wa monthly
often in alternet
prolly neglected
SEVERAL AN 3 26
see wa mon (bak?)
often does big picture?
i just heard talk by founder on socialism hist from 90's kpfa ts song? 320
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wa mo 10 26
here’s a grim reality that few would have predicted in the 1990s: Neo-Nazi rhetoric and ideology have found a place in American political discourse. You don’t have to believe America is fascist to become alarmed that crackpot rhetoric has found its way into the national dialogue. Review the ravings of Timothy McVeigh, watch footage of a neo-Nazi rally, or even sit down with a 1998 movie like American History X, the story of a skinhead played by Edward Norton, and you will discern a disturbing pattern.
Beyond epithets, the vocabulary of lunacy and hatred is now part of our vernacular.
“The Great Replacement” theory is boilerplate Republican lingo and dogma. Although it originated with a French nationalist, it was David Lane, cofounder of the white supremacist organization The Order, who was responsible for its American coinage. He included it in his 1995 textual vomit, the White Genocide Manifesto. Today’s leading proponent of the Great Replacement Theory is Vice President JD Vance, who recently told Angie Nixon, a Black woman running for the U.S. Senate in Florida and a natural-born citizen, “You don’t belong in America,” excoriating her alignment with democratic socialism. He told her to “get the hell out of the country.” Meanwhile, Vance has also developed a habit of whining about “institutionalized anti-white discrimination,” a longtime staple of neo-Nazi recruitment campaigns.
Related
It’s Hard to Find Any Daylight Between Trump and Neo-Nazis
American Terrorism: From Timothy McVeigh to January 6
John Bolton’s New Chief of Staff Has Deeply Alarming Connections
It is common for Vance, his supporters, and his dotard superior, Donald Trump, to denigrate their critics and adversaries as “globalists.” The Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee explain that “globalist” originated in white supremacist circles as a pejorative to identify those who were directly involved in the “great replacement” and “new world order.” The most frequent targets of the thinly veiled conspiracy theory were Jews. In the contemporary right-wing media ecosystem, a “globalist” is anyone who opposes the “real America,” “Christianity,” and even “God.” George Soros, the Jewish financier and philanthropist, even at 96 and rarely seen, remains the most influential and dangerous “globalist.”
“Cultural Marxism” is another popular expression of derangement in mainline right-wing politics. Pundits, ranging from Fox News’s Sean Hannity to internet staples Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, use the term to castigate everything from gender studies programs at major universities to Disney films with gay characters. Owens has claimed that “satanic pedophiles who work for Israel” rule over the common people. While few reach her levels of psychosis, “cultural Marxism,” according to one scholar of political extremism, has become the “conspiracy theory of our time.” It is strikingly similar to Nazi propaganda that warned Europeans of “Cultural Bolshevism” deriving from Jewish intellectuals.
Decades after the fall of the Third Reich, the term, which first became popular within the White Power Movement, has been broadened to condemn multiculturalism and social liberalism.
A cacophony of neo-Nazi rhetoric is broadcast globally with the amplification of Elon Musk, who not only uses the terminology himself, but shifts the algorithm on X to promote brazen racism and antisemitism. The trillionaire is also one of the most effective manipulators of widespread white anxiety, stoking delusions of persecution and censorship. Far-right bloviators, with audiences numbering from the hundreds of thousands to millions, pounce on those who argue for pluralism, multiculturalism, even decency, denouncing them as “woke.” The result: Legions of young white men now believe that support for “free speech” equates to approval of demeaning insults of racial minorities, gay and transgender people, and women.
The left once functioned as a bulwark against recrudescence of hatred, but in recent years has demonstrated a tendency to parrot neo-Nazi nomenclature. In their zealotry to denounce all things Israeli, progressive podcast hosts, such as Emma Vigeland, Jennifer Welch, and Hasan Piker, along with their large numbers of devoted listeners, have taken to deploying the terms “Zionist” and “Zio” as slurs. The origin of “Zio” as a pejorative traces back to none other than David Duke, the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, who, between plastic surgery recovery periods, still makes time to slander Blacks, Jews, and immigrants of color.
The accusation that “Zionists,” whether through AIPAC or alleged Israeli influence, control the US government, subverting democracy in service of themselves, is found on the left and right. The remix of the “Jewish cabal” conspiracy, now prevalent in online discourse, was once the hallmark of the White Power Movement. During the 1980s, David Lane’s organization, The Order, committed a series of terrorist acts to fight “ZOG,” the “Zionist Occupied Government.”
Christian Picciolini, a former neo-Nazi who, in the 1990s, was the leader of Chicago-Area Skinheads (CASH), the largest neo-Nazi street gang in the U.S., and would later become an inspiring anti-racist advocate and deradicalization specialist, has discussed how he and other hate movement leaders advised young supporters to “trade their boots for suits.” Instead of turning themselves into societal pariahs, they should insinuate themselves in American institutions, from law enforcement to local government, spreading their beliefs through more socially palatable means than swastika tattoos and vandalism.
It doesn’t require much paranoia to speculate that the “boots for suits” strategy has succeeded beyond its proponents’ wildest dreams. The neo-Nazis have seen their terminology enter the national vocabulary. Their language and influence are visible everywhere, poisoning debate and turning generations of young men into vessels of cruelty, paranoia, and prejudice. Far more destructive than hate speech, the racial profiling and violence of ICE demonstrate that, under the authority of President Trump, it functions as a white nationalist paramilitary.
This is not a fascist nation, and there are no Brownshirts in the streets, brawling in the lead-up to an important legislative election, as was so common in Weimar Germany. But the lexicon of hate is in our broadcast world and political discourse in ways that Ernst Rohm or Joseph Goebbels might recognize even if today’s technology would have been inconceivable to them.
As pundits focus on the midterms, remember that a long-term struggle transcends the immediate stakes of congressional control: Pushing neo-Nazi politics toward a foul corner, where it belongs, out of the public square. This demands sustained focus and vigilance. Election results, even if they are awful for MAGA this year, are far from conclusive about the prospects of hate in America.
Independent since 1969.
The Washington Monthly is nonprofit and reader-supported. Your tax-deductible gift pays for the reporting you just read.
Tagged:Angie Nixon, Anti-Defamation League, Christian Picciolini, David Lane, Donald Trump, Edward Norton, Elon Musk, Ernst Rohm, great replacement theory, JD Vance, Jennifer Welch, Joseph Goebbels, MAGA, neo-Nazis, Third Reich, Timothy McVeigh
David Masciotra, a contributing writer to the Washington Monthly, is the author of several books, including Exurbia Now: The Battleground of American Democracy and I Am Somebody: Why Jesse Jackson Matters. His Substack is Absurdia Now. More by David Masciotra
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AN 3 26
President Donald Trump’s belligerent foreign policy can be understood by his “abusive, impulsive narcissist relations with women,” says the associate editor of a prominent Washington DC magazine.
Describing Trump’s statement last week that he plans on “taking Cuba in some form” because he can “do anything I want with it,” the bottom line is that “Trump’s megalomania continues to grow because he is so rarely punished for it,” wrote Washington Monthly associate editor Gillen Tener Martin in a Sunday editorial.
From winning the 2016 presidential election despite the "Access Hollywood” tape leaking (in that tape he bragged about sexually assaulting women) to getting reelected in 2024 even though he was found liable by a civil jury for the sexual assault of E. Jean Carroll, Trump has learned that he can harm others with impunity — and that translates into his policy choices.
“But, of course, ‘I can do anything’ isn’t just Trump’s modus operandi with women,” Martin wrote. “It’s his mantra—how he moves through life: selfishly, chaotically, with little forethought and no expectation of consequences. And we’ve seen how that translates into policy; from tariffs to vaccines to DOGE, from Minneapolis to Venezuela to Iran.”
Martin added, “Turns out, if you’re an abusive, impulsive narcissist in your relations with women, you tend to be one in other areas of life, too. Who would’ve thought?”
There is good news for anti-Trumpers in that Trump’s attitude of invincibility does not translate into actual invincibility, Martin pointed out. He failed to repeal Obamacare, contain the COVID-19 pandemic, steal the 2020 presidential election or convince America’s former allies to back his reckless military venture in Iran.
“Even a military superpower needs allies in war, and allies are hard to find when war is waged on specious grounds without a diplomatic endgame,” Martin concluded regarding the last point. “Under different circumstances, the president being forced to reckon with the consequences of his actions may have brought solace—even glee—to some. Alas, the repercussions of this mess will come for us all.”
Martin’s concern over a possible US invasion of Cuba is based on Trump’s recent fixation on the Caribbean island country. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose parents are Cuban immigrants and who is a staunch opponent of that nation’s longstanding Communist regime, has long called for the island to be democratized.
"There is a very personal and corrupt agenda that he is carrying out, which seems to be sacrificing the national interests of the U.S. in order to advance this very extremist approach," Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla told the AP in October about Rubio.
In response to additional Trump threats in January, Cuba's President Miguel Diaz-Canel told Reuters that "Cuba is a free, independent, and sovereign nation. Nobody dictates what we do. Cuba does not attack; it has been attacked by the U.S. for 66 years, and it does not threaten; it prepares, ready to defend the homeland to the last drop of blood."
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nancy let
Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chair of the World Economic Forum, raised an :{important question:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: last December: “What kind of capitalism do we want?” He posited that there were three potential forms:
- Shareholder capitalism—which currently dominates Western corporations and is focused on maximizing short-term profits;
- State capitalism—otherwise known as “democratic socialism”—which trusts the government with setting the direction of the economy; or
- Stakeholder capitalism—a system in which corporations serve the interests of all their stakeholders, including customers, suppliers, employees, shareholders, and local communities.
Schwab founded the World Economic Forum in part to promote the benefits of stakeholder capitalism. During a speech in July, President-elect Joe Biden :{said that:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: “It’s way past time to put the end to the era of shareholder capitalism. The idea [that] the only responsibility a corporation has is its shareholders—that is simply not true …They have a responsibility to their workers, their community, to their country.”
Recognizing that the coronavirus pandemic had exposed “inconsistencies, inadequacies and contradictions of multiple systems—from health and financial to energy and education,” the World Economic Forum launched :{an initiative called:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}:“The Great Reset” in June 2020 to extol the principles of stakeholder capitalism. Klaus :{wrote:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: that the initiative’s goals would have three main components.
- Governments should improve coordination (for example, in tax, regulatory, and fiscal policy), upgrade trade arrangements, and create the conditions for a “stakeholder economy.”
- Investments should advance shared goals, such as equality and sustainability.
- Innovations of the :{Fourth Industrial Revolution:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: should be harnessed to support the public good, especially by addressing health and social challenges.
Of course, those on the far left who are :{committed:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}:to viewing corporations as the enemy have responded to this initiative with derision. But they have a point. For the most part, the Great Reset relies on voluntary efforts from corporations to reform themselves, asking the government to merely “create the conditions” for change. While such efforts may be laudable, they have never been sufficient. Some form of regulatory oversight is necessary.
On the far right, however, the Great Reset has become grist for massive QAnon-like conspiracy theories used by various groups to promote their own self-interests. For example, Justin Haskins is often :{referred:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: to as “a leading authority on the Great Reset” in right-wing media. He not only :{writes:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: for publications like Breitbart, he is the :{editorial director:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: and a research fellow at the Heartland Institute, a libertarian public policy think tank :{founded:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: in 1984 to deny the science of climate change. That is the backdrop on which Haskins distorts the message of the Great Reset, transforming it into a socialist plot to implement the Green New Deal, when in fact it is anything but socialist.
In short, the Great Reset is a proposal to completely alter the entire global economy, moving it more toward collectivism and away from capitalism. According to its most ardent supporters, the purpose for the “Great Reset” is three-fold: (1) repairing the global economic damage caused by the coronavirus; (2) stopping a coming climate change catastrophe; and (3) using the two previously mentioned “crises” as an opportunity to advance socialist ideals, including the destruction of capitalism and individual rights.
Another major proponent of a conspiracy theory about the Great Reset is Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, a former Vatican ambassador to the United States and an outspoken adversary of Pope Francis. In October, he :{penned a letter:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: to Donald Trump warning that “the whole world is being threatened by a global conspiracy against God and humanity.”
A global plan called the Great Reset is underway. Its architect is a global élite that wants to subdue all of humanity, imposing coercive measures with which to drastically limit individual freedoms and those of entire populations…
The purpose of the Great Resetis the imposition of a health dictatorship aiming at the imposition of liberticidal measures, hidden behind tempting promises of ensuring a universal income and cancelling individual debt. The price of these concessions from the International Monetary Fund will be the renunciation of private property and adherence to a program of vaccination against Covid-19 and Covid-21 promoted by Bill Gates with the collaboration of the main pharmaceutical groups…
As is now clear, the one who occupies the Chair of Peter has betrayed his role from the very beginning in order to defend and promote the globalist ideology, supporting the agenda of the deep church, who chose him from its ranks.
According to Viganò, the “deep state” has now been joined by the “deep church,” headed by the Pope he :{attempted:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: to unseat.
Tucked away in Viganò’s letter is a reference to another conspiracy theory recently :{promoted:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: by televangelist Pat Robertson about Biden merely being a placeholder for a Harris presidency. The archbishop wrote that, “It is obvious that those who manipulate [Biden] already have someone worse than him ready, with whom they will replace him as soon as the opportunity arises.” It should come as no surprise, then, that Christian nationalists have once again joined far right Catholics in spreading lies.
[vid]
if all of this talk about a globalist conspiracy crafted by the elites sounds familiar, that’s because it has always been the foundational message coming from Steve Bannon, who :{joined:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: Archbishop Viganò in attempting to undermine Pope Francis. Bannon is now using his Youtube channel :{to promote:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: a slightly different, but even more sinister take on the Great Reset.
In Bannon-land, the great reset is an opportunity for the elite cabal to “depopulate” the earth to 500 million, then genetically engineer humankind using “the convergence of artificial intelligence, advances in chip design and bioengineering.” He explains that the Democrats are attempting to “steal this election” because “if they can thwart the will of the people in this country,” they’ll be able to achieve the great reset by taking down populist movements in other countries as well.
