve as a tiebreaker in her role as vice president.

Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), who are collectively known as The Squad and commonly painted as representing the partys left, all won reelection.

Rep. Donna Shalala (D-Fla.), who lost her south Florida seat, reportedly said leadership has been excellent and I have no complaints.

Dem leaders warn caucus not to veer left after House losses (Politico)

Its Not OK: Democrats Start Pointing Fingers After Losing Major Ground In Miami-Dade (Forbes)

Read the rest here:
Dont Say Socialism Ever Again: Democrats In Congress Push Back Against Lefty Messaging After Disappointing Election - Forbes

While most radical artists have spent the last few years demanding that statues of imperial heroes be pulled down, in Manchester they have gone the other way. In 2017, the film-maker Phil Collins transported a statue of Friedrich Engels on a flat-bed truck from eastern Ukraine, a former colony of the Soviet empire, to the heart of the northern powerhouse.

It was a superb, counter-intuitive gesture: placing the man who hated Cottonopolis in the heart of its commercial nexus. For with the exception of a polite blue plaque in north Londons Primrose Hill and a sign that once stood on Eastbourne beach (where his ashes were scattered), the statue is one of the hopelessly few reminders we have of one of Britains greatest emigres.

This month marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of the Rhinelander turned reluctant Mancunian turned old Londoner.

Always happy to play second fiddle to so splendid a first violin as Karl Marx (How can anyone be envious of genius; its something so very special that we, who have not got it, know it to be unattainable right from the start?), he deserves so much more than just being cast as historys supporting man.

Not only was he instrumental in shaping 20th-century Marxism, but his own vision of socialism feels more relevant to our contemporary concerns than does the pure political economy of Karl Marx.

Born on 28 November 1820 in Barmen, along the Wupper Valley, in Prussia, Engels grew up as the scion of a strictly Calvinist, capitalist, and suffocatingly bourgeois family of textile merchants. His was a loving childhood of plentiful siblings, family wealth and communal cohesion in what was termed the German Manchester. But from an early age Engels found the human costs of his familys prosperity hard to bear. Aged only 19, he wrote of the plight of factory workers in low rooms where people breathe in more coal fumes and dust than oxygen, and lamented the creation of totally demoralised people, with no fixed abode or definite employment.

After falling under the spell of the Young Hegelians at Berlin University it was 1840s Manchester that turned him towards socialism. Sent to work at the family mill in Salford in the epicentre of the industrial revolution, he saw how unregulated capitalism entailed sustained dehumanisation: Women made unfit for childbearing, children deformed, men enfeebled, limbs crushed, whole generations wrecked, afflicted with disease and infirmity, purely to fill the purses of the bourgeoisie, as he put it in his masterwork, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845).

What Engels also brilliantly revealed in this book was how urban planning and regeneration were arenas for class conflict. He is the father of modern urban sociology, explaining in ways in which we are only now familiar how city space is always socially and economically constructed. Todays commentators on the privatisation of public space or Mike Daviss work on our Planet of Slums all exist in the shadow of Engels pioneering critique of industrial Manchester.

After the failure of the 1848 continental revolutions, Engels was forced to return to Manchester as a cotton lord in order to fund Marxs philosophy. He hated it. Huckstering is too beastly, most beastly of all is the fact of being not only a bourgeois but one who actively takes sides against the proletariat.

That painful personal sacrifice ensured the publication of Das Kapital in 1867 and, with it, the summation of the Marxian world view. Unfortunately, Marxs life work soon looked in danger of falling victim to the bourgeois conspiracy of silence, until Engels started organising much-needed publicity. It was Engelss popularisation of Marxs central insights in his pamphlets Anti-Dhring and Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, that launched Marxism as a compelling global creed.

Most people are too lazy to read stout tomes like Das Kapital, Engels explained, as his own easily intelligible guides to Marxism garnered readers across France, Germany, America, Italy and Russia.

After Marxs death in 1883, Engels enjoyed the freedom of expanding Marxs thinking in new directions. In his study of the history of family life, Engels laid the foundations for socialist feminism with his connection of capitalist exploitation to gender inequality.

Similarly, Engels pioneered the Marxist vision of colonial liberation with his early analysis of imperialism as a core component of Western capitalism. From Vietnam to Ethiopia, China to Venezuela, Engelss theory of emancipation was adopted by anti-imperial freedom fighters, even as the Soviet empire deployed him to expand across eastern Europe.

Engels was a figure of profound historical and philosophical significance. Yet what I discovered, as his biographer, was that his vision of socialism could also be richly uplifting: the grisly, corrupt, anti-intellectual egalitarian Marxism of the 20th century would have horrified him. The concept of a socialist society as a realm of equality is a one-sided French concept, he said. Instead, Engels believed in cascading the pleasures of life food, sex, drink, culture, travel, even fox-hunting across all classes. Socialism should not be a never-ending Labour party meeting, but a life of enjoyment. The real challenge of living in Manchester was that he could find no single opportunity to make use of my acknowledged gift for mixing a lobster salad.

It is entirely appropriate then that his statue now commands Tony Wilson Place, named in honour of the fast-living co-founder of Factory Records and the Hacienda nightclub, who also believed in the good things in life. Finally, 200 years after his birth, and a long way from his birthplace, we have a proper memory of Engels in his rightful place.

See the article here:
Engels comes of age: the socialist who wanted a joyous life for everyone - The Guardian

I keep seeing folks worried sick that the Democrats will bring us socialism. When I hear that I think back to when Bob Hope said he wasnt a bit worried about socialism as long as skilled tradesmen were making $40,000 a year. This was back when that was a real good living wage.

I also read a book once that was titled Lenin in Zurich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. It was amusing reading about Lenins frustration trying to enlist Swiss workmen in communism. Workers there had it pretty darn good and didnt want any changes. I dont believe the United States will ever be a real socialist country.

Seattle, which is one of the most liberal cities anywhere, is practically lousy with rich capitalists. Many of the richest and most successful people on Earth live in Seattle. I think accusing Trump of being a Nazi or Biden being a socialist is pretty lame. I lived in both liberal West Coast cities and in conservative rural areas in the plains states and I met nice people both places.

Mike Miller

Everett

More:
Fears regarding Democrats and socialism are overblown - The Daily Herald