Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – February 18, 2024
by Tony Wikrent
Who will guard the guardians?
Public, via Naked Capitalism 02-15-2024]
“Former CIA Director Gina Haspel blocked the release of ‘binder’ with evidence that may identify her role in the Trump-Russia collusion hoax.”
CIA Had Foreign Allies Spy On Trump Team, Triggering Russia Collusion Hoax, Sources Say
Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag [via Naked Capitalism 02-14-2024]
[TW: I want to put forward the observation that given Trump’s close association with Roy Cohn, and business dealings with the Russian mafia, it would have been malpractice for USA intelligence agencies NOT to make such requests. The real problem with this is that there is no longer any reason to believe the the CIA, FBI, NSA and other intelligence agencies actually serve the General Welfare of the citizens of USA.
Or to put it another way, how would we want an intelligence agency to have dealt with Aaron Burr when Burr was running for president? Or how about dealing with Secretary of War Jefferson Davis in the 1850s as the sectional crisis worsened? What do we want an intelligence agency to do when one such appears headed for the highest office in the land? Or actually wins it?
There are many people who have a knee jerk reaction against intelligence agencies. Are we to abolish any and all intelligence agencies? I have no doubt that there are many people who immediately answer with an emphatic “yes!” I would ask them to take the time to read James Fenimore Cooper’s The Bravo/ It is Cooper’s “novel” of how the secret service of Venice blackmails a poor man into being an assassin. At the very least, read Cooper’s Introduction; there is nothing fictional there at all. Cooper explains that he wrote the novel to explore the process of cultivating evil in the dark recesses of government power, and how that contrasts to the process of acculturation in civic values that is supposed to occur in a real republic.
In the case of Trump, we know that his behavior and character was molded in profoundly evil ways because Trump was tutored in Cohn’s methods and philosophy of government. But, again, what are we to do about this when we no longer have government institutions steeped in the civic values of republicanism? Recall that Jeffrey Epstein’s first troubles with law enforcement were dissipated by the intervention of intelligence agencies with the district attorney in Florida who wanted to bring charges.
Lambert Strether applauds (anti)Republicans for opposing the campaign of the intelligence agencies against Trump, but I do not think these (anti)Republicans are acting from any moral commitment to the good. Rather, their position is part of their partisan warfare against the Democrats, calculated to gain a political advantage. The excesses and coups of the CIA, let us remember were committed as much, if not more, under Republicans as Democrats. The names Dulles, Helms, Colby and Casey come to mind. And then there is George Bush Sr., who was both CIA director and POTUS. And I think it is a mistake to assume that only the Democrats thought they would benefit from the RussiaGate operation. Trump is as much a danger to the Republican establishment as he is to the Democratic Party. Nobody yet has been much interested in looking for a RussiaGate connection to the Bush family apparatus yet, but I suspect there are some important stories there waiting to be uncovered.
It is useful to look at the history of intelligence activities before the formal establishment of intelligence agencies — and especially the creation of the national security state — beginning with Franklin’s and Washington’s espionage operations during the Revolutionary War. Why were there no scandals arising from those operations? Or from the Union Army and Pinkerton operations during the Civil War? I contend that a large part of the reason was that the guardrails of public duty as defined by civic republicanism were still in place and quite robust.
In the final analysis, the only real way to “guard the guardians” is to make sure that the doctrines and values of civic republicanism a suffused throughout the nation. But capitalism, and its single-minded emphasis on self-interest, is a strong and dangerous corrosive element that must be reckoned with. — TW]
Death of Aleksei Navalny: the Brits did it!
Gilbert Doctorow [via Naked Capitalism 02-17-2024]
...In all of the false flag operations that have been directed by the West against Russia over the past decade or more, I have argued that the old Roman investigative principle of cui bono militated against the Kremlin having been involved in any way. So it is today: why would Putin want to murder Navalny, when the man is now largely forgotten within Russia. Navalny is yesterday’s news and his ‘anti-corruption’ campaign is irrelevant to Russians in the midst of an existential struggle with the Collective West that is being fought on the territory of Ukraine? However, the murder of Navalny clearly serves the interests of that same Collective West.…
Let us go beyond the cui bono argumentation to circumstantial evidence that is damning for the Brits. As the Americans like to say, there are ‘fingerprints’ of the Brits all over this death of Navalny.
