Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – October 13 2024
by Tony Wikrent
Strategic Political Economy
America Is Lying to Itself About the Cost of Disasters
Zoë Schlanger, October 5, 2024 [The Atlantic]
...This mismatch, between catastrophes the government has budgeted for and the actual toll of overlapping or supersize disasters, keeps happening—after Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Maria, Hurricane Florence. Almost every year now, FEMA is hitting the same limits, Carlos Martín, who studies disaster mitigation and recovery for the Brookings Institution, told me. Disaster budgets are calculated to past events, but “that’s just not going to be adequate” as events grow more frequent and intense. Over time, the U.S. has been spending more and more money on disasters in an ad hoc way, outside its main disaster budget, according to Jeffrey Schlegelmilch, the director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia Climate School….
The U.S. is facing a growing number of billion-dollar disasters, fueled both by climate change and by increased development in high-risk places. This one could cost up to $34 billion, Moody’s Analytics estimated. Plus, the country is simply declaring more disasters over time in part because of “shifting political expectations surrounding the federal role in relief and recovery,” according to an analysis by the Brookings Institution…....A study by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce found that every dollar of disaster preparedness saves communities $13 in damages, cleanup costs, and economic impacts. But since 2018, the government has set aside just 6 percent of the total of its post-disaster grant spending to go toward pre-disaster mitigation….Meanwhile, costs of these disasters are likely to balloon further because of gaps in insurance. In places such as California, Louisiana, and Florida, insurers are pulling out or raising premiums so high that people can’t afford them, because their business model cannot support the current risks posed by more frequent or intense disasters. So states and the federal government are already taking on greater risks as insurers of last resort. The National Flood Insurance Program, for instance, writes more than 95 percent of the residential flood policies in the United States, according to an estimate from the University of Pennsylvania. But the people who hold those policies are almost all along the coasts, in specially designated flood zones. Inland flooding such as Helene brought doesn’t necessarily conform to those hazard maps; less than 1 percent of the homeowners in Buncombe County, North Carolina, where the city of Asheville was badly hit, had flood insurance….But some of these measures, such as adopting stronger building codes, tend to be unpopular with the states that hold the authority to change them. “There is a sort of quiet tension between states and the federal government in terms of how to do this,” Schlegelmilch said. The way things work right now, states and local governments would likely end up shouldering more of the cost of preparing for disasters. But they know the federal government will help fund recovery.
Plus, spending money on disaster recovery helps win elected officials votes in the next election. “The amount of funding you bring in has a very strong correlation to votes—how many you get, how many you lose,” Schlegelmilch said. But the same cannot be said for preparedness, which has virtually no correlation with votes.
...All of that is a way of saying that hurricanes are really dangerous, and involve massive sums of money and important questions of market power and shortages. And that’s especially true today, with our monopolized and thus fragile supply chains. For instance, when North Carolina got hit with immense rain from Hurricane Helene a few weeks ago, it killed hundreds of people, and also knocked out a mine making 90% of the key pure quartz on which the semiconductor industry depends. To take another example, the American Hospital Association has already asked the President to declare a national emergency due to a shortage of IV fluids as a result of the disaster….((One factory about 35 miles east of Ashville supplied 60% of the nation’s IV fluids...))….So what’s the right approach to addressing the resulting crisis?
The response will require more state capacity. Clearly there’s search and rescue and immediate crisis response, which requires a lot more funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). We’re going to need a permanently larger FEMA, since climate change has dramatically increased the pace of natural disasters. The government should probably just rebuild and then make all cell phone service free in the area for the next two months, and find a way of extending Medicaid to everyone so no one has to deal with billing. Or they could just temporarily nationalize hospitals.
What we can learn from the Covid crisis and the CARES Act is that we should immediately be sending resources to individuals and small businesses in the area. A quick disbursal of cash to everyone in the region, as well as a revival of the Paycheck Protection Program for small business loan/grants, would help people afford basic necessities, and keep businesses alive. Bank regulators should also freeze credit reporting and student debt payments for people in affected counties.
Given the potential crisis of Florida property values and all the financing attached to those, we need to think about bank solvencies. To address the possibility of a financial crisis, Congress should stop working through the Federal Reserve, which is too focused on helping private equity and large banks and far too opaque. Instead, the government should structure a new public bank called the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. It should be run by the FDIC, and be allowed to use the Fed balance sheet for loans, which would all be publicly posted.
We can also learn some lessons from the post-Katrina moment, as well as what happened during Covid, and the CARES Act. What we can learn from Katrina is that it’s important to do as much within the government as possible, instead of through contractors….
... we are entering a world beset by climate change, which will require a different political order. Last July, I wrote a piece on how we are forgetting the lessons from Covid. We are still highly dependent on China, and the fragility of our supply chains hasn’t improved. And that’s because, while there are some good policymakers in positions of authority like Lina Khan and Rohit Chopra, the bulk of our leadership class is still in thrall to a finance-friendly model of industrial fragility. And this dynamic is as much an ideological problem as anything else….
Thomas Neuburger, October 09, 2024 [God’s Spies]
Davos Man votes. The rich who run the world, who own all the governments Washington isn’t bombing, droning, hating on or disrupting, those people vote. Davos Man, his boards, his bankers, enablers, bought politicians, that’s who reaps the wealth from all those emissions. That’s who decides whether they stop or continue.
Humanity’s just a passenger on this train. If you don’t want what the rich already want, your wishes are dreams. If you depend on the favor of the great, your dreams are empty, entertainments at best.
And so with the climate crisis: To blame “humanity” hides both cause and solution. The rich are running this world into the ground — because they can, because it keeps them in charge, because they want total control more than they want any kind of future for the cattle we call “humanity.”
To the super-rich — and I don’t say it lightly — “humanity,” people, are things, tools to be used. Humanity holds no more value in the eyes of our lords than the people of Gaza hold for Tony Blinken….
The Ukrainian Endgame: Winter is coming. Is peace-or-collapse what's left?
Thomas Neuburger, October 04, 2024 [God’s Spies]
From an excellent Substack site by Nicolo Soldo, impishly named Fisted by Foucault, comes this dispassionate Ukraine War piece called “Towards the Endgame.” Here he’s descriptive only, which is its value.