As you can see, whether your agenda is to deny climate change, challenge the Pope, or warn of an impending apocalypse, the Great Reset can be twisted into a conspiracy theory to meet your needs, regardless of how many lies that requires.
g epps law emeritus ACS
https://muckrack.com/garrett-epps/articles
~ filibuster
Trump’s 1776 Commission: A Fable from the Future
By Garrett Epps
It’s the worst, most bonkers history lesson no one asked for: The former president’s pushback on The 1619 Project. A legal scholar’s imaginative look back. January 26, 2021 | 2:05 AM A NOTE FROM THE FUTURE—Not since the burning of the Great Library of Alexandria has human learning suffered such a grave setback as occurred on Inauguration Day 2021
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/how-a-con-artist-scammed-the-u-s-government-from-the-shadows/
no lnx
Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly September 17, 2020
On October 23rd, Garrison Courtney will be sentenced in court after pleading guilty to an elaborate fraud scheme that raked in at least $4.4 million from federal contractors. The tale reads like a Hollywood script. Courtney had a relatively undistinguished career as a spokesperson for the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Department of Homeland Security. But apparently he studied up on spycraft and, as his high school drama teacher suggested, “Sometimes I think I trained him too well as an actor.”
Courtney presented himself to unwitting private companies as a CIA agent who could steer contracts their way if they gave him a salary and an office. To back up his story, Courtney produced memos on the letterhead of various federal agencies spelling out authorization for what he was doing and containing the forged signatures of high-level government officials. He also recruited current and former military leaders to a task force he named “Alpha214” and used them as unwitting props to validate his claims.
Incredibly, the now 44-year-old built enough of a reputation to actually place himself inside the National Institutes of Health as a watchdog over the allocation of no-bid contracts. What you have at that point is the proverbial fox inside the henhouse. But by that time, the scheme had started to unravel.
Some of the heroes of this story were lawyers at the companies Courtney swindled who began asking why they weren’t being paid under the contracts they had signed.
Navid Keshavarz-Nia was another hero. He had done cybersecurity and technical counterintelligence work for the C.I.A., N.S.A. and F.B.I. After several months of working with Courtney, he fired off a resignation letter from Alpha214, distributed to its members, and addressed Courtney directly: “It is clear that I have been deliberately deceived, lied to and criminally victimized by you based on your numerous false statements.” At about the same time, the Justice Department began an investigation.
It’s not hard to figure out how this fraud could work. You take a skilled con artist and add it to the feeding frenzy for government contracts. Combine that toxic mix with something my colleague Gilad Edelman wrote for the Washington Monthly three years ago.
While the number of federal employees has basically flatlined for a half-century, the government has ballooned if you include another group in your tally: private contractors. As the size and scope of federal programs grew, but the number of civil servants stayed fixed, that labor had to get done by someone. Congress’s answer has increasingly been to contract with the private sector…
Very few Americans realize that this exact trend—using contractors to hide the true size and cost of a government mission—is not even close to being limited to the military. It’s ubiquitous. There has been a de facto political cap on federal workers since the 1970s, and every administration since at least Jimmy Carter’s has used contractors to get around it. Bill Clinton, who announced that “the era of big government is over,” harvested the end of the Cold War to cut 400,000 federal jobs, mostly in defense. But big government was only over if you ignored the contracting workforce, which kept rising by the hundreds of thousands. The Bush administration took things to another level, as contracting morphed from a way to sneakily expand government to an ideological goal in itself.
There are lessons from this tale that go beyond the importance of holding an individual like Courtney accountable for his crimes. Here’s how Edleman summarized the situation:
The key is to transcend the false choice of big government versus small government. The real choice is between a transparent and relatively competent big government of civil servants and a dysfunctional shadow big government of private contractors.
Whenever our government operates in the shadows, exploitation by con artists like Courtney is possible.
Liar-in-chief’ Trump has broken the last vestiges of trust Americans had in their government
Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly September 15, 2020
For the last four years, the busiest people in journalism have been the fact-checkers who compile Trump’s lies, which total well over 20,000. Early in this administration, there were discussions about what…
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/trump-and-his-cronies-must-be-brought-to-justice-but-more-will-be-required/
no lnx
trump and his cronies must be brought to justice — but more will be required
Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly September 15, 2020
Over the weekend, David Atkins wrote a piece titled, “To Save Democracy, Democrats Must Hold Trump Officials Accountable.” He ended by noting that “people have to go to jail for what has happened, or there probably won’t be a democracy worth saving for long.”
Reaching a similar conclusion, Jonathan Chait has a piece in the latest edition of New York Magazine titled, “Lock Him Up? For the Republic to survive Trump’s presidency, he must be tried for his crimes. Even if that sparks a constitutional crisis of its own.”
Trump’s reversals of Obama-era police reforms and his open contempt for the law send a signal about whom the law constrains and whom it protects. The fashioning of a more equal society means sending a different message: The rule of law must bind everyone, just as it protects everyone. A world where the power of the state can be brought to bear against a person who was once its most famous symbol of wealth is one where every American will more easily imagine a future in which we are all truly equal before the law.
Even with that conclusion, Chait raises important considerations. One of them is that, along with everything else, Trump has politicized crime. As Chait suggests, “crimes has ceased to denote violations of written law and become instead a catchall description for any anti-Trump activity.” That provides the kind of closure mechanism the president’s supporters use to not only wall themselves off from facts, but reinforces the narrative of Trump being the victim of lawbreakers out to get him. It must, therefore, be taken as a fact that approximately 40 percent of the population will view prosecution of Trump and members of his administration as political payback from the opposition, regardless of its grounding in evidence.
That leads to the major dilemma Chait outlined.
The prospect of an electorally defeated Trump, though glorious, would immediately set off a conflict between two fundamental democratic values: the rule of law and mutual toleration. The rule of law is a banal yet utterly foundational concept that the law is a set of rights and obligations, established in advance, that apply equally to everybody…
Mutual toleration means that political opponents must accept the legitimacy and legality of their opponents. If elected leaders can send their opponents to prison and otherwise discredit them, then leaders are afraid to relinquish power lest they be imprisoned themselves…
If the government is run by lawbreakers, though, the state faces a dilemma: Either the principle of equal treatment under the law or the tradition of a peaceful transition of power will be sacrificed. It’s hard to imagine any outcome under which the rule of law survives Trump unscathed.
This president’s criminality means that we will be forced to choose between two foundational principles of democracy: the rule of law or mutual toleration. Chait makes the case that protecting the rule of law is more important, recognizing the threat that poses to a peaceful transition of power.
What I appreciate about Chait’s analysis is that he takes what would otherwise be the unintended consequences of his position into consideration. Those are the kinds of difficult choices that, more often than not, don’t present us with clear options of right vs wrong or good vs evil.
But given that both Atkins and Chait frame their arguments in terms of what will be required to save democracy, it is important to also recognize that, should Biden win in November, prosecuting Trump and members of his administration will be necessary, but not sufficient to complete the task.
Many of the ways that Trump has corrupted our democracy don’t constitute crimes that can be prosecuted in court. Some of those could be addressed for the future by passing new laws, such as requiring presidential candidates to release their tax returns and a more complete requirement for divestment from business interests.
Others, however, involved the breaking of norms that have developed over decades and don’t lend themselves to legal remedies. As an example, one of the major contributors to the erosion of the rule of law is the breakdown of independence between the president and the attorney general. Even cases that could be prosecuted have been covered up by Bill Barr, such as Trump’s obstruction of justice in the Mueller investigation.
It becomes difficult to imagine how that wall can be constructed via legislation, and yet the way that expectation has been destroyed over the last few years threatens the rule of law even more profoundly than it would be if Trump isn’t prosecuted after leaving office. When the attorney general turns a blind eye to a president who violates the Constitution, this country is in serious jeopardy.
Of course, we might not even be having this discussion if Republican senators hadn’t dismissed the evidence against Trump that was produced during the impeachment trial. Having a major political party that is willing to embrace lawlessness in order to stay in power is perhaps the biggest threat to democracy that we face today. There is no easy remedy to that one.
The rather pessimistic conclusion therefore, is that, even if Biden wins and the Trump administration is held legally accountable, our democracy will remain imperiled. It always has been. It’s just that we can now see how.
no lnx twt
Trump vaccine that actually works
Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly September 9, 2020
If you talked politics over the last few days with Trump supporters, you probably got a good lesson in how they have become inoculated against information that contradicts their assumptions about the president.
Jeffrey Goldberg’s article in the Atlantic about how Trump referred to Americans who have died in war as “losers” and “suckers” was published last Thursday—just in time to ruminate over the three-day weekend. It included three to four sources per quote and was eventually confirmed by the Associated Press, the Washington Post, Fox News, CNN, and the New York Times. As David Frum documented, the reports seemed plausible based on all of the other times Trump attacked members of the military. The silences are also resounding.
Amid the clamor, it’s easy to overlook those who are not yelling, those who are keeping silent. Where are the senior officers of the United States armed forces, serving and retired—the men and women who worked most closely on military affairs with President Trump? Has any one of them stepped forward to say, “That’s not the man I know”?
How many wounded warriors have stepped forward to attest to Trump’s care and concern for them? How many Gold Star families have stepped forward on Trump’s behalf? How many service families?
The silence is resounding. And when such voices do speak, they typically describe a president utterly lacking in empathy to grieving families, wholly uncomprehending of sacrifice and suffering.
It wasn’t long before Trump responded with attacks against Goldberg, The Atlantic, and Laurene Powell Jobs, the magazine’s majority owner.
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Most of the president’s supporters didn’t need the prompt, however. It quickly became labelled “fake news.” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who had been preparing to launch a book tour this week, defended Trump by describing a president most of us have never seen.
While Sanders says that she has witnessed Trump showing heart and demonstrating respect, we’ve never actually witnessed that kind of behavior from him in public. It makes her denial much less plausible. But her description of the president is something his supporters desperately want to believe. So they utilize the closure mechanisms Trump has provided for them by calling The Atlantic report “fake news,” which automatically makes the president a victim. It is exactly the process described by Julian Sanchez in his explanation of the term “epistemic closure.”
Over the weekend a chorus arose asking for John Kelly, who was present during most of the discussions cited by Goldberg, to address what happened. Underlying that call is the assumption that the former White House Chief of Staff could actually clear things up. While I think that he should do so for the sake of his own conscience, it is absurd to think that Trump supporters would listen to him any more than they did when former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis called the president a threat to our Constitution.
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The president’s supporters are not going to change their minds about the most dishonest and corrupt man to ever occupy the Oval Office. While it remains important to document his incompetence and malfeasance, it isn’t likely to have any impact politically. Trump has one vaccine that actually works: He’s inoculated his supporters against anything that might threaten their loyalty to him.
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David Atkins / Washington Monthly August 16, 2020
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/why-the-gop-cant-control-qanon-the-party-was-already-becoming-a-conspiracy-cult/
at long last, mainstream reporters are starting to take the QAnon conspiracy cult seriously. With at least one QAnon devotee about to be elected to Congress, millions of online followers and several big stories in major publications, the cult has come into its own. Pushback against it has come too little, too late. Facebook, Twitter and TikTok only recently started deactivating major QAnon promoters and groups, even as those accounts engage in coordinated ban evasion and continue to peddle lies on other platforms.
I (as others have) use the word “cult” here very intentionally. QAnon is not a political movement centered around an ideology or policy platform: it is a freewheeling grab bag of mostly far-right but also non-partisan conspiracy theories from flat-earthers to believers in lizard people to those who believe that JFK Jr is still alive and coordinating the arrests of a massive global pedophile and Satanic child sacrifice ring. Its adherents demand not allegiance to a specific orthodoxy, but only blind faith in the leader: an anonymous online figure nicknamed “Q” who began posting on 4chan during the early days of the Trump Administration, claiming to be a member of the administration withtop “Q” level security clearance (no such clearance actually exists.) Members spend countless hours analyzing specific “drops” from Q, using numerology and other hokey deep reading techniques to parse misspelling in Trump tweets for hidden messages and patterns, fitting them into bizarre and hopelessly complicated “calendars” and “clocks.”
The key catchphrases of the movement are typical of cultic in-groups with political overtones. “Trust the Plan.” “Patriots Are in Control.” “Where We Go One We Go All.” It provides a built-in community of fellow believers, and a chiliastic all-encompassing spiritual battle against both human and supernatural enemies. As with an adventist cult, Q followers are supposed to beessential team members laying the groundwork for the exposure of the “truth”: a giant global ring of child-eating Satanist pedophiles restricting access tofree energy, debt jubileesand world peace.
Central to all of this is the figure of Donald Trump, who will supposedly one day bring “the pain”: the mass arrest and summary execution of all the cult’s enemies, ranging from standard right-wing targets like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to celebrities like Tom Hanks and Chrissy Teigen. (The fact that President Trump, leader of the Executive Branch of the United States, has supposedly allowed this ring to exist unhampered for nearly four years while an anonymous 8chan user spreads the gospel is dismissed as a minor inconvenience.) All of it is overlaid on existing white supremacist and anti-semitic themes, as the enemy is supposed to be a “globalist” cabal using minorities to overwhelm majority-white Christian nations.
QAnon followers are also suffering the same sorts of social isolation and estrangement from family and friends that is typical of new cult members. QAnon leaders, for their part, offer a substitute family for them in replacement. As QAnon influencer Martin Geddes once tweeted before his account was suspended:
'Part of the struggle of being “awake(ish)” is that many of your normal sources of support become flimsy or even can attack. Your preacher, teacher, therapist, mother, lover etc can be under the spell of false narratives or devious doctrines. Requires building a whole new network.”
This is not a political movement. It is a :{novel form of :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}::{online religion:(style="background-color:#ffcc66;"):}: enabled by social media algorithms. And it is deeply dangerous, not just because of its capacity for catapulting all sorts of misinformation but also because of its natural tendency toward political violence. After all, if you believed that such things were true and such people existed, what would you do to stop them?
One would think that the Republican Party would see the danger of this phenomenon and try to nip it in the bud, as surely as any political entity would try to quell a cult growing like a cancer within it. But it hasn’t. House GOP Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has come under fire for not doing enough to stop QAnon within Republican circles and hewing too close to Trump, but he is unlikely to be seriously threatened for leadership. Trump himself refuses to try to squelch the conspiracy group, seeing any supporter as a good supporter.
The problem is that Republican Party has been relying on only slightly milder forms of conspiratorial politics for years now. It’s staggering to ponder the implications of modern Republican ideology all at once, but consider a few examples. To be a modern Republican you have to believe that thousands of climate scientists are engaged in a worldwide conspiracy to falsify data for grant money, while oil executives are victims trying to expose the truth. You have to believe that hundreds of thousands or even millions of people are engaged in coordinated voter impersonation fraud, abetted by hundreds of local elections officials in both blue and red areas, and no one has ever leaked it or been caught. You have to believe in a massively coordinated effort to take away guns not to protect children from being shot in schools and movie theaters, but to leave white people defenseless in a race war or implement a Stalinist state tyranny. You have to believe that social services are a racket to keep racial minorities voting for Democrats, rather than an attempt to mitigate the inequities of brutal capital markets in a society riddled with horrific structural racism. And so on.
