#& that the so called two parties such as they are have virtually the same policies especially when it comes to the international stage

[lilies-of-the-fields]

....

[eowyntheavenger]

Hi! I saw your post on telling Americans to vote, and I was wondering what you think of posts from people from other parts of the world who are calling Americans evil for voting for Biden because of his support for Israel. I've seen a few already. They seem to be completely convinced that Americans deliberately voted for Biden specifically to side against Palestine and no other reason, and spread the general (pretty ignorant and hateful) message of "Americans are evil because of the actions of their government and because they collectively refuse to vote for a president who is good and not simply 'the lesser of two evils'". It frustrates me because they seem to think they're experts on US politics, culture, and society and have all the answers, but it also makes me concerned because it reminds me of the whole Russian bot thing from last time. Like, I'm 99% sure the people reblogging these posts aren't Russian bots (don't know about the OPs though), and they unquestioningly believe this. What do you think of this and how would you go about addressing this issue? Do you think it's possible to get them to understand how little they actually know about the US and how they're actually promoting a message that makes things worse for everyone? I've also seen less scathing posts that are just disheartened and don't seem to believe the democrats are truly better to vote for than the republicans and so it's just two sides of the same coin. To be fair, I think that sort of feeling is only further encouraged because there didn't really seem to be much if any progress made with Biden, not even back to square one after Trump moved the country so far backwards. I think most Americans really wish the elections actually had good candidates and they could pick the best of two goods, but are frustrated and stuck with the current system and don't know how to actually get to the point where there are good candidates. (Though personally I think voting for the one who isn't actively trying to make themselves a king with unlimited terms is a decent start. I can understand the frustration though.)

Hi! Thanks for the ask. This stuff worries me too. I've gotten comments on my posts like that too, telling me/other Americans that we're evil for voting for Biden.

But I've seen a much larger number of comments and posts from people outside the United States BEGGING us to vote for Biden. I literally get tags like that on my posts EVERY DAY urging Americans to vote blue. So I think that's valuable context, even if it doesn't solve the problem of the "I hate everybody who votes for Biden" crowd.

And yes, it's definitely a shitty argument on their part to claim that people voting for Biden are specifically siding against Palestine. Literally every single person I know in real life and online who plans to vote for Biden has been criticizing and protesting his policies on Palestine.

In terms of convincing the anti-voters that they're wrong, honestly, I don't know. They don't listen to reason and they seem intent on spreading despair. Some of Biden's policies have been terrible (Willow oil-drilling project), some of them have been downright evil (military aid to Israel), but I'm a rational person and I know that Trump is worse in every respect.

I've tried debating them. It's been pointless every time. They genuinely don't know how the government works, which scares me. Common takes include: 1) a genuine lack of awareness of how pro-Israel Trump and the right wing are, combined with magical thinking that a virtually unknown third party candidate can win the presidential election, 2) truly impressive mental gymnastics blaming Biden for the overturn of Roe v. Wade, and 3) continuing the mental gymnastics to blame Biden and the Democrats for anti-trans policies...

I guess my advice is to either ignore them and move on, or debunk things when you have time/energy? It's easier said than done, I know. There's nothing more annoying than someone being stupid on the internet, especially when they accuse you of stuff that just isn't true, and especially when they're spreading dangerous misinformation or voter-suppression rhetoric.

Like you, I'm highly suspicious of anyone who advocates AGAINST voting, or against voting blue. And I agree, many of these people are not bots, like you said, but I call them useful idiots, because they're doing the bots' work for them.

The one thing you said that I'm going to push back on is "there didn't really seem to be much if any progress made with Biden." Biden's actually made lots of progress on a variety of issues, and reversed some of Trump’s damage, it just doesn't get a lot of fanfare and it’s unfortunately happening at the same time as Republican gains in state legislatures and while they control the Supreme Court. But Biden and his administration have:

• invested billions in green architecture and clean energy, including making sure federal investments benefit low-income communities

• introduced new fines for companies' methane emissions

• introduced a plan to cut the federal government's greenhouse gas emissions by 65% by 2030 (that includes the military, which is a huge emitter)

• passed a huge bill for improving the country's infrastructure, including bridges, roads, broadband and more

• introduced first-ever national strategy on gender equality and equity and pushed Congress to pass the Equal Rights Amendment

• fought for women's reproductive rights after the overturn of Roe v. Wade

• put more women, people of color, and women of color on the federal bench than any of his predecessors combined

• nominated Kentaji Brown Jackson as the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court

• boosted funding to historically Black colleges

• ordered the DOJ to end the use of private prisons by the federal government

• pardoned thousands of people convicted on federal marijuana charges

• created a White House office of gun violence prevention

• passed the Respect for Marriage Act, guaranteeing federal rights and benefits for same-sex couples

• rolled out a series of actions to protect the rights and safety of the LGBTQ+ community, including protecting queer and trans foster youth, improving access to mental health services, and addressing the rise in hate crimes

• challenged discriminatory state bans against gender-affirming care and trans athletes

• called to support trans youth in State of the Union address and restored the White House tradition of recognizing Pride Month

• changed passport rules so that people can obtain a passport with no gender marker

• examined efforts by each federal agency to advance LGBTQ+ rights around the world

• reversed Trump's transgender military ban

• protected the rights of incarcerated trans people

• forgave billions in student debt, repeatedly, and introduced penalties for college programs that trap students in debt

• slashed bank overdraft fees

• expanded guaranteed overtime pay for millions of people

• made union-busting harder

• prevented discriminatory mortgage lending

• made efforts to expand the child tax credit, which could lift hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty

• cracked down on agriculture monopolies to support farmers and small businesses

• made it so the government is going to start taking drug companies' patents away if they don't make affordable drugs

• made over-the-counter birth control pills available for the first time

• lowered the cost of hearing aids and expanded access to them

• spent millions of dollars on students' mental health

• reversed discriminatory healthcare rules

• reinvigorated cancer research

• announced plans to replace all leaded pipes in the next ten years as well as combatting lead exposure abroad

• changed rules for how people can get aid after disasters so they can get more protection and immediate payments more easily

• introduced new data privacy rules protecting people from tech companies

• pushed the federal government to monitor AI risks

• maintained steadfast support for Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression

• maintained steadfast support for Taiwan in the face of Chinese intimidation

• strengthened ties with allies in Asia and the Pacific Islands

• pledged climate change assistance to low-lying Pacific Island countries

• literally IMMEDIATELY after being elected, Biden fortified DACA, rejoined the Paris Agreement, and ended Trump's discriminatory "Muslim ban", ended the Keystone XL Pipeline and fossil duel development in wildlife monuments, (same as last link) rejoined the WHO, strengthened COVID-19 response measures on a variety of fronts, re-included non-citizens in the U.S. census, and passed executives orders on racial equity in the federal government

And I'm sure there's more I left out.