Poking the BearFirst, the piece confirms what may or may not be the result of Lawrence Wilkerson’s thesis that the U.S. military, through Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin, has drawn a line in the sand regarding military support for Ukraine. If Wilkerson isn’t right, it’s as if he were.Soldo (emphasis mine):
“President Zelensky has just returned from an important trip to the USA, with reports informing us that he has come away empty-handed. An $8 Billion USD cheque was cut to support Ukraine’s continued defense, but that is nowhere near what he requested as part of his so-called “Victory Plan”. The Americans also rejected the other key element of that plan, denying Ukraine the right to use US arms to hit targets deep within Russia.”
Whether this is Biden finding the limit to what he will do for Ukraine, or whether Lloyd Austin said to Biden “This far and no farther,” is immaterial to the result. The U.S., at least this week, won’t poke the bear by attacking (or allowing Ukraine to attack) deep targets in Russia.
Global power shift
Biden's Intent Is To Sow Chaos - Netanyahoo And Zelensky Are Working For Him
Moon of Alabama [via Naked Capitalism 10-12-2024]
It is in fact the Biden administration which is using the Israeli (and Ukrainian) government to serve its foreign policy purposes. As I remarked:
This has been the general theme of a media campaign for a while. "Natanyahoo is steamrolling Biden and the poor guy can do nothing about it."I do not buy it. One phone call from the White House to the Pentagon would hold resupply flights from the U.S. to Israel. Without constant supply renewal the Israeli Air Force would have to stop its bombing campaigns in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen within days if not within hours.
But instead of calling the Pentagon, the whole Middle East team around Biden, Antony Blinken, Brett McGurk and IDF soldier Amos Hochstein, has been urging Israel to extend its campaign.
They are hoping, like the neoconservatives in 2006 during the Bush administration, for the 'birth pangs of a new Middle East', which will forever change the strategic situation on the ground.
...
The conclusion from this is that Netanyahoo is largely doing exactly what the Biden administration wants him to do.Gilbert Doctorow, the well known historian and journalist, is of similar opinion:
More on tails wagging dogs and vice versa
Some viewers/readers support my contention that the United States is using Israel as its proxy in the Middle East and is not just enabling but even directing Israel’s rampage in the region to ‘kick ass’ generally and to reinforce American dominance there in line with American global hegemony. Far from being outraged by the Israeli atrocities, the U.S. government is satisfied to see Israel take revenge for the many humiliations that the United States has suffered in the Middle East, most recently in the disorderly and disgraceful pull-out from Afghanistan but going back, say, 40 years to the hostage taking at the American embassy in Teheran by the new revolutionary Iranian leadership there that overthrew the American backed Shah.
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
Gaza Doctor Corrects CNN Anchor: 'This Is Not a Humanitarian Crisis... This Is Genocide'
Brett Wilkins, October 11, 2024 [CommonDreams]
What did Al Jazeera’s investigation into Israeli war crimes in Gaza reveal?
[Al Jazeera, via Naked Capitalism 10-07-2024]
Historic ICC War Crimes Complaint Names 1,000 Israeli Soldiers
Brett Wilkins, October 09, 2024 [CommonDreams]
"This complaint is not only the largest ever submitted to the ICC, but it is also a milestone in documenting Israeli war crimes for future generations."
How Netanyahu stole defeat from the jaws of victory
[Middle East Eye, via Naked Capitalism 10-08-2024]
Inside the State Department’s Weapons Pipeline to Israel
[ProPublica, via Naked Capitalism 10-06-2024]
Meet Matthew RJ Brodsky, a so-called U.S. foreign policy expert who just publicly called for the carpet bombing and napalming of Irish peacekeepers in South Lebanon. This is a man who’s briefed U.S. officials, advised the White House on the Palestinian-Israeli “peace” process, and helped shape the communications strategy of the Trump administration.
Are these the people we trust with international peace and diplomacy? Calling for war crimes on social media is not only reckless—it’s dangerous.
[Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 10-10-2024]
As the Columbia University professor steps down, he addresses student protests, links between Ireland and Palestine and how ‘higher education has developed into a hedge fund’
[CNN, via Naked Capitalism 10-12-2024]
Oligarchy
Howie Klein, October 7, 2024 [downwithtyranny.com]
According to political scientists Jeffrey Winters and Benjamin Page, the political influence of the 400 richest Americans is 22,000 times that of the average member of the bottom 90%. Needless to say, Timothy Mellon is one billionaire that’s proving Winters and Page right.”
Pluto-Populism Comes To America— No Tariffs Charged
Howie Klein, October 9, 2024 [downwithtyranny.com]
...“Many of us saw, pretty early on,” wrote William Kristol (AKA “Dan Quayle’s brain” when he was the then-Vice President’s chief of staff) on Monday, “the dangers of demagogic populist nativism, bigotry, and grievance-mongering. That’s why we were Never Trump. We had a sense of the damage Trump as president could do. But we also had a sense of the damage Trumpism, unleashed as a movement, could do… [W]e probably underestimated how much damage Trumpism could do to our political system, to our legal order, to our civil society, to our country.”
His essay, though was about something he regrets having missed: “I didn’t see clearly enough that oligarchic arrogance and entitlement would eagerly join forces with populist demagoguery. The photo of Elon Musk leaping on stage to exultantly join Donald Trump Saturday night in Butler, Pennsylvania, captures the phenomenon that I’m describing. It’s not that I had an excessively high opinion of the virtues or judgment of the super-wealthy. But I assumed that, having done well in America over the last few decades, they’d be a ‘conservative’ force in more or less upholding the current political and economic order. I assumed they’d be wary of, even opposed to, someone like Trump, who was unleashing forces that could ultimately turn against them. I assumed they wouldn’t want to put their success at risk… I didn’t expect was the unbridled arrogance and the authoritarian zeal that we’ve seen from the new oligarchs. I should have remembered the words of Franklin D. Roosevelt in his acceptance speech at the 1936 Democratic convention: ‘It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over government itself.’”
Helaine Olen, October 3, 2024 [The American Prospect]
Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism
By Brooke Harrington
Norton
The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World
By Atossa Araxia Abrahamian
Riverhead
The greatest observers of how money influences people and corrupts institutions are not, as a general rule, those who possess it. They are instead those who, as F. Scott Fitzgerald recognized a century ago, live and work in close proximity to them. This is the insight that both inspires and informs sociologist Brooke Harrington’s trenchant new book Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism.
...Harrington quickly and unsurprisingly runs into brick walls attempting to learn more about this secretive system of wealth, until she recalls something she first noted about the rich families she encountered as a child: They rarely do anything for themselves. They need help, even with something as mundane as changing a light bulb….
