Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – November 24, 2024
By Tony Wikrent
Strategic Political Economy
Cory Doctorow [Pluralistic, via Naked Capitalism 11-22-2024]
...Trump is a scab, Dems need unions, Dems are not faithful to unions, unions make the Dems better, workers want unions, the public loves unions, and union membership is falling… it's the union bosses' fault.….
Those shitty union bosses? They're on the way out. In 2023, the UAW held its first honest elections for generations, and radicals, led by Shawn Fain, swept the board. How did workers win their union back? They unionized more workers! Specifically, the UAW organized the brutally exploited Harvard grad students, and the Harvard kids memorized the union by-laws, and every time the corrupt old guard tried to steal the leadership election, one or another of them popped to their feet, reciting chapter-and-verse from the union's own rules and keeping the vote going:
https://theintercept.com/2023/04/07/deconstructed-union-dhl-teamsters-uaw/
Fain led the UAW to an historic strike: the UAW took on all three of the Big Three automakers, and cleaned their clocks. UAW workers walked away with three new contracts, all set to expire in 2028. Fain then called upon every union to bargain for contracts that run out in 2028, because if every union contract expires in 2028, we've got the makings of a general strike.
That means that when the next presidential election rolls around, it's going to be in the middle of the most militant moment in a century of US labor history. That is an opportunity.
Labor movements fight fascists. They always have. Trump and the GOP are not on the side of workers, notwithstanding all that bullshit about supporting workers by fighting immigration. Sure, when the number of workers goes up, wages can go down – if you're not in a union. Conservatives have never supported unions. They hate solidarity. Conservatives want workers to believe that they can get paid more if labor is scarcer, and there's some truth to that, but solidarity endures in good times and bad, and scarcity ends any time bosses figure out how to offshore, outsource, or automate your job. Scarcity is brittle….
Organizing a 2028 general strike under Trump won't be easy. Workers won't be able to secure support from the courts or the NLRB, whose brilliant Biden-era leadership team is surely doomed:
But the NLRB only exists today because workers established unions when doing so was radioactively illegal and union organizers were beaten, jailed and murdered with impunity. The tactics those organizers used are not lost to the mists of time – they are a tradition that lives on to this day.
The standard-bearer for this older, militant, community-based union organizing was the great Jane McAlevey (rest in power). McAlevey ran organizing and strike drives as mass-movements; she wouldn't call for either without being sure of massive majorities, 70%-95%:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/23/a-collective-bargain/
McAlevey understood union organizing as a source of worker power, but also as a source of community power. When she helped organize the LA #RedForEd Teachers' strike, the teachers didn't just demand better working conditions for themselves, but also green space for their students, and protection from ICE raids for their students' parents. They did this under Trump, and built a turnout organization that flipped key seats and delivered a House majority to the Democrats in 2020.
In her work, McAlevey excoriated the kind of shittyass Dem power-brokers who just lost an election to a convicted felon and rapist, condemning their technocratic conceit that the path to electoral victory was in winning over precisely 50.1% of the vote in each tactically significant precinct. McAlevey said that's how you get the nightmarish Manchin-Synematic Universe where Dems can't deliver and workers don't vote for Dems. To transform America, we need the kinds of majorities that McAlevey and her fellow organizers won in those strike votes – majorities that produced durable, anti-fascist power that turned into electoral victories, too.
The Revenge of the Deplorables?
Les Leopold, November 20, 2024
The working class started abandoning the Democrats long before Trump became a political figure, let alone a candidate. In 1976, Jimmy Carter received 52.3 percent of the working-class vote; In 1996, Clinton 50 percent; In 2012, Obama 40.6 percent; and in 2020, Biden received only 36.2 percent.
This decline has little to do with illiberalism on social issues. Since Carter’s victory, these workers have become more liberal on race, gender, immigration and gay rights, as I detail in Wall Street’s War on Workers.
Furthermore, my research shows that mass layoffs, not illiberalism, best explains the decline of worker support for the Democrats. In the former Blue Wall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, for example, as the county mass layoff rate went up the Democratic vote went down. The statistical causation, of course, may be off, but the linkage here between economic dissatisfaction and flight from the Democratic Party is straightforward.
Unions to Democrats: Don’t blame us for Tuesday’s losses
Nick Niedzwiadek, 11/06/2024 [Politico]
Despite persistent fears that labor might break for former President Donald Trump, exit polling showed Vice President Kamala Harris winning voters in union households 55 to 43 percent, roughly on par with President Joe Biden’s performance in 2020. (A separate survey from NBC News had Harris up 10 points among union voters.)
In fact, union voters were one of the few groups that did not appreciably shift toward Trump and Republicans….
Lean Into the Punch: Labor under Trump.
Hamilton Nolan, November 22, 2024 [How Things Work]
...For all of their public talk about how they plan to fight, the instinct of the leadership of most big labor unions in America when faced with a hostile federal government is to do the opposite—to withdraw into their shells like turtles and try to weather the storm, to protect what they already have as best they can until the next election rolls around, when they will pour everything into the campaign of a friendlier candidate, who they presume will reset the playing field to a more welcoming state, which will then allow them to flourish.
This mentality will get us fucking smashed over the next four years….
Many stories have been written about what Project 2025 and another Trump administration will mean for labor policy and the takeaway is “bad things.” The NLRB will be hostile. All prospects for helpful labor legislation will disappear. Related policy action helpful to worker power, like aggressive antitrust enforcement, will cease. Many bad things are coming down the pipeline, but let me touch on three big ones:
- The NLRB….
- Government employees … Trump, with the help of Tweedlee and TweedleDOGE, is going to do everything he can to strip labor protections away from federal workers, purge career employees, install political loyalist hacks in positions that should really have career civil servants, and laugh as federal agencies stop working properly because there are no qualified employees there left to run them….
- The legal assault on the entire structure of America’s labor law regime: Parallel to what the Trump administration will be doing with policy and inside of government agencies, there is already an ongoing attempt by employers to attack the legality of the NLRB and, more broadly, the National Labor Relations Act itself. (More on that here.)….
There are precisely two things to be done, beginning now, and continuing for the next four years. One thing is to organize….
The other thing to do is to strike. More bluntly: to do more legal as well as illegal strikes. (Teachers in Massachusetts are showing us the way right this minute.) The legal regime that corporations are salivating to dismantle is the same one that has, for decades, laid out the ground rules for who and how and where and when strikes could expect to be sanctioned by the law. Take away those rules and the only silver lining for workers is that the shackles are off....
Frontline Democrats Won With Progressive Populist Messages
Luke Goldstein, November 22, 2024 [The American Prospect]
Longtime Democratic moderates who attacked big business and monopolies outpaced Harris in swing districts.
On the Democratic Party’s Cult of Powerlessness
Matt Stoller, November 18, 2024 [BIG]
...as I watch the angry back and forth, and more broadly the institutional actors who were rejected by voters, I find a curious dynamic that explains far more than any tactical mistake. From local field organizers to the most prestigious people in the Democratic Party, like Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama, all seem to feel powerless. For instance, most insiders felt Joe Biden was far too old to win reelection, but did not feel able to act or say anything when it mattered. Similarly, Nancy Pelosi and Obama indicated they knew Harris was a bad candidate, but holding an open process to find a new one was, in Pelosi’s words, “impossible.”
And it’s not just an electoral problem, it goes back to governing. It’s not that Democrats didn’t know the core problem they faced among voters. The main legislative effort they passed in 2022 was titled “The Inflation Reduction Act.” They knew that people were mad about inflation, hence the title. But did it actually do much about inflation? No. And they knew that too. It was a pre-baked set of solutions and they would have applied it to any problem. They knew they should do something about costs, but, well, there was just no way to do anything but ride off the cliff with everyone else.
In other words, there is a cult of learned helplessness at the core of most American institutions, one that Trump punctured by appearing to be a man of action. And the Democratic Party in 2024, with its associated law firms, think tanks, elected officials, donors, and media outlets, was rejected by voters precisely because the core value on the left, center, and right is about embracing powerlessness. This pervasive belief has an intellectual and political origin, and it conflicts directly with the anti-monopoly framework.