These (among others) are truly bizarre beliefs, but they are preached from the Fox News pulpit 24-hours-a-day on America’s most-watched cable news network. They have become part of our daily political existence, such that we barely stop to remark anymore on just how outlandish and nonsensical they are when given a moment’s thought.It’s a deeply conspiratorial worldview that depends on its adherents remaining ensconced in a bubble of alternative misinformation.
So it’s not a huge logical leap from these conspiracy theories into even more fantastical QAnon territory. It’s not a big step, for instance, from ridiculously claiming that climate scientists are all lying for grant money–which lacks real credibility as a motive–to speculating that they’re lying for deeper, more nefarious ends. In some ways the Republican tropes actually gain more credibility the more villainous the opponents’ motives are claimed to be. If you’re going to claim that Democrats want to offer universal childcare as an evil scheme to gain power to do vague unspecified things, why not go all the way to claiming that they want to keep patriots subdued so they can harvest babies for adrenochrome? If you’re going to vilify your enemies with absurd claims and keep your followers in a tightly controlled information bubble, why stop at a partially enraptured cable news/AM radio audience? Why not go all the way?
This is why the GOP can’t control QAnon. Once the Republican Party handed over control of its messaging to cable news and radio hosts, and once it began to depend on an alternative universe of conspiracy theories promulgated on social media to prop itself up, it was only a matter of time before these things started to take on a life of their own.
Now we are all paying the price as this toxic cult threatens to infuse American politics with even more extremism, misinformation and violence. But it was the “mainstream” Republican Party and its allies that laid all the groundwork for it.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/christian-nationalists-are-willing-to-toss-the-constitution-aside-because-trump-gave-them-exactly-what-they-want/
no lnx twt
Christian nationalists are willing to toss the Constitution aside because Trump gave them exactly what they want
Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly August 11, 2020
On Sunday, Trump’s trade advisor Peter Navarro attempted to justify the president’s memorandum on coronavirus relief by suggesting that God had something to do with creating executive orders.[twt]
The narrative is that congress is simply a “swamp” and so Trump took action via something that was created by God and our founding fathers to bypass the legislative body. Of course, that is the opposite of what was written into the Constitution when it describes three separate, but equal branches of government. In a sense, Navarro is claiming that our founding fathers created a mechanism for the president to act as king. He backs that up with the idea that God was involved with doing so.
None of that is going to be a concern for Trump’s base among Christian nationalists. Over the weekend, Elizabeth Dias published a piece in which she reminded us of that one time when Trump actually told the truth by saying that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue in broad daylight and his supporters wouldn’t abandon him. She noted that it was during that same speech at a Christian college in Iowa that Trump said this:
“I will tell you, Christianity is under tremendous siege, whether we want to talk about it or we don’t want to talk about it,” Mr. Trump said.
Christians make up the overwhelming majority of the country, he said. And then he slowed slightly to stress each next word: “And yet we don’t exert the power that we should have.”
If he were elected president, he promised, that would change. He raised a finger.
“Christianity will have power,” he said. “If I’m there, you’re going to have plenty of power, you don’t need anybody else.”
Over the last four years, we’ve heard endless attempts to explain why Christian nationalists have been so loyal to a man who has lived the opposite of everything they have claimed to value. But there you have your answer: he promised to give them power. That is precisely why Katherine Stewart titled her book about Christian nationalists, The Power Worshippers. She explains that we miss the mark if we assume that this movement is all about the so-called “culture wars.”
This is a political movement that wants power. I do think it is helpful, in understanding this movement, to distinguish between the leaders and the followers. The foot soldiers may believe that they’re fighting for things like traditional marriage and a ban on abortion. But over time, the movement’s leaders and strategists have consciously reframed these culture war issues in order to capture and control the votes of a large subsection of the American public. They understand if you can get people to vote on just one or two issues, you can control their vote. So they use these issues to solidify and maintain political power for themselves and their allies, to increase the flow of public and private money in their direction, and to enact economic policies that are favorable to their most well-resourced funders.
In commenting on the Christian right’s comparison of Trump to King Cyrus, Stewart wrote this:
Today’s Christian nationalists talk a good game about respecting the Constitution and America’s founders, but at bottom they sound as if they prefer autocrats to democrats…The great thing about kings like Cyrus, as far as today’s Christian nationalists are concerned, is that they don’t have to follow rules. They are the law. This makes them ideal leaders in paranoid times…
This isn’t the religious right we thought we knew. The Christian nationalist movement today is authoritarian, paranoid and patriarchal at its core. They aren’t fighting a culture war. They’re making a direct attack on democracy itself.
They want it all. And in Mr. Trump, they have found a man who does not merely serve their cause, but also satisfies their craving for a certain kind of political leadership.
This is why you’ll find no objections from Christian nationalists to the prospect of Trump upending Constitutional norms like the separation of powers among the three branches of government. They want the tyrannical power associated with an autocrat in order to enact their agenda.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/a-realistic-strategy-for-overturning-citizens-united-within-10-years
A realistic strategy for overturning Citizens United within 10 years
Written by David Edward Burke / The Washington Monthly July 25, 2020
Most Americans share similar views about how to get big money of politics. Polling released in 2018 showed that 66 percent of Republicans, 70 percent of independents, and 85 percent of Democrats support a constitutional amendment. But since we haven’t amended the Constitution since 1992, the idea sounds like an impossibility to many. Of course, passing an amendment is inherently difficult—requiring support from two thirds of Congress and three quarters of states. Yet we are already closer to the goal than most people know.
In fact, an amendment has more momentum in Congress than many other widely discussed policy proposals. With a focused bipartisan campaign, activists could push one across the finish line in less than a decade.
Consider where things stand today. 47 sitting Senators have already expressed support for an amendment, compared to just 15 who have signed on to Medicare For All. More than 200 House members back it too, compared to only 21 who have signed on to the Free College For All Act. Additionally, 20 states have already expressed their support for an amendment through legislation or a ballot initiative, including “red states” like Montana and West Virginia.All told, that’s more than half that is needed.Plus, when those two states agree with California and Oregon, you know this is an issue than can transcend partisanship.
But ten years after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. FECdecision, which allowed corporations and unions to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections, we are still waiting. That’s primarily because the idea does not yet have the bipartisan support in Congress that it does among voters. And that’s due to the specific Republicans that have been in power since 2010. Both Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy are huge beneficiaries of big money and, not coincidentally, staunch opponents of campaign finance reform. Another reason is that some amendment proposals to overturn Citizens Unitedhave been divisive and partisan.
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Many politicians and activists have conflated campaign finance reform with abolishing all corporate constitutional rights, which misunderstands the problem and draws valuable energy away from the real battle. Stripping Fifth Amendment protections away from corporations would allow the government to seize property without just compensation, but would not bring us closer to campaign finance reform.
Similarly, by framing the fight to get big money out of politics as a battle between Democrats and Republicans, instead of one between the people and the powerful, some organizations have made the issue unduly polarizing.
Fortunately, there are ways to improve our chances of making history. By focusing on the core issue of campaign finance reform rather than the red herring of corporate constitutional rights, there’s a path toward ensuring that Citizens Uniteddoes not survive another ten years.
Though passing a constitutional amendment may sound like a drastic step, it is the most logical way to fix our broken campaign finance system. Big money got into politics because of Supreme Court decisions like Buckley v. Valeoand Citizens United,which struck down federally enacted campaign spending limits designed to reduce political corruption and ensure that ultra-wealthy individuals and artificial entities did not gain undue influence over elections. In both cases, a slim majority of justices failed to acknowledge that independent expenditures—outside spending from individuals and groups—jeopardize the integrity of our elections and government.
Now, the only way to overturn those grievous decisions is through a constitutional amendment. It would be folly to expect subsequent decisions to reverse course. At the same time, the problems caused by big money in politics are important enough that we cannot afford to wait for the court to change its mind. And the reforms we can use within the current system are simply not enough. Neither more disclosure requirements nor publicly financed elections can stop billionaires from spending unlimited amounts of money.
Plus, there is always the risk that without an amendment, the Supreme Court could strike down some public financing systems as unconstitutional. An amendment that gives Congress, state legislatures, and voters the power to enact limits on campaign spending is the best response to the Court’s dangerous precedents.
The good news: This is achievable. Campaign finance reform has widespread bipartisan support among voters—74 percent of voters in “very red” districts are in favor of an amendment, along with 76 percent in “very blue” districts.
Campaign finance reform has historically been a bipartisan issue. In 1990, William Rehnquist and Thurgood Marshall agreed that restrictions on political expenditures by corporations were both constitutional and desirable in Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce. As recently as 2002, the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act (also known as McCain-Feingold) passed with support from 51 congressional Republicans. Today’s GOP may have even more reason to support reform than their predecessors because many have been targeted by outside spending. In the 2018 election cycle for instance, liberal undisclosed “dark money” groups outspent conservative ones $81 million to $43 million.
But that reality is lost on many voters. Citizens Unitedhas become too polarized. John Katko of New York is the only Republican member of Congress signed onto any campaign finance reform amendment proposal. Much of that is due to Mitch McConnell’s leadership within his party. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t also look at holes in the advocacy for an amendment.
Some groups and politicians, such as Representative Pramila Jayapal, have combined the effort for a campaign finance reform amendment with a separate goal of abolishing all corporate constitutional rights. But it is a mistake to conclude that corporate constitutional rights—or the concept of corporate personhood—were the basis for Citizens United, or that abolishing such rights would solve the problem. The problem is that the Court has given both corporations and individuals a right neither should have—the right to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections. The sensible solution, which dissenting justices have expressed, is to allow legislatures to enact limits on outside spending by individuals or artificial entities, because such spending poses a “mortal danger” to the political process.
Furthermore, as law professor Garrett Epps has written, “[T]he Court in Citizens Unitedexpressly said that it was not relying on the idea of personhood as the basis for its decision striking down the McCain–Feingold Act’s limits on money in electioneering. The Court relied on the nature of the speech itself, not the identity of the speaker…Thus if by a heroic effort we enacted a constitutional amendment stating that corporations are not people, a future conservative Court would have no trouble striking down limits on corporate political expenditures anyway.”
Nonetheless, Representative Pramila Jayapal has introduced an amendment proposal aimed at overturning Citizens Unitedthat would also abolish all the constitutional rights of corporations and unions.
That comes with two flaws.
First, such a provision could lead to unintended consequences, such as preventing nonprofits like Planned Parenthood from filing lawsuits, or allowing the government to conduct searches and seizures of businesses without a warrant.Even many liberal law professors like Epps and Kent Greenfield oppose the abolition of all corporate constitutional rights. Second, by pairing the far less popular idea of abolishing the rights of unions and corporations with the goal of campaign finance reform, Jayapal’s proposal deters potential allies who share the second goal, but not the first. Other proposals that are focused exclusively on campaign finance reform, like H.J. Res 2 or the Restore Democracy Amendment (which I wrote), offer a better chance of success.
Of course, passing a constitutional amendment is going to require bipartisan support. That means progressives need to adjust their approach accordingly. Too many organizations have pursued an incomplete strategy of trying to pass an amendment solely by electing Democrats. For example, one PAC founded by former Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee fundraisers called End Citizens United has raised more than $50 million by targeting left-leaning donors. But rather than attempting to build bipartisan support for an amendment, End Citizens United’s primary focus is on unseating Republicans. Similarly, groups like Public Citizen have done stellar work getting more than 200 Democrats to cosponsor H.J.Res 2, but that ratio has to change dramatically for an amendment to succeed. Simply put, we must make the same effort to work with Republicans who may support campaign finance reform that we do to unseat those who don’t.
That doesn’t mean we should expect an amendment to pass through this House or Senate. It won’t. We need to understand that this is a long-term project. But no matter how long it takes, bipartisan support is essential. The push for a campaign finance reform amendment among Congressional Republicans can follow a similar trajectory to the fight for same-sex marriage, by steadily gaining support over time. In 2009, only 21 percent of Republicans supported same-sex marriage, but in less than a decade, that more than doubled to 47 percent.
Passing an amendment to undo the damage caused by 40 years of bad Supreme Court decisions is one of the most important things we can do to improve government. If we can’t solve our underlying problems like big money in politics, we will never be able to tackle income inequality, prescription drug prices, or any other major problem that is exacerbated by our campaign finance system. In short, solving this problem is a prerequisite to solving our other problems.
Fortunately, we are closer to achieving the historic goal of passing a constitutional amendment to get big money out of politics than most people know. It can be done in ten or maybe even five years. But to cross the finish line, the focus should be on campaign finance reform rather than corporate personhood. We must work with Republicans and Democrats, and make the issue one of our top priorities. If we can do that, we can put Citizens United where it belongs—in the dustbin of history alongside Dred Scott v. Sanford and Bowers v. Hardwick.
https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/janfeb-2015/let-us-now-praise-corporate-persons/
no lnx
January/February 2015
Let Us Now Praise Corporate Persons
Citizens United was a bad decision; but the cry of “Corporations are not people!” isn’t helping fix the problem—in fact, it’s making it worse.
by Kent GreenfieldMAGAZINE
Unpeopling America:: The response to Citizens United has been to destroy "corporate personhood." This could make the situation worse, not better. Getty Images
The American left is notoriously fractious. But one belief that unites more than most is this: corporations are not people. “Corporations are people, my friend,” said Mitt Romney in 2012, and Democrats skewered his cluelessness. “I don’t care how many times you try to explain it,” Barack Obama said on the stump. “Corporations aren’t people. People are people.” During the 2014 midterms, Massachusetts Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren barnstormed the country to rally the faithful. Her most dependable applause line? “Corporations are not people!”
The main target of the corporations-are-not-people crowd is the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling striking down limits on independent corporate spending in elections. After that case, groups sprang up to fight corporate personhood. Others rebranded themselves by newly taking aim at it. But they do not limit themselves to attacking the Court’s campaign finance jurisprudence. Most groups make a broader attack on corporations being able to assert any First Amendment speech rights at all; and some have called for disabusing all corporations or businesses of any constitutional right.