A fair number of the poisonings and other assorted deaths of people who could be said were ‘inconvenient’ to the Kremlin happened in the U.K., after all. That is where Boris Berezovsky, the exiled oligarch who opposed Putin tooth and nail, was ‘suicided’ and it occurred in 2013 at his London estate when it was widely rumored he was looking for forgiveness for his treachery and was preparing to return to Mother Russia with a trove of documents. Earlier still, the U.K. is where the Berezovsky employee Alexander Litvinenko met his death in 2006 from polonium poisoning in a very British cuppa tea.
However, more recently there were incidents in the U.K. which bear directly on the fate of Navalny, and their timing is very relevant. I am thinking about the Novichok poisoning of former Russian spy Alexander Skripal in Salisbury at the start of March 2018, ahead of the 18 March presidential elections in Russia that year, when Putin was making his return to power following the interregnum when Dmitry Medvedev was president….
Global power shift
Maersk CEO Says Military Operations Can’t Guarantee Safety of Ships in Red Sea
HEATHER MONGILIO, February 8, 2024 [USNI News]
The military operations in the Red Sea cannot guarantee the safety of commercial shipping in the region, the chief executive officer of a major shipping company said on Thursday.
During a 2023 third-quarter earnings call, Maersk CEO Vincent Clerc mentioned the lack of guaranteed safety in the Red Sea, which has come under several attacks by the Yemen-based Houthis in a Thursday interview on Bloomberg T.V.
Clerc said disruptions in the Red Sea have affected about a third of the company’s container volume, which was less than the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We’ve not seen the level of threat peak, to the contrary,” Clerc said. “The amount or the range of weapons that are being used for these attacks is expanding and there is no clear line of sight to when and how the international community will be able to mobilize itself and guarantee safe passage for us.”
Russia Expanding Munitions Production, Says Norwegian Foreign Minister
JOHN GRADY, February 8, 2024 [USNI News]
Russia has ramped up its capacity to produce munitions, despite two years of war draining its stockpiles and increasingly severe economic sanctions, to continue its fight in Ukraine, Norway’s foreign minister said Wednesday.
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
Patrick Lawrence: The Crisis at The New York Times
t has been evident to many of us since the genocide in Gaza began Oct. 7 that Israel risked asking too much of those inclined to take its side. The Zionist state would ask what many people cannot give: It would ask them to surrender their consciences, their idea of moral order, altogether their native decency as it murders, starves and disperses a population of 2.3 million while making their land uninhabitable.The Israelis took this risk and they have lost. We are now able to watch videos of Israeli soldiers celebrating as they murder Palestinian mothers and children, as they dance and sing while detonating entire neighborhoods, as they mock Palestinians in a carnival of racist depravity one would have thought beyond what is worst in humanity—and certainly beyond what any Jew would do to another human being. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports, as American media do not, that the Israel Defense Forces covertly sponsor a social media channel disseminating this degenerate material in the cause of maintaining maximum hatred.…Post–Gaza, apartheid Israel is unlikely ever to recover what place it enjoyed, merited or otherwise, in the community of nations. It stands among the pariahs now. The Biden regime took this risk, too, and it has also lost. Its support for the Israelis’ daily brutalities comes at great political cost….
Max Blumenthal thinks the crisis inside The Times reflects a deep divide between the newsroom, where there seems to be a surviving cohort of conscientious journalists, and the upper reaches of management, where the paper’s ideological high priests reside. I have not been inside the Times building in well more than a decade, but there is a history to support this thesis. It goes at least as far back as the 1950s, when Aurthur Hays Sulzberger, as publisher, signed a secrecy agreement with the Central Intelligence Agency and gave tacit approval to correspondents who wanted to work for the agency.