There are also things Biden does that literally don’t make the news, but matter a lot, like funding the Postal Service, and continuing to have a State Department so we can conduct overseas diplomacy (Trump tried to defund the USPS and wants to purge the State Department and fill it with loyalists).

[dailyanarchistposts]

A.5 What are some examples of “Anarchy in Action”?

A.5.4 Anarchists in the Russian Revolution

The Russian revolution of 1917 saw a huge growth in anarchism in that country and many experiments in anarchist ideas. However, in popular culture the Russian Revolution is seen not as a mass movement by ordinary people struggling towards freedom but as the means by which Lenin imposed his dictatorship on Russia. The truth is radically different. The Russian Revolution was a mass movement from below in which many different currents of ideas existed and in which millions of working people (workers in the cities and towns as well as peasants) tried to transform their world into a better place. Sadly, those hopes and dreams were crushed under the dictatorship of the Bolshevik party — first under Lenin, later under Stalin.

The Russian Revolution, like most history, is a good example of the maxim “history is written by those who win.” Most capitalist histories of the period between 1917 and 1921 ignore what the anarchist Voline called “the unknown revolution” — the revolution called forth from below by the actions of ordinary people. Leninist accounts, at best, praise this autonomous activity of workers so long as it coincides with their own party line but radically condemn it (and attribute it with the basest motives) as soon as it strays from that line. Thus Leninist accounts will praise the workers when they move ahead of the Bolsheviks (as in the spring and summer of 1917) but will condemn them when they oppose Bolshevik policy once the Bolsheviks are in power. At worse, Leninist accounts portray the movement and struggles of the masses as little more than a backdrop to the activities of the vanguard party.

For anarchists, however, the Russian Revolution is seen as a classic example of a social revolution in which the self-activity of working people played a key role. In their soviets, factory committees and other class organisations, the Russian masses were trying to transform society from a class-ridden, hierarchical statist regime into one based on liberty, equality and solidarity. As such, the initial months of the Revolution seemed to confirm Bakunin’s prediction that the “future social organisation must be made solely from the bottom upwards, by the free associations or federations of workers, firstly in their unions, then in the communes, regions, nations and finally in a great federation, international and universal.” [Michael Bakunin: Selected Writings, p. 206] The soviets and factory committees expressed concretely Bakunin’s ideas and Anarchists played an important role in the struggle.

The initial overthrow of the Tsar came from the direct action of the masses. In February 1917, the women of Petrograd erupted in bread riots. On February 18th, the workers of the Putilov Works in Petrograd went on strike. By February 22nd, the strike had spread to other factories. Two days later, 200 000 workers were on strike and by February 25th the strike was virtually general. The same day also saw the first bloody clashes between protestors and the army. The turning point came on the 27th, when some troops went over to the revolutionary masses, sweeping along other units. This left the government without its means of coercion, the Tsar abdicated and a provisional government was formed.

So spontaneous was this movement that all the political parties were left behind. This included the Bolsheviks, with the “Petrograd organisation of the Bolsheviks oppos[ing] the calling of strikes precisely on the eve of the revolution destined to overthrow the Tsar. Fortunately, the workers ignored the Bolshevik ‘directives’ and went on strike anyway … Had the workers followed its guidance, it is doubtful that the revolution would have occurred when it did.” [Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism, p. 123]

The revolution carried on in this vein of direct action from below until the new, “socialist” state was powerful enough to stop it.

For the Left, the end of Tsarism was the culmination of years of effort by socialists and anarchists everywhere. It represented the progressive wing of human thought overcoming traditional oppression, and as such was duly praised by leftists around the world. However, in Russia things were progressing. In the workplaces and streets and on the land, more and more people became convinced that abolishing feudalism politically was not enough. The overthrow of the Tsar made little real difference if feudal exploitation still existed in the economy, so workers started to seize their workplaces and peasants, the land. All across Russia, ordinary people started to build their own organisations, unions, co-operatives, factory committees and councils (or “soviets” in Russian). These organisations were initially organised in anarchist fashion, with recallable delegates and being federated with each other.

Needless to say, all the political parties and organisations played a role in this process. The two wings of the Marxist social-democrats were active (the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks), as were the Social Revolutionaries (a populist peasant based party) and the anarchists. The anarchists participated in this movement, encouraging all tendencies to self-management and urging the overthrow of the provisional government. They argued that it was necessary to transform the revolution from a purely political one into an economic/social one. Until the return of Lenin from exile, they were the only political tendency who thought along those lines.

Lenin convinced his party to adopt the slogan “All Power to the Soviets” and push the revolution forward. This meant a sharp break with previous Marxist positions, leading one ex-Bolshevik turned Menshevik to comment that Lenin had “made himself a candidate for one European throne that has been vacant for thirty years — the throne of Bakunin!” [quoted by Alexander Rabinowitch, Prelude to Revolution, p. 40] The Bolsheviks now turned to winning mass support, championing direct action and supporting the radical actions of the masses, policies in the past associated with anarchism (“the Bolsheviks launched … slogans which until then had been particularly and insistently been voiced by the Anarchists.” [Voline, The Unknown Revolution, p. 210]). Soon they were winning more and more votes in the soviet and factory committee elections. As Alexander Berkman argues, the “Anarchist mottoes proclaimed by the Bolsheviks did not fail to bring results. The masses relied to their flag.” [What is Anarchism?, p. 120]

The anarchists were also influential at this time. Anarchists were particularly active in the movement for workers self-management of production which existed around the factory committees (see M. Brinton, The Bolsheviks and Workers Control for details). They were arguing for workers and peasants to expropriate the owning class, abolish all forms of government and re-organise society from the bottom up using their own class organisations — the soviets, the factory committees, co-operatives and so on. They could also influence the direction of struggle. As Alexander Rabinowitch (in his study of the July uprising of 1917) notes:

“At the rank-and-file level, particularly within the [Petrograd] garrison and at the Kronstadt naval base, there was in fact very little to distinguish Bolshevik from Anarchist… The Anarchist-Communists and the Bolsheviks competed for the support of the same uneducated, depressed, and dissatisfied elements of the population, and the fact is that in the summer of 1917, the Anarchist-Communists, with the support they enjoyed in a few important factories and regiments, possessed an undeniable capacity to influence the course of events. Indeed, the Anarchist appeal was great enough in some factories and military units to influence the actions of the Bolsheviks themselves.” [Op. Cit., p. 64]

Indeed, one leading Bolshevik stated in June, 1917 (in response to a rise in anarchist influence), ”[b]y fencing ourselves off from the Anarchists, we may fence ourselves off from the masses.” [quoted by Alexander Rabinowitch, Op. Cit., p. 102]