Common Cause, for example, uses Robert Reich to tout its support for “a constitutional amendment declaring that ‘Only People are People’ and that only people should have free speech rights protected by the Constitution.” Public Citizen, the liberal litigation group founded by Ralph Nader, argues that “rights protected by the Constitution were intended for natural people.” Free Speech for People, one of the groups most influential in the anti-personhood movement, is pushing a “People’s Rights Amendment.” A version has already been sponsored in the U.S. Senate by Jon Tester of Montana and in the House by Jim McGovern of Massachusetts. It would declare that “the rights protected by this Constitution” are “the rights of natural persons.” A range of liberal groups have signed on to the anti-personhood project—MoveOn, Sierra Club and NAACP chapters, and steelworker and SEIU locals. By their count, sixteen states and nearly 600 localities have endorsed some kind of anti-personhood amendment. Even in a moment when the progressive left seems otherwise to be fighting rearguard actions, this movement has genuine energy.
These are my people. Many of the leaders of this movement are friends and respected colleagues. I contributed to Elizabeth Warren’s senatorial campaign and voted for Reich when he ran for governor of Massachusetts. Forty years ago, my coal miner grandfather sat me down and told me how a union had saved his life. As a law professor, I have spent my career as an oddity—a progressive who teaches corporate law, almost always the most liberal person in any room of business law academics. A decade ago, I came up with a novel legal theory that shareholder activists recently put to good use suing the Hershey Company over the use of child labor in West African chocolate cultivation.
A corporate lickspittle I’m not.
But the attack on corporate personhood is a mistake. And it may, ironically, be playing into the hands of the financial and managerial elite.
What’s the best way to control corporate power? More corporate personhood, not less.
If you’re shopping for glue sticks or glitter and hearing Christian music over a loudspeaker, you’re probably in a Hobby Lobby store. An arts-and-crafts retailer, Hobby Lobby is a big company, with upwards of 20,000 employees and more than 600 stores. But it’s a “closely held” corporation—meaning its stock is not publicly traded. The stock is owned by members of one family, the Greens of Oklahoma City, who are devout Christians. As enacted, the Affordable Care Act contained a provision requiring the company to provide its employees with health insurance that includes all medically approved forms of contraceptive care. The Greens objected. They believe that four of those methods are “abortifacients,” and claimed that the coverage mandate violated their rights under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
When their suit made it to the Supreme Court in early 2014, a group of corporate law professors (of which I was one) filed a “friend of the court” brief arguing against the corporation.
The brief’s main argument? Corporate personhood.
Understand that “corporate personhood” simply expresses the idea that the corporation has a legal identity separate from its shareholders. That separateness, the brief pointed out, is inherent in what it means to be a corporation. A “first principle” of corporate law (as we explained) is that “for-profit corporations are entities that possess legal interests and a legal identity of their own—one separate and distinct from their shareholders.” The very purpose of the corporation as a legal form is to create an entity “distinct in its legal interests and existence from those who contribute capital to it.” This separateness means that shareholders are not held liable for the debts of the corporation. That makes it possible for people who do not wish to oversee the day-to-day activities of companies in which they invest—and do not wish to risk every penny they own if the corporation goes bankrupt—to invest in corporate stock. In other words, this separateness is what makes capital markets possible. And capital markets are essential for the development of a vibrant national economy. Beyond that, corporations can exist long after the life of any individual that invests in, or works for, them. This means, as the legal scholar Lynn Stout has pointed out, that corporations provide a mechanism for society to make long-term, intergenerational investments that are not linked to government or a specific family.
It is not an overstatement to say that corporate separateness has been one of the legal innovations most important to the development of national wealth.
The professors argued that this separateness meant that the Greens should not be able to attach their own religious beliefs to the corporation. The reason the Greens had chosen to form a corporation was to be able to operate the business without running the risk of losing their personal assets if the corporation went belly up. They wanted separateness.
They should not then be able to stand in the shoes of the corporation for purposes of religion.
The Supreme Court disagreed. It held, 5-4, that the Greens could project their religious beliefs onto the corporation and refuse to provide their employees the required contraceptive-care benefits. Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion is evidence of the Court’s much-discussed pro-business tilt, to be sure. But it’s also evidence that the majority doesn’t understand the basics of corporate law. Its sin was not an embrace of corporate personhood but a rejection of it.
In fact, let us now praise corporate persons.
Consider the Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster. For three months in 2010, Americans woke each morning to the news of another 50,000 barrels of crude spewing into the coastal waters of the Gulf of Mexico. We were justifiably outraged. In a legal system without corporate personhood, the channel for that outrage would be limited to lawsuits and criminal inquiries against individual human beings responsible—managers, workers, and contractors. That’s important, of course. In any legal jurisdiction worth its salt, the search for culpable individuals has to be part of the settling-up of any man-made disaster. But it should not be all. No human being—except, perhaps, Bill Gates—would have enough money to compensate those harmed by a massive disaster like Deepwater Horizon. Because a corporate entity is also on the hook, there’s a chance for something approaching real compensation or real responsibility. Corporate personhood is thus not only a mechanism for the creation of wealth (by encouraging investment), it is also a mechanism for enforcing accountability (by providing a deep pocket to sue).
The movement against “corporate personhood” does not spend much time talking about these aspects of the concept. When the left cries that corporations are not people, what they mean is that corporations should not be able to claim the constitutional rights that human beings can. Yet even here, there is reason to praise corporate personhood. Remember, the opposite of a constitutional right is a government power. If corporations have no rights, then governmental power in connection with corporations is at its maximum. That power can be abused, and corporate personhood is a necessary bulwark.
In 1971, for example, the government sought to stop the New York Times, a for-profit, publicly traded media conglomerate, and the Washington Post, which had gone public as a corporation only a few weeks previously, from publishing the leaked Pentagon Papers. The Supreme Court correctly decided that the newspapers had a First Amendment right to publish. That was one of the most important free speech decisions of the twentieth century. At the time, no one seriously suggested that the correct answer to the constitutional question was that the Times and the Post, as corporations, had no standing to bring a constitutional claim at all. (And for those of you saying to yourselves, “Well, this isn’t a good example, since the newspapers are protected by the First Amendment’s press clause”: the Court has never given any greater substance to the press clause not already covered in the freedom of speech. And the current proposals to end corporate personhood do not claim to save media corporations any more than pharmaceutical or oil companies.)
In 1992, Planned Parenthood won a hard-fought battle to have the Supreme Court reaffirm Roe v. Wade. Planned Parenthood is a corporation; but no one seriously suggested it had no standing to object to limits on its ability to provide abortions. Today, Google and other media companies are fighting government demands to disgorge the contents of their servers. No one seriously suggests that the government’s power should be unchecked because the media companies, as corporations, have no Fourth Amendment rights to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures. Finally, if corporations were not able to claim the Fifth Amendment rights to be free of government takings, their assets and resources would always be at risk of expropriation. The risk of investing in corporations would skyrocket, undermining the reason we have them in the first place.
In fact, the argument that corporations should never have constitutional rights is embarrassingly flawed. I often think that those who make it are aware of that fact, and are using “corporations are not people” not as an analytic principle but as an organizing and fund-raising tool.
Please don’t misunderstand me. Of course corporations are not genuine human beings. They should not automatically receive all the constitutional rights that you and I can claim. Corporations cannot vote or serve on juries, for example; it does not make any sense to think of corporations asserting those rights, both because of the nature of the right and the nature of the corporate entity. Similarly, the Court has held that corporations cannot assert the Fifth Amendment right to be free of self-incrimination. The exclusion makes sense, since corporations could otherwise evade all kinds of disclosure obligations necessary to make markets work. Can you imagine General Motors having a constitutional right not to disclose safety defects in their cars?
When the time comes, the Court should draw the same line with regard to the freedom to exercise religion. The right is to protect the freedom of conscience, and only actual human beings have a conscience. (And only some of them at that.) There should be allowances for genuine associations of religious people, such as churches. But because of corporate separateness—that is, corporate personhood—it will be quite difficult for companies to show that they are genuine associations of religious people.
Should corporations be able to assert First Amendment free speech rights? The answer depends on the context; that context includes the fact that the corporation is a legal form, but is not completely dependent on it. Sometimes it makes little sense to protect the First Amendment rights of corporations. Securities laws, for example, routinely require corporations to disclose to the public their financial well-being. If you or I were required to reveal our personal finances, we could object to the requirement as coerced speech, a violation of the First Amendment. But corporations’ arguments along those lines would fail, and they should. In fact, in 2011, AT&T asked that information about its finances be excluded from Freedom of Information Act requests, because the statute has an exception for “personal privacy.” The Court unanimously rejected this claim—and Chief Justice John Roberts ridiculed it in his opinion. That exception, he wrote, “does not extend to corporations. We trust that AT&T will not take it personally.”
On the other hand, sometimes it’s important to protect the right of a corporation to speak, as in the Pentagon Papers case, not because the corporation owns free speech rights but because of the rights of human listeners to listen to what it has to say. This idea—that listeners have a right to hear the words of corporate speakers—is actually a liberal idea. In the 1970s, Ralph Nader’s group Public Citizen brought a First Amendment challenge to limits on commercial advertising. They argued that these laws violated the public’s right to know. Legal scholar Adam Winkler argues that Public Citizen’s advocacy led directly to Citizens United. In his majority opinion in that case, Justice Anthony Kennedy said that the public has a right to know corporations’ views. Public Citizen now decries corporate personhood; if truth be told, it’s their own fault.
When it comes to campaign finance, I agree with the personhood opponents that Citizens United wrongly expanded corporate rights to spend money on elections. I also agree that the Court’s mistake traces its origins to the 1976 case Buckley v. Valeo, where the Court struck down limits on individual (human) campaign expenditures as violations of free speech. But the problem in Citizens United was not the Court’s supposed holding that corporations are people, and the problem in Buckley was not a supposed ruling that “money is speech.” Both are mischaracterizations, and the critical yelps they attract are poorly targeted in any event. Corporations occasionally say things that matter to voters, even in elections. And while money is not itself speech it is sometimes essential to make speech audible above the din. Giving it, too, can be an expressive act. Imagine if Texas told its citizens they could not contribute to Planned Parenthood or had to pay dues to the National Rifle Association. It would be inane to argue that the First Amendment would not be implicated because money is not speech.
The left and corporate rights: Left, Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee and publisher Katharine Graham celebrate the paper’s victory in the Pentagon Papers case. The Post parent company had gone public only weeks before. Right, pro-choice demonstrators protect the entrance to a Planned Parenthood clinic. PP, a nonprofit corporation, litigates to protect its right to offer abortion and contraceptive services.
Nevertheless, there are myriad reasons why a commitment to free speech rights—even corporate free speech rights—should not bar reasonable limits on independent campaign expenditures from both corporations and the super rich. It is not hyperbole to say that without such limits, our democracy is at risk. The billions of dollars flooding the electoral process skew it toward the monied and well heeled, and pervert the nature of public service. The current Court is so enamored with a simplistic, libertarian theory of free speech doctrine that it is blind to those risks. A sane Court could easily construct exceptions to otherwise applicable doctrine to protect the sanctity and fairness of our elections. In fact, Canada’s supreme court has done that very thing.
But notice something. One can support campaign finance regulation and still acknowledge corporate personhood as well.
In fact, most of the money flooding into the electoral process isn’t coming from corporations. It’s coming from rich individuals like Sheldon Adelson and the Koch brothers. There is a lot of corporate money, to be sure. Chevron, the most politically active public corporation in 2012, spent $2.5 million in that year’s election cycle; the Chamber of Commerce, the largest corporate bundler, funneled over $35 million into various 2012 races. But both were dwarfed by the torrent of individual money. Adelson alone threw almost $93 million into various races during the same period, and the Koch brothers ran a network of shady groups that spent over $400 million.
The power of corporations is frequently misused, usually to the advantage of the financial and managerial elite. Employees, communities, consumers, the environment, and the public interest in general are elbowed aside in corporate decisionmaking, unless the corporation can make money by taking them into account. Corporations are managed aggressively to maximize shareholder return. As a result, the risks they run—whether of oil spills in the Gulf or of financial crises erupting from Wall Street—are often unrecognized until too late. The executives who run American corporations do not generally think of themselves as having obligations to the public. The social contract of American corporations is pretty thin.
But these defects of corporate power, fundamental as they are, are not problems of constitutional law or corporate personhood. They are problems of corporate law, and they could be fixed by corporate law.
American courts forged sweeping protections for corporations during the Gilded Age (see sidebar); the legal fortress was slowly breached during the Progressive and New Deal eras. But in many ways we are back where we started. The Supreme Court is applying twisted ideas of free speech and due process to wall corporations off from accountability. In corporate governance, after a mid-century pendulum swing toward more public-spiritedness, managers and investors are now once again fixated on maximizing shareholder value.
In the last few years, however, there’s been a pushback—even a small bandwagon—against the shareholder primacy norm. An article in the Harvard Business Review (that socialist rag!) declared in 2012, “There’s a growing body of evidence … that the companies that are most successful at maximizing shareholder value over time are those that aim toward goals other than maximizing shareholder value. Employees and customers often know more about and have more of a long-term commitment to a company than shareholders do.” New York Times columnist Joe Nocera wrote that “it feels as if we are at the dawn of a new movement—one aimed at overturning the hegemony of shareholder value.” An opinion piece in the Financial Times recently argued that “[c]ompanies need a bigger and better purpose than simply maximising shareholder value.” And speaking of socialist rags, a 2011 Forbes article called shareholder primacy “the dumbest idea in the world.”
The case against shareholder primacy was argued best by Steven Pearlstein last year in the Washington Post. Maximizing shareholder value, he wrote, is a “pernicious” ideology that “has no foundation in history or in law.” He continued, “What began in the 1970s and ’80s as a useful corrective to self-satisfied managerial mediocrity has become a corrupting, self-interested dogma peddled by finance professors, money managers and over-compensated corporate executives.” In fact, he argued, “much of what Americans perceive to be wrong with the economy these days—the slow growth and rising inequality; the recurring scandals; the wild swings from boom to bust; the inadequate investment in R&D, worker training and public goods—has its roots in this ideology.”
These skeptics are popularizing what a number of legal scholars and I have been saying for quite a while—that corporations should be seen as having robust social and public obligations that cannot be encapsulated in share prices. Now, executives have legal obligations to take account of shareholder interests. Progressive corporate scholars argue that these “fiduciary duties” should be extended to employees and other corporate stakeholders.