Israel and Hamas 2023 Conflict In Brief: Overview, U.S. Policy, and Options for
Congress (pdf)
Congressional Research Service, November 30, 2023
[TW: Where there is no vision the people perish.]
Gaza and the End of the Rules-Based Order
[Foreign Affairs, via Naked Capitalism 02-16-2024]
Why a Demilitarized Palestine Won’t Work
[Foreign Policy, via Naked Capitalism 02-16-2024]
Oligarchy
Inside European finance’s most secretive society
[Financial Times, via Naked Capitalism 02-11-2024]
FT. The Institut International d’Etudes Bancaires.
The IIEB was founded in Paris in 1950 by the heads of four lenders from across the continent — Crédit Industriel et Commercial, Union Bank of Switzerland, Société Générale de Belgique and Amsterdamsche Bank — with the aim of holding regular top-level discussions on developments in the banking sector, as well as the economy and monetary system. It was part of a raft of cross-border institutions set up during that period to encourage closer ties between organisations from countries that had recently been at war with one another…. Ilaria Pasotti, a researcher who has studied the organisation’s early archives,
A great many inholdings, including Crazy Peak and the meadows below it, had recently been sold to Switchback Ranch LLC, owned by billionaire private equity investor David Leuschen. And the company had plans for this property. One day, I followed a helicopter to a cabin construction site by an alpine lake on one of the company’s inholdings, 8,000 feet up and miles from a road. The area bristled with fresh “No Trespassing” signs.Meanwhile, down in the foothills, other landowners were choking off public access routes and effectively privatizing vast swaths of the mountains.What was going on here?
The Crazies, it seems, have been swept up in the wave of wealth and gentrification that is reshaping the West — driving up housing costs in nearby towns, displacing working-class residents and carving up the landscape for profit. Among the newcomers to the Crazies is CrossHarbor Capital Partners, which owns the Yellowstone Club, an ultra-exclusive residential development near Big Sky that boasts the only private ski and golf resort in the world and where membership costs millions of dollars. In 2021, CrossHarbor bought (through one of its subsidiary companies) the 18,000-acre Crazy Mountain Ranch and later announced plans for two golf courses. “As incredible a setting [as] there will ever be for the game of golf,” says the website. The company plans to run the ranch as “a private membership experience.”
Donald Cohen Exposing The Lies That Protect Power And Wealth in America
[Corporate Crime Reporter, February 14th, 2024]
...“As remarkable as this political progress has been, the political rhetoric surrounding the minimum wage remains surprisingly unchanged,” Hanauer writes in his new book (co-authored with Donald Cohen and Joan Walsh) titled Corporate Bullshit: Exposing the Lies and Half-Truths that Protect Profit, Power and Wealth in America (The New Press, 2023).
“Minimum wage opponents continue to deride every proposed increase as a surefire job-killer, while reporters and pundits reliably characterize the passage of every minimum wage ordinance and statute as a dangerous experiment that threatens to harm the very people it’s intended to help.”
….How did the book get started?
“It grew out of a project I was working on called The Cry Wolf Project,” Cohen told Corporate Crime Reporter in an interview last week.
Adam M. Lowenstein, February 16, 2024 [The American Prospect]
Two new histories of American capitalism reveal how alluring narratives have nurtured corporate power.
Taming the Octopus: The Long Battle for the Soul of the Corporation
By Kyle Edward Williams
Norton
One Day I’ll Work for Myself: The Dream and Delusion That Conquered America
By Benjamin C. Waterhouse
Norton
….
Taming the Octopus, which gets its title from a 1904 cartoon that depicted the Standard Oil trust as a sprawling, uncontrollable sea creature with tentacles reaching toward every corridor of power, traces the centuries-long American debate about the purpose of the corporation in society. It documents how the notion that private companies, rather than governments, should solve public problems—“corporate social responsibility” to most; “woke capitalism” to Vivek Ramaswamy and other Republican politicians—is a feel-good story that company bosses, academics, journalists, and “thought leaders” have been honing for decades.