I’ve seen this learned helplessness in most institutions I’ve dealt with. I was a Congressional staffer during the financial crisis. In late 2008, many of us were eager to see what we could do to fix the banking system and the country, as Obama and the Democrats had immense political capital to reshape the economy. But over the next year, during the crafting of the Dodd-Frank legislation, it became clear that our political leaders didn’t really think solving anything was possible….
This dynamic is also how to really understanding why we allow monopolies to run our society. While there are a bunch of debates about the right standard for antitrust, consumer welfare or otherwise, the real problem has always been much simpler. Inaction. From 1998-2020, the Department of Justice didn’t bring a single major monopolization claim. Why not? No one can explain it….
...the counter-culture had paved the way, breaking with the fundamental dissenting tradition of America… As one old left Columbia professor put it, that left “was committed, or so we believed, to the universal, egalitarian values of the Enlightenment represented by Jefferson, Paine, and Lincoln.”
In the 1960s, a set of disillusioning arguments prevailed on the left, particularly in academia. The idea that the American republic was committed to the “political program of the Enlightenment” seemed fraudulent. But dissidents didn’t renounce egalitarianism or elements like liberty for all. Instead, they “disconnected Lincoln’s proposition from the idea of America and reattached it to the aspirations of those subordinate groups of Americans—women, African Americans, the working class—oppressed, victimized, or excluded by an irremediably corrupt nation.”….
At the same time, a new vision of political economy emerged that erased the nation-state and the law. In his 1967 bestseller The New Industrial State, John Kenneth Galbraith, who thought antitrust law was silly, discussed something called convergence theory, the idea that the Soviet Union and the United States had the same economic system. The U.S. had corporations, the U.S.S.R. had state-run entities, but the “technostructure” as he called it was virtually identical. “It is part of the vanity of modern man that he can decide the character of his economic system,” he wrote. Man’s “area of decision, in fact, is vanishingly small.” Galbraith’s philosophy eventually morphed into neoliberalism….
...If you don’t believe in the state, or if you don’t associate enlightenment notions with the American project, then rolling back democratic protections for working people simply doesn’t matter. If America itself is immoral, then who cares what the governing apparatus looks like? If all commerce is driven by forces out of our hands, then there’s nothing we can do anyway.
Politics, which is fundamentally the forming of a society, itself becomes immoral. The wielding of authority, which is essential to a democratic polity, is indistinguishable from authoritarian abuse. The New Democrat project of the 1980s, which turned human choices into Gods we called “technology and globalization,” succeeded wildly, because we had been conditioned to believe in them. Markets became monopolies, economists became priests, and cultural attitudes are the only real stakes in elections.
And that brings me back to the learned helplessness of the Democrats. The reason the anti-monopoly movement is interesting is because we are a break from this attitude. It’s not that we are fighting Bork, it’s that we are fighting the whole notion of anti-politics itself, the idea that protest and marginalized communities are the only mechanisms for moral legitimacy. We are saying that morality is shaped by politics through the state itself.
Philip Mirowski — Hell is Truth Seen Too Late (pdf)
[Mirowski, Philip. “Hell Is Truth Seen Too Late.” boundary 2 (2019): n. pag.]
[TW: When I read Stoller above (“a set of disillusioning arguments prevailed on the left”), I immediately recognized a point I have made a number of times: liberalism is philosophically incapable of defeating conservatism. The best explanation I have yet found of why, is Philip Mirkowski’s, and I have long wanted to present his argument here. It is worth saving Mirowski’s paper, and going over it a few times to understand this crucial philosophical incapacity of liberalism.]
...No one is more pathetic than a contemporary American trying to explain what it means to be a “liberal” these days. One suspects that the designation “neoliberalism” attracts surplus disdain of its nominal opponents precisely because it embarrasses so many who were convinced their prior grasp of economic and political currents was so comprehensive and complete that no such movement could have caught them as wrong- footed as did this ideology. I am continually nonplussed that so many sup- posed activists respond with blank incomprehension when queried about whether they know what the Mont Pèlerin Society (MPS) is, or whether they have heard of the Atlas Foundation, or the Liberty Fund, or the Mercatus Center, or Heritage Action, or the Ethics and Public Policy Center, or the Federalist Society….
The hallmark of the NTC [neoliberal thought collective] was that its members more or less accepted the inherited image of an addled and befuddled populace but thoroughly rejected any appeals to a scientific technocracy to instill some discipline in the masses. For them, the discombobulated masses were not a prescription for despair but rather the necessary compost out of which a spontaneous order might blossom. The primary way this would happen was through acknowledgment that “the market” was an information processor more powerful and more efficacious than any human being was or could ever be. The cretinous and nescient would propose; the market would dispose….
For instance, few remember that the single cause Milton Friedman felt so passionately about that he bequeathed his entire fortune to support it was the privatization and debasement of public schools. Nancy MacLean (2017) has recently stressed how destruction of state-sponsored education was central to the trajectory of James Buchanan. Much of George Stigler’s work rested on a notion of optimal ignorance of the masses.8 if you leave this root “political epistemology” out of your account, basically, you have omitted the essence of the neoliberal project….
...If, as we have seen, they believed the vast mass of people were not cognitively capable of rational self-determination, 11 then the only arbiter of dependable knowledge in a neoliberal world devolves to the market. Furthermore, older attempts to offset any such cognitive debility by means of state-supported education, public libraries, and broadcast outlets were to be dismantled and debased into privatized get-rich- quick schemes. The notion that one might strive to take the future in hand and bend it to one’s will was treated as a species of delusion that had to be wrung out of the population (although, significantly, not out of the card-carrying members of the NTC itself). Hayek himself loudly and repeatedly sought to banish the “rationalist” element from earlier liberalism. Instead, the planner was to be supplanted by the figure of the entrepreneur….
How Neoliberalism Rendered Marxism Untenable
...the residual Marxism of the Left is a big part of the problem because no one committed to Marxist categories can admit in good conscience that neoliberalism really exists, much less mount a serious opposition to it. The beginning of political wisdom is to appreciate that neoliberalism’s doctrinal intent was to dissolve Marxism from within….
the core philosophical tenet of the market as superior information processor delivers the final coup de grâce to any Marxist argument....It was central to Marx’s precept that profit was not generated in exchange, only in production... There is no such thing as Marxist“ exploitation” if profit can be generated de novo by simple exchange.
Here is where the metamorphosis of the market into information processor sounds thedeath knell. If the market primarily deals in “ideas” or“ information,” then Marxism is unceremoniously sidelined, if only because the Marxist tradition has suffered serial insecurity about how to deal with those entities. Believers in historical materialism used to pride themselves on their insistence that most intellectual activity took place in the “superstructure,” and as such, was mere artifact of the so-called mode of production of the real economy. Yet, even if they were more catholic than that when it came to matters of the intellect, all sorts of things now dubbed“ services” were deemed as existing outside the Marxist laws of the economy; Marx himself, in Capital, treated all manner of processes of circulation, accounting, finance, and so forth as “unproductive” of value. Marx’s frame could never consider the notion of a market engaged in the conveyance and, God forbid, validation of ideas. After all, what would be the “labor value” of a spurious idea, in either hours or more abstract labor? Keep in mind this was not to be determined by its use value but, rather, by the amount of labor that went into its conception….
The Seeds of Social Revolution: Extreme Wealth Inequality
Charles Hugh Smith, via Naked Capitalism 11-17-2024]
For a rundown of the policies that have exacerbated wealth inequality, consider the following excerpts from Time magazine, September 2020: The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90% -- And That's Made the U.S. Less Secure.