So Harrington gets credentialed in wealth management, specializing in her target, offshore finance. She’ll study the rich by studying their financial consiglieres and enablers.
As an academic, Harrington is granted no access. As a peer, even though she isn’t working in wealth management and informs everyone she is doing academic fieldwork, she’s viewed as not just an equal, but someone with whom secrets can be shared. In sociological terms, she performs immersive fieldwork, gaining the trust of wealth managers so she can reveal this world to the rest of us.
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
Have We Finally Turned The Corner On The Neoliberal Consensus?
Project Democracy, October 6, 2024 [via downwithtyranny.com]
A brilliant, progressive, forward thinking first term member of Congress, Rep Summer Lee of Pennsylvania, has proposed new economic legislation that addresses both taxes and wages, to create a more just economy and lift millions of people out of poverty. It’s called the American Stability Act. Its basic features are:
Replace the minimum wage with a stability wage, which would assure that everyone who works full time would earn at least a livable wage, according to the annual MIT Study
Increase the current personal exemption with the livable wage exemption, so that no person earning less than a livable wage would pay federal income taxes, and we would stop taxing people into poverty (the increased exemption would gradually phase-out for people with higher incomes)
Replace the tax revenue that would be lost as a result of the higher personal exemption with surtaxes on very high incomes, 3% on annual incomes over $1 million and an additional 5% on annual incomes over $15 million
Index the Stability Wage to inflation or average wage growth, so the stability wage would adjust periodically to reflect actual economic conditions; without congressional intervention
GRAPH — Wealth distribution in the United States
After Gorging on Stock Buybacks for Years, Boeing Announces Mass Layoffs
Jake Johnson, October 12, 2024 [CommonDreams]
Predatory finance
Monopoly Round-Up: The Fed Took $3k From You and Gave it to Jamie Dimon
Matt Stoller, October 6, 2024 [BIG]
...We’ll start with this story on Fed Chair Jay Powell’s choice to transfer $1.1 trillion to large financial institutions over the past two and a half years when he helped raise interest rates, which is about $3000 from every single American.
How did this transfer happen? “Lenders got higher yields for their deposits at the Fed but kept rates lower for many savers,” wrote the FT, with subsidies higher for big banks than small ones. There’s a lot of discussion in the media about whether rates should go up or down, but for some reason, the trillion dollar transfer doesn’t come up….
Most of our bank regulators operate the way Powell does, harming business by concentrating money in the hands of banks who steward it poorly. It’s not just the Fed, the other main bank regulator, the Office of Comptroller of the Currency, is often worse. Earlier this week, for instance, Acting OCC chief Michael Hsu - a Janet Yellen disciple - had his agency file a brief with a court asking a judge to invalidate an Illinois law restricting the right of credit card companies to charge certain fees. “The Illinois Interchange Fee Prohibition Act,” it said, “is an ill-conceived, highly unusual, and largely unworkable state law that threatens to fragment and disrupt this efficient and effective system.”
That is a remarkable legal statement, considering the fact that a few weeks ago, the Department of Justice Antitrust Division sued Visa for monopolization, over high fees, no innovation, and coercive behavior towards business….
Pam Martens and Russ Martens, October 7, 2024 [Wall Street on Parade]
On September 24, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) released its Quarterly Report on Bank Trading and Derivatives Activities for the second quarter of this year. The OCC is the federal regulator of banks that operate across state lines, which are known as “national banks.”
Restoring balance to the economy
A Means to Live: The past and future of debt resistance
Astra Taylor, September 25, 2024 [The Nation]
...The Political Development of American Debt Relief, a fascinating new book by Emily Zackin and Chloe N. Thurston, seeks to recover this history. It is not a full account of how we got into the overleveraged bind that now sees Americans carrying a collective $17 trillion in household debt. Nor does it document every movement seeking to give the indebted relief. But it does provide some critical episodes in the story of both. As Zackin and Thurston show, the ongoing battle between the owing and owning classes has deep roots in American history—from Shays’s Rebellion in the 1700s, to Dust Bowl farmers radicalized by predatory mortgages, to the more recent campaigns against student loans, back rent, and carceral fines and fees. Ordinary people have struggled under the burden of personal debt since the founding of the country in 1776, and they have struggled against that burden for just as long….
Consistently attentive to the power struggles that inform public policy, The Political Development of American Debt Relief shows how laws are shaped and reshaped by citizen action—and, just as critically, by its absence. Laws are written, thrown out, reinterpreted, and enforced (or not enforced) depending on how much, or how little, debtors are involved in politics and how much leverage they can muster and wield.
The Best Tool to Solve the Housing Crisis
Sam Russek, October 11, 2024 [The New Republic]
To improve conditions and lower prices, tenants should start withholding rent….
This pipeline to lifelong housing insecurity, which exists with varying degrees of barbarity across the country, is often called the “housing crisis.” In this framing, the central problem is merely a shortage of housing, meaning high demand for a limited supply, driving prices up and making affordable units ever more scarce. The proposed solution is more construction, on the theory that more housing (even the luxury condos that typically get built) decreases demand on cheaper units. But as Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis point out in their new book, Abolish Rent, this approach ignores many of the issues tenants face. “Housing isn’t in crisis, tenants are.” While there is indeed a shortage of cheap units, the housing system is working exactly as designed: It maximizes the profits of landlords, developers, and real estate speculators at the expense of people who need homes. Current efforts to increase construction “do not produce lower rents, but rather rents that rise less quickly,” effectively kicking the can down the road. The “housing crisis” framing also obfuscates the power imbalance between landlords and tenants, and suggests that to “solve” the crisis, we should focus on building more, rather than on giving tenants a voice in their homes.
Disrupting mainstream economics
New CA QSR Min Wage Study. A Victory Lap.
[The Big Picture, October 7, 2024]
If you’re not aware of the brouhaha that was stirred about a year or so ago when CA Gov Gavin Newsom signed into law (taking effect April 1, 2024) a new $20 minimum wage for so-called “limited service” (a/k/a fast food or QSR) restaurant workers, read up here, here, or here.
In a nutshell, the usual suspects’ heads exploded well before the legislation even took effect, claiming it would lead to widespread devastation in the fast food space: job losses, restaurant closures, extreme price hikes, etc. We have seen this happen every time the minimum wage rises—lots of sound and fury that, in the end, signified nothing.