One way to make these obligations operational is to make the decisionmaking structure of the company itself more pluralistic. In a number of European countries, for example, companies have “codetermined” board structures that require representation of both shareholders and employees. Even with these management structures, corporations continue their focus on building wealth—that is the core purpose of the corporate form—but not for a narrow sliver of their investors only. And it works. Germany, where codetermination is strongest, is the economic powerhouse of Europe. A former CEO of the German company Siemens argued that codetermination is a “comparative advantage” for Germany; the senior managing director of the U.S. investment firm Blackstone Group had said that codetermination was one of the factors that allowed Germany to avoid the worst of the financial crisis.
Notice something. These reforms make corporations more like persons, not less. Human beings routinely balance a multitude of interests—I am, for example, a parent, a spouse, a teacher, a writer. Only the rare oddball—Donald Trump,
maybe?—behaves as if accumulating money is the paramount and unitary good. Humans have consciences; corporations do not. Left to themselves, they will behave as if profit is the only thing that matters. The best way to constrain corporations is to require them to sign on to a more robust social contract and to govern themselves more pluralistically—mechanisms designed to mimic the traits of human personhood within the corporate form.
If corporations had these traits of personhood, I would worry less about corporate involvement in the political arena. American corporations have become a vehicle for the voices and interests of a small managerial and financial elite—the notorious 1 percent. The cure for this is more democracy within businesses—more participation in corporate governance by workers, communities, shareholders, and consumers. If corporations were more democratic, their participation in the nation’s political debate would be of little concern.
But corporate personhood opponents are making these corporate governance reforms less likely. Personhood skeptics often characterize corporations as having a narrow social role; because of that narrow role, the argument goes, they owe it to shareholders to stay out of politics. The famous words of the conservative economist Milton Friedman, that the “one and only social responsibility of business” is to make “as much money as possible,” were long used as the mantra of corporate managers who wanted to be released from any social obligation. Now the opponents of Citizens United are endorsing a similarly narrow view of business as a way to explain why corporations should be exiled from the public square. To fight corporate personhood, they are bolstering shareholder primacy.
Take, for instance, Justice John Paul Stevens’s dissent in Citizens United itself. He argued, among other things, that corporate speech should be limited in order to protect shareholders’ investments. Shareholders are seen as owners, as “those who pay for an electioneering communication,” and are assumed to have “invested in the business corporation for purely economic reasons.” Stevens argued that corporate political speech did not merit protection because “the structure of a business corporation … draws a line between the corporation’s economic interests and the political preferences of the individuals associated with the corporation; the corporation must engage the electoral process with the aim to enhance the profitability of the company, no matter how persuasive the arguments for a broader … set of priorities.”
Even more revealing, Stevens cites as support a set of corporate governance principles adopted by the prestigious American Law Institute. The Principles were the product of compromise, both asking corporations to look after shareholder interests and allowing them to act with an eye toward “ethical” and “humanitarian” purposes. But Stevens quoted only the language embodying shareholder primacy: “A corporation … should have as its objective the conduct of business activities with a view to enhancing corporate profit and shareholder gain.”
Opponents of corporate personhood are following Stevens into the shareholder rights trap. Common Cause now has a “featured campaign” for “strengthening shareholder rights.” The Brennan Center for Justice is supporting a “shareholder protection act” and calls shareholders “the actual owners” of corporations. Professor Jamie Raskin of American University, one of the smartest and most energetic academic opponents of Citizens United, says that corporations should not be spending in elections because, “after all, it’s [shareholders’] money.” This is all shareholder primacy language brought to bear in fighting Citizens United.
Wall Street loves talk of shareholder rights. Sure, many of us are shareholders through our retirement accounts and the like. But widows and orphans are still the minority; most stock held in American businesses is owned by the very wealthy. (The richest 5 percent of Americans own more than two-thirds of all stock assets. The bottom 40 percent—125 million working-class people—essentially own nothing in terms of stock.) So when opponents of Citizens United focus on shareholder rights, they are singing Wall Street’s tune.
I wish this shareholder-protective rhetoric was just that, but it’s not. Corporate personhood opponents urge, as an intermediate measure short of a constitutional amendment, that corporations be required to seek shareholder approval before spending corporate money on political campaigns. I myself have been tempted by this position, mostly because such a rule would help ensure that executives do not spend corporate monies on issues and candidates opposing company interests. But that benefit is probably marginal, and comes at the risk of validating corporate involvement in the political process in furtherance of shareholder value and to the detriment of other stakeholders. Corporations could speak out in favor of Wall Street but not employees? That would be worse, not better.
The efforts of anti-personhood activists are not only in tension with stakeholder theory on the conceptual level. In the political arena, too, a tension exists because the energy for reform is a finite resource. I believe that, in this moment, there is an opening to question the very framework of how we view corporations and their social obligations. But we won’t get anywhere on that front if the progressive left wastes its energy fighting for a constitutional amendment that is unlikely to succeed and would do more harm than good if it did.
To cure the ills of Citizens United, we should stop fighting corporate personhood. Instead, let’s fight to make corporations more like people.
Support the Washington Monthly and get a FREE subscriptionKent Greenfield
Kent Greenfield is professor of law and Dean's Research Scholar at Boston College Law School. He is the author of The Failure of Corporate Law: Fundamental Flaws and Progressive Possibilities and The Myth of Choice: Personal Responsibility in a World of Limits.
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burke not progressive
What Mark Zuckerberg Gets Wrong About Free Speech
October 22, 2019
Misinformation disrupts the democratic process. It does not deserve Facebook’s protection.
https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/why-some-trump-supporters-are-starting-to-realize-hes-delusional/
why some Trump supporters are starting to realize he’s delusional
President Donald J. Trump disembarks Air Force Two Monday, Oct. 28, 2019, at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago and is met by supporters. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)
AD REMOVED FOR SUBSCRIBED USER
Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly June 19, 2020
Trump will almost certainly get an emotional boost from an adoring crowd at his rally in Tulsa. But perhaps for the first time in his privileged life, reality is beginning to challenge the delusional world he has created for himself. As a result, he just keeps making things worse.
The president has been so eager to reopen the economy that he is ensuring an ongoing rise in the number of people contracting COVID-19. As experts are warning, the U.S. isn’t experiencing a second wave of the virus—the first wave never ended.
Because Trump views every relationship as a transaction, he seemed to have turned over his Twitter account on Thursday night to someone who could help him bribe voters in swing states. The president’s account sent out 21 tweets bragging about the money he sent to various states from the Department of Transportation. For example, Colorado got over $60 million, Nevada $50 million, North Carolina $25 million, and Texas $80 million. The list goes on. Nothing is more typical of how this president operates than to think he can use federal taxpayer dollars to boost his chances of reelection.
Demonstrating that he learned nothing from the fiasco of clearing out peaceful protesters in order to stage a photo-op for himself in front of a church, the president is threatening a repeat performance in Tulsa.
Donald J. Trump
?
@realDonaldTrump
Any protesters, anarchists, agitators, looters or lowlifes who are going to Oklahoma please understand, you will not be treated like you have been in New York, Seattle, or Minneapolis. It will be a much different scene!
In what might be the most obvious sign of desperation, Trump resorted to using a terrorist who was taken out by the Obama administration in an attack against his opponent.
The reality that is beginning to burst the president’s delusional world comes, in part, from voters like Paul, a former Trump supporter from rural Tennessee.
Republican Voters Against Trump
@RVAT2020
Paul was happy to support Trump in 2016. Four years later, he won't be voting for him again.
"I was excited and I thought surely this man will grow into the job. Never in my wildest dreams would I believe that he would go to the links of depravity and lawlessness that he has"
Embedded video
As Trump heads to Oklahoma, this is an ad that will be running on local television channels.
Republican Voters Against Trump
@RVAT2020
Carter and Nancy are Republicans who live near Tulsa that will be voting for Joe Biden this year. Their story will greet @realDonaldTrump on Fox News ahead of the MAGA-COVID rally on Saturday.
WATCH.
Embedded video
At this point in the 2020 presidential race, Trump is losing support. In response, he is growing more desperate and resorting to behavior that only escalates his problems. Unless someone he trusts is able to stop him, that will remain his trajectory in the coming months. What we are witnessing is a perfect example of Trump being Trump.
620 geo f military st john
walk of shame for Republican senators who betrayed AmericanNancy LeTourneau / Washington Mo
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Trump is screwing up so badly he may finally lose older votersNancy LeTourneau / Washington mo520 an
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WHY GO AFTER MUELLER NOW?
520 wa mon?
https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/bill-barrs-twisted-plot-to-use-the-doj-as-a-political-weapon-is-just-beginning/
no lnx
Bill Barr’s twisted plot to use the DOJ as a political weapon is just beginning
Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly May 13, 2020
After the Trump administration stonewalled Congress on the release of any records or witnesses during the impeachment hearings, it is important to keep in mind that there is some material they are determined to make public.
Shortly after the attorney general assigned John Durham the task of investigating the Trump-Russia probe, the president announced that he had given Barr the authority to declassify any material pertaining to the investigation. That directive came the day before Trump accused FBI officials of treason and referred to Mueller’s investigators as “killers.”
Normally, it would be the director of national intelligence who would determine whether to release classified information. So before Barr could proceed, the administration needed to get rid of Dan Coates, who hadn’t demonstrated sufficient loyalty to Trump. With the president’s lackey, Richard Grenell, installed as acting DNI, the declassification process is now underway.
Last Thursday, Grenell released the transcripts of classified testimony before the House Intelligence Committee during their investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. That was the same day that the Department of Justice announced that they were dropping the charges against Michael Flynn. Thursday was a busy day. It is also when Grenell delivered a “satchel” of documents to Barr at the Department of Justice. ABC News is now reporting that they contain the names of “former Obama administration officials who were allegedly involved in the so-called ‘unmasking’ of former national security adviser Michael Flynn in his conversations with the former Russian ambassador during the presidential transition.” According to Fox News, Barr plans to release the names as early as Tuesday.
What we can expect from this news is a renewal of the attacks on Obama’s national security advisor Susan Rice. If you remember, back in March of 2017, shortly after Trump tweeted that the Obama administration had his “wires tapped at Trump Tower,” Devin Nunes went to the White House for a clandestine meeting after which, he held a press conference saying that he had seen intelligence reports that indicated Trump and his associates were included in electronic surveillance.
As it turned out, what he had seen were reports on electronic surveillance of foreign adversaries in which the names of Trump campaign staff had been “unmasked.” Soon all of the attention about that unmasking turned into attacks on Rice. But when the materials Nunes had seen at the White House were shared with members of the House Intelligence Committee, this is what CNN reported.
After a review of the same intelligence reports brought to light by House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes, both Republican and Democratic lawmakers and aides have so far found no evidence that Obama administration officials did anything unusual or illegal, multiple sources in both parties tell CNN.
Their private assessment contradicts President Donald Trump’s allegations that former Obama national security adviser Susan Rice broke the law by requesting the “unmasking” of US individuals’ identities. Trump had claimed the matter was a “massive story.”…
One congressional intelligence source described the requests made by Rice as “normal and appropriate” for officials who serve in that role to the president.
What is about to happen is the same thing I reported on Monday about what right-wing news outlets did with Rice’s testimony before the House Intelligence Committee. Grenell and Barr are selectively leaking information (often with contradictory evidence redacted) that allows Trump’s enablers to cherry-pick statements to lie about the events surrounding the Russia probe and create what they’re calling the “Obamagate” narrative. These particular releases are a coordinated attempt to exonerate Michael Flynn and attack anyone who played a role in his prosecution.
If any of this sounds similar to what Barr did in the days before he released the Mueller report, it is probably because that is exactly what he is doing. He is twisting evidence to lay the groundwork for his coming actions with regard to the Durham investigation.
Back in May 2016, Benjamin Wittes warned us about all of this when he wrote about the fact that the least tyrant-proof part of the government is the Department of Justice. To demonstrate, he quoted Justice Robert Jackson.
If the prosecutor is obliged to choose his case, it follows that he can choose his defendants. Therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than cases that need to be prosecuted. With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him. It is in this realm—in which the prosecutor picks some person whom he dislikes or desires to embarrass, or selects some group of unpopular persons and then looks for an offense, that the greatest danger of abuse of prosecuting power lies. It is here that law enforcement becomes personal, and the real crime becomes that of being unpopular with the predominant or governing group, being attached to the wrong political views, or being personally obnoxious to or in the way of the prosecutor himself.
With an assist from Grenell, that is exactly the sword that Barr is wielding in an attempt to exonerate Trump and smear the previous administration. The attorney general is using the Department of Justice to create a hall of mirrors and, as Peter Wehner suggested, asking us to live within Trump’s lies.
Those who have worked for the Department of Justice under both Republican and Democratic presidents are sounding the alarm. For example, Mary McCord, who served as acting assistant attorney general for national security at the Justice Department wrote a piece for the New York Times titled, “Bill Barr Twisted My Words in Dropping the Flynn Case. Here’s the Truth.” Former federal prosecutor Chuck Rosenberg shot down one of Barr’s lies by documenting “The long list of people who thought Flynn’s lies were material.” Jonathan Kravis, the federal prosecutor who resigned over Barr’s intervention in the sentencing of Roger Stone, wrote:
In both cases [Stone and Flynn], the department undercut the work of career employees to protect an ally of the president, an abdication of the commitment to equal justice under the law. Prosecutors must make decisions based on facts and law, not on the defendant’s political connections. When the department takes steps that it would never take in any other case to protect an ally of the president, it betrays this principle.
Indeed, the department chose to assign these matters to a special counsel precisely to avoid the appearance of political influence. For the attorney general now to directly intervene to benefit the president’s associates makes this betrayal of the rule of law even more egregious.
That betrayal of the rule of law is why over 2,000 Justice Department alumni (including our own Julie Zebrak) have signed a statement calling on Congress to hold Barr accountable.
My two cents on the matter would be that we are still in the early stages of how Barr and Grenell are planning to betray the rule of law. They’ll be dropping a bucket-load of twisted lies in the coming months.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/do-republicans-have-a-god-given-right-to-infect-you/
leT
Writing at the Washington Times, Cheryl Chumley makes the argument we’re hearing a lot these days from those who are protesting against the measures being used to slow the spread of the coronavirus. She is particularly upset about any requirement for people to wear protective masks.
Major U.S. airlines have announced that as a condition of riding their friendly skies, passengers must all put on a face mask.
Let the muzzling of America commence.
After noting that some state governments are requiring people to wear masks under certain conditions—like working in a restaurant—Chumley writes this.
This seems a blatant violation of an individual’s right to choose — of an individual’s right to self-govern. America, after all, isn’t a nation founded on collectivism, but rather individualism — on the right of individuals to exercise their God-given authorities, absent government tinkering and intrusion. What gives government the authority to order citizens to cover their faces?