"There are some who blame the current plight of working Americans on structural changes in the underlying economy--on automation, and especially on globalization. According to this popular narrative, the lower wages of the past 40 years were the unfortunate but necessary price of keeping American businesses competitive in an increasingly cutthroat global market. But in fact, the $50 trillion transfer of wealth the RAND report documents has occurred entirely within the American economy, not between it and its trading partners. No, this upward redistribution of income, wealth, and power wasn't inevitable; it was a choice--a direct result of the trickle-down policies we chose to implement since 1975.We chose to cut taxes on billionaires and to deregulate the financial industry. We chose to allow CEOs to manipulate share prices through stock buybacks, and to lavishly reward themselves with the proceeds. We chose to permit giant corporations, through mergers and acquisitions, to accumulate the vast monopoly power necessary to dictate both prices charged and wages paid. We chose to erode the minimum wage and the overtime threshold and the bargaining power of labor. For four decades, we chose to elect political leaders who put the material interests of the rich and powerful above those of the American people."
In other words, extreme wealth inequality is not the result of economic forces outside our control; it's the result of our policy responses to changing social, political and economic conditions. While those benefiting from the policies attribute the asymmetric distribution of the economy's gains to "forces outside our control" such as globalization and automation, those losing ground sense that this is an excuse for taking advantage of the situation, to the detriment of the national interest….
In the broad sweep of history, extreme asymmetries in the distribution of the economy's output are rebalanced one way or the other, if not with policy changes than by the overthrow of the status quo. The book The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century breaks down the various pieces of this complex puzzle….
The RAND study Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018 concluded that capital siphoned $50 trillion from labor from 1975 to 2018.
Using data from the Federal Reserve's FRED database (series A4102E1A156NBEA), correspondent Alain M. calculated the actual sum for the period 1970 to 2022 (2022 being the most recent data available) was a staggering $149 trillion: his spreadsheet is available here as a PDF: Employees Share of Gross Domestic Income 1970-2022.
Global power shift
China surpasses Germany and Japan in industrial robotics adoption density: report
[South China Morning Post, via Naked Capitalism 11-21-2024]
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 11-20-2024]
Arnaud Bertrand
@RnaudBertrand
This video is a must-watch. I rarely agree with
@brhodes
but he's 100% correct here.He says he'll "always be haunted" by a comment that Xi Jinping made to Obama in 2016 when referring to Trump: "If an immature leader throws the world into chaos, the world will know who to blame".
Why does it haunt him? Because in his words "we've kind of been dealing with that ever since".
He mocks Biden's foreign policy of trying to restore a "Liberal rules-based order with the U.S. at the center of it" (i.e. U.S. primacy) as "designed for the world that doesn't exist anymore". Remember Rhodes was Obama's Deputy National Security Advisor, so it's quite something to hear him say that...
He illustrates this with the contrasting performances of China and the U.S. at APEC in Peru: on one side you had China's multibillion-dollar port and on the other Blinken's "few million in diesel engines". It really illustrates two different worldviews: one stuck in a patronizing past of small-scale 'aid', the other focused on serious development partnerships.
In fact when you think about it, Biden and Trump are really two sides of the same coin on foreign policy: their platforms - "Make America Great Again" and "America is Back" - both represent different flavors of nostalgia for a world that structurally cannot exist anymore; we're in a multipolar world now. As Rhodes says, this leaves the U.S. swinging erratically between two obsolete visions while the rest of the world moves on. The Global South isn't 'aligning with China against the West' as much as it's choosing predictability and development over chaos and condescension.
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
The Secret Recordings Netanyahu Wants Censored (podcast)
[The Lever, November 22, 2024]
A new documentary exposes never-before-seen video of the Israeli leader — and argues he’s prolonged the Gaza War to evade corruption charges…. producer Arjun Singh talks to Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney about his latest documentary The Bibi Files, which uncovers explosive new police footage from the corruption trial of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The podcast comes the same week the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu — and the U.S. Senate voted down a measure to block military aid to his government.
Gibney, known for his investigative documentaries, sheds light on the allegations against Netanyahu, including bribery and media manipulation. The film, which the Israeli leader tried to block with an unsuccessful lawsuit, reveals leaked footage of Netanyahu during police interrogations.
The conversation also touches on the broader implications of Netanyahu’s actions, his role in the Gaza conflict, and how his leadership has contributed to widespread division within Israel. Gibney draws comparisons to other corrupt leaders he’s documented, exploring the psychology behind political misconduct, right-wing authoritarianism, and the lengths some will go to stay in power.
Israel grants gas exploration license in areas considered to be within Palestine’s maritime boundary
[Anadolu Agency, via Naked Capitalism 11-17-2024]
What have Trump administration nominees said about Israel and its wars?
[Al Jazeera, via Naked Capitalism 11-17-2024]
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
[Workday Magazine, via Naked Capitalism 11-17-2024]
Private equity: vampire capital
[Michael Roberts’ Blog, via Naked Capitalism 11-20-2024]
Restoring balance to the economy
How teachers demolished billionaires for the biggest progressive win of 2024
Blue Tuesday, November 20, 2024 [DailyKos]
Even the most optimistic statistics teacher would probably be baffled by what happened on Election Day in Kentucky.
They were outspent by a who’s who of conservative billionaires, competed logistically against several powerful political machines, and had to contend with turnout goosed by Donald Trump, who won the state with 64.6% of the vote. Yet Protect Our Schools didn't just defeat the Kentucky GOP’s school privatization amendment, it did so by winning 65% of the vote, surpassing Trump’s own margin.
It was a stunning result, one that defied the national political climate generally and outpaced the positive returns for similar elections elsewhere — Nebraska and Colorado also rejected school privatization, but by smaller margins in more competitive environments. Voters in Kentucky chose to reject Amendment 2, which would have allowed public money to be used for private school tuition, by double digit margins in 119 out of the state’s 120 counties. It was equally unpopular in rural and urban counties, further defying national political trends….
Archegos’s Bill Hwang sentenced to 18 years in prison for massive US fraud
[Al Jazeera, via Naked Capitalism 11-21-2024]
General strike over cost of living paralyzes Athens
[Anadolu Agency, via Naked Capitalism 11-21-2024]
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
OpenAI just scored a huge victory in a copyright case … or did it?
[Los Angeles Times, via The Big Picture 11-18-2024]
McMahon’s ruling may also undermine what has been a growing trend toward the licensing of copyrighted content by AI developers — in part to forestall copyright infringement claims. OpenAI reached a $250 million licensing deal with Dow Jones, the parent of WSJ; OpenAI also cut deals with Axel Springer, the owner of Business Insider and Politico; the Financial Times; and the Associated Press.
Harpercollins wants authors to sign away AI training rights
Cory Doctorow [Pluralistic, via Naked Capitalism 11-18-2024]
The Technology the Trump Administration Could Use to Hack Your Phone
[The New Yorker, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-21-2024]
“In September, the Department of Homeland Security (D.H.S.) signed a two-million-dollar contract with Paragon, an Israeli firm whose spyware product Graphite focusses on breaching encrypted-messaging applications such as Telegram and Signal. Wired first reported that the technology was acquired by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—an agency within D.H.S. that will soon be involved in executing the Trump Administration’s promises of mass deportations and crackdowns on border crossings. A source at Paragon told me that the deal followed a vetting process, during which the company was able to demonstrate that it had robust tools to prevent other countries that purchase its spyware from hacking Americans—but that wouldn’t limit the U.S. government’s ability to target its own citizens.” And the Israelis would never lie to us! More: “The technology is part of a booming multibillion-dollar market for intrusive phone-hacking software that is making government surveillance increasingly cheap and accessible. In recent years, a number of Western democracies have been roiled by controversies in which spyware has been used, apparently by defense and intelligence agencies, to target opposition politicians, journalists, and apolitical civilians caught up in Orwellian surveillance dragnets. Now Donald Trump and incoming members of his Administration will decide whether to curtail or expand the U.S. government’s use of this kind of technology.
Democrats' political malpractice
A Graveyard of Bad Election Narratives
Musa al-Gharbi [Symbolic Capital(ism), via Naked Capitalism 11-17-2024]
All the prominent but obviously false narratives about the 2024 election prepared for burial in one convenient post.