It began with some shoddy reporting at the Wall St. Journal, which seemed to unquestioningly reprint industry press releases… The mistake then spread to the Hoover Institution, then a CA group called CABIA, the NY Post and, of course, Fox News.
We know that numerous academic studies have shown that most dire forecasts that are made about raising the minimum wage do not come to pass. And now comes the first such study about the hike in California. Cut to the chase:
“We find that the sectoral wage standard raised the average pay of non-managerial fast food workers by nearly 18%, a remarkably large increase when compared to previous minimum wage policies. Nonetheless, the policy did not affect employment adversely. It did increase fast food prices, on a one-time basis only, by about 3.7%, or about 15 cents for a $4 item. Consumers, therefore, absorbed about 62% of the cost increases. These effects are benign. However, restaurant profit margins likely fell, and the royalty fees restaurant operators pay to franchisors likely increased.”
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
AI Is Threatening the Social Safety Net
Ami Fields-Meyer, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez October 11, 2024 [The American Prospect]
Across the country, state and local governments have turned to algorithmic tools to automate decisions about who gets critical assistance. In principle, the move makes sense: At their best, these technologies can help long-understaffed and underfunded agencies quickly process huge amounts of data and respond with greater speed to the needs of constituents.
But careless—or intentionally tightfisted and punitive—design and implementation of these new high-tech tools have often prevented benefits from reaching the people they’re intended to help.
In 2016, during an attempt to automate eligibility processes, Indiana denied one million public assistance applications in three years—a 54 percent increase. Those who lost benefits included a six-year-old with cerebral palsy and a woman who missed an appointment with her case worker because she was in the hospital with terminal cancer. That same year, an Arkansas assessment algorithm cut thousands of Medicaid-funded home health care hours from people with disabilities. And in Michigan, a new automated system for detecting fraud in unemployment insurance claims identified fivefold more fraud compared to the older system—causing some 40,000 people to be wrongly accused of unemployment insurance fraud.
Smart TVs Are Like ‘a Digital Trojan Horse’ in People’s Homes
[ars technica, via Naked Capitalism 10-09-2024]
[Mediaite, via Naked Capitalism 10-06-2024]
Meta Is Aggressively Censoring Criticism Of US-Israeli Warmongering
Caitlin Johnstone [via Naked Capitalism 10-08-2024]
Climate and environmental crises
Percent of global ocean with September sea surface temperatures (SSTs) of at least 30C (86F)
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 10-09-2024]
Percent of global ocean with September sea surface temperatures (SSTs) of at least 30C (86F). It's as if something has changed.
How satellite data has proven climate change is a climate crisis
[Space.com, via Naked Capitalism 10-06-2024]
Clean Energy Transition Faces Looming Metal Supply Crunch
[OilPrice, via Naked Capitalism 10-12-2024]
Democrats' political malpractice
I Worked for Democrats for Years. Billionaires Have Unfettered Influence
[Newsweek, via Naked Capitalism 10-08-2024]
Lina Khan's future is the future of the Democratic Party – and America
Cory Doctorow, 11 Oct 2024 [Pluralistic]
On the one hand, the anti-monopoly movement has a future no matter who wins the 2024 election – that's true even if Kamala Harris wins but heeds the calls from billionaire donors to fire Lina Khan and her fellow trustbusters.
In part, that's because US antitrust laws have broad "private rights of action" that allow individuals and companies to sue one another for monopolistic conduct, even if top government officials are turning a blind eye. It's true that from the Reagan era to the Biden era, these private suits were few and far between, and the cases that were brought often died in a federal courtroom. But the past four years has seen a resurgence of antitrust rage that runs from left to right, and from individuals to the C-suites of big companies, driving a wave of private cases that are prevailing in the courts, upending the pro-monopoly precedents that billionaires procured by offering free "continuing education" antitrust training to 40% of the Federal judiciary:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down ….
...another reason to think that the antitrust surge will continue irrespective of US politics: antitrust is global. Antitrust fervor has seized governments from the UK to the EU to South Korea to Japan. All of those countries have extremely similar antitrust laws, because they all had their statute books overhauled by US technocrats as part of the Marshall Plan, so they have the same statutory tools as the American trustbusters who dismantled Standard Oil and AT&T, and who are making ready to shatter Google into several competing businesses….
But on the other hand, if Harris wins and then fires Biden's top trustbusters to appease her billionaire donors, things are going to get ugly.
A new, excellent long-form Bloomberg article by Josh Eidelson and Max Chafkin gives a sense of the battle raging just below the surface of the Democratic Power, built around a superb interview with Khan herself:
The article begins with a litany of tech billionaires who've gone an all-out, public assault on Khan's leadership – billionaires who stand to personally lose hundreds of millions of dollars from her agency's principled, vital antitrust work, but who cloak their objection to Khan in rhetoric about defending the American economy. In public, some of these billionaires are icily polite, but many of them degenerate into frothing, toddler-grade name-calling, like IAB's Barry Diller, who called her a "dope" and Musk lickspittle Jason Calacanis, who called her an all-caps COMMUNIST and a LUNATIC….
...Khan's FTC banned noncompetes nationwide:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/25/capri-v-tapestry/#aiming-at-dollars-not-men
Only to have a federal judge in Texas throw out their ban, a move that will see $300b/year transfered from workers to shareholders, and block the formation of 8,500 new US businesses every year:
https://www.npr.org/2024/08/21/g-s1-18376/federal-judge-tosses-ftc-noncompetes-ban
Notwithstanding court victories like Epic v Google and DoJ v Google, America's oligarchs have the courts on their side, thanks to decades of court-packing planned by the Federalist Society and executed by Senate Republicans and Reagan, Bush I, Bush II, and Trump. Khan understands this; she told Bloomberg that she's a "close student" of the tactics Reagan used to transform American society, admiring his effectiveness while hating his results. Like other transformative presidents, good and bad, Reagan had to fight the judiciary and entrenched institutions (as did FDR and Lincoln). Erasing Reagan's legacy is a long-term project, a battle of inches that will involve mustering broad political support for the cause of a freer, more equal America.
Neither Biden nor Khan are responsible for the groundswell of US – and global – movement to euthanize our rentier overlords. This is a moment whose time has come; a fact demonstrated by the tens of thousands of working Americans who filled the FTC's noncompete docket with outraged comments. People understand that corporate looters – not "the economy" or "the forces of history" – are the reason that the businesses where they worked and shopped were destroyed by private equity goons who amassed intergenerational, dynastic fortunes by strip-mining the real economy and leaving behind rubble….