The anarchists operated with the Bolsheviks during the October Revolution which overthrew the provisional government. But things changed once the authoritarian socialists of the Bolshevik party had seized power. While both anarchists and Bolsheviks used many of the same slogans, there were important differences between the two. As Voline argued, ”[f]rom the lips and pens of the Anarchists, those slogans were sincere and concrete, for they corresponded to their principles and called for action entirely in conformity with such principles. But with the Bolsheviks, the same slogans meant practical solutions totally different from those of the libertarians and did not tally with the ideas which the slogans appeared to express.” [The Unknown Revolution, p. 210]

Take, for example, the slogan “All power to the Soviets.” For anarchists it meant exactly that — organs for the working class to run society directly, based on mandated, recallable delegates. For the Bolsheviks, that slogan was simply the means for a Bolshevik government to be formed over and above the soviets. The difference is important, “for the Anarchists declared, if ‘power’ really should belong to the soviets, it could not belong to the Bolshevik party, and if it should belong to that Party, as the Bolsheviks envisaged, it could not belong to the soviets.” [Voline, Op. Cit., p. 213] Reducing the soviets to simply executing the decrees of the central (Bolshevik) government and having their All-Russian Congress be able to recall the government (i.e. those with real power) does not equal “all power,” quite the reverse.

Similarly with the term “workers’ control of production.” Before the October Revolution Lenin saw “workers’ control” purely in terms of the “universal, all-embracing workers’ control over the capitalists.” [Will the Bolsheviks Maintain Power?, p. 52] He did not see it in terms of workers’ management of production itself (i.e. the abolition of wage labour) via federations of factory committees. Anarchists and the workers’ factory committees did. As S.A. Smith correctly notes, Lenin used “the term [‘workers’ control’] in a very different sense from that of the factory committees.” In fact Lenin’s “proposals … [were] thoroughly statist and centralist in character, whereas the practice of the factory committees was essentially local and autonomous.” [Red Petrograd, p. 154] For anarchists, “if the workers’ organisations were capable of exercising effective control [over their bosses], then they also were capable of guaranteeing all production. In such an event, private industry could be eliminated quickly but progressively, and replaced by collective industry. Consequently, the Anarchists rejected the vague nebulous slogan of ‘control of production.’ They advocated expropriation — progressive, but immediate — of private industry by the organisations of collective production.” [Voline, Op. Cit., p. 221]

Once in power, the Bolsheviks systematically undermined the popular meaning of workers’ control and replaced it with their own, statist conception. “On three occasions,” one historian notes, “in the first months of Soviet power, the [factory] committee leaders sought to bring their model into being. At each point the party leadership overruled them. The result was to vest both managerial and control powers in organs of the state which were subordinate to the central authorities, and formed by them.” [Thomas F. Remington, Building Socialism in Bolshevik Russia, p. 38] This process ultimately resulted in Lenin arguing for, and introducing, “one-man management” armed with “dictatorial” power (with the manager appointed from above by the state) in April 1918. This process is documented in Maurice Brinton’s The Bolsheviks and Workers’ Control, which also indicates the clear links between Bolshevik practice and Bolshevik ideology as well as how both differed from popular activity and ideas.

Hence the comments by Russian Anarchist Peter Arshinov:

“Another no less important peculiarity is that [the] October [revolution of 1917] has two meanings — that which the working’ masses who participated in the social revolution gave it, and with them the Anarchist-Communists, and that which was given it by the political party [the Marxist-Communists] that captured power from this aspiration to social revolution, and which betrayed and stifled all further development. An enormous gulf exists between these two interpretations of October. The October of the workers and peasants is the suppression of the power of the parasite classes in the name of equality and self-management. The Bolshevik October is the conquest of power by the party of the revolutionary intelligentsia, the installation of its ‘State Socialism’ and of its ‘socialist’ methods of governing the masses.” [The Two Octobers]

Initially, anarchists had supported the Bolsheviks, since the Bolshevik leaders had hidden their state-building ideology behind support for the soviets (as socialist historian Samuel Farber notes, the anarchists “had actually been an unnamed coalition partner of the Bolsheviks in the October Revolution.” [Before Stalinism, p. 126]). However, this support quickly “withered away” as the Bolsheviks showed that they were, in fact, not seeking true socialism but were instead securing power for themselves and pushing not for collective ownership of land and productive resources but for government ownership. The Bolsheviks, as noted, systematically undermined the workers’ control/self-management movement in favour of capitalist-like forms of workplace management based around “one-man management” armed with “dictatorial powers.”

As regards the soviets, the Bolsheviks systematically undermining what limited independence and democracy they had. In response to the “great Bolshevik losses in the soviet elections” during the spring and summer of 1918 “Bolshevik armed force usually overthrew the results of these provincial elections.” Also, the “government continually postponed the new general elections to the Petrograd Soviet, the term of which had ended in March 1918. Apparently, the government feared that the opposition parties would show gains.” [Samuel Farber, Op. Cit., p. 24 and p. 22] In the Petrograd elections, the Bolsheviks “lost the absolute majority in the soviet they had previously enjoyed” but remained the largest party. However, the results of the Petrograd soviet elections were irrelevant as a “Bolshevik victory was assured by the numerically quite significant representation now given to trade unions, district soviets, factory-shop committees, district workers conferences, and Red Army and naval units, in which the Bolsheviks had overwhelming strength.” [Alexander Rabinowitch, “The Evolution of Local Soviets in Petrograd”, pp. 20–37, Slavic Review, Vol. 36, No. 1, p. 36f] In other words, the Bolsheviks had undermined the democratic nature of the soviet by swamping it by their own delegates. Faced with rejection in the soviets, the Bolsheviks showed that for them “soviet power” equalled party power. To stay in power, the Bolsheviks had to destroy the soviets, which they did. The soviet system remained “soviet” in name only. Indeed, from 1919 onwards Lenin, Trotsky and other leading Bolsheviks were admitting that they had created a party dictatorship and, moreover, that such a dictatorship was essential for any revolution (Trotsky supported party dictatorship even after the rise of Stalinism).