Another new book, Benjamin C. Waterhouse’s One Day I’ll Work for Myself: The Dream and Delusion That Conquered America, charts the rise of the “persistent myth,” as the author puts it, that individual entrepreneurs and small businesses anchor the U.S. economy, and that every American would be better off “going it alone.”
Together, these histories trace the emergence and entrenchment of ideas about capitalism that have deeply infiltrated the American psyche. As a consequence, countless people live under the gnawing weight of economic precarity, and the notion that we might solve problems through collective action and democracy has been shattered….
One conclusion that emerges from Williams’s detailed and timely history is that little of today’s chatter about “stakeholder capitalism” or “ESG investing” (investing based on environmental, social, and governance standards) is as new, or as transformational, as the hype suggests. Time and time again, Williams demonstrates matter-of-factly, corporations have responded to public criticism with increasingly well-honed storytelling campaigns, designed primarily to resist momentum for new laws and regulations. And time and time again, journalists, professors, and thought leaders have been ready to endorse polished assurances that corporations really are different now.
[TW: One example of the idea of collective action having been shattered is the Obama administration’s refusal to discuss or even consider public works programs during the economic crises resulting from the financial crash of 2007-2009. In January 2008, I wrote about how Harry Hopkins, director of President Franklin Roosevelt’s Civil Works Administration (CWA), prevented mass starvation by putting over four million American on government payrolls in the winter of 1933-34. A commenter noted that “1934 was the last midterm congressional election when the Democrats gained seats in Congress with a Democrat in the White House.” A useful contrast: After Roosevelt, we got a half century of Democratic Party dominance that cemented in place Social Security and other New Deal programs. After Obama, we got a 47 percent increase in the cost of health insurance … and Donald Trump. ]
[TW: And just in case you forgot exactly how we got here, with the (anti)Republicans fighting to use the issue of immigration as a bludgeon against Democrats in the 2024 election: ]
Blame the poor and immigrants - clip from the closing scenes of The Big Short
.
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
[Business Insider, via The Big Picture 02-17-2024]
South Africa’s failed infrastructure privatisation and deregulation
[CADTM, via Naked Capitalism 02-13-2024]
The Economics Teacher of the New Generation: Cryptocurrency Ideology
[MR Online, via Naked Capitalism 02-16-2024]
The widespread ownership of crypto currencies has created the grounds for a very reactionary economic understanding among broad social segments, especially among young people.
Torching the Google car: Why the growing revolt against big tech just escalated
[Blood in the Machine, via Naked Capitalism 02-15-2024]
...we know that trust in Silicon Valley in general is eroding, and anger towards the big tech companies — Waymo is owned by Alphabet, the parent company of Google — is percolating. Not just at self-driving cars, of course, but at generative AI companies that critics say hoover up copyrighted works to produce plagiarized output, at punishing, algorithmically mediated work regimes at the likes of Uber and Amazon, at the misinformation and toxic content pushed by Facebook and TikTok, and so on.
It’s all of a piece. All of the above contributes to the spreading sense that big tech has an inordinate amount of control over the ordinary person’s life — to decide, for example, whether or not robo-SUVs will roam the streets of their communities — and that the average person has little to no meaningful recourse.
Especially when government seems incapable or unwilling to push back. In the case of the robotaxi, even after public opposition from San Francisco city officials, firefighters and emergency responders and months of activist protest, a state body, the CPUC, overrode the city’s concerns and approved allowing more on the streets. Around the same time, California governor Gavin Newsom vetoed a bipartisan bill that would have required a human operator in self-driving trucks. Shortly after both decisions, the Cruise car hit the pedestrian.
When people feel like their backs are against the wall, that their voices are not being heard, that those who profit from the deployment of invasive technologies are being given free reign, well, it creates the kind of conditions in which we might not be surprised to see more drastic measures taken up directly against those technologies.
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
[Microsoft, via Naked Capitalism 02-16-2024]
Co-pilot is Microsoft’s new AI tech, which is now “integrated with operating system” exactly as Internet Explorer once was.