What Election Do These People Think We Just Had?
Jack Mirkinson, November 11, 2024 [discourseblog.com, via Avedon's Sideshow 11-20-2024]
Democrats are inventing wild fantasies about the power of Big Woke rather than confront the failures of their actual approach….
The ugly truth for these people is that Kamala Harris ran as right-wing a campaign as any Democrat in living memory. She downplayed discussions of her race and gender. She bent over backward to welcome billionaires, corporate titans, and Republicans into the fold. She told Black men that one of her priorities for them was…crypto. She made her past as a prosecutor a cornerstone of her pitch. She bragged about owning a Glock and joked that she would shoot people who broke into her house. She stuffed the Democratic National Convention to the gills with cops and Border Patrol agents while crushing even the tiniest dissent over her support for the genocide in Gaza. She promised the most 'lethal' military in the world. She was seemingly joined at the hip with Liz Cheney for weeks. She even praised Dick Cheney! It's hard to think of what more she could have done to satisfy the people clamoring for her to pander to conservatives. But admitting that would mean that the CNN favorites and the anonymous politicos had to confront an even more uncomfortable reality: that, ideologically at least, Harris ran the campaign of their wildest dreams, and got crushed."
Democratic turnout plummeted in 2024 — but only in safe states”
David Weigel, November 15, 2024 [Semafor]
In the 43 states (and D.C.) where neither campaign invested resources, there was an average 8-point shift toward the Republican ticket. In battleground states, the shift was 3 points….
The Harris campaign’s desperate strategy, of reconstituting a Biden coalition with fewer non-white voters and more college-educated white voters, came close to working — she lost by less than 2 points in the decisive Rust Belt states and only a little more in Georgia.
In four swing states, Harris was even able to win more raw votes than Joe Biden did four years ago: Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. Adjusted for population growth, that didn’t mean much in the first three states, and Black turnout was disappointing enough to Georgia Democrats that Sen. Jon Ossoff is calling for a change in party leadership. But there was no overall decline in Democratic votes.
There was one in uncompetitive states….
Wrong For The Democratic Party: Republican-Lite Politicians Like John Avlon & Rahm Emanuel
Howie Klein, November 20, 2024 [downwithtyranny.com]
...the Democrats keep nominating right-wing candidates in the hope of capturing Republican and Republican-leaning voters. It doesn’t work, but it’s been the basis of the DCCC’s strategy since Emanuel was chair almost 2 decades ago…..
Democratic Party Elites Brought Us This Disaster
Branko Marcetic, November 6, 2024 [Jacobin, via Avedon's Sideshow 11-20-2024]
The story that is about to be pushed hard is that Kamala Harris lost because she was too far left. It will be pushed because this is the Democratic establishment's go-to explanation for all its failures. [...] For years now, voters have been telling pollsters that they were fed up with the economy, and poll after poll during this campaign registered them saying it was the issue that would most decide their vote, especially among those who were leaning toward Trump. This held across last night's exit polls. Across all seven battleground states and nationally, survey results were virtually the same: voters viewed the economy as the most important issue in the election; they felt their personal financial situation was worse and they thought so at significantly higher rates than they did in 2020; and huge majorities of those who voted for Trump viewed the economy negatively, considered it the election's most pressing issue, and voted for the person they thought was going to bring 'change.'"
[Avedon's Sideshow 11-20-2024]
Just for the record, this is Liz Cheney, pretending that Democrats want to kill babies because they didn't want to pass a law to make infantacide illegal because it already is. She has also always been a warmonger. Her father, by the way, helped steal the 2000 election, lied us into bombing the hell out of Afghanistan and invading Iraq and violated US law against torture. I can't imagine how Democrats convinced themselves that they could win an election by putting her front and center to campaign with.
The Democrat Who Tried To Warn Us With Rep. Dean Phillips
[The Lever, November 24, 2024]
In a special Lever Time post-election bonus episode, Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) details how he was nearly excommunicated from the Democratic Party after he raised early concerns about the party's electability in 2023.
The group discusses how Democrats’ culture of blind loyalty to the party elite and extreme deference to wealthy donors leave them hopelessly out of touch with voters — and what can be done to change that.
Political Ads Can’t Buy the Presidency”
[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-18-2024]
Democrats outspent Republicans by more than $300 million in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election. Yet Harris won none of the swing states where the vast majority of spending went….
“Money doesn’t win US elections, but it often helps. In bids for the Senate, the candidate who spends the most is typically the victor. That pattern held this year: In 21 of 33 Senate races, the candidate who spent the most on advertising—generally the major expenditure for a campaign—was the winner…. The link between spending and winning has always been weaker in presidential contests…. Given that turnout had a large impact on election outcomes in 2024, [Adam Bonica, a professor of political science at Stanford University] suggests that, in the future, both parties should consider rethinking their spending. ‘Maybe it’s not advertising they need to do,’ he says. ‘Maybe they should be putting more of the resources into mobilization and registration and party building.'”
[Grand Canyon Times, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-18-2024]
“Steve Cortes, president and founder of the League of American Workers (LAW), today said that poll results released by his organization show Arizona voters no longer feel the American Dream is reachable. That poll showed 84% of Arizona voters say families in the state cannot live on a single income.” • More on the League of American Workers.
Why Kamala Harris couldn’t convince an anti-establishment America
[Guardian, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-20-2024]
“As the party of educated knowledge workers, policy elites and public sector unions, the Democratic party simply is the party of institutional incumbents. And how do you run against the establishment when you are the establishment. Democrats are thus guaranteed to learn all the wrong lessons from this election. They will focus-group economic policies that appeal to the working class and excise wokeness from their political messaging. They will try to engineer their own Joe Rogan and uplift candidates that shoot from the hip. But this will all be a version of treating the symptom rather than the disease. Until the elites in the Democratic party loosen their grip and allow authentic, anti-establishment party factions to arise organically, they will remain the party of control and stasis in a world hungry for change.”
[RealClearPolitics, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-20-2024]
KORNACKI: “Remember, three straight elections Trump’s been the Republican candidate. So pre-Trump voters under 30 were going for the Democrats by 23 points. Folks with incomes under $50,000, 22 points for the Democrats. Folks without college degrees, four points for the Democrats. That’s pre-Trump. What comes out of this election? Look at some of these shifts. The youth vote, that Democratic margin cut more than in half. Voters under $50,000, now a Republican constituency. Voters without a college degree, look at that shift. Now a core Republican constituency. And then we can talk about race, ethnicity. This gets into that diversity I mentioned a minute ago. Check this out. Again, pre-Trump versus now. The Black vote still overwhelmingly Democratic, but that’s a 15-point shift. It used to be 87 points for the Democrats, down to 72. How about this? You’ve heard a lot about it this week. This is what the numbers look like. Hispanic voters were 44 points Democratic before Donald Trump. Now, basically a toss-up constituency. And Asian Americans, a 32-point shift there as well. That’s what’s happened to the Republican Party since Donald Trump became its standard bearer eight years ago. This has been the movement.”