If Harris gives in to billionaire donors and fires Khan and her fellow trustbusters, paving the way for more looting and scamming, the result will be more nihilism, which is to say, more electoral victories for the GOP….
Zephyr Teachout, October 13, 2024 [The New York Review]
Kamala Harris has a chance to outflank Trump’s rhetoric on tariffs—and lay out her own vision of fair, green, worker-first global commerce….
..And yet the people I met at county fairs and chicken dinners and parades also cared deeply about trade. If you asked them their top priorities, they wouldn’t say “trade policy,” necessarily. But if you heard them tell a story of their lives, their work, and the towns they lived in, they’d invariably say jobs were being lost to Mexico and China, or mention NAFTA. Our internal polling backed up what I was hearing at the Ellenville Blueberry Festival. Of seven “profile” messages we tested, the strongest was: “[Candidate] believes we need to bring jobs home, make things in America again, and support local farming and manufacturing.” A net 93 percent supported it.
People I met associated Trump with being against NAFTA and trade deals like the then-pending Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), an initiative Obama was selling as a way to remove barriers to export and investment in the Pacific Rim.
Kamala Could Still Blow This Whole Thing—There Are No Cheney Democrats & Very Few Cheney Republicans
Howie Klein, October 7, 2024 [downwithtyranny.com]
On Friday, The Nation published an essay by Dave Zirin, Behind the Harris Campaign’s Quest for the Mythical “Cheney Democrats”.
”The Democratic consultant class— the immortal swamp things of DC— only ever seem to have one idea: pitch your campaign to the political center. In 2024, this means trying to win over what are being called “Cheney Democrats”— whatever the hell that means. This strategy apparently requires ignoring your base on domestic issues and horrifying it on foreign policy by funding Israel’s genocide. In our polarized political moment, this is electoral suicide.
“The Harris-Walz ticket is running a campaign rooted in the fantasy that there is a centrist wing of the GOP appalled by Donald Trump. For this to work, Trump would need to be an outlier, and a significant section of the GOP would need to be looking for an alternative….
“I have no doubt the Harris-Walz team knows that it is repelling many young people and Arab American voters. And we know now that Biden says in private what so many critics have been saying in public: that Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is refusing a ceasefire and launching a regional war in part to hand Trump the presidency. And yet, a Democratic administration still arms him. Netanyahu is humiliating Biden for the world to see, and Harris won’t break from Biden’s Israel policy. Facing such an obvious sucker punch, the Harris campaign insists on sticking out its chin.
”This is not incompetence. As Dan Denvir of the podcast The Dig tweeted, “What we’re seeing is not so much Democratic Party elites ignoring the anti-war demands of their constituents so much as a coordinated reaction against the party’s anti-war base. They want to silence and demobilize their base so party elites can pursue endless Israeli war abroad.”
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 10-10-2024]
it was kinda cool those three weeks Kamala campaigned on "Republicans are weird and we're not going back" before deciding to pivot to "Republicans are my friends and they're good and we can do Republican policy even better than they can," the strategy that already lost to Trump
Harris Rails Against Corporate Landlords While Taking Donations From Blackstone Billionaire
[Sludge, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 10-10-2024]
“In late July, speaking to a crowd of more than 10,000 people at her first campaign rally in Atlanta, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris vowed to go after corporations that buy up homes and jack up rent. ‘We will take on corporate landlords and cap unfair rent increases,’ Harris said to great applause. The Harris campaign has made taking on corporate landlords a major plank of its plans to help make life more affordable for the middle class, and it has become a common theme at her rallies. In her Aug. 16 plan for an ‘opportunity economy,’ the campaign outlined the steps Harris would take to go after these real estate investors during her first 100 days in office…. While she campaigns on the issue, the Harris campaign is being backed by the president of the largest corporate landlord in the country, a company that her longtime political advisors are currently helping to defeat a California ballot measure that would expand rent control. Jonathan Gray, the billionaire president and chief operating officer of investment firm Blackstone, donated $413,000 to the Harris Action Fund in late July, just after President Biden dropped out of the race. Gray also donated $50,000 to the fund last June, while Biden was the nominee, plus $6,600 to the Biden campaign—funds that are now controlled by the Harris campaign…. Blackstone, a massive alternative investment management company with over $1 trillion in assets under management, is the largest landlord in the country, owning and managing almost 350,000 units of rental housing, according to a report from the Private Equity Stakeholder Project (PESP).”
Who's Going To Save Us From An Undead Confederacy Risen From The Grave— In Service To Billionaires?
Howie Klein, October 12, 2024 [downwithtyranny.com]
Writing for The Atlantic yesterday, Renée DiResta noted that Twitter’s flood of conspiracy theories now define reality for the far right. These crazy, baseless “stories seem absurd to most people. But to a growing number of Americans living in bespoke realities, wild rumors on Twitter carry weight. Political influencers, elites, and prominent politicians on the right are embracing even pathologically outlandish claims made by their base. They know that amplifying online rumors carries little cost— and offers considerable political gain.” ….
“History shows that the weaponization of rumors can lead to devastating consequences— scapegoating individuals, inciting violence, deepening societal divisions, sparking moral panics, and even justifying atrocities. Yet online rumormongering has immense value to right-wing propagandists. In the 2020 election, Trump and his political allies set the narrative frame from the top: Massive fraud was occurring, Trump claimed, and the election would be stolen from him. The supposed proof came later, in the form of countless online rumors. I and other researchers who watched election-related narratives unfold observed the same pattern again and again: Trump’s true believers offered up evidence to support what they’d been told was true. They’d heard that impersonators were using other people’s maiden names to vote. A friend of a friend’s ballot wasn’t read because they’d used a Sharpie marker. These unfounded claims were amplified by influencers and went viral, even as Twitter tried to moderate them— primarily by labeling and sometimes downranking them. None of them turned out to be true. Even so, today, 30 percent of the public and 70 percent of Republicans still believe the Big Lie that Democrats stole the 2020 election from Trump. This simmering sense of injustice is powerful— it spurred violence on January 6, 2021— and continues to foster unrest….”
”…Conservatives have reframed fact-checking as a censorship technique by “woke” tech companies and biased journalists….”
...So… are young people going to save us from ourselves? Polling from John Della Volpe is optimistic on the question. Dave Weigel interviewed him recently and he said he thinks “that many folks underestimated the degree to which younger people were looking for political leaders they could connect with….