The Red Army, moreover, no longer was a democratic organisation. In March of 1918 Trotsky had abolished the election of officers and soldier committees:

“the principle of election is politically purposeless and technically inexpedient, and it has been, in practice, abolished by decree.” [Work, Discipline, Order]

As Maurice Brinton correctly summarises:

“Trotsky, appointed Commissar of Military Affairs after Brest-Litovsk, had rapidly been reorganising the Red Army. The death penalty for disobedience under fire had been restored. So, more gradually, had saluting, special forms of address, separate living quarters and other privileges for officers. Democratic forms of organisation, including the election of officers, had been quickly dispensed with.” [“The Bolsheviks and Workers’ Control”, For Workers’ Power, pp. 336–7]

Unsurprisingly, Samuel Farber notes that “there is no evidence indicating that Lenin or any of the mainstream Bolshevik leaders lamented the loss of workers’ control or of democracy in the soviets, or at least referred to these losses as a retreat, as Lenin declared with the replacement of War Communism by NEP in 1921.” [Before Stalinism, p. 44]

Thus after the October Revolution, anarchists started to denounce the Bolshevik regime and call for a “Third Revolution” which would finally free the masses from all bosses (capitalist or socialist). They exposed the fundamental difference between the rhetoric of Bolshevism (as expressed, for example, in Lenin’s State and Revolution) with its reality. Bolshevism in power had proved Bakunin’s prediction that the “dictatorship of the proletariat” would become the “dictatorship over the proletariat” by the leaders of the Communist Party.

The influence of the anarchists started to grow. As Jacques Sadoul (a French officer) noted in early 1918:

“The anarchist party is the most active, the most militant of the opposition groups and probably the most popular … The Bolsheviks are anxious.” [quoted by Daniel Guerin, Anarchism, pp. 95–6]

By April 1918, the Bolsheviks began the physical suppression of their anarchist rivals. On April 12th, 1918, the Cheka (the secret police formed by Lenin in December, 1917) attacked anarchist centres in Moscow. Those in other cities were attacked soon after. As well as repressing their most vocal opponents on the left, the Bolsheviks were restricting the freedom of the masses they claimed to be protecting. Democratic soviets, free speech, opposition political parties and groups, self-management in the workplace and on the land — all were destroyed in the name of “socialism.” All this happened, we must stress, before the start of the Civil War in late May, 1918, which most supporters of Leninism blame for the Bolsheviks’ authoritarianism. During the civil war, this process accelerated, with the Bolsheviks’ systematically repressing opposition from all quarters — including the strikes and protests of the very class who they claimed was exercising its “dictatorship” while they were in power!

It is important to stress that this process had started well before the start of the civil war, confirming anarchist theory that a “workers’ state” is a contraction in terms. For anarchists, the Bolshevik substitution of party power for workers power (and the conflict between the two) did not come as a surprise. The state is the delegation of power — as such, it means that the idea of a “workers’ state” expressing “workers’ power” is a logical impossibility. If workers are running society then power rests in their hands. If a state exists then power rests in the hands of the handful of people at the top, not in the hands of all. The state was designed for minority rule. No state can be an organ of working class (i.e. majority) self-management due to its basic nature, structure and design. For this reason anarchists have argued for a bottom-up federation of workers’ councils as the agent of revolution and the means of managing society after capitalism and the state have been abolished.

As we discuss in section H, the degeneration of the Bolsheviks from a popular working class party into dictators over the working class did not occur by accident. A combination of political ideas and the realities of state power (and the social relationships it generates) could not help but result in such a degeneration. The political ideas of Bolshevism, with its vanguardism, fear of spontaneity and identification of party power with working class power inevitably meant that the party would clash with those whom it claimed to represent. After all, if the party is the vanguard then, automatically, everyone else is a “backward” element. This meant that if the working class resisted Bolshevik policies or rejected them in soviet elections, then the working class was “wavering” and being influenced by “petty-bourgeois” and “backward” elements. Vanguardism breeds elitism and, when combined with state power, dictatorship.

State power, as anarchists have always stressed, means the delegation of power into the hands of a few. This automatically produces a class division in society — those with power and those without. As such, once in power the Bolsheviks were isolated from the working class. The Russian Revolution confirmed Malatesta’s argument that a “government, that is a group of people entrusted with making laws and empowered to use the collective power to oblige each individual to obey them, is already a privileged class and cut off from the people. As any constituted body would do, it will instinctively seek to extend its powers, to be beyond public control, to impose its own policies and to give priority to its special interests. Having been put in a privileged position, the government is already at odds with the people whose strength it disposes of.” [Anarchy, p. 34] A highly centralised state such as the Bolsheviks built would reduce accountability to a minimum while at the same time accelerating the isolation of the rulers from the ruled. The masses were no longer a source of inspiration and power, but rather an alien group whose lack of “discipline” (i.e. ability to follow orders) placed the revolution in danger. As one Russian Anarchist argued:

“The proletariat is being gradually enserfed by the state. The people are being transformed into servants over whom there has arisen a new class of administrators — a new class born mainly form the womb of the so-called intelligentsia … We do not mean to say … that the Bolshevik party set out to create a new class system. But we do say that even the best intentions and aspirations must inevitably be smashed against the evils inherent in any system of centralised power. The separation of management from labour, the division between administrators and workers flows logically from centralisation. It cannot be otherwise.” [The Anarchists in the Russian Revolution, pp. 123–4]

For this reason anarchists, while agreeing that there is an uneven development of political ideas within the working class, reject the idea that “revolutionaries” should take power on behalf of working people. Only when working people actually run society themselves will a revolution be successful. For anarchists, this meant that ”[e]ffective emancipation can be achieved only by the direct, widespread, and independent action … of the workers themselves, grouped … in their own class organisations … on the basis of concrete action and self-government, helped but not governed, by revolutionaries working in the very midst of, and not above the mass and the professional, technical, defence and other branches.” [Voline, Op. Cit., p. 197] By substituting party power for workers power, the Russian Revolution had made its first fatal step. Little wonder that the following prediction (from November 1917) made by anarchists in Russia came true:

“Once their power is consolidated and ‘legalised’, the Bolsheviks who are … men of centralist and authoritarian action will begin to rearrange the life of the country and of the people by governmental and dictatorial methods, imposed by the centre. The[y] … will dictate the will of the party to all Russia, and command the whole nation. Your Soviets and your other local organisations will become little by little, simply executive organs of the will of the central government. In the place of healthy, constructive work by the labouring masses, in place of free unification from the bottom, we will see the installation of an authoritarian and statist apparatus which would act from above and set about wiping out everything that stood in its way with an iron hand.” [quoted by Voline, Op. Cit., p. 235]

The so-called “workers’ state” could not be participatory or empowering for working class people (as the Marxists claimed) simply because state structures are not designed for that. Created as instruments of minority rule, they cannot be transformed into (nor “new” ones created which are) a means of liberation for the working classes. As Kropotkin put it, Anarchists “maintain that the State organisation, having been the force to which minorities resorted for establishing and organising their power over the masses, cannot be the force which will serve to destroy these privileges.” [Anarchism, p. 170] In the words of an anarchist pamphlet written in 1918:

“Bolshevism, day by day and step by step, proves that state power possesses inalienable characteristics; it can change its label, its ‘theory’, and its servitors, but in essence it merely remains power and despotism in new forms.” [quoted by Paul Avrich, “The Anarchists in the Russian Revolution,” pp. 341–350, Russian Review, vol. 26, issue no. 4, p. 347]

For insiders, the Revolution had died a few months after the Bolsheviks took over. To the outside world, the Bolsheviks and the USSR came to represent “socialism” even as they systematically destroyed the basis of real socialism. By transforming the soviets into state bodies, substituting party power for soviet power, undermining the factory committees, eliminating democracy in the armed forces and workplaces, repressing the political opposition and workers’ protests, the Bolsheviks effectively marginalised the working class from its own revolution. Bolshevik ideology and practice were themselves important and sometimes decisive factors in the degeneration of the revolution and the ultimate rise of Stalinism.