The Democrats’ Long Goodbye to the Working Class
Michael Baharaeen [The Liberal Patriot, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-21-2024]
“[B]y the 1990s, the country was growing more diverse and better educated. Bill Clinton was a beneficiary of this new reality, as he made sweeping gains with women, young people, voters of color (especially Hispanics), and college-educated voters. Importantly, he also retained significant support from white Americans and lower-educated voters, who made up the vast majority of the electorate. As Clinton rode this coalition to victory twice—marking the first time since FDR that a Democrat had won two full terms as president—some political observers, including my colleague, Ruy Teixeira, saw the emergence of a new majority, one that could consistently win elections using the formula Clinton had used…. Obama’s two wins confirmed for many Democrats and Republicans the validity of the ’emerging Democratic majority’ thesis. Gone were the days when Democrats needed to win a majority of white voters, a feat they had found nearly impossible to achieve since the 1960s. Now, the party that represented America’s demographic future stood to lead it as well.” But: “The Obama coalition is not a coalition, but rather a moment,” Is “The Obama Coalition” Even a Thing? Was It Ever? (2016). And indeed: “But no sooner had that consensus come into focus than Donald Trump arrived on the scene. Trump disrupted the Democrats’ plans for building a dominant coalition and, in the process, helped precipitate a dramatic realignment between the two parties—one rooted in economic and social class. This change has tipped the demographic advantage in favor of Republicans and left Democrats at very real risk of losing many of the voters who not long ago were expected to deliver them an enduring majority.” And here we are: “[T]he transformation of the parties along class lines appears to be moving full steam ahead. Harris retained higher levels of support among college-educated voters, winning them by 14 points. But perhaps just as telling: she carried high-income earners (those earning at least $100,000) by seven points—by far the largest margin for a Democratic nominee in the modern era. On the other side, Trump became the first Republican nominee on record to win low-income voters, narrowly carrying them by three points. He also continued growing his advantage with non-college voters, winning them by 13 points—the largest margin for the GOP since at least 1988. And his 44 percent support from union households marked the greatest share for a Republican since Ronald Reagan. Looking at this picture, it’s hard not to see that the Democrats are becoming the very thing they have long fought against: the party of the elites. This stands in sharp contrast to their longtime image as the champions of the working class.”
Democrats Need to Stop Defending a Broken Democratic System
Ari Berman and Jacob Rosenberg, November 21, 2024 [Mother Jones]
A Pew Research poll from September 2023 found that only 4 percent of US adults believed that the political system was working extremely or very well. More than six in 10 expressed little to no confidence in its future. At the same time, only 16 percent of the public said they trusted the federal government always or most of the time, the lowest level of faith in Washington in nearly seven decades. A poll by the New York Times days before the election found that 45 percent of the public did not believe American democracy did a good job of representing ordinary people.
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
Republicans in North Carolina pass sweeping changes to consolidate power
[Washington Post, via downwithtyranny.com 11-21-24]
Republicans in North Carolina rushed a bill through the legislature this week to boost their power before they lose their supermajority, approving a measure to give their party more control over elections, eliminate the jobs of judges who have ruled against them and limit the authority of the incoming Democratic governor and attorney general.
Republicans hold three-fifths majorities in the legislature and have used that power to override vetoes by Gov. Roy Cooper (D). In January, they’ll lose the ability to easily roll back vetoes by incoming Gov. Josh Stein (D) because they’ll no longer hold such a large majority in the North Carolina House.
The GOP response has been to flex their power now, while they still have it. They loaded up a $227 million Hurricane Helene relief package with an array of provisions that weaken the hand of Stein and other Democrats in the battleground state. Hours after unveiling the proposals, the state House passed the bill Tuesday night, and the state Senate approved it Wednesday.The lame-duck bill will shift the ability to appoint members of the state and county elections boards from the governor to the state auditor. That will mean Republicans instead of Democrats will control those boards, which oversee ballot tallies, set voting rules and decide how many early-voting locations to open.
GOP Takes First Steps To Shut Down Climate Groups
[The Lever, November 21, 2024]
Democrats are helping give Trump the power to wipe out enemy nonprofits — and there’s already a road map on how to defund clean energy groups….
Earlier this month, the House Energy and Commerce Committee laid out a plan to target environmental justice nonprofits and organizations working to transition the economy away from fossil fuels….
...the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s report focused on the Inflation Reduction Act’s distribution of federal funding, offering a preview of how the new terrorism legislation could be wielded for political purposes. It also highlighted the kinds of organizations that could be targeted, including those that support clean-energy policies like committing investments to renewable energy, phasing out fossil fuel production and use, and expanding public land conservation.
Criticizing the Biden administration’s environmental justice grants for marginalized groups historically inundated by pollution, the report says, “Enriching nonprofit organizations to spread radical, left-leaning ideology is an inappropriate use of taxpayer dollars.”
The plan singles out specific groups that the committee says have pushed a “radical rush-to-green agenda,” including Rewiring America, a nonprofit working on electrification, and New York City-based environmental justice group WE ACT. It castigated, for example, a blog post on WE ACT’s website “criticizing ‘Republican gas stove culture wars,’ and House GOP Members’ ‘preformative [sic], out-of-touch agenda.’”
Vigilantes Inc.—America’s New Vote Suppression Hitmen (film)
Greg Palast [saveyourvote.org]
The film centers on a terrible new threat this year to the right to vote: “Vigilante” challenges by self-appointed vote-fraud hunters, not government officials, who’ve are targeting well over one million to challenge and block the counting of their ballots. Most suspiciously, the vast majority of vigilante targets are young voters and voter of color. As shown in our trailer (watch below), our film features African-American career officer Maj. Gamaliel Turner whose vote was challenged and blocked by a GOP official who actually dresses up like vigilante Doc Holliday, including loaded six-guns. The Major was challenged because he’d been temporarily assigned by the military to a California based. Here’s the statistic that should scare all defenders of democracy. Our early “ACLU” version of the film exposed the 88 vigilantes, challenging voters only in Georgia. Now, the Trump-sponsored group True the Vote has gone from 88 vigilantes to over 40,000 “volunteers” in 43 states! ….
9,600 % Increase since 2022 in the number of Vigilantes challenging voters nationwide.
A GOP operative accused a monastery of voter fraud. Nuns fought back
[Washington Post, via Avedon's Sideshow 11-20-2024]
Sister Stephanie Schmidt had a hunch about what her fellow nuns would discuss over dinner at their Erie, Pennsylvania, monastery on Wednesday night. The day before, a Republican operative in the battleground state falsely suggested to his nearly 58,000 followers on X that no one lived at the monastery and that mail ballots cast from there would be 'illegal votes.' Cliff Maloney, who hired 120 people to go door-to-door across Pennsylvania urging Republican voters to return their mail ballots, wrote on X that one of those workers had 'discovered' an Erie address where 53 people were registered to vote but 'NO ONE lives there.'"
Trump’s transactional regime
Trump’s dictatorship is a fait accompli
John Q, November 19, 2024 [crookedtimber.org]
...I can’t give any hopeful advice to Americans. The idea of defeating Trump at the next election is an illusion. Although elections may be conducted for some time, the outcome will be predetermined. Street protest might be tolerated, as long as it is harmless, but will be suppressed brutally if it threatens the regime. Legal action will go nowhere, given that the Supreme Court has already authorised any criminal action Trump might take as president.
The models to learn from are those of dissidents in places like China and the Soviet Union. They involve cautious cultivation of an alternative, ready for the opportunity when and if it comes.
Trump’s Pick to Lead His Budget Office Wants to Use It to Deliver on MAGA’s Big Dreams
Isabela Dias, November 23, 2024 [Mother Jones]
[During Trump’s first term] At OMB, Vought tried to reclassify almost 90 percent of the agency’s workforce as at-will employees, hoping to set an example for other government heads. As a former OMB worker and author of Trump and the Bureaucrats: The Fate of Neutral Competence put it to me, Vought’s first round leading the agency was nothing short of “traumatic.”
Inside the Trump administration, Vought came across as fiercely dedicated to the America First cause, even if it meant a colossal increase in the federal debt. Trump was prone to outbursts, but to Vought that aggression equaled power. Vought made it his mission to weaponize OMB on behalf of the president, who had long perceived the civil service bureaucracy as an obstacle to his haphazard rule. “We view ourselves as the president’s Swiss Army Knife,” he once said. “How do you come up with options that work and then talk through the pros and cons?” Vought interpreted his job as being inside Trump’s head—a “keeper of ‘commander’s intent.’”
And that appears to be the same approach Vought plans to take when restored to his old job next year. In previously undisclosed videos of 2023 and 2024 private speeches obtained by ProPublica, Vought talked about wanting the “bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” adding they should “not want to go to work” when waking up in the morning. “We want to put them in trauma.”