The Bipartisan Bid to Stop Surveillance Reform
Luke Goldstein, David Dayen, February 16, 2024 [The American Prospect]
Rep. Mike Turner may have overstepped by publicly warning about Russian space nukes, but Democrats were also trying to use the intelligence to influence the vote on warrantless spying.
‘Enough Is Enough’: Australia Says Free Assange
Amy Goodman, Denis Moynihan, February 18, 2024 [CommonDreams]
Predatory Finance
Pam Martens and Russ Martens, February 13, 2024 [Wall Street on Parade]
[TW: USA 2021 GDP was $23.3 trillion; world 2021 GDP was $96.5 trillion.]
How to Diffuse the Derivatives Time Bomb
Ellen Brown, February 18, 2024 [CommonDreams]
Restoring balance to the economy
FTC Chair Khan: Stop Monopolies Before They Happen
[Axios, via Naked Capitalism 02-14-2024]
LERACH: “The Democratic administration – because politically they are dependent on corporate money, Wall Street money, the accounting firm money, corporate community money – they have become soft on prosecuting big corporate cases.”
“On the other hand, these cases are hard to prosecute. These corporate executives are smart. They are surrounded by lawyers and experts. They get opinions. They insulate themselves. To us, we might say – the conduct there is so bad they ought to be prosecuted. But when you get into it, proving criminal intent can be difficult.”
“So what are the results? A system whereby deferred prosecution agreements and big fines paid with corporate shareholder money, not the individual wrongdoers money, create headlines, create statistics for the prosecutors and a perfectly acceptable world for the corporate criminals where they can just go on with their conduct paying for it with the shareholders’ money. Now that’s not a good system.”
….
CCR: If Congress were to act to control corporate wrongdoing ... what would you propose
that they do?LERACH: I would re-establish aiding and abetting liability for professionals. I’d get rid of the strong inference subjective test in the PSLRA [Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995]. I would get rid of the ability to appeal interlocutory and class certification orders. I would get rid of the Morrison decision so that the poor class action cases don’t lose half their damages when they are filed because many investors are foreign or are buying on foreign exchanges. You do those things, you will see bigger recoveries, more lawsuits and more justice.
Major new study to identify Kleptocratic “red flags” and craft new anti-corruption rules
[University of Exeter, via Naked Capitalism 02-14-2024]
Professor Heathershaw said: “Lawyers, accountants, company service providers and other professionals often play essential roles in the movement of illicit wealth. They can be enormously powerful and effective at resisting both scrutiny and regulation. This influence, along with the complexity of this terrain, has led to a lack of consensus around what counts as “enabling” activity and what consequences should follow.
Public Ownership of Housing Could Be Closer Than You Think
Mindy Isser, February 15, 2024 [In These Times]
Forget private developers—cities and states could just build their own housing to solve the crisis. In New York, now there’s a bill to do it….
New York is not the only state dealing with a housing crisis, which legislators and activists around the country are working creatively to solve. In Montgomery County, Maryland, an affluent suburban area outside of Washington D.C., legislators resolved to increase the affordable housing stock by using public money to create a revolving fund that would finance the building of nearly 9,000 new units. It’s a relatively new plan, passed by the Montgomery County Council in 2021, but so far it appears to be working: the first publicly-funded project opened in April 2023, and is 97% rented. And last February, voters in Seattle approved an initiative to create the Seattle Social Housing Developer, a public development authority to create social housing in the city.
Barbara Lee calls for $50/hour federal minimum wage
[National Desk, via Naked Capitalism 02-17-2024]
...The representative continued, citing a United Way report that showed $127,000 is “just barely enough to get by” for a family of four in the San Francisco Bay Area. Another individual making $104,000 annually would be classified as low income, Rep. Lee said, citing another report.
“Just do that math. Just do that math,” Rep. Lee said. “Of course we have national minimum wages that we need to raise to a living wage. You’re talking about 20, 25 dollars, fine. But I have got to be focused on what California needs and what the affordability factor is when we calculate this wage.”
Collapse of independent news media
Over Three Decades, Tech Obliterated Media: My front-row seat to a slow-moving catastrophe.