As anarchists had predicted for decades previously, in the space of a few months, and before the start of the Civil War, the Bolshevik’s “workers’ state” had become, like any state, an alien power over the working class and an instrument of minority rule (in this case, the rule of the party). The Civil War accelerated this process and soon party dictatorship was introduced (indeed, leading Bolsheviks began arguing that it was essential in any revolution). The Bolsheviks put down the libertarian socialist elements within their country, with the crushing of the uprising at Kronstadt and the Makhnovist movement in the Ukraine being the final nails in the coffin of socialism and the subjugation of the soviets.

The Kronstadt uprising of February, 1921, was, for anarchists, of immense importance (see the appendix “What was the Kronstadt Rebellion?” for a full discussion of this uprising). The uprising started when the sailors of Kronstadt supported the striking workers of Petrograd in February, 1921. They raised a 15 point resolution, the first point of which was a call for soviet democracy. The Bolsheviks slandered the Kronstadt rebels as counter-revolutionaries and crushed the revolt. For anarchists, this was significant as the repression could not be justified in terms of the Civil War (which had ended months before) and because it was a major uprising of ordinary people for real socialism. As Voline puts it:

“Kronstadt was the first entirely independent attempt of the people to liberate themselves of all yokes and carry out the Social Revolution: this attempt was made directly … by the working masses themselves, without political shepherds, without leaders or tutors. It was the first step towards the third and social revolution.” [Voline, Op. Cit., pp. 537–8]

In the Ukraine, anarchist ideas were most successfully applied. In areas under the protection of the Makhnovist movement, working class people organised their own lives directly, based on their own ideas and needs — true social self-determination. Under the leadership of Nestor Makhno, a self-educated peasant, the movement not only fought against both Red and White dictatorships but also resisted the Ukrainian nationalists. In opposition to the call for “national self-determination,” i.e. a new Ukrainian state, Makhno called instead for working class self-determination in the Ukraine and across the world. Makhno inspired his fellow peasants and workers to fight for real freedom:

“Conquer or die — such is the dilemma that faces the Ukrainian peasants and workers at this historic moment … But we will not conquer in order to repeat the errors of the past years, the error of putting our fate into the hands of new masters; we will conquer in order to take our destinies into our own hands, to conduct our lives according to our own will and our own conception of the truth.” [quoted by Peter Arshinov, History of the Makhnovist Movement, p. 58]

To ensure this end, the Makhnovists refused to set up governments in the towns and cities they liberated, instead urging the creation of free soviets so that the working people could govern themselves. Taking the example of Aleksandrovsk, once they had liberated the city the Makhnovists “immediately invited the working population to participate in a general conference … it was proposed that the workers organise the life of the city and the functioning of the factories with their own forces and their own organisations … The first conference was followed by a second. The problems of organising life according to principles of self-management by workers were examined and discussed with animation by the masses of workers, who all welcomed this ideas with the greatest enthusiasm … Railroad workers took the first step … They formed a committee charged with organising the railway network of the region … From this point, the proletariat of Aleksandrovsk began to turn systematically to the problem of creating organs of self-management.” [Op. Cit., p. 149]

The Makhnovists argued that the “freedom of the workers and peasants is their own, and not subject to any restriction. It is up to the workers and peasants themselves to act, to organise themselves, to agree among themselves in all aspects of their lives, as they see fit and desire .. . The Makhnovists can do no more than give aid and counsel … In no circumstances can they, nor do they wish to, govern.” [Peter Arshinov, quoted by Guerin, Op. Cit., p. 99] In Alexandrovsk, the Bolsheviks proposed to the Makhnovists spheres of action — their Revkom (Revolutionary Committee) would handle political affairs and the Makhnovists military ones. Makhno advised them “to go and take up some honest trade instead of seeking to impose their will on the workers.” [Peter Arshinov in The Anarchist Reader, p. 141]

They also organised free agricultural communes which ”[a]dmittedly .. . were not numerous, and included only a minority of the population .. . But what was most precious was that these communes were formed by the poor peasants themselves. The Makhnovists never exerted any pressure on the peasants, confining themselves to propagating the idea of free communes.” [Arshinov, History of the Makhnovist Movement, p. 87] Makhno played an important role in abolishing the holdings of the landed gentry. The local soviet and their district and regional congresses equalised the use of the land between all sections of the peasant community. [Op. Cit., pp. 53–4]

Moreover, the Makhnovists took the time and energy to involve the whole population in discussing the development of the revolution, the activities of the army and social policy. They organised numerous conferences of workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ delegates to discuss political and social issues as well as free soviets, unions and communes. They organised a regional congress of peasants and workers when they had liberated Aleksandrovsk. When the Makhnovists tried to convene the third regional congress of peasants, workers and insurgents in April 1919 and an extraordinary congress of several regions in June 1919 the Bolsheviks viewed them as counter-revolutionary, tried to ban them and declared their organisers and delegates outside the law.

The Makhnovists replied by holding the conferences anyway and asking ”[c]an there exist laws made by a few people who call themselves revolutionaries, which permit them to outlaw a whole people who are more revolutionary than they are themselves?” and ”[w]hose interests should the revolution defend: those of the Party or those of the people who set the revolution in motion with their blood?” Makhno himself stated that he “consider[ed] it an inviolable right of the workers and peasants, a right won by the revolution, to call conferences on their own account, to discuss their affairs.” [Op. Cit., p. 103 and p. 129]

In addition, the Makhnovists “fully applied the revolutionary principles of freedom of speech, of thought, of the press, and of political association. In all cities and towns occupied by the Makhnovists, they began by lifting all the prohibitions and repealing all the restrictions imposed on the press and on political organisations by one or another power.” Indeed, the “only restriction that the Makhnovists considered necessary to impose on the Bolsheviks, the left Socialist-Revolutionaries and other statists was a prohibition on the formation of those ‘revolutionary committees’ which sought to impose a dictatorship over the people.” [Op. Cit., p. 153 and p. 154]

The Makhnovists rejected the Bolshevik corruption of the soviets and instead proposed “the free and completely independent soviet system of working people without authorities and their arbitrary laws.” Their proclamations stated that the “working people themselves must freely choose their own soviets, which carry out the will and desires of the working people themselves, that is to say. ADMINISTRATIVE, not ruling soviets.” Economically, capitalism would be abolished along with the state — the land and workshops “must belong to the working people themselves, to those who work in them, that is to say, they must be socialised.” [Op. Cit., p. 271 and p. 273]

The army itself, in stark contrast to the Red Army, was fundamentally democratic (although, of course, the horrific nature of the civil war did result in a few deviations from the ideal — however, compared to the regime imposed on the Red Army by Trotsky, the Makhnovists were much more democratic movement).