Weigel asked “how does Harris’ position now compare to the Democrats who’ve won and lost? And Della Volpe responded “It best compares to Obama 2012 and Biden 2020. Obama won 66% of the under-30 vote in 2008. He won 60% in 2012, and Biden got 60% in 2020. The feel of this campaign is a mash-up of 2008 and 2018. It’s the hopefulness and the energy of Obama’s first run, and it’s the focus, organization and determination of 2018 when young people got serious. People got organized after Parkland. That’s the year Joe Crowley lost his primary to AOC, for example. One difference is that Trump is doing somewhat better with men than he did four years ago. He’s been introducing himself to a new group of voters for the first time. That is paying off to some degree. Today’s 20 year olds were 11 when he came down the escalator. They were 12 or 13 when he appointed Steve Bannon to the NSC, when he pulled out of the Paris accords, when he tried to end the ACA. These kids didn’t see him as a villain. They saw him as an anti-hero. They saw him standing up to authority. They tell me they thought it was funny. Then they enter high school with COVID. They’re discovering Joe Rogan, Theo Von, and conspiracy theories about the government. The only sport they could watch for an extended period of time was UFC and Dana White. And when Biden becomes president, post-COVID, the cost of living spikes and it’s really expensive to do the simple things young people want to do. Many young people connect the feelings of being five years old during the Great Recession and worried about whether their parents would stay in their house to fear of inflation and potential recession today; that’s where a Trump-curious young voter is coming from.”
Jill Stein: The Grifter Who May Hand Trump the White House Again
Thom Hartmann, October 10, 2024 [The New Republic]
Not only is she helping Trump win—she’s destroying a once-noble party that could be doing good in this country….
In 2016, Hillary Clinton lost Wisconsin to Trump by 22,748 votes; Stein carried 31,072 votes. In Michigan the story was similar: Clinton lost to Trump by 10,704 votes while Stein carried 51,463. Ditto for Pennsylvania, where Trump won by 44,292 votes and Stein pulled in 49,941 votes.
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
The Political Violence Spilling Out of Red States
Jon D. Michaels, David Noll October 10, 2024 [The American Prospect]
State-supported vigilantism remained a central feature of American political life throughout the long decades of Jim Crow. Only after the civil rights movement gained momentum did the tide turn. But to the surprise and horror of practically everyone who understood state-supported vigilantism to be gone for good, the ignoble practice is now making a roaring comeback. Equally inspired and chastened by the chaos of January 6, 2021, MAGA strategists recalled that for private violence and intimidation to work well, it would have to be normalized, and even legalized.
To carry out this plan, MAGA lawmakers backed by a loose network of lawyers, dark-money groups, and right-wing advocacy shops like the Alliance Defending Freedom and Russell Vought’s Center for Renewing America have repurposed Jim Crow–era strategies to advance the dual objectives of prosecuting today’s Christian nationalist culture wars and entrenching MAGA political power.
In our forthcoming book Vigilante Nation: How State-Sponsored Terror Threatens Our Democracy, we term the first of these strategies dissenter vigilantism. By reconfiguring what used to be a right to opt out, lone dissenters are given the de facto right to impose their policy views on their communities.
The second strategy, courthouse vigilantism, encourages MAGA foot soldiers to surveil members of their communities and bring legal proceedings to punish deviations from MAGA orthodoxy, even if those deviations take place outside their jurisdictions. Pioneered in Texas’s infamous anti-abortion bounty hunter law, it has become a key mechanism for policing the gender of high school athletes and pushing LGBTQ+ families out of public life.
The next strategy, street vigilantism, involves the use of violence and threats of violence to control who exercises rights and how. Through immunities from criminal prosecution, an exorbitant conception of “self-defense” that allows for the use of deadly force when heavily armed vigilantes feel “threatened,” kid-glove exercises of prosecutorial discretion, and Trumpian uses of the pardon power, MAGA politicians telegraph that violence against their political enemies is welcome and will not be punished.
Lastly, electoral vigilantism involves the use of dissenter, courthouse, and street vigilantism to take and hold political power. In locales like Shasta County, California, and Clallam County, Washington, it has propelled right-wing government takeovers, creating a vicious circle in which vigilante-backed officials further empower the foot soldiers who put them in office, all in the hope of creating a Jim Crow–style lock on political power. But this is not preordained; in Shasta County, frustration with the incompetence and maladministration of the militia-backed officials has enabled some of the community’s old-school conservatives to regain their footing. Control of county government is now closely divided between MAGA die-hards and their opponents….
Already, some numbers of Americans are seeking to leave vigilante-enabling jurisdictions, principally to obtain access to medical services. But the same MAGA lawyers and activists who deployed vigilantes to stamp out access to legal abortions in Texas (and surveil high schools to prevent transgender children from competing in women’s sports) are now targeting interstate travel.
Under the guise of regulating “abortion trafficking,” Texas cities have enacted local ordinances that unleash vigilantes against individuals who use public highways to secure out-of-state abortions. Taking a page from Texas, Idaho has endeavored to make it a crime to help a minor cross state lines to seek an abortion or obtain abortion medication.
Trump Found Another Way To Turn Americans Against Each Other— Will He Ever Reap The Whirlwind?
Howie Klein, October 11, 2024 [downwithtyranny.com]
Yesterday, Joe Gould, Connor O’Brien and Paul McLeary reported that Members of Congress from both parties are vowing to fight back if Señor T wins and tries to make good on his pledge to put the name of failed Confederate general Braxton Bragg back on North Carolina’s Fort Liberty, “undoing the work of a bipartisan congressional renaming commission.”
Meteorologists Get Death Threats as Hurricane Milton Conspiracy Theories Thrive
[Rolling Stone, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 10-10-2024]
As Hurricane Milton approaches Florida, meteorologists are staying awake for days at a time trying to get vital, life-saving information out to the folks who will be affected. That’s their job. But this year, several of them tell Rolling Stone, they’re increasingly having to take time out to quell the nonstop flow of misinformation during a particularly traumatic hurricane season. And some of them are doing it while being personally threatened…. ‘It affects our mental health,’ he adds, saying he’s spoken to the Weather Channel’s Jim Cantore and other meteorologists about it a lot this week. After [Alabama meteorologist James Spann] posted a FEMA website about rumor control, he got multiple private messages telling him to retire or personally threatening him. ‘You’re working with two to three hours of sleep for multiple weeks under a high stress situation and then you deal with these threats that come in, it’ll beat you down.'”