My immediate reaction was that she could make the same argument against things like speed limits, carrying explosives on airplanes, or even smoking in public places. After all, those laws restrict an individual’s right to self-govern. What gives the government the authority to order citizens to limit how fast they drive?
The answer, of course, is that we have always had laws that put restrictions on individuals to limit the damage their behavior could pose to others. Honestly, the kind of “individualism” Chumley describes is more akin to anarchy than anything our founders envisioned. They actually wrote a kind of collectivism into the Preamble to the Constitution.
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
In our modern-day two-party system, the traditional argument has never been that “freedom” gives the individual the right to do anything they please. Instead, it has been to disagree about how far the government should go in intervening for the common good.
At the Democratic Convention in 2012, President Barack Obama laid out that tension as he focused on what citizenship means in a democratic republic.
We honor the strivers, the dreamers, the risk- takers, the entrepreneurs who have always been the driving force behind our free enterprise system, the greatest engine of growth and prosperity that the world’s ever known.
But we also believe in something called citizenship — citizenship, a word at the very heart of our founding, a word at the very essence of our democracy, the idea that this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another and to future generations…
We, the people — recognize that we have responsibilities as well as rights; that our destinies are bound together; that a freedom which asks only, what’s in it for me, a freedom without a commitment to others, a freedom without love or charity or duty or patriotism, is unworthy of our founding ideals, and those who died in their defense.
As citizens, we understand that America is not about what can be done for us. It’s about what can be done by us, together through the hard and frustrating but necessary work of self-government. That’s what we believe.
There is a reason why Obama focused his speech that year on the importance of citizenship. During a campaign appearance in Roanoke, Virginia, he had talked about the fact that economic growth is driven by a dynamic of both individual and collective effort.
If you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own…somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.
The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires.
Republicans, and their presidential nominee Mitt Romney, zeroed in on two sentences: “If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen,” claiming that Obama attacked the very foundation of our free enterprise system. They even went so far as todedicate a whole day of their convention to a rebuke of those two sentences taken out of context.
This battle between the individual and the collective has been the defining difference between Democrats and Republicans for years. It is important to recognize that when conservatives talk about “freedom” these days, it is most often in the context of freedom from any form of government action or intervention. The claim, as Chumley notes, is that self-government no longer refers to our collective responsibilities as citizens of a democratic republic, but “an individual’s right to self-govern” themselves. That is one of the more dangerous arguments that Attorney General William Barr made during his speech at Notre Dame.
In the words of Madison, “We have staked our future on the ability of each of us to govern ourselves…”
This is really what was meant by “self-government.” It did not mean primarily the mechanics by which we select a representative legislative body. It referred to the capacity of each individual to restrain and govern themselves.
What makes that argument so dangerous is that it wasn’t being made to promote anarchy or even libertarianism. Instead, it is a way to advocate for the idea of “religious liberty,” or the right of conservative Christians to impose their beliefs onto others via government intervention. In other words, it is all about freedom for me, but not thee.
That is precisely why we see the irony of people protesting the coronavirus restrictions carrying signs that read: “My body, my choice.” These people seem to believe in their freedom to threaten the lives of others during a pandemic, but the government should decide what a woman does with her body.
Even more dangerous is the kind of attitude on display with the protester who carried a sign that replicated the one on the gate of Auschwitz, translated “work will set you free.”
What I would observe is that the Republican Party has completely lost touch with concepts like “freedom” and “liberty” in an attempt to deny the collective responsibility of citizenship.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/trumps-enablers-are-inflating-his-lies-about-vote-by-mail/
no lnx
Trump’s enablers are inflating his lies about vote-by-mail
President Donald J. Trump waves after talking with reporters on the South Lawn of the White House Monday, Nov. 4, 2019, and walks to board Marine One to begin his trip to Kentucky. (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian)
Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly April 24, 2020
Joe Biden is sounding the alarm.
“Mark my words, I think [Trump] is gonna try to kick back the election somehow, come up with some rationale why it can’t be held,” Biden said during a Q&A at a virtual fundraising event.
He noted Trump’s refusal to fund the U.S. Postal Service, which is struggling under the weight of the COVID-19 pandemic, as lawmakers across the country push for mail-in voting to keep the virus from spreading.
“Now what in God’s name is that about, other than trying to let the word out that he’s going to do all he can to make it very hard for people to vote?” Biden asked. “That’s the only way he thinks he can possibly win.”
After the debacle in Wisconsin, many states are pursing an expansion of mail-in voting. But Trump has led the charge against that option by spouting a whole series of lies. Jane Timm went through them one by one and fact-checked them all as false. Here’s the bottom line.
Richard Hasen, an election law expert and a professor at the University of California, Irvine, pointed to an exhaustive News21 review of voter fraud between 2000 and 2012, which found just 491 incidents of alleged absentee voter fraud among more than a decade of elections and 146 million registered voters.
“No means of voting is perfect, but the benefits of vote-by-mail — particularly during a pandemic — greatly exceed the risks of fraud associated with it,” he told NBC News.
But that isn’t likely to stop the president’s enablers. For example, Mark Hemingway has written a piece with this explosive title: “28 Million Mail-In Ballots Went Missing in Last Four Elections.”
Between 2012 and 2018, 28.3 million mail-in ballots remain unaccounted for, according to data from the federal Election Assistance Commission. The missing ballots amount to nearly one in five of all absentee ballots and ballots mailed to voters residing in states that do elections exclusively by mail.
In order to heighten the angst, Hemingway goes on to point out that “in 2016 Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by garnering over 2.8 million more votes than Donald Trump. But nearly 6 million unaccounted mail-in ballots were never counted in 2016.”
To his credit, Hemingway does note in the third paragraph that “there is no evidence that the millions of missing ballots were used fraudulently.” Nevertheless, he says that “the sheer volume of them raises serious doubts about election security.”
So what is Hemingway talking about when he refers to these 28 million missing mail-in ballots? The first thing to note is that he got his information from a report published by the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a group that claims that voter fraud is rampant in the U.S. and that large numbers of ineligible aliens are casting ballots. The president of PILF—J. Christian Adams—was appointed to serve on Trump’s voter fraud commission and one of their board members is Hans von Spakovsky, who has been advocating for voter suppression since he fought against motor-voter provisions in 1997.
The report on these so-called “missing ballots” makes it difficult to follow their numbers, but they suggest that over 40 million mail-in ballots are sent out every election. In looking at four elections (2012, 2014, 2016, and 2018), that would total over 160 million ballots, of which 28 million (or roughly 17.5 percent) went missing. They note that some never reached the intended targets (perhaps because of outdated addresses), some were never returned (ie, people chose not to vote), and some were rejected—usually due to signature errors.
It is interesting that PILF included “rejected” ballots among those they suggested are “missing.” Checking signature against voter registrations is one of the security measures utilized with vote-by-mail. While maintaining accurate addresses will always be a challenge for mailed ballots, the fact that some people chose not to take the opportunity to vote is hardly a problem, especially given that voter turnout has hovered around 50-60 percent in recent presidential elections (lower in midterms). So overall, if 82.5 percent of mailed ballots are returned as valid, that demonstrates pretty astounding success.
Of course, the whole point of reports like this is to scare people with numbers like 28 million “missing” ballots without any context whatsoever. Given what we’ve seen from Trump, it probably won’t be long before he adds to these lies and starts talking about 28 million people casting fraudulent mail-in ballots as a reason to either force people to vote in person during a pandemic, or, as Biden has warned, as an excuse to delay the election.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/trumps-anti-intellectualism-didnt-come-from-nowhere-the-gops-disdain-for-science-has-endangered-us-all
no lnx
Trump’s anti-intellectualism didn’t come from nowhere — the GOP’s disdain for science has endangered us all
Written by The Washington Monthly April 24, 2020
Donald Trump recently created a stir by retweeting a call by a Republican politician to fire Dr. Anthony Fauci. The reason: Fauci had the temerity to contradict the president on scientific facts. Then, whether out of fear or a willful suspension of intellect, the president’s coronavirus task force coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx proclaimed that Trump has been “so attentive to the scientific literature and the details and the data”—in contradiction to the avalanche of lies Trump puts out in his daily propaganda rallies masquerading as pandemic briefings.
Yet these are but surface examples of an ongoing tension between experts and Trumpists.It is a dynamic that has been at play since the very beginning of the administration: the war between experts and propagandists, between actual facts and “alternative facts.” Driving it is a wave of anti-intellectualism growing in America. And now, in this era of pandemic, tens of thousands of American lives are at stake. So, too, is the nation’s credibility. Given Donald Trump’s relentless antipathy toward truth and expertise, the outlook doesn’t look promising.
As the novel coronavirus rampaged across the country, a storm broke out in the White House over how to respond. Rather than taking dramatic actions early on to curtail the spread of the virus and prepare states and hospitals to meet the coming surge, the administration reverted to its profound anti-intellectualism, all in a bid to deflect its own failure in protecting American lives.
Disturbingly, Trump promoted the anti-malarial drug hydroxychlorine to tackle the virus, despite the fact that it hasn’t gone through the proper testing and approval process. After hearing about a country doctor in upstate New York who claimed to have treated patients for the disease with a cocktail of hydroxychlorine and other drugs with positive results, the president ran with it as a magic bullet. “I’ll tell you what, what do you have to lose?” he said. A just-released Veterans Administration study shows not only no benefit from use of hydroxychlorine, but there were more deaths among patients given the drug.Then, Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro asserted that studies have showed the drug to have “clear therapeutic efficacy” in treating Covid-19 patients. Asked his qualifications for making such a claim, Navarro told CNN, “I’m a social scientist.” Others also trumpeting the medicine include the president’s usual Fox News chorus, led by Sean Hannity, and Rudolf Giuliani. This has had real impact: the White House directed health officials to put the anti-malarial medication ahead of other efforts to combat the outbreak. The federal government has since stockpiled 29 million pills.
Scientists, however, are counseling caution. “In terms of science, I don’t think we can definitively say it works,” said Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top epidemiologist. American Medical Association President Patrice Harris added: “You could lose your life. It’s unproven.” Axios reported a major blow-up in the situation room at one point between Navarro and a skeptical Fauci, who has confided to colleagues that Trump “almost always” ignores the advice he gives him before the daily press briefings.
Trump’s own CDC issued a statement on April 7 saying, “There are no drugs or other therapeutics approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to prevent or treat COVID-19.” Medical experts are cautioning it will take a minimum of 12 to 18 months to come up with a vaccine.
In the meantime, Trump is putting the public health at even greater risk by propagating lies and misinformation. As of this writing, the coronavirus has claimed more than 47,000 American lives. Fatalities far surpass those in China, a nation with four times our population. And the rate of confirmed cases is growing faster in the United States than in all of Western Europe. The University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation predicts some 67,000 Americans could die by August. Right now, one American dies of coronavirus every 45 seconds.
How many more will die depends on who is calling the shots: experts or hacks.
The Trump administration’s attitude toward science can only be described as contemptuous.There has been an 85 percent turnover of federal agency senior executives, and President Trump has failed to appoint anyone to nearly half of the federal scientific leadership positions. More often than not, Trump appointees are unqualified and ideologically driven.
Trump’s disdain for science comes with grievous consequences.He was alerted by the intelligence community of an emerging pandemic in January. Still, the president squandered more than two months before treating the issue seriously. That came after he disbanded the National Security Council’s pandemic team and defunded a $200 million USAID program for detecting virus outbreaks overseas. Simply put, the president rid the government of some of its best resources to prepare for and respond to this kind of emergency. These actions come on top of the administration’s measures to marginalize science and fact-based research, including denying climate change.
But Trumpism did not come out of nowhere. Undergirding the president’s war on expertise is a recurrent strain of anti-intellectualism in America’s social and political DNA. As the late writer Isaac Asimov observed, “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’”
Trump panders to rightwing populists’ contempt for empirical facts and expert knowledge. Rush Limbaugh, whom Trump awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, has named science as one of his so-called Four Corners of Deceit, which also include government, academia and media. The coronavirus, Limbaugh said, “appears far less deadly” than the flu, but the government and the mainstream news media “keep promoting panic.”
The evangelical movement, a bedrock of Trump’s base, promotes an anti-science culture that rejects critical thinking.Pro-Trump Pentecostal preacher Rodney Howard-Browne has called his followers to attend church services in defiance of social distancing restrictions, dismissing coronavirus as a “phantom plague.”
Of course, it’s no surprise that anti-intellectualism also extends into the halls of Congress, where a sitting congressman declared a few years ago that evolution and the Big Bang are “lies straight from the pit of hell,” and where the chairman of a Senate environmental committee brought a snowball into the chamber to prove that climate change is a hoax.
The coronavirus is not a hoax. It’s a mega-killer. A month after President Trump assured everyone that it would “go away,” more than 850,000 Americans have tested positive and the U.S. leads the world in the number of Covid-19-related deaths. Now, with his call over the weekend to “liberate” states imposing shelter-in-place orders, and red-state governors taking a care-free approach to social distancing, the risk of these numbers burgeoning out of control becomes very real.
Perhaps reality will sink in as the body count rises. Statistics, after all, are stubborn things. No amount of bluster, bluffing, and bullshit by the president and his enablers can obfuscate or contradict them. If there was ever a moment when it should be clear to voters why the nation needs a return to policies based on facts, knowledge, and science, this is it.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/if-the-postal-service-dies-so-does-democracy/
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If the postal service dies, so does democracy
Written by Roxanne Cooper / The Washington Monthly April 11, 2020
There are two big stories this week about a subject that normally sounds painfully boring: the mail. Each is crucially important in its own right, but combined they presage a nearly apocalyptic threat to American democracy.
The first is that the Donald Trump and Republican Party are engaged in an all-out war against the expansion of mail-in voting in the era of COVID-19.The flimsy outward justification is concern about voter fraud, but of course there is no evidence of significant voter fraud surrounding mail ballots. In fact, the only major scandal in the modern era around mail-in voting was a corrupt scheme by Republicans in North Carolina–one that was quickly and easily discovered. Republicans aren’t exactly being shy about why they want to restrict the expansion of access to mail voting: they think the more people are allowed to vote, the better Democrats will do against them. It certainly doesn’t hurt that Republicans are far less concerned about the virus than are Democrats, and that in battleground states with Republican legislatures like Wisconsin, there are far more polling places per capita in red districts than blue ones, which means not only longer lines but more dangerous crowding at the polling places. It only adds to the Republican turnout advantage if most people have to vote in person.