The anarchist experiment of self-management in the Ukraine came to a bloody end when the Bolsheviks turned on the Makhnovists (their former allies against the “Whites,” or pro-Tsarists) when they were no longer needed. This important movement is fully discussed in the appendix “Why does the Makhnovist movement show there is an alternative to Bolshevism?” of our FAQ. However, we must stress here the one obvious lesson of the Makhnovist movement, namely that the dictatorial policies pursued by the Bolsheviks were not imposed on them by objective circumstances. Rather, the political ideas of Bolshevism had a clear influence in the decisions they made. After all, the Makhnovists were active in the same Civil War and yet did not pursue the same policies of party power as the Bolsheviks did. Rather, they successfully encouraged working class freedom, democracy and power in extremely difficult circumstances (and in the face of strong Bolshevik opposition to those policies). The received wisdom on the left is that there was no alternative open to the Bolsheviks. The experience of the Makhnovists disproves this. What the masses of people, as well as those in power, do and think politically is as much part of the process determining the outcome of history as are the objective obstacles that limit the choices available. Clearly, ideas do matter and, as such, the Makhnovists show that there was (and is) a practical alternative to Bolshevism — anarchism.

The last anarchist march in Moscow until 1987 took place at the funeral of Kropotkin in 1921, when over 10,000 marched behind his coffin. They carried black banners declaring “Where there is authority, there is no freedom” and “The Liberation of the working class is the task of the workers themselves.” As the procession passed the Butyrki prison, the inmates sang anarchist songs and shook the bars of their cells.

Anarchist opposition within Russia to the Bolshevik regime started in 1918. They were the first left-wing group to be repressed by the new “revolutionary” regime. Outside of Russia, anarchists continued to support the Bolsheviks until news came from anarchist sources about the repressive nature of the Bolshevik regime (until then, many had discounted negative reports as being from pro-capitalist sources). Once these reliable reports came in, anarchists across the globe rejected Bolshevism and its system of party power and repression. The experience of Bolshevism confirmed Bakunin’s prediction that Marxism meant “the highly despotic government of the masses by a new and very small aristocracy of real or pretended scholars. The people are not learned, so they will be liberated from the cares of government and included in entirety in the governed herd.” [Statism and Anarchy, pp. 178–9]

From about 1921 on, anarchists outside of Russia started describing the USSR as “state-capitalist” to indicate that although individual bosses might have been eliminated, the Soviet state bureaucracy played the same role as individual bosses do in the West (anarchists within Russia had been calling it that since 1918). For anarchists, “the Russian revolution … is trying to reach … economic equality … this effort has been made in Russia under a strongly centralised party dictatorship … this effort to build a communist republic on the basis of a strongly centralised state communism under the iron law of a party dictatorship is bound to end in failure. We are learning to know in Russia how not to introduce communism.” [Anarchism, p. 254]

This meant exposing that Berkman called “The Bolshevik Myth,” the idea that the Russian Revolution was a success and should be copied by revolutionaries in other countries: “It is imperative to unmask the great delusion, which otherwise might lead the Western workers to the same abyss as their brothers [and sisters] in Russia. It is incumbent upon those who have seen through the myth to expose its true nature.” [“The Anti-Climax’”, The Bolshevik Myth, p. 342] Moreover, anarchists felt that it was their revolutionary duty not only present and learn from the facts of the revolution but also show solidarity with those subject to Bolshevik dictatorship. As Emma Goldman argued, she had not “come to Russia expecting to find Anarchism realised.” Such idealism was alien to her (although that has not stopped Leninists saying the opposite). Rather, she expected to see “the beginnings of the social changes for which the Revolution had been fought.” She was aware that revolutions were difficult, involving “destruction” and “violence.” That Russia was not perfect was not the source of her vocal opposition to Bolshevism. Rather, it was the fact that “the Russian people have been locked out” of their own revolution by the Bolshevik state which used “the sword and the gun to keep the people out.” As a revolutionary she refused “to side with the master class, which in Russia is called the Communist Party.” [My Disillusionment in Russia, p. xlvii and p. xliv]

For more information on the Russian Revolution and the role played by anarchists, see the appendix on “The Russian Revolution” of the FAQ. As well as covering the Kronstadt uprising and the Makhnovists, it discusses why the revolution failed, the role of Bolshevik ideology played in that failure and whether there were any alternatives to Bolshevism.

The following books are also recommended: The Unknown Revolution by Voline; The Guillotine at Work by G.P. Maximov; The Bolshevik Myth and The Russian Tragedy, both by Alexander Berkman; The Bolsheviks and Workers Control by M. Brinton; The Kronstadt Uprising by Ida Mett; The History of the Makhnovist Movement by Peter Arshinov; My Disillusionment in Russia and Living My Life by Emma Goldman; Nestor Makhno Anarchy’s Cossack: The struggle for free soviets in the Ukraine 1917–1921 by Alexandre Skirda.

Many of these books were written by anarchists active during the revolution, many imprisoned by the Bolsheviks and deported to the West due to international pressure exerted by anarcho-syndicalist delegates to Moscow who the Bolsheviks were trying to win over to Leninism. The majority of such delegates stayed true to their libertarian politics and convinced their unions to reject Bolshevism and break with Moscow. By the early 1920’s all the anarcho-syndicalist union confederations had joined with the anarchists in rejecting the “socialism” in Russia as state capitalism and party dictatorship.

[planetofsnarfs]

Part of the deal with being CEO is that you get a big paycheck in exchange for being the public face of a company. For most people, at most companies, that means, at minimum, trying not to make an ass of yourself in public.

Tweeting a Holocaust joke, for example, might very well get you booted. Punching down at marginalized communities? Also a bad look.

But the same rules don't apply if you're the richest person on the planet, running companies stacked with cronies.

ICYMI: On Monday, Elon Musk invoked the names of two German Nazis in a tweet while simultaneously disparaging modern pronoun conventions - attempting, as he so often does, to make a joke. (I'm not repeating the text here - not because it's profane, but mostly because it's just not funny.)

For context, Musk was responding to a post about a Der Spiegel article that compared him to a media mogul who helped Hitler climb to power.