He also suggested creating a “shadow Office of Legal Counsel” to enable a crackdown on anti-Trump dissent. “We want to be able to shut down the riots and not have the legal community or the defense community come in and say, ‘That’s an inappropriate use of what you’re trying to do.” A new Trump administration,” Vought declared, “must move quickly and decisively.”
Trump Is Struggling With His Treasury Pick for the Dumbest Reason
Timothy Noah, November 19, 2024 [The New Republic]
He wants someone who’ll sell Wall Street on across-the-board tariffs. That person doesn’t exist....
Trump needs a treasury secretary who can sell Wall Street on tax cuts, reduced regulation, and protectionism, but this time it’s protectionism on a colossal scale, with tariffs of 10 to 20 percent slapped onto every import plus a 60 percent tariff on all Chinese goods and a tariff of 25 percent to 100 percent on all goods from Mexico, which is an even bigger trading partner than China.
These tariffs would, it is widely agreed, tank the economy and usher in a bear market—and that’s before factoring in the worker shortage from Trump’s planned mass expulsion of undocumented aliens. Any Treasury nominee who understands the misery that Trump’s tariffs would create will resist them, and any Treasury nominee who doesn’t understand, or (more likely) pretends not to, will scare the living daylights out of Wall Street.
Wall Street is the only part of the American establishment that Trump respects. As Bloomberg’s Carmen Reinicke and Esha Dey wrote earlier this week, “The stock market is a way [Trump] keeps score.”
Jared Kushner’s $3 billion conflict of interest
[Popular Information, via The Big Picture 11-17-2024]
The Financial Times reported that Kushner is expected to “play an advisory role on the next administration’s Middle East policy.” According to the report, Kushner may also be helping the Trump transition team make selections for key posts involving Middle East policy. His firm, Affinity Partners secured $2 billion from Saudi Arabia and additional funds “from Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Taiwanese billionaire Terry Gou.” There is a fifth foreign investor that Affinity Partners will not disclose. There are no U.S. investors.
The knives are out over Treasury
[Politico, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-20-2024]
“SCOTT BESSENT. KEVIN WARSH. HOWARD LUTNICK. MARC ROWAN. All the supposed frontrunners for Treasury secretary have something in common — they’re Wall Street finance guys. That’s got the populist right freaking out. Protectionists in and out of President-elect DONALD TRUMP’s inner circle are terrified that none of the Treasury frontrunners will deliver on Trump’s most consistent — and potentially disruptive — economic campaign promise: across-the-board tariffs not seen in nearly a century, according to a person with direct knowledge of internal conversations, as well as dozens of public statements from populists in the past week. They’re pushing their own candidate: Trump’s former trade chief ROBERT LIGHTHIZER. And though he’s widely viewed as a long shot — if not out of contention for Treasury entirely — protectionists are going public with their campaign to get him named to the most powerful economic role in the Cabinet The campaign — and continuing uncertainty about such an essential Cabinet job — points to simmering discontent in Trump’s world about the ultimate direction of economic policy: whether to deliver on high, universal tariffs, or shy away for fear that the duties will spook the stock market.”
Tulsi Gabbard's DNI Nomination
Thomas Neuburger, November 20, 2024
For this discussion, let's focus primarily on Jeremy Scahill's evaluation of Gabbard's nomination. He’s gathered as many of her pluses and minuses as anyone, and Gabbard, to my eyes, is certainly a mixed nomination.
Virtue and Vice
Scahill on what he (and I) consider her virtues (all emphasis mine):If confirmed as the next Director of National Intelligence, Gabbard would represent one of the most unorthodox political figures to hold such a senior national security post in U.S. history. A veteran of the war in Iraq, Gabbard was elected to Congress in 2012 and emerged as a sharp critic of the U.S. forever wars launched in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. She denounced U.S. regime change wars, including the 2011 overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, and consistently opposed U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s scorched earth war against Yemen, which extended from Barack Obama to Donald Trump. On multiple occasions, she accused Trump of being “Saudi Arabia’s bitch,” taking orders from his Saudi “masters,” and of supporting Al Qaeda. She has called for pardoning whistleblowers Julian Assange and Edward Snowden and fought to change U.S. laws permitting domestic surveillance of Americans.
These are all points in the anti-imperialist ledger. Yet she also brings this to the role:
Gabbard is not an antigen infiltrating the U.S. intelligence system. Over the past four years she has fully embraced Trump’s America First posture in explaining her dissent from the elite foreign policy consensus. Gabbard also has a history of support for a slew of standard, bipartisan U.S. national security and defense policies. She has offered die-hard backing for Israel’s war against Gaza, opposed a ceasefire, and accused Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the chief facilitators of Israel’s genocidal war, of being soft on terrorism and anti-semitism. She has also argued that the U.S. and other Western nations should wage both a military and ideological war against what she calls “radical Islamist ideology.” She has described herself as a “hawk” when it comes to using military action against “terrorists” and has advocated using “surgical” drone strikes against terror groups, a system refined and expanded under the Obama and Trump administrations. She has praised Egyptian dictator Abdel Fatah al-Sisi for his “great courage and leadership” and, following a 2015 meeting with Sisi in Cairo, called on Obama to “take action to recognize President el-Sisi and his leadership.” In Congress, Gabbard voted to keep in place U.S. surveillance laws aimed at foreign nationals and nations and supported economic sanctions against Russia, Iran, and North Korea.
There’s also this: “Gabbard also has close ties to far right Hindu nationalists with an explicitly violent anti-Muslim agenda and an alliance with Israel and extremist Zionists.”
As I say, a very mixed bag.
Donald Trump’s Other Big Victory
Alex Shephard, November 22, 2024 [The New Republic]
He didn’t just win the election. He’s also become fully normalized in American culture.
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy: The DOGE Plan to Reform Government
[Wall Street Journal, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-21-2024]
“Most legal edicts aren’t laws enacted by Congress but “rules and regulations” promulgated by unelected bureaucrats—tens of thousands of them each year. Most government enforcement decisions and discretionary expenditures aren’t made by the democratically elected president or even his political appointees but by millions of unelected, unappointed civil servants within government agencies who view themselves as immune from firing thanks to civil-service protections. This is antidemocratic and antithetical to the Founders’ vision. It imposes massive direct and indirect costs on taxpayers. Thankfully, we have a historic opportunity to solve the problem.” Highlights from MSN: “According to Musk and Ramaswamy, the group will leverage recent Supreme Court rulings, such as West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency and Loper Bright v. Raimondo, to target regulations that lack clear congressional approval. ‘We will focus particularly on driving change through executive action based on existing legislation rather than by passing new laws,’ they wrote, describing the US Constitution as their ‘North Star.'” Hilariously, they steal a liberal Democrat trope (which I’ve always hated because it doesn’t mean anything). More: “One of their first initiatives involves identifying regulations that Trump could nullify immediately through executive action. These, they argued, would free businesses and individuals from the constraints of ‘illicit regulations’ and stimulate the economy. ‘When the president nullifies thousands of such regulations, critics will allege executive overreach. In fact, it will be correcting the executive overreach of thousands of regulations promulgated by administrative fiat,’ they noted. Acknowledging the likelihood of political and legal pushback, Musk and Ramaswamy expressed confidence in their mandate. ‘With a decisive electoral mandate and a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court, DOGE has a historic opportunity for structural reductions in the federal government,’ they declared. The authors set an ambitious deadline of July 4, 2026, to finalise their reforms, framing their mission as a transformative effort to restore governance to its constitutional roots. ‘We expect to prevail,’ they concluded, signalling their readiness to confront entrenched interests in Washington.”
How to Cut $2 Trillion in Federal Spending Without Breaking a Sweat
Stephanie Kelton, November 21, 2024 [The Lens, via Mike Norman Economics, November 21,2024]
There’s a difference between eliminating a third of government (as Brian Reidl suggested to The New York Times) and eliminating $2 trillion in spending. There’s also the issue of timing. Perhaps I missed it, but I haven’t seen Donald Trump, Elon Musk, or any republican member of Congress pledging to slash $2 trillion from a single year’s budget. If the goal is to reduce federal spending by $2 trillion or more—over some reasonably short period of time—that can be done fairly easily and without eliminating government agencies or cutting essential programs like Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid. And interest expenditure is exactly the right place to find those savings.