The opposition to mail voting is amusing given that it has traditionally been advantageous to Republicans, and even now doesn’t much benefit one party or the other. But facing electoral calamity after four years of Trump plus a disastrous epidemic response and looming recession, Republicans clearly feel their best shot at keeping power is if as few people are allowed to safely vote as possible. It’s a fundamentally immoral stance at odds with the principles of democracy itself, but unashamedly taking baldly self-serving positions contrary to previously shared values of basic decency is a hallmark of Republicanism under Donald Trump. It’s not a bug; it’s a feature.
The second story involves the Post Office itself. The United States Postal Service is set to run out of money by September. The previous round of emergency coronavirus stimulus did not take the long-beleaguered Postal Service into account. Conservative policymakers have been eyeing the USPS with hungry privatizing chops for a long time, and have been hamstringing it with ridiculous provisions like forcing the USPS to take into account 50 years of pension payments in advance in its budget, which no other corporation or public agency has to do.
Donald Trump loves to talk about what a “great American company” FedEx is, and conservatives would love to eliminate the postal service and give all of its operations to private shipping companies and private equity. Of course, long gone would be the days of sending a letter from coast to coast in a few days for a fraction of a dollar–but since when was that sort of thing a concern for Republicans?As with libraries, if the Postal Service didn’t already exist and you proposed it, it would be considered a ridiculous and wasteful socialist fantasy. In the modern era Republicans would make sure it never came into being, and mainstream Democrats would means-test it so that everyone would have to fill out tax statements in triplicate to make sure that no one making over a certain amount got a free mailbox.
Are these two stories merely a coincidence? Perhaps. It is possible that just as Republicans are attempting to thwart vote-by-mail in order to reduce voter turnout in a pandemic, they also just so happen to be defunding the Postal Service.
But what if it’s not? What if the plan is explicitly to cripple the mail system itself as yet another argument against mail-in voting, providing them an excuse to force people to vote in person in a pandemic or not vote at all? It would be a villainous plot straight out of a James Bond film. That doesn’t mean it’s not real, especially given the current administration. Even if it’s not intentional, the combined effect of both acts of bad faith would certainly be convenient for deeply unpopular conservatives whose only chance of holding onto ill-gotten power is to thwart democracy itself.
Democrats would do well to act as if they were facing opponents with the depraved moral instincts of a Bond villain, and think proactively. Any future assistance on legislation to Trump and McConnell over the coming year should be predicated on both saving the Postal Service and ensuring access to mail-in voting across the country. An election in which one side is lulled into complacency about a pandemic and has lots of polling places available, while the other is rightfully concerned for the public good while also being crushed by long lines and crowded locations, is no true election at all. It’s a mockery of democracy and cannot be allowed to stand.
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What if Trump wins?
President Donald J. Trump returns to the Oval Office following a White House Coronavirus Task Force coronavirus update briefing Sunday, March 29, 2020, at the White House. (Official White House Photo by Andrea Hanks)
Written by The Washington Monthly April 10, 2020
For many people, the prospect of what might happen if Donald Trump wins a second term is too awful to contemplate. But, as we are witnessing with the coronavirus, not contemplating scenarios that have at least some chance of happening is a grave mistake. Indeed, it’s a mistake that helped elect Trump in the first place.
Ideally, the press corps would be hard at work exploring this question. Alas, it is not. In the thousands of presidential campaign stories that have been published this year, you will be hard pressed to find much reporting or informed speculation about what policies Trump might pursue if he’s reelected, or what the consequences might be if he were successful in enacting them. That’s not because such things aren’t knowable in advance. If that were the problem, political reporters wouldn’t have spent the last six months gaming out which candidates were, say, likely to win which primaries. The real reason campaign journalists don’t do this kind of work is that it’s not what they’re trained to do—and, perhaps, it’s not what most people want to read.
We think our readers are different. So we gathered a distinguished group of area experts and beat reporters. We told them to imagine that, come November of 2020, Trump wins the Electoral College and the balance of power in Congress remains unchanged; Republicans hold the Senate and Democrats hold the House. Then, we asked them to think through the hitherto unthinkable: What will Trump aim to do, and what could he realistically get away with, if given another four years in power? —The Editors
Can The Liberal World Order Survive Another Four Years of Trump?
Probably not. Here’s why.
What Would a Second Trump Term Do to the Federal Bureaucracy?
An EPA stocked with climate change deniers. A Surgeon general sympathetic to anti-vaxxers. It could get grim.
How Trump Could Take Away Obamacare With a Second Term
After packing the courts, the president’s use of executive authority will be more effective.
How Trump Would Gut the Social Safety Net With a Second Term
There’s a backdoor tactic the administration would use to weaken programs that help the poor.
How Trump Could Dismantle Workers’ Rights with Another Four Years
In just his first term, he’s been a fairly effective union buster.
Trump’s Second Term Immigration Agenda
Will anyone be allowed into America?
Can Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Survive a Second Trump Term?
It’s a proposition better left untested.
Why a Second Trump Term Will Not Be a Horror Movie
Let’s hope it doesn’t happen. But if it does, we won’t be helpless.
Support the Washington Monthly
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/heres-the-perfect-antidote-to-trumps-orwellian-attempts-to-rewrite-recent-history/
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Here’s the perfect antidote to Trump’s Orwellian attempts to rewrite recent history
Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly April 3, 2020
As a writer, it can be difficult to come up with words to describe what it’s like to live through a crisis with someone like Trump in the Oval Office. Words like “Orwellian” seem totally inadequate when I want to rage at how crazy-making it feels to be constantly barraged with lies.
For example, on Wednesday, Vice President Mike Pence told Wolf Blitzer that the president has never belittled the threat of the coronavirus. What?! We all heard Trump belittle the threat over and over and over again—with our own ears. It is on tape for heaven’s sake.
How can someone go on national television and say something that is so blatantly refuted by the evidence? But the fact is that these folks do it all the time—which is where a word like “gaslighting” comes in because it is absolutely crazy-making.
The example that is most disturbing, however, is the fact that Trump is preparing to congratulate himself if this pandemic results in the death of 200,000 Americans. It’s coming. We all know it because he’s already teed it up.
Nancy LeTourneau
@Smartypants60
This is unconscionable. https://twitter.com/sparksjls/status/1244429399300112385 …
Jason Sparks
@sparksjls
Replying to @sparksjls
“If we have between 100,000 and 200,000 we’ve all together done a very good job,” Trump says, about up to 200,000 Americans dying of #COVID19.
Embedded video
To step away from the crazy for a moment, it is impossible to know how many Americans would have died if this country had a competent president. But on the issue of initial testing as a means of containment, we can already see the vast difference between what happened in South Korea and this country.
Trump belittled the threat, ignored multiple warnings, and avoided testing because the numbers would make him look bad. By the time the administration got serious about this pandemic, it was too late for containment and we were left with mitigation strategies like social distancing. While it is impossible to quantify the number of lives that were sacrificed due to that particular failure, it is clear that this president is responsible for the deaths of thousands on that issue alone.
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve often thought of Representative Adam Schiff’s warning about “midnight in Washington” at the end of the Senate impeachment trial—especially when he said, “You can’t trust this president to do the right thing. Not for one minute. Not for one election. Not for the sake of our country. You just can’t. He will not change and you know it…Truth matters little to him. What’s right matters even less. And decency matters not at all.” With those words, Schiff demonstrated that he doesn’t underestimate Donald Trump’s depravity. The congressman cut through the bullshit and grounded us all in the reality we are facing.
That is why I find some reassurance from this announcement.
When America has recovered from the coronavirus crisis and people are back to work, Rep. Adam B. Schiff thinks Congress should consider a 9/11-style independent commission to examine why the nation was so unprepared for the pandemic.
Schiff, a California Democrat, told me in an interview Monday that his staff has already started working on a discussion draft modeled after the 9/11 Commission, and that he would be talking about the possibility with others in Congress…
“We will need to delay the work of the commission until the crisis has abated to ensure that it does not interfere with the agencies that are leading the response,” Schiff explained in an email. “But that should not prevent us from beginning to identify where we got it wrong and how we can be prepared for the next pandemic.”
The antidote to the constant stream of Orwellian propaganda coming from Trump and his enablers is a grounding in the truth provided by people who have demonstrated that they recognize the depths to which this president has already gone. I can think of no one who would perform that task better than Representative Adam Schiff.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/how-the-war-against-voting-rights-became-a-pillar-of-the-conservative-agenda/
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How the war against voting rights became a pillar of the conservative agenda
Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly April 1, 2020
Included in the stimulus bill put together by Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats was a provision that established “a national requirement for both 15 days of early voting and no-excuse absentee vote-by-mail.” That one apparently got under Trump’s skin.
Trump openly admitting if we made voting easier in America, Republicans wouldn’t win elections
Trump: “The things they had in there were crazy. They had levels of voting, that if you ever agreed to it you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”pic.twitter.com/x5HmX6uogo
— Lis Power (@LisPower1) March 30, 2020
Trump basically admitted that if more people voted, “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” A lot of people assume that he said the quiet parts out loud when it comes to Republican efforts to suppress the vote. But just as Trump represents the culmination of many of the foundational principles on which the modern-day GOP was founded, the party has demonstrated over time that they aren’t particularly fond of democracy.
As Katherine Stewart documented in her book, The Power Worshippers, Paul Weyrich is often credited as the founder of the modern-day conservative movement. Even though he was not a particularly religious man, he developed a coalition between Goldwater Republicans and the religious right, which became the base that has elected every Republican president from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.
Here is something Weyrich said at a gathering of religious leaders back in 1980.
Weyrich clearly stated that he didn’t want everyone to vote. He went on to say that, for Republicans, “our leverage in the elections, quite candidly, goes up as the voting populace goes down.” That was basically an admission that the majority of Americans don’t support Republican principles.
As far back as 1980, the whole idea of a so-called “moral majority” was a lie—and people like Weyrich knew it. Rather than attempt to reflect the will of voters, Republicans simply decided that, as Zachary Roth put it, “being outnumbered doesn’t have to mean losing.” Voter suppression was therefore embraced as a conservative principle.
More recently, Ari Berman documented the decades-long battle against the Voting Rights Act that was waged by our current Chief Justice of the Supreme Court—John Roberts.The seeds of that battle were planted while Roberts served as a clerk for Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist, as well as his time in the Reagan Justice Department. It culminated in the Shelby vs Holder case when the Court overturned key elements of the Voting Rights Act, leading to a new wave of voter suppression efforts in the states.
Last year, when House Democrats passed a bill that included democratic reforms to campaign finance, ethics and voting rights, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the quiet parts out loud when he called them a “Democrat Politician Protection Act.” Once again, the inference is that, if more people vote, Democrats will be elected.
Those are just a few examples from the last forty years. But since our founding, rich white men have tried to limit the franchise to themselves. Here’s what Roth wrote about Alexander Hamilton’s only major speech at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.
Hamilton said the system should allow the “rich and the well born” to maintain their supremacy, since they would oppose radical change pushed by “the many.” The goal, he said, was to “check the imprudence of democracy.”
It is only through the blood, sweat, and tears of various movements that voting rights have been expanded in this country as a foundational principle of democracy. Obviously, that battle still rages on.
320 called for recess walk back to 3 day weekend, nancy and mnu negit on covid bill
why Mitch McConnell is running scaredNancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly
https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/managing-fear-republicans-now-have-to-strategically-decide-which-threats-to-maximize-and-to-minimize/
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Managing fear: Republicans now have to strategically decide which threats to maximize and to minimize
Written by Jonathan Zimmerman / The Washington Monthly March 16, 2020
In the recent movie Bombshell, a Fox News producer played by Kate McKinnon tells a younger colleague how the network decides what to cover. “The world is a bad place,” she quips. “Ask yourself, what would scare my grandmother or piss off my grandfather? And that’s a Fox story.”
That calculus has also been the engine of Republican politics in the age of Donald Trump, who has raised fear mongering to unprecedented heights. The country was under siege fromimmigration, terrorism, and crime, Trump asserted. Only he could make it safe—and great—again. As Democrats correctly noted, Trump has been exaggerating dangers to stoke voters’ prejudices and anxieties.
But coronavirus has scrambled politics in America, just as it has upended everything else. Until he declared a national emergency on Friday, Trump and his GOP media defenders were downplayingthe crisis.And Democrats became the party of fear, warning that Americans should be afraid—very afraid—and that the GOP was in a state of denial.
In a Quinnipiac University poll released last week, roughly 60 percent of surveyed Republicans said they were not especially concerned that the coronavirus would disrupt their lives. Two-thirds of Democrats, meanwhile,said they were somewhat or very concerned about disruption from the virus. Most remarkably, Democrats were twice as likely as Republicans to say they were afraid that they or someone they knew could catch Covid-19.
In large part, that’s because of the tone set by Trump. Last month, he said that the virus “dies with the hotter weather” and that it “will go away in April.” He also said that the total number of coronavirus cases stood at 15 and would soon be “close to zero.” Fox News host Sean Hannity quickly echoed the same sentiment, and continually hinted on his broadcast that the entire crisis might be a hoax.Rush Limbaugh likened coronavirus to a common cold.
These claims also earned a sharp rebuke from a handful of conservative media figures, including Fox’s Tucker Carlson. “People you trust, people you probably voted for, have spent weeks minimizing what is clearly a very serious problem,” Carlson told viewers last week, in a clear reference to Trump. “People you know will get sick. Some may die. This is real.”
Carlson was calling Republicans back to their customary sweet spot, as the party of fear. According to numerous research studies, Americans who perceive more danger in the world are more likely to vote Republican, while people who are more optimistic and hopeful typically pull the lever for Democrats.
That was never more obvious than in 2016, when Trump rooted his campaign firmly in fear. And it worked. Two-thirds of Trump supporters feared being a victim of terrorism, as opposed to half of all Americans. And 83 percent of people supporting Trump agreed that the American way of life needed to be protected from “foreign influence,” compared to 55 percent overall.
Never mind that foreign influence—in the form of Russian interference—helped Trump win the election. The larger moral was clear: to motivate voters, as the Fox News producer in Bombshell noted, Republicans and the conservative movement should harp on things that will scare your grandmother.
Well, coronavirus is one of those things—or, at least, it should be. The people most at risk during this crisis are the elderly, of course, who make up a big swath of the Fox News viewership. The viral infection is tailor-made for both Fox and the GOP, if they can wean themselves from their lockstep loyalty to Donald Trump.