It was hardly Musk's first, and certainly not his most offensive, statement involving the Third Reich or their White supremacist progeny. Just last month, Musk promoted Tucker Carlson's widely condemned interview with a Nazi apologist who said the murder of Jews in concentration camps was "humane" and that Winston Churchill was the "chief villain" of World War II. Musk later deleted his X post that called the interview "very interesting" and "worth watching," per the Independent.

Representatives for X and Tesla didn't respond to CNN's request for comment.

Musk rarely deletes his social media posts, no matter how inflammatory. Also not deleted: the one where he reposted the "interesting observation" that women are incapable of independent thought and that only "alpha males" should make policy decisions.

And while he once apologized for his post endorsing an antisemitic conspiracy theory - the one that sparked an exodus of advertisers from X - he never deleted it, either.

The point is: Any other CEO of a major company could expect to be shown the door after airing any one these ideas. Or at least that was the case as recently as 2018, when more CEOs were forced out for "ethical lapses" than poor financial performance, according to a PwC study. 

So why is Musk special?

It's partly because of the way he's structured his wealth and his companies.

Musk is the single biggest individual shareholder at Tesla, the only publicly traded business he owns. The second-largest individual shareholder is his brother, Kimbal Musk, who sits on the board. In fact, the entire Tesla board of directors is stacked with Musk allies who lack sufficient independence, according to a Delaware judge who in 2023 overturned Musk's $55 billion pay package.

In other words, the only folks with a fiduciary duty to keep Musk in line are, according to Judge Kathaleen McCormick, not exactly disinterested parties.

But even bullish Tesla investors are starting to get nervous about Musk's rhetoric online and his "dark MAGA" turn, which could lead to some awkward moments on Wednesday's earnings call.

"The Musk/Trump dynamic has added to the agita of Tesla investors and it's not helping the demand issues in the US," Dan Ives, managing director at Wedbush Securities, told me. "Musk becoming more political is not bullish for the Tesla brand."

The other major source of Musk's wealth is SpaceX, a rocket manufacturer that's been tapped by NASA to resupply the International Space Station.

There are no public shareholders to worry about there, as SpaceX is a private company with virtually zero competition in the market. (Technically, it competes for space contracts with Boeing. But given Boeing's disastrous last five-ish years, SpaceX probably isn't sweating the competition too much - especially after NASA called on SpaceX to return two Boeing astronauts from the space station after their space ship broke down.)

Litigation is a key part of the Musk playbook when it comes to any person or group challenging him or his businesses. Angry at advertisers for leaving his Nazi-tolerating social media site, Musk sued a nonprofit ad group out of existence. In fact, Musk and his companies have filed at least 23 lawsuits in federal courts alone since July of 2023, according to Fortune, targeting "competitors, startups, law firms, watchdog groups, individuals, the state of California, federal agencies, and pop star Grimes, who is the mother of three of his children."

Bottom line: When you have virtually unlimited money, you have practically unlimited power to play offense – in court, in the boardroom or on social media.

[prokopetz]

There are a couple of things worth noting here.

First, 4E being criticised for being "too video game-like" is nothing new – it's one of the standard criticisms that's been trotted out by edition-warring grognards for nearly every edition of Dungeons & Dragons. When 3E came out, it was dismissed as "just tabletop Diablo" in precisely the same way that 4E was dismissed as "just tabletop World of Warcraft". Hell, 1E was sometimes accused by OD&D fans of selling out to video game fans for its heavy reliance on randomly generated dungeons, and that was way back in the early 1980s!

Second, a lot of the popular criticisms of 4E are basically the result of a game of telephone – the vast majority of the people repeating them have never played or read the thing, and there's a very specific series of fuckups by Hasbro to thank for that:

About a year ahead of 4E's publication, Hasbro announced that 4E would not be released under the Open Game License (OGL), but under a much more restrictive license called the Game System License (GSL). Further, they informed third party publishers who'd been taking advantage of the Dungeons & Dragons System Trademark License (STL) to put the official D&D logo on their products that all STL partners would be required to throw away any products currently in development and redevelop them for 4E under the terms of the GSL, or else their STL privileges would be revoked. Understandably, most third party publishers decided that Hasbro could go fuck themselves. Not only did this reduce 4E's third-party support nearly to nothing, it also prompted Paizo Publishing, formerly one of D&D's biggest proponents, to develop their own OGL compatible in-house system instead; this is what ultimately became Pathfinder, now D&D's largest competitor.

Just a few weeks before 4E was set to drop, the digital print masters (i.e., the digital files that were given to the printers to produce the physical books) for the three core books were leaked online. Hasbro corporate responded by panicking and ordering an indefinite halt to digital sales of 4E products, even though the source of the leak was demonstrably not their digital publishing arm; it's unclear whether those responsible for this decision understood the distinction. This meant that digital pre-orders for 4E's core rulebooks were not honoured, and 4E was initially made available exclusively in print, as an expensive three-book set that dropped right in the middle of the worst economic recession in thirty years. The upshot is that a lot of folks just plain couldn't afford to access it.

4E's planned virtual tabletop integration was hugely ambitious for its time, and predictably, missed its release date by several years. This wouldn't have been big a problem, as few of D&D's competitors had any significant virtual tabletop support at the time – were it not for the aforementioned piracy scare torpedoing the game's ebook version. Between the hasty no-ebooks policy and constant release date slippage on the VTT side, the end result is that 4E had no digital availability at all for the first two full years of its lifespan – and right in the middle of that digital drought, Pathfinder dropped, with a free ebook starter edition to boot.

There were other missteps by Hasbro in the mix, including a tone-deaf promotional campaign that basically told folks who were on the fence about 4E to fuck off and play Pathfinder instead, and an inexplicable decision to paywall the 4E character creation app behind a monthly subscription; however you slice it, the problem isn't just that Hasbro were being generally scummy: it's that 4E's rollout was a shitshow the likes of which have rarely been seen before or since.

4E was basically dead on arrival for large chunks of the fandom, which allowed a tiny core of highly vocal critics to dominate the conversation and spread a lot of frankly bizarre misconceptions about it which persist to this day. With the deck stacked so heavily against it before it was even released, what was actually in the books hardly mattered!

People rallied against 4e for being well designed? I always heard it was because it was too much like WoW.

D&D 4e being too much like WoW is one of those things that's true in places (it actually had design informed by WoW among other things but a lot of said design was actually remodeled to actually work in the context of tabletop game instead of trying to lazily transplant mechanics from a video game directly into a tabletop game), but ultimately is just a lazy shorthand for "it's like bideo gane therefore bad." On a deeper level D&D 4e wasn't rejected "just" because it was too much like videos game but because its designers actually took a look at all the things taken as default in D&D and actually considered how conducive they were to the experience people were seemingly looking for from D&D (D&D 4e being built to be a fun skirmish game didn't come out of nowhere: it was a response to people basically playing D&D 3e like that and finding the game too unbalanced to serve that experience).