Kara Swisher [New York Magazine, via The Big Picture 02-11-2024]
In the early 1990s, I was a reporter at the Washington Post. Having just turned 30, I was the “young” person in the newsroom, so when the digital-media start-ups appeared, I got what many reporters looked at as the short end of the beat. They had no interest in understanding the massive changes that were happening. As I learned more, it often fell to me to explain what this newfangled internet was as if I were trying to explain a tree to a child….
In 1995, a quirky programmer in San Francisco named Craig Newmark started emailing friends a list of local events, job opportunities, and things for sale. The next year, he turned Craigslist into a web-based service and eventually started expanding it all over the country and the world.
It was clear this list was a giant killer, and I told everyone who would listen to me at the Post that we needed to put all the money, all the people, and all the incentives into digital. I insisted that the bosses had to make readers feel like digital was the most important thing. But the bosses never did because the business they knew was the physical paper….
Climate and environmental crises
28-Ton, 1.2-Megawatt Tidal Kite Is Now Exporting Power To the Grid
[New Atlas, via Naked Capitalism 02-13-2024]
...Just as land-based wind energy kites fly in figure 8 patterns to accelerate themselves faster than the wind, so does the Dragon underwater. This, says Minesto, lets the Dragon pull more energy from a given tidal current than other designs – and it also changes the economic equations for relevant sites, making slower tidal flows worth exploiting.
These are by no means small kites – the Dragon 12 needs to be disassembled to fit in a shipping container. It rocks a monster 12-meter (39-ft) wingspan, and weighs no less than 28 tons. But compared to other offshore power options like wind turbines, it's an absolute minnow, and extremely easy to install using a single smallish boat and a sea bed tether.
Chernobyl’s mutant wolves appear to have developed resistance to cancer, study finds
[Sky News, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 02-13-2024]
“Dr Cara Love, an evolutionary biologist and ecotoxicologist at Princeton University in the US, has been studying how the Chernobyl wolves survive despite generations of exposure to radioactive particles….. The researchers discovered that Chernobyl wolves are exposed to upwards of 11.28 millirem of radiation every day for their entire lives – which is more than six times the legal safety limit for a human. Dr Love found the wolves have altered immune systems similar to cancer patients undergoing radiation treatment, but more significantly she also identified specific parts of the animals’ genetic information that seemed resilient to increased cancer risk.”
Democrats' political malpractice
The Democrats Are Blowing the 2024 Election
Jason Linkins, February 17, 2024 [The New Republic]
Joe Biden’s reelection hopes have been ill served by his complacent colleagues—who are currently getting pummeled by their more vigorous Republican counterparts….
There are always good reasons to complain about the political press—and Republicans do their own share of carping. But Democrats too often operate as if the media they’d prefer to have—temperate and fair, dedicated to substance and nuance, committed to preserving democracy—is the one that actually exists. Republicans don’t believe that the press is a noble institution and they don’t treat its members that way. Instead, they innately understand that the political press is just a ravenous, insensate maw looking for its next hot meal of crassness, chaos, conflict, and controversy—and Republicans always come with a heaping plate.
What Would Happen If Biden Stepped Aside?
Thomas Neuburger, February 13, 2024 [downwithtyranny.com]
...If Biden were to remove himself from the race, the answer to what would happen is already before us. Just examine the 2016 primary race between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, and consider the role of superdelegates….
Consider a state like Michigan, where Sanders won the popular vote. The pledged delegate allocation was 67-63 Sanders. But with superdelegate preferences added in, Clinton won the state — it was reported as such on the national news — and the delegate distribution changed to 75-67 Clinton. Several states went from the Sanders column to the Clinton column in this way.
But worse, consider states won by Clinton in the popular vote, Iowa, for example. The pledged delegate count was 23-21 Clinton. With superdelegates added in, the count went to 29-21 Clinton. In Connecticut, 28-27 Clinton became 43-27 Clinton. The differences are most striking in states like California and New York, with their large delegate totals.In all, with a total of 712 superdelegates available, Clinton started the race with an opening lead of 572-42. In the end, without her superdelegates, Clinton would not have won on the first ballot, even with the skewed reporting that served to depress the Sanders vote….I’ve often written that had Sanders won the Democratic nomination, he’d have beaten Trump handily in the general election.