There’s also a difference between reducing interest payments and stopping payments as they come due. While Musk and Ramaswamy raise the possibility of violating the 1974 Impoundment Control Act in their new op-ed, there is no reason for President Trump to defy Congress in order to bring interest expenditure sharply down. He just needs Congress to take appropriate action to curb these expenditures over time.
As MMT scholars (Fullwiler, Mosler/Fullwiler, Wray, Kelton, etc.) have long reminded us, issuing bonds is a policy choice, and the interest rate that is paid on any securities the U.S. Treasury chooses to issue is also a policy choice. And there is growing recognition outside of the MMT community that the yield curve is a policy choice.
If you agree with Warren Mosler that interest payments are an income subsidy that overwhelmingly benefits “people who already have money,” making them a kind of “basic income for the rich,” then you might find it relatively easy to classify interest as a “wasteful” form of spending. If we continue down the path we’re on, the government will pay out tens of trillions of dollars to financial institutions and wealthy investors over the coming decade. That’s a large—and highly regressive—form of fiscal stimulus that Mosler thinks could help explain why inflation might be getting “sticky” or even poised to reaccelerate.
If the Federal Reserve were to cut rates sharply—either on its own or in response to political pressure, some of that fiscal largesse would disappear. And it doesn’t take all that long to for huge savings to materialize.
Inside the Junk Food Lobby's Plans to Derail RFK's Agenda
Lee Fang, November 20, 2024
Resistance
The Red Wave Didn’t Hit Statehouses in This Election
Heather Williams, November 21, 2024 [The Nation]
...What’s missing from national headlines is that Republicans’ widespread gains fizzled just a little farther down the ballot, in the states. Given what we saw at the top of the ticket, conventional wisdom would say there should have been a red wave in our statehouses. But, significantly, there was not. In fact, state legislative Democrats largely held their ground, even scoring key victories in battleground states like Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Wisconsin, while fighting to a draw in others like Minnesota. We won critical races on tight margins in battlegrounds that went red for the presidential and US Senate and congressional races—and we did it with fewer resources at our disposal. The presidential campaign spent our entire cycle’s budget every single week.
Here’s why this matters as we collectively brace for what’s to come: Democrats’s state power is shaping up to be the strongest counterweight to the Trump administration….
Los Angeles passes ‘sanctuary city’ ordinance to protect migrants from mass deportation under Trump
[France24, via Naked Capitalism 11-21-2024]
America’s Judicial Divisions Take New Shape Under Trump
Hassan Ali Kanu, November 21, 2024 [The American Prospect]
...The shift to a Republican administration, and former President Trump’s record of breaking norms and pushing the boundaries of the law, suggest both that we will see an uptick in litigation against the government in the next four years, and that the landscape of that litigation will change significantly.
Lawsuits challenging nationwide policies during Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration were filed by business groups, a national network of interlocking conservative legal organizations, and (predictably) Republican states’ attorneys general. And an outsize portion of those lawsuits were filed in Texas, where the federal appeals court is dominated by a supermajority of Republican appointees, and also has an unusual concentration of court divisions with just one or a handful of judges—allowing parties to sometimes hand-pick a preferred jurist.
Those trends will almost certainly fluctuate during the next four years.
“The dynamic where [Texas Attorney General] Ken Paxton wakes up, goes to work, and files a new lawsuit against the federal government is going to change,” said David Coale, an appeals lawyer at Lynn Pinker Hurst & Schwegmann in Dallas. “It’s going to be states like New York and California suing the federal government now, and I doubt they’ll be very interested in coming down here to file their cases.”….
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
A Trump Judge Just Nixed Overtime Pay for Millions—and Media Yawned
Greg Sargent, November 21, 2024 [The New Republic]
Remember the right-wing frenzy over “Rich Men North of Richmond”? Well, this ruling exposes Trump-MAGA hypocrisy on the working class—and reveals a big media failure.
Sam Alito Got Knighted... Just Like The Founding Fathers EXPLICITLY MADE UNCONSTITUTIONAL
Joe Patrice, October 31, 2024 [abovethelaw.com]
Oligarchy
How Sam Alito’s Monarchist Cosplay Explains His Jurisprudence
Alex Aronson and Katie Chenoweth, November 04, 2024 [Slate]
...Alito’s choice to become a knight in the Sacred Military Constantinian Order of St. George, an order led by fringe Italian monarchists, is not mere eccentric cosplay, although it is certainly also that. Knighthoods bestowed by princes are, to put it mildly, well outside the everyday experience of most Americans. After all, the Sacred Military Constantinian Order of St. George is not comparable to more familiar fraternal societies like the Knights of Columbus, or Catholic lay orders like the Knights of Malta. Among other key distinctions, the Constantinian Order is attached to a crown, and its Grand Master is a would-be king. It is what is known as a “dynastic order of chivalry”; that is, an order under the patronage of a royal family. Knighthoods like Alito’s were historically conferred by monarchs in reward for loyalty or service to the crown….
...in the alternate universe of the Constantinian Order, their majesty is very much intact. Led in the U.S. by self-described “monarchists” who actively seek to restore their Bourbon prince to the throne, the Constantinian Order seems to exist above all to keep the lost monarchy alive: allowing a would-be king to exercise his hereditary privilege in a miniature kingdom of loyal subjects, and allowing those he deems worthy to bask in the royal glow.
By contrast, the American republic was founded on an explicit rejection of monarchy and nobility, which the framers viewed as inimical to principles of equality and equal justice under the law. The framers also recognized that titles, gifts, and other “emoluments” could be used by foreign monarchs and states to gain influence in the U.S. government. This is why the Constitution places explicit limits on executive power, and why the foreign emoluments clause of the Constitution prohibits officers—including Supreme Court justices—from accepting these things without explicit approval from Congress.
Alito didn’t just join a club. He accepted a high honor from a foreign prince and made a lifetime commitment to that prince’s “sacred militia.” ... [He] accepted a knighthood and swore an oath to an order that seeks to restore monarchic power—and does so by investing that power with the highest religious authority. The Americans running the Constantinian Order in the U.S. subscribe to a “throne and altar”–style monarchism. According to a leading monarchist revered by these knights, “throne and altar” monarchy sees the church as the “animating principle of society” that “confers legitimacy and authority upon the King via … ceremonies of state,” while the monarch exercises power with a “God-given authority.”… Five years before authoring the inflammatory decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, Alito joined an organization whose ideology aligns religion, political authority, and the force of law.
…. In the U.S. and abroad, the theo-monarchical worldview is ascendant among prominent political leaders on the “New Right,” like J.D. Vance, Peter Thiel, Steve Bannon, and the coalition of powerful forces behind Project 2025.
Importantly, Alito’s ideological fundamentalism is expressed in the outcomes of his judicial rulings, which have categorically advanced not only his far-right religious views but also his commitments to an unchecked, monarchical executive power that would have been anathema to the framers. Following decades of trenchwork by Alito and his allies in the right-wing legal movement to advance the concept of a dominant “unitary executive,” this worldview catapulted into the spotlight—and our constitutional law—in this year’s 6–3 ruling in Trump v. United States, when, 248 years into the American experiment, the court’s purported “originalists” invented the concept of absolute presidential immunity, giving the U.S. president the powers of a monarch….
The Knight in Black: Justice Alito's Knighthood, Explained
Vaidehi Mehta, updated November 08, 2024 [findlaw.com]
...Justice Alito had his investiture ceremony in D.C.’s St. Matthews Cathedral in Washington, D.C.,…
...There are a few other Americans who hold membership to the Constantinian Order, and they all lean politically conservative. Among them are Laura Bush’s former chief of staff, Anita McBride, and the vice president of the Catholic Media Association (who happens to be the brother of Trump’s campaign manager), Michael La Civita. These two Republicans have also been granted dame and knight titles, respectively….
