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  Cold War reflections During the Axis of Evil years, there was a sub-category of journalistic histories that went back over the 30s and the Cold War from a Bush-ite perspective, a search for the Good Guys (Americans, Churchill) and the bad guys (Stalin, communists, useful idiots, the whole nine yards). Because I’m writing a story about two lives in the cold war – Willi Schlamm and Otto Katz – I’ve been unpleasantly plunged into this literature. A literature heavily marked by the McCarthyism that succeeded the fall of the wall and the end of history decade of the 90s, that decade which was also the end of big government, also humanitarian intervention, and other alsos that led us to march, finally, on Baghdad. It is a striking thing about this literature that the focus is so entirely on Stalin. There’s little mention of fascist Italy, and Hitler only crops up as Stalin’s secret ally. Much is made of the failure of the communists in Germany to join with the Social Democrats and defeat H

 " The  Tax Policy Center in Washington estimates  that the direct payments and expanded tax credits in the bill would, by themselves, increase after-tax income this year by more than 20 percent for an average household in the lowest quintile of income earners in the United States. It previously had forecast that Mr. Trump’s tax cuts would raise that same group’s income by  less than 1 percent in the first year ." Start with stuff. The stimulus package, as we know to our sorrow, did not contain the minimum wage increase. What it does contain, though, is a program that is targeted to award those in the lower income and median income percentiles. This should not be cause for trumpets, but it is. Since the turn in the seventies - the cat's foot creep of neoliberalism - the neoliberal consensus shared by both parties has been: millionaires first. On the Dem side, this was the a real break with the Clinto-Obama paradigm. Set the conditions for working class people to actually