There are many arguments for this, including the fact that in many “open” primaries, where a voter could choose either a Democratic or a Republican ballot, Sanders beat Trump in most of them.For example, in the open same-day primary on March 8 in Michigan, these are the popular vote totals:
- Sanders: 595,222
Trump: 483,751
….
A Biden Pre-Convention Withdrawal
The rules for superdelegates have changed a little since 2016. They’re now not allowed to vote on the first ballot. In this case, though, that wouldn’t matter. Since the Democratic leaders chose not to hold a real primary, almost no one but Biden will enter with a delegate count. Without Biden to vote for, the convention would be brokered from the start, and anyone could win — so long as they had superdelegate support….If Biden Drops Out After the ConventionIf Biden drops out after the Convention, the voters would have no say at all. According to Lee Fang in a paid post, superdelegates would “maintain direct control of the process if Biden were to step down after the convention.”
If Biden Steps Aside, Lobbyists Poised to Select Democratic Presidential Nomination
Lee Fang, February 12, 2024 [via Thomas Neuburger]
If President Biden steps aside after the convention, the Democratic nomination is entirely in the hands of a small set of DNC insiders and corporate lobbyists….
Following Biden’s election in 2020, the president, as the de-facto leader of the Democratic Party, appointed former corporate lobbyist Jaime Harrison as DNC chairman. Harrison used his role to bring more business representatives into superdelegate positions and voted down proposals to limit the influence of special interests within the party.
Rather than limit the influence of lobbyists, the DNC doubled down. Harrison’s appointments DNC members include Lacy Johnson, who leads the lobbying practice at Taft’s Public Affairs Strategies Group, a firm that assists Koch Industries and a trade group for oil refineries with government outreach; Marcus Mason, a lobbyist who represents Google and Navient; and Nicole Isaac, a former Meta and Google official, now leads Cisco's global lobbying operations.
The Harrison-led DNC has blocked efforts to curb corporate influence in the party. The Rules and Bylaws Committee has instead concentrated more power to a select group of DNC insiders. The committee is also responsible for the decision to remove Iowa and make South Carolina the first official primary election….
Minyon Moore, co-chair of the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee, is an influential lobbyist who previously served as an aide to Bill and Hillary Clinton and now works at Dewey Square Group. DSG has worked for a variety of corporate interests. Lyft tapped DSG to fight proposals in California and Massachusetts that would force the company to provide benefits and minimum wages to its drivers….
Democrats Have Themselves a Victory in New York. But They Also Have a Problem
[Slate, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 02-16-2024]
“The key to this race was the money. Democrats spent nearly $14 million, almost double the GOP’s $8 million investment in the race. According to AdImpact, the total ad spend for just this Long Island district totaled an eyewatering $21.4 million. That’s more than quadruple the outlay of the 2022 race that yielded Santos…. Waiting for the national party to airdrop a spending advantage of millions of dollars is not a sustainable way to win elections. The difficulty of this win and the price tag show the cost of the New York State Democratic Party’s refusal to reconcile with the failures of the party apparatus after the 2022 midterms. This district will also have to go back to the polls for this same race in November. How many millions will that cost? It could be a problem for Biden too. He may be old. He may be unpopular. But New York Democrats are a millstone around his neck, not the other way around. ‘This should not be a close race,’ said Klein, the progressive organizer, on election day. “It makes me very nervous for November.”
[Lambert Strether adds: “Lots of not-very-encouraging detail on NY Democrats.”]
(anti)Republican Party
Breaking: Talking Points Memo has details of the legal warfare to keep January 6 going for days
xaxnar, February 13, 2024 [DailyKos]
Talking Points Memo has gained access to a trove of documents that lay out how Kenneth Chesebro and other Trump attorneys planned to keep the 2020 election from being certified for days, until the Supreme Court would be forced to step in to settle….