Justice Alito’s Royalist Cosplay
Nina Burleigh, October 31, 2024 [New York magazine Intelligencer]
On this side of the Atlantic, American neo-Bourbonists advocate for this cause on a badly edited blog, Il Regno (“the kingdom”). “For those of us who are traditionally minded, the Bourbons of Naples are anything but a footnote in history, they are a symbol of authority, sovereignty and justice,” one of them wrote on Il Regno in 2019. “They represent a possible future in the face of the present crises that threatens [sic] the remnants of our moribund civilization. A return to traditional religious and aristocratic principles, embodied by There [sic] Sicilian Majesties, will be our foundation to confront globalism and the unholy secular worldview currently plaguing our society with wanton materialism and widespread apathy.”….
The list of Constantinian knights and dames includes cardinals and bishops, rightist politicians like Brexiteer Ann Widdecombe and Italian Alberto Lembo, and dozens of obscure European aristocrats such as Princess Philomena, Countess of Paris; Jean-Christophe, Prince Napoléon; Jean, Count of Paris (head of the House of Orléans); Princess Marie-Therese von Hohenberg, great-granddaughter of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary; and Prince Laurent of Belgium….
Bourbon–Two Sicilies supporters are monarchists with a history of links to the American right going back to the Confederacy. Some of their supporters even fought for the South in the Civil War, finding common cause with the slavers whose way of life the North was destroying. The alliance is so strong that some neo-Bourbons fly the Confederate flag, sharing with the American South the grievance of having lost to the northern powers. One of the movement leaders wears a Confederate-flag pin on his lapel alongside the Bourbon–Two Sicilies flag….
The Crypto Triad Won The Election
[The Lever, November 20, 2024]
...Three cryptocurrency political action committees spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars trying to elect pro-crypto candidates on both sides of the aisle — the most of any industry this election cycle. This so-called “crypto triad” even donated to influential politicians’ campaigns not facing reelection or in uncompetitive races.
The coming years will be pivotal for crypto regulation. Experts say that Trump could stack relevant agencies with crypto boosters and crypto-backed lawmakers will likely push to weaken regulatory efforts, allow the digital money to become more entwined with everyday consumers, and rollback rules designed to crack down on money laundering and terrorist financing — provisions that can be burdensome for crypto exchanges.
These pro-crypto measures could undermine investor protections and jeopardize the larger financial markets by allowing the extremely volatile industry to avoid scrutiny and become more entrenched with traditional markets, experts told The Lever….
The crypto industry will also have friends in the upcoming White House, as Trump surrounds himself with crypto supporters and industry figureheads such as billionaire Elon Musk, who is heavily invested in cryptocurrencies; Vice President-elect and Ohio Sen. JD Vance, who holds between $250,000 and $500,000 worth of bitcoin; and Howard Lutnick, a financial adviser with deep ties to the crypto industry who is cochairing Trump’s transition team and was just nominated for Commerce Secretary, which partially oversees crypto regulations and other initiatives.
[TW: I read a number of years ago that George Washington wanted to prohibit bankers and stock speculators from serving in Congress. I was unable to find any further sources. But there are many sources for Thomas Jefferson’s invectives against “stock jobbers.” The political economy of a functioning republic places strict limits on financial speculation and usury.]
Civic republicanism
Trump Is Gunning for Birthright Citizenship—and Testing the High Court
Matt Ford, November 20, 2024 [The New Republic]
The president-elect has targeted the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship protections for deletion. The Supreme Court might grant his wish.
Will Conservative Judges Abide Trump’s Ending Birthright Citizenship?
Garrett Epps, November 19, 2024 [Washington Monthly]
It’s been settled doctrine since the 19th Century that you’re American if you’re born here. But one jurist, and perhaps others, seems ready to dump the 14th Amendment for a MAGA power grab.
[TW: It is a big mistake to think that the idea of mass deportations arrived only with Trump. The 14th Amendment and naturalized citizens have long been a target of USA’s movement conservatives. In The Hill, Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law professor Steven Lubet writes that the incoming Trump regime is planning not only to deport illegal aliens, but also naturalized citizens.
It appears that President-elect Donald Trump intends to keep his campaign promise to begin deporting at least 15 million people who, he claims, have been “poisoning the blood” of our country…. One initiative, smaller in scale but potentially devastating in its impact, will be aimed at immigrants who have become naturalized U.S. citizens.
[Lubet writes that incoming deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller
… is likely to be especially influential and especially brutal.
“America is for Americans only,” he shouted at Trump’s Madison Square Garden campaign rally….
But even “documented” immigrants will not be safe, because Miller has declared that he will pursue the seldom-used process of “denaturalization” to go after people who have been citizens for years or decades, based on suspicions about purported fraud on their naturalization applications. Individuals stripped of citizenship will then be subject to deportation along with Miller’s other targets.
[These bad ideas were percolating among USA conservatives long before Trump came on the scene. Garrett Epps wrote in Washington Monthly today (November 19, 2024) that in 2004,
… Reagan former Attorney General Edwin Meese and “coup memo” lawyer John C. Eastman, have claimed that the children of the undocumented are not citizens. After Kamala Harris (born in Oakland to legal immigrant parents) was nominated for Vice President, Eastman even wrote that she was not a “natural born citizen” and thus could not be vice president, objections he never raised about Canadian-born Ted Cruz. Even before he took office in 2017, Trump repeatedly attacked birthright citizenship., and he repeated his opposition during the 2024 campaign. In 2018, Michael Anton, a former Trump White House, proposed the idea that the president could set just set the clause aside by executive order, stripping American-born children of their citizenship if their parents were not in legal status when they were born.
[In January 2011, former Bush Jr. DOJ official Hans A. von Spakovsky, posted an “opinion” on Fox News, entitled “Birthright Citizenship -- A Fundamental Misunderstanding of the 14th Amendment,” arguing against the idea
that anyone born in the United States is automatically a U.S. citizen, even if their parents are here illegally. But that ignores the text and legislative history of the 14th Amendment, which was ratified in 1868 to extend citizenship to freed slaves and their children.
The 14th Amendment doesn’t say that all persons born in the U.S. are citizens. It says that “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” are citizens. That second, critical, conditional phrase is conveniently ignored or misinterpreted by advocates of “birthright” citizenship.
[It’s instructive to read the Wikipedia biography of von Spakovsky:
He is the manager of The Heritage Foundation's Election Law Reform Initiative and a senior legal fellow in The Heritage Foundation's Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies.[1] He is an advocate for stricter voting laws.[2][3] He has been described as playing an influential role in making concern about voter fraud mainstream in the Republican Party… [he] served as Republican Party chairman in Fulton County, Georgia, and as a Republican appointee to the Fulton County Registration and Election Board, where he championed strict voter-identification laws.
Von Spakovsky became a member of Voting Integrity Project, which investigated alleged voter fraud across the United States,[15] as well as a member of the politically conservative Federalist Society. He worked as a lawyer for George W. Bush's team during the 2000 Florida Presidential election recount.[13] After Bush's election victory, von Spakovsky was appointed to the Civil Rights division of the U.S. Department of Justice.[15]
In 2023, von Spakovsky authored the chapter on the Federal Election Commission for the ninth edition of the Heritage Foundation's book Mandate for Leadership, which provides the policy agenda for Project 2025.
[It is noteworthy that von Spakovsky retains the oligarchic honorific of “von” in his name, a social relic of the defunct monarchies of central and eastern Europe. Like Alito becoming a member of a monarchical cult, it indicates a lack of appreciation for the historical fight between the USA as a constitutional republic on one hand, and the oligarchies of the old world. This indifference to the issue of oligarchy versus republic, is one reason why I think it is now far more accurate to use the phrase “(anti)Republican Party,” than the misleading “Republican Party.” ]
How Native Americans Guarded Their Societies Against Tyranny
[JSTOR Daily, via Naked Capitalism 11-22-2024]