Last week, Fox announced that most of its employees would work from home to prevent the spread of coronavirus. It also removed Fox Business anchor Trish Regan from her prime-time slot after she dismissed the crisis as “another attempt to impeach the president.”
But the president himself remains casual about coronavirus, as his behavior at Friday’s press conference made evident. Even while declaring a national emergency, Trump shook hands—something health experts have strenuously warned against—with all but one of the CEOs he invited to the White House. And despite having stood next to a Brazilian press aide who was diagnosed with coronavirus, Trump said he would not self-quarantine because has has “no symptoms whatsoever.” Of course, asymptomatic carriers of the virus can spread it to others.
In the face of Trump’s ignorance and nonchalant attitude,Democrats need to keep emphasizing the perils of the virus. Ever since Franklin D. Roosevelt proclaimed that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” we’ve been reluctant to engage fear as a political tool. Simply put, we’re afraid to make people afraid.
But sometimes, you have to do precisely that to move them in the proper direction. No matter our partisan affiliations, we should all be afraid of the coronavirus. Although most Americans who contract the virus will recover, they also threaten to infect those in greatest danger: old people and those with pre-existing health conditions. And if a huge number of people contract coronavirus in a very short span of time, they could overrun our hospitals and other medical facilities and compromise the care of those who need it most. Lives are truly at stake: if the virus itself doesn’t kill people, an inadequate response to it might.
The only thing we have to fear right now is complacency, not fear. And we need leaders—in both parties-—who aren’t afraid to say that.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/heres-why-trumps-incessant-vendetta-against-obama-is-a-losing-proposition/
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Here’s why Trump’s incessant vendetta against Obama is a losing proposition
Image via Wikipedia.
Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly February 19, 2020
Barack Obama took advantage of an anniversary on Monday to poke at one of the lies being repeated by his successor.
Barack Obama
@BarackObama
Eleven years ago today, near the bottom of the worst recession in generations, I signed the Recovery Act, paving the way for more than a decade of economic growth and the longest streak of job creation in American history.
Since his administration began, Trump has attacked Obama’s record of job creation and touted his own. Perhaps long-time readers here at the Washington Monthly will enjoy the fact that I intend to expose that lie based on information provided by Steve Benen and Kevin Drum. Here’s Benen:
As we discussed after the release of the latest report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Trump has now been in office for three full years (36 months), and during that time, the economy has created 6.56 million jobs. In the final full three years of Obama’s presidency, the economy created 8.08 million jobs.
Of course, Drum put the specifics into a chart.
It will surprise no one that data means nothing to Trump.
Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
Did you hear the latest con job? President Obama is now trying to take credit for the Economic Boom taking place under the Trump Administration. He had the WEAKEST recovery since the Great Depression, despite Zero Fed Rate & MASSIVE quantitative easing. NOW, best jobs numbers....
As the saying goes, Obama has taken up residence in Trump’s head—rent-free.
Jonathan Chait recently documented another way that Trump’s efforts to undo Obama’s legacy are failing.
One of the Obama administration’s most effective climate initiatives was tightened regulations of auto emissions, which will reduce carbon emissions by billions of tons. Trump, of course, is trying to roll it back. The good news is that he is almost certainly too incompetent to pull it off in his first term.
When regulatory agencies write new rules, they have to follow some fairly complicated legal procedures, which often have to hold up under judicial scrutiny. Historically, agencies win about 80 percent of the time against legal challenges. But Trump’s regulations lose about 90 percent of the time, because his administration is staffed with incompetent hacks.
The courts will soon be fighting over Trump’s plan to weaken auto-emission standards. Trump is highly likely to lose, because, as two new reports show, the incompetence of his regulators reached almost mind-boggling proportions.
The reports Chait referred to come from an article by Robinson Meyer that details how the Trump administration’s attempt to kill the auto-emission standards has been a “complete debacle” and one from Coral Davenport predicting a dead end for Trump’s efforts.
What also caught my eye was the fact that Trump’s regulations (or attempts to roll back Obama’s regulations) have failed in court about 90 percent of the time. That number comes from the Institute for Policy Integrity, which has been tracking this administration’s record in the courts. Of the 70 cases they have followed, Trump has won four and lost 66. As Chait points out, typically federal agencies have won about 80 percent of the time, so this administration’s record is worse than abysmal.
In writing about the effort to roll back Obama’s fuel-efficiency standards, Davenport identified the problem.
In January, administration staff members appointed by President Trump sent a draft of the scaled-back fuel economy standards to the White House, but six people familiar with the documents described them as “Swiss cheese,” sprinkled with glaring numerical and spelling errors (such as “Massachusettes”), with 111 sections marked “text forthcoming.”
The cost-benefit analysis showed that consumers would lose more money than they would gain. And, because the new auto pollution rule lacks the detailed technical analyses required by law, the regulations would be unlikely to withstand court challenges…
More basic issues holding up the regulations point to another problem: the skeleton crew of inexperienced political appointees who are heading the drafting process may not be up to a job that would usually be handled by career federal workers with decades of expertise.
As Chait rightfully suggested, Trump’s actual goal of humiliating Obama can’t be included in the analysis. So his incompetent staff are left with trying to manipulate the numbers and the science, which don’t support the president’s goals.
For Trump, things like math, science, and expertise are anathema. His only concern is to prop up his own narcissistic ego and demean anyone he views as a threat. That is why Trump’s vendetta against Obama’s legacy will always be a losing proposition. His incompetence overshadows his malevolence.
Nancy LeTourneau is a contributing writer for the Washington Monthly. Follow her on Twitter @Smartypants60.
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the mess Trump created in Iran could be his most disastrous mistake yet
Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly
Back in 2012, as negotiations were just beginning with Iran, President Obama outlined why it was important to stop the country from developing nuclear weapons.
vilification of enemies is all that matters in Trump’s GOPNancy LeTourneau / Washington Mont
an 1/20
How colleges can help reverse regional inequality
Most of us know by now that the richest Americans are getting even richer. What’s less well known is that America’s richest places are getting richer too. From 2005 to…
https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/how-a-right-wing-disinformation-network-keeps-republicans-steeped-in-lies/
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How a right-wing disinformation network keeps Republicans steeped in lies
Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly December 30, 2019
While Democrats continue to wring their hands over the 2020 presidential primary, Donald Trump and his enablers decided a long time ago that the eventual nominee would be Joe Biden. That explains the pressure the president put on Ukraine to announce an investigation into the Bidens, a move that led to his impeachment.
But just as we saw with the attempts to smear Hillary Clinton in 2016, the disinformation campaign about the Bidens will continue unabated in an effort to drive up negative impressions of the former vice president. Nicholas Grosman has documented the origins of one of those campaigns that is underway.
Hunter Biden is currently involved in a paternity suit in Arkansas. The New York Post recently ran an article titled, “Private-eye firm claims Hunter Biden is linked to multiple criminal probes.” Here’s the lead paragraph.
Hunter Biden is the subject of multiple criminal investigations related to “fraud, money laundering and a counterfeiting scheme,” it’s claimed in court documents filed Monday in his Arkansas paternity case.
The documents they are referring to were filed by a Florida-based private-eye firm, D&A Investigations, and were almost immediately dismissed by the judge because they had nothing to do with the paternity case. Nowhere in the documents did D&A name the agencies behind the purported criminal probes of Biden.
Grossman did what the reporters at the New York Post apparently couldn’t be bothered to do: he googled D&A Investigations and found their web site. The home page lists “active investigations.”
D&A opened an independent investigation (Transparency) in August 2016 into Hillary R. Clinton (HRC), Jeffrey Epstein & the Democrat National Committee (DNC) claims of: Russia broke into the DNC.
At the time, William J. Clinton (WJC), HRC, John Podesta, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and John Kerry were in collusion with Rogue Officials in the British Isles, Hong Kong, Iran, Russia, the Ukraine, United States, et al, to influence the outcome of the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election.
In other words, the firm is dedicated to spreading conspiracy theories—particularly those that originate as Russian propaganda.
Hunter Biden’s attorney, Brent Langdon, responded to the filings by saying that D&A was engaged in “a scheme by a non-party simply to make scandalous allegations in the pending suit to gain some quick media attention.” As confirmation, the charges were never substantiated and were almost immediately dismissed, and yet they’ve caught fire on right wing media.
Two days after the article in the Post, the story showed up on Fox News under the title, “Hunter Biden is subject of criminal probes, says PI firm hinting at more incriminating details.” Other than repeating what had already been reported and using the opportunity to rehash the claims about Burisma, they added that D&A told them “to expect an additional filing soon, and hinted that more incriminating details concerning Hunter Biden’s business dealings would soon come to light.”
The story was then picked up by OAN and made its way to RealClearPolitics. At this point, the title simply reads: “Court Filing Shows Hunter Biden Earned $156 Million From Ukraine Corruption.” We can assume that social media feeds are now inundated with these false claims.
It is worth noting that this attempt to spread disinformation is so blatant that reputable news organizations are simply ignoring it. But as Grossman writes, “to figure out what to do about disinformation, first we need understand how it works.” This case gives us an example of how that happens. Either news organizations like the New York Post, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics are complicit with a firm like D&A Investigations or they aren’t interested in verifying information when it reinforces their biases. As a result, they spread disinformation and lies.
That is how Trump is able to maintain his 40+ percent support in the polls. Republicans have a propaganda network that keeps them steeped in lies. Back in 2016, mainstream media gave credence to those lies about Hillary Clinton in the name of balance.Beyond offering a mea culpa for their complicity, reporters should do their part to expose the propaganda network for what it is. This story would be a good place to start.
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/trump-is-trying-to-alter-the-truth-about-his-presidency-just-like-the-soviets-did/
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Trump is trying to alter the truth about his presidency — just like the Soviets did
Written by Martin Longman / The Washington Monthly November 28, 2019
Long before Photoshop was invented, the Soviets figured out how to alter photographs and thereby alter history. In the following example, you can see Nikolai Yezhov, the feared chief of the secret police during the worst of the Great Purge, whitewashed out of a photograph of Stalin. Yezhov was executed in 1940 after having served his purpose. He reportedly insisted on his loyalty to Stalin until the end, even declaring that he would die with Stalin’s name on his lips.
It wasn’t enough to simply kill Yezhov, however. Stalin wanted to eliminate him, as much as possible, from the historical record. That wasn’t an easy task for someone who was responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, and cropping him out of a photo seems so insufficient to the task as to be somewhat ridiculous. Still, it was Stalin’s version of, “I hardly knew the guy.”
As of October 9, 2019, the Washington Post had tallied 13,435 false or misleading claims by President Trump since he was inaugurated in January 2017. Among these are numerous denials that he said or did things that are well-documented. Among these are statements that he hardly knew people who worked closely with him or that minimized the amount or importance of their work. There are lies about Russia did in 2016 and lies about what Ukraine did not do in 2016.
One recent example of the former involves the U.S Ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland. On October 4, Trump minimized the statements of the State Department officials who were lining up to give depositions to Congress about Ukraine, “I don’t even know most of these ambassadors. I didn’t even know their names.” But Trump expected Sondland to have his back and called him “highly respected.”
He followed that up with a tweet on October 8, in which he wrote that Sondland “a really good man and great American.” Exactly a month later, on November 8, Trump stood on the South Lawn of the White House and said with a straight face, “Let me just tell you: I hardly know the gentleman.” On November 20, as Sondland was testifying on national television that Trump had engaged in a quid pro quo, Trump told reporters “I don’t know him very well. I have not spoken to him much. This is not a man I know well. He seems like a nice guy though.”
The truth is much different. Sondland had as many as 20 one-on-one phone calls with the president and was widely understood within the State Department to have direct and unusual access to both the president and his chief of staff Mick Mulvaney. In fact, he was effectively given the lead role on Ukraine in a May 23 meeting in the Oval Office, despite Ukraine not being a member of the European Union or an official part of Sondland’s portfolio. To demonstrate my point, the following is from acting assistant secretary of European and Eurasian Affairs Philip Reeker’s October 26, 2019 deposition before the House Intelligence Committee (see, e.g., pages 71-75 for his discussion of Sondland’s role). Reeker had just been asked if it is true that Sondland had been given “a rather large remit (for Ukraine) by the president”?
Deposition of Philip Reeker, October 29, 2019
The latest example of Trump trying to whitewash history came on Tuesday night when he claimed in an interview with Bill O’Reilly that he had not deputized Rudy Giuliani to help carry out his Ukraine policy.
Asked point-blank if Giuliani was acting on his behalf in trying to dig up dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden—an issue now at the heart of an impeachment inquiry—Trump said, “No, I didn’t direct him, but he is a warrior, he is a warrior.”
Let’s compare that to what President Trump said on the July 25 call with President Zelensky of Ukraine:
Trump is very clear there that President Zelensky is to take a call from Rudy Giuliani to discuss several issues, including the investigation of Joe and Hunter Biden. In fact, going back to the May 23 meeting in the Oval Office, Ambassadors Kurt Volker and Sondland were instructed to “talk to Rudy” so they could implement Trump’s instructions for Ukraine.
President Trump’s instruction in May to a U.S. delegation that had just returned from Ukraine made clear that his personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani was playing the driving role in shaping the president’s view of that country — and that top officials needed to cater to him, according to transcripts of testimony released this week.
“Rudy had some bad issues with Ukraine, and until Rudy was satisfied, the president wasn’t going to change his mind,” European Union Ambassador Gordon Sondland said in his testimony to House investigators.
After the May 23 Oval Office meeting, Kurt Volker, then-special envoy to Ukraine, contacted Giuliani, attempting to court his support for U.S. foreign policy goals, and also put him in touch with a top Ukrainian official.
There is every indication that Giuliani may soon be indicted on a laundry list of crimes, and so now the president is finally realizing that he needs to create at least a little distance from him. Before long, he may try to tell us that he hardly knew Giuliani and rarely spoke to him. He can do this because he he has two things going for him. The first is a right-wing media Wurlitzer that plays his tune with little contradiction. The second is a mainstream media that does an excellent job of documenting his lies but feels compelled to offer “both sides” of every argument. When the Republican Party and high-ranking Republican officials adopt the president’s line, it gets reported as almost as credible as whatever the media or the Democrats are saying.
This is why you need organizations like the Washington Monthly that do not engage in both-siderism.At Political Animal we call bullshit on bullshit and we document the atrocities without feeling the need to get a quote from partisan hacks like Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, Lindsey Graham or Devin Nunes. That’s not “balance.” It’s amplifying lies and helping the president act like some modern day Josef Stalin.
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