”Today, we published a story — the first in a three-part series based on the documents — which reveals Trump’s attorneys theorizing about how a never-ending Jan. 6 could be engineered, and what it might look like. They envision hearings in Congress over the endless, mythical voter fraud claims which abounded after Trump refused to concede the 2020 election and, most of all, appeals to the Supreme Court to do in 2020 what it did in 2000: step in and resolve the count in favor of the GOP.
“Chesebro appears to have live-tweeted his plans along the way, via an account I uncovered called “Badger Pundit.” He cuts a bizarre figure: a well-credentialed outsider, willing to take on the persona of influential White House attorney at exactly the moment when the Trump campaign is desperately searching for a legitimate-seeming means to postpone the inevitable: recognizing that it lost the election.”
Ron Brownstein, The Atlantic, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 02-13-2024]
“[Stephen Miller, Trump’s top immigration adviser] outlined the Trump team’s plans for a mass-deportation effort most extensively in an interview he did this past November on a podcast hosted by the conservative activist Charlie Kirk. In the interview, Miller suggested that another Trump administration would seek to remove as many as 10 million ‘foreign-national invaders’ who he claims have entered the country under Biden. To round up those migrants, Miller said, the administration would dispatch forces to ‘go around the country arresting illegal immigrants in large-scale raids.’ Then, he said, it would build ‘large-scale staging grounds near the border, most likely in Texas,’ to serve as internment camps for migrants designated for deportation. From these camps, he said, the administration would schedule near-constant flights returning migrants to their home countries. ‘So you create this efficiency by having these standing facilities where planes are moving off the runway constantly, probably military aircraft, some existing DHS assets,’ Miller told Kirk. In the interview, Miller acknowledged that removing migrants at this scale would be an immense undertaking, comparable in scale and complexity to ‘building the Panama Canal.’ He said the administration would use multiple means to supplement the limited existing immigration-enforcement personnel available to them, primarily at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, better known as ICE. One would be to reassign personnel from other federal law-enforcement agencies such as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the DEA. Another would be to ‘deputize’ local police and sheriffs. And a third would be to requisition National Guard troops to participate in the deportation plans.” Interestingly: “If Trump invoked the Insurrection Act, which dates back to 1792, he would have almost unlimited authority to use any military asset for his deportation program. Under the Insurrection Act, Trump could dispatch the Indiana National Guard into Illinois, take control of the Illinois National Guard for the job, or directly send in active-duty military forces, [Joseph Nunn, a counsel in the Liberty & National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School] said. ‘There are not a lot of meaningful criteria in the Insurrection Act for assessing whether a given situation warrants using it, and there is no mechanism in the law that allows the courts or Congress to check an abuse of the act,’ Nunn told me. ‘There are quite literally no safeguards.'”
The Right to Protest Is in Peril at the Supreme Court
Matt Ford, February 15, 2024 [The New Republic]
Disrupting mainstream politics
Are You An Activist? Do You Have A Dilemma? What Are We Going To Do About The Genocide In Gaza?
Howie Klein, February 12, 2024 [downwithtyranny.com]
Robb Willer is a much admired Stanford sociologist who studies, among other things, the effectiveness of activists’ tactics. I heard him on NPR talking about it yesterday. It didn’t surprise me when he said that when passionate activists use violence or aggressive disruption to protest their cause, they tend to turn off more people than they recruit to that cause— and it’s not even close. I wish I could have talked to him about how to protest the urgency of something as existential as genocide….
Four years earlier, Willer and Feinberg had already conducted 6 studies with over 1,300 participants. Willer told the Stanford News that they found “the most effective arguments are ones in which you find a new way to connect a political position to your target audience’s moral values… Moral reframing is not intuitive to people. When asked to make moral political arguments, people tend to make the ones they believe in and not that of an opposing audience— but the research finds this type of argument unpersuasive.” Feiberg added that “Our natural tendency is to make political arguments in terms of our own morality. But the most effective arguments are based on the values of whomever you are trying to persuade.”
Willer laid out this part of their research (more reframing) well as part of a TEDTalk he did in 2017. Watch:
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