Trump’s Legacy Will Be A GOP Held Hostage by Lies— Deceit Has Become The Party Line
Howie Klein, October 4, 2024 [downwithtyranny.com]
...a column by Bill Adair, the founder of PolitiFact, What I Didn’t Understand About Political Lying. “For American politicians,” he wrote, “this is a golden age of lying. Social media allows them to spread mendacity with speed and efficiency, while supporters amplify any falsehood that serves their cause. When I launched PolitiFact in 2007, I thought we were going to raise the cost of lying. I didn’t expect to change people’s votes just by calling out candidates, but I was hopeful that our journalism would at least nudge them to be more truthful. I was wrong. More than 15 years of fact-checking has done little or nothing to stem the flow of lies. I underestimated the strength of the partisan media on both sides, particularly conservative outlets, which relentlessly smeared our work. (A typical insult: ‘The fact-checkers are basically just a P.R. arm of the Democrats at this point.’) PolitiFact and other media organizations published thousands of checks, but as time went on, Republican representatives and voters alike ignored our journalism more and more, or dismissed it.”….
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a scholar on authoritarians wrote that Trump backing out of the 60 Minutes interview he had agreed to because he couldn’t get a guarantee he wouldn’t be fact-checked, “reminds us that the ‘strongman’ is nothing without his fortress of lies. Falsehoods about the leader’s competence, power, and efficiency prop up personality cults, and are integral to his identity as the only man who can lead the nation to greatness. In an extreme case, one Big Lie— for example, that you are the winner of a presidential election— may become essential for a leader’s legitimacy. Then that leader might even make recourse to violence to make reality fit his fabrications, as Trump did with the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection. Who would Trump be if he admitted he lost the 2020 election? By democratic standards, he would be just another president who failed to convince the electorate that he was the best choice given his record. But Trump is an authoritarian: defeat is associated with weakness, and leaves him vulnerable to prosecution.”
Trump has long blasted China’s trade practices. His ‘God Bless the USA’ Bibles were printed there
Richard Lardner and Dake Kang, October 9, 2024 [Associated Press, via The American Prospect]
Thousands of copies of Donald Trump’s “God Bless the USA” Bible were printed in a country that the former president has repeatedly accused of stealing American jobs and engaging in unfair trade practices — China.
Global trade records reviewed by The Associated Press show a printing company in China’s eastern city of Hangzhou shipped close to 120,000 of the Bibles to the United States between early February and late March.
The estimated value of the three separate shipments was $342,000, or less than $3 per Bible, according to databases that use customs data to track exports and imports. The minimum price for the Trump-backed Bible is $59.99, putting the potential sales revenue at about $7 million.
Jennifer C. Berkshire, October 11, 2024 [The American Prospect]
Red states are enacting universal education vouchers, threatening budget calamity and potentially degrading student achievement…. As one school district leader stated, “It feels like to me that there’s a desire to suffocate traditional public schools to justify their demise.”
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
Here’s How Loper Bright is Stripping Away Workers’ Rights
[On Labor, via Naked Capitalism 10-06-2024]
The Supreme Court May Use Dobbs to Take Down Trans Rights—and Beyond
Susan Rinkunas, October 11, 2024 [The New Republic]
The overturning of Roe was always going to affect more than just abortion, and we’re about to find out how bad it can get.
Civic republicanism
MASTER PLAN, Ep 9: The Swing Vote That Changed America
[The Lever, October 06, 2024]
Once the master planners’ Federalist Society machine started cranking out conservative lawyers, Republican presidents did their part to get them installed on the U.S. Supreme Court. Ronald Reagan had no problem with one of his Federalist Society-affiliated appointments, Antonin Scalia. But he had more trouble filling the next vacancy when Lewis Powell retired in 1987. After his first candidate Robert Bork got borked, and a second nominee’s chances went up in flames thanks to a pot-smoking past, Reagan finally found a more palatable selection in Anthony Kennedy.
Carefully watching this appointment was an Indiana lawyer who’d made it his life’s mission to outlaw abortion and gut campaign finance laws. James Bopp knew that Kennedy had a moderate reputation after siding with liberal justices on social issues, but his rulings on campaign finance cases began to signal that he could be open to helping the master planners further open the floodgates of dark money.
Bopp got a chance to test his theory when the political advocacy group Citizens United planned to release Hillary: The Movie. Knowing that a film criticizing then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton would likely violate the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law’s restrictions on electioneering, Bopp challenged the constitutionality of the law.
A hidden drama at the Supreme Court began as Chief Justice Roberts proposed a narrow ruling in the Citizens United case, while Justice Kennedy pushed for a far-reaching decision. Behind the scenes, a scathing dissent has since vanished from the record — and the final ruling would live in infamy, reshaping campaign finance law for years to come….
DAVID SIROTA: So Roberts and the other conservatives then compare drafts, and they love Kennedy's idea so much that Roberts withdraws his more narrow opinion and lets Kennedy write the majority
ULA CULPA: Exactly. And this is where the drama hits after Justice Souter sees what Roberts and Kennedy are planning to do. He gets pissed and writes a dissent, and it has become infamous in legal circles because it was this Full Tilt bridge burning attack on the logic of his fellow justices, which is something that almost never happens, and definitely not like this. Reportedly, Souter berated not only the conclusions that Roberts and Kennedy had come to, but the like intellectual depravity to step outside of and way beyond what this case was asking in the first place.
DAVID SIROTA: Finally, someone was calling bullshit. Okay, so read us some excerpts.
ULA CULPA: Well, I can't.
DAVID SIROTA: Wait. Why?
ULA CULPA: Because very few people have actually ever seen Souter's dissent, and that's because not long after he drafted it, just as David Souter has informed the White House, he will retire at the end of a Supreme Court term in June. God, it's exactly like that scene from half baked….
ULA CULPA: Totally and then John Roberts basically makes sure Souter’s dissent never gets published as part of the official record….
...Read Senator Sheldon Whitehouse's paper, which argues that the Supreme Court has overstepped its role by engaging in flawed fact-finding — traditionally a trial court function — resulting in biased, partisan decisions in cases like Citizens United, Shelby County, and Dobbs.
How Justice Souter Almost Left the Supreme Court in a Blaze of Glory
John Hudson, May 14, 2012 [The Atlantic]
Before retiring from the Supreme Court in 2009, liberal Justice David Souter penned a dissent so critical of the court's conservative justices, Chief Justice John Roberts went to great lengths to prevent it from being published.
Tom Nichols, October 09, 2024 [The Atlantic]
Last November, during a symposium at Mount Vernon on democracy, John Kelly, the retired Marine Corps general who served as Donald Trump’s second chief of staff, spoke about George Washington’s historic accomplishments—his leadership and victory in the Revolutionary War, his vision of what an American president should be. And then Kelly offered a simple, three-word summary of Washington’s most important contribution to the nation he liberated.
“He went home,” Kelly said….
Donald Trump and his authoritarian political movement represent an existential threat to every ideal that Washington cherished and encouraged in his new nation. They are the incarnation of Washington’s misgivings about populism, partisanship, and the “spirit of revenge” that Washington lamented as the animating force of party politics. Washington feared that, amid constant political warfare, some citizens would come to “seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual,” and that eventually a demagogue would exploit that sentiment….
For decades, I taught Washington’s military campaigns and the lessons of his leadership to military officers when I was a professor at the U.S. Naval War College. And yet I, too, have always felt a distance from the man himself. In recent months, I revisited his life. I read his letters, consulted his biographers, and walked the halls at Mount Vernon. I found a man with weaknesses and shortcomings, but also a leader who possessed qualities that we once expected—and should again demand—from our presidents, especially as the United States confronts the choice between democracy and demagoguery.
The votes cast in November will be more consequential than those in any other American election in more than a century. As we judge the candidates, we should give thought to Washington’s example, and to three of Washington’s most important qualities and the traditions they represent: his refusal to use great power for his own ends, his extraordinary self-command, and, most of all, his understanding that national leaders in a democracy are only temporary stewards of a cause far greater than themselves….
Most American presidents have had some sort of military experience. A few, like Washington, were genuine war heroes. All of them understood that military obedience to the rule of law and to responsible civilian authority is fundamental to the survival of democracy. Again, all of them but one.
During his term as president, Trump expected the military to be loyal—but only to him. He did not understand (or care) that members of the military swear an oath to the Constitution, and that they are servants of the nation, not of one man in one office. Trump viewed the military like a small child surveying a shelf of toy soldiers, referring to “my generals” and ordering up parades for his own enjoyment and to emphasize his personal control.
Trump was more than willing to turn the American military against its own people. In 2020, for instance, he wanted the military to attack protesters near the White House. “Beat the fuck out of them,” the president told the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley. “Just shoot them.” Both Milley and Defense Secretary Mark Esper (a former military officer himself) talked their boss out of opening fire on American citizens….
In 1783, Washington was camped with most of the Continental Army in Newburgh, New York. Congress, as usual, was behind on its financial obligations to American soldiers, and rumbles were spreading that it was time to take matters into military hands. Some men talked of deserting and leaving the nation defenseless. Others wanted to head to Philadelphia, disband Congress, and install Washington as something like a constitutional monarch.
Washington allowed the soldiers to meet so they could discuss their grievances. Then he unexpectedly showed up at the gathering and unloaded on his men. Calling the meeting itself “subversive of all order and discipline,” he reminded them of the years of loyalty and personal commitment to them. He blasted the dark motives of a letter circulating among the troops, written by an anonymous soldier, that suggested that the army should refuse to disarm if Congress failed to meet their needs. “Can he be,” Washington asked, “a friend to the army? Can he be a friend to this country?”
Then, in a moment of calculated theater meant to emphasize the toll that eight years of war had taken on him, he reached into his pocket for a pair of eyeglasses, ostensibly to read a communication from a member of Congress. “Gentlemen,” he said, “you must pardon me, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in the service of my country.” Some of the men, already chastened by Washington’s reproaches, broke into tears. The Newburgh conspiracy, from that moment, was dead.
The presidential historian Stephen Knott told me that Washington could have walked into that same meeting and, with a nod of his head, gained a throne. “A lesser man might have been tempted to lead the army to Philadelphia and pave the way for despotism,” Knott said. Instead, Washington crushed the idea and shamed the conspirators.
Nine months later, Washington stood in the Maryland statehouse, where Congress was temporarily meeting, and returned control of the army to the elected representatives of the United States of America. He asked to be granted “the indulgence of retiring from the service of my country” and handed over the document containing his military commission. Washington, in the words of the historian Joseph Ellis, had completed “the greatest exit in American history.”
Decades ago, the scholar S. E. Finer asked a question that shadows every civilian government: “Instead of asking why the military engage in politics, we ought surely ask why they ever do otherwise.” The answer, at least in the United States, lies in the traditions instituted by Washington. Because of his choices during and after the Revolution, the United States has had the luxury of regarding military interference in its politics as almost unthinkable. If Trump returns to office with even a handful of praetorians around him, Americans may realize only too late what a rare privilege they have enjoyed….
Thomas Neuburger, October 09, 2024 [God’s Spies]
I brought up David Hackett Fischer’s 1989 book Albion’s Seed. The bulleted link is to an excellent article on who and what our main British colonists were: the Puritan Yankees, Virginia farmers and plantationists, Appalachian fighters and herders, Quakers of Pennsylvania. Each added its colors to the American tapestry.
A sample:
“As [author David Hackett] Fischer has pointed out, people everywhere in British America embraced the ideal of liberty (freedom) in one form or another; however, it would be a mistake to think that liberty had the same meaning to New Englanders as it did to Virginians. New Englanders believed in ordered liberty, which meant that liberty belonged not just to an individual but to an entire community. In other words, an individual’s liberties or rights were not absolute but had to be balanced against the public good. […]
“The Virginians, in contrast, embraced a form of liberty that Fischer has described as hegemonic or hierarchical liberty. According to Fischer, freedom for the Virginian was conceived as “the power to rule, and not to be overruled by others. … It never occurred to most Virginia gentlemen that liberty belonged to everyone.” Moreover, the higher one’s status, the greater one’s liberties. […]”
And:
“The Quaker’s view of liberty was different from that of both the Puritans and the Royalists. While the Puritans embraced ordered or bounded liberty for God’s chosen few, and the Royalists embraced a hierarchical view of liberty for the privileged elite (and who saw no contradiction in the keeping of slaves), the Quakers believed in reciprocal liberty, a liberty that they believed should embrace all of humanity. The Quakers were the most egalitarian of the three colonies discussed so far, and they would be among the most outspoken opponents of slavery.”
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