Funnily enough, in being willing to reconsider what people actually wanted out of D&D, 4e is actually the edition of Hasbro D&D most aligned with what people seem to actually want out of D&D these days. A lot of the common design issues people bring up with 5e are issues that D&D 4e already rectified once and 5e actually walked back on because they wanted to get back the purists who had rejected 4e for not being D&D-shaped enough.

[antoine-roquentin]

Republicans, Don’t Ignore the Evidence on ‘Labor Shortages’ 

At its peak in the Great Recession, the unemployment rate was 10 percent, but it ultimately got down to 3.5 percent — without a hugely expanded national training program to accelerate skills attainment. What actually slowed growth? Insufficient demand for goods and services, which, in turn, meant low demand for workers — not that there weren’t enough qualified workers. It was a labor demand problem, not a labor supply problem.

This is also true today. Wage growth decelerated in May in most sectors. And in a large majority of sectors, wages are growing solidly but not fast enough to raise concern about damaging labor shortages, given that job growth is also strong. Further, we still have 7.6 million fewer jobs than we did before Covid, and there are large employment gaps in virtually all industries and demographic groups. The good news is that unlike in the wake of the Great Recession, today’s labor demand problems are likely to be resolved relatively quickly, thanks to the American Rescue Plan.

While we haven’t seen widespread labor shortages, there is one sector where wage growth points to the possibility of an isolated one: leisure and hospitality. For typical workers in this sector, which includes restaurants, bars, hotels and recreation, the current weekly wage translates into annual earnings of $20,714. With that figure so low, there is little concern recent pay increases will generate broader pressure on wages. In addition, wages in this sector plummeted in the recession and have largely returned to where they’d be if there were no pandemic. And these job reports also take tips into account, which means that wage changes in this sector are most likely driven by the impact of customers returning, en masse, to in-person dining. On top of all this: Rising wages in leisure and hospitality don’t appear to be stymieing job growth, which has been by far the strongest of any sector, contributing three-quarters of the total jobs added in the past two months.

Nevertheless, many commentators have ignored this evidence. They conclude not only that there are widespread shortages, but also that the culprit is pandemic unemployment insurance benefits. Governors in 25 Republican-led states have said they will no longer accept federal unemployment benefits. This will cut aid to nearly four million affected workers, despite the absence of compelling evidence that jobless benefits are causing problems in the labor market. Instead, we have considerable evidence that it is helpful.

Low-wage sectors have seen swifter job growth than higher-wage sectors in recent months. This is exactly the opposite of what you would expect to find if unemployment benefits were keeping people from working. This is because pandemic programs, like the extra $300 weekly benefit, are worth much more to low-wage workers than to higher-wage workers. Unemployment insurance, then, is not hampering job growth.

Face-to-face service jobs have become far harder and riskier during the pandemic. A healthy labor market would compensate for that by offering higher wages.

But employers of low-wage workers typically have a great deal of power to suppress wages. Out of desperation, these workers often have no choice but to take any job no matter how bad the wages, unsafe the labor or chaotic the schedule as they try to cobble together child care or elder care. Unemployment insurance isn’t keeping people out of the labor market en masse right now. But when expanded benefits means some individuals don’t feel the same pressure to accept a terrible job, that is what economists would call efficiency enhancing.

Finally, the 25 states cutting pandemic programs are weakening their own recoveries. The recipients of benefits in these states are expected to lose $22 billion in aid, and as a consequence these states will be forgoing an enormous amount of economic activity.

but cutting short the recovery by hamstringing demand isn’t just a republican policy point:

Yellen Says Higher Interest Rates Would Be ‘Plus’ for U.S., Fed 

Biden Is Planning to Illegally Cut Unemployment Benefits

A Biden-friendly economist is creating a big headache for president's spending plans

businesses, of course, will suffer lower profit margins from the reduced demand, but maintaining control over their low wage labour is so much more important for them that they’ve managed to lobby biden into breaking his campaign promises and endangering him and his party’s re-election efforts

[robertreich]

The Dangerous Seduction of “Going Back to Normal”

“Life is going to return to normal,” Joe Biden promised Thursday in a Thanksgiving address to the nation. He was talking about life after Covid-13, but you could be forgiven if you thought he was also making a promise about life after Trump.

It is almost impossible to separate the two. To the extent voters gave Biden a mandate, it was to end both scourges and make America normal again.  

Despite Covid’s grim resurgence, Dr. Anthony Fauci -- the public health official whom Trump ignored and then muzzled, with whom Biden’s staff is now conferring -- sounded guardedly optimistic last week. Vaccines will allow “a gradual accrual of more normality as the weeks and the months go by as we get well into 2021.”

Normal. You could almost hear America’s giant sigh of relief, similar to that felt when Trump implicitly conceded the election by allowing the transition to  begin.

It is comforting to think of both Covid and Trump as intrusions into normality, aberrations from routines that prevailed before.

When Biden entered the presidential race last year, he said history would look back on Trump as an “aberrant moment in time.”

The end of both aberrations conjures up a former America that, by contrast, might appear quiet and safe, even boring.

Trump called Biden “the most boring human being I’ve ever seen,” and Americans seem to be just fine with that.

Biden’s early choices for his cabinet and senior staff fit the same mold – “boring picks,” tweeted the Atlantic’s Graeme Wood (referring to Biden’s foreign policy team),“who, if you shook them awake and appointed them in the middle of the night at any time in the last decade, could have reported to their new jobs and started work competently by dawn.” Hallelujah.

All his designees, including Janet Yellen for Treasury and Anthony Blinken for Secretary of State, are experienced and competent – refreshing, especially after Trump's goon squads. And they’re acceptable both to mainstream Democrats and to progressives.

They also stand out for their abilities not to stand out. There is no firebrand among them, no Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders (at least not so far).

For the same reasons, they’re unlikely to stir strong opposition from Republicans, a necessity for Senate confirmation, particularly if Democrats fail to win the two Senate runoffs in Georgia on January 5.

And they’re unlikely to demand much attention from an exhausted and divided public.

Boring, reassuring, normal – these are Biden’s great strengths. But he needs to be careful. They could also be his great weaknesses.

That’s because any return to “normal” would be disastrous for America.

Normal led to Trump. Normal led to the coronavirus.

Normal is four decades of stagnant wages and widening inequality when almost all economic gains went to the top. Normal is forty years of shredded safety nets, and the most expensive but least adequate healthcare system in the modern world.

Normal is also growing corruption of politics by big money -- an economic system rigged by and for the wealthy.

Normal is worsening police brutality.

Normal is climate change now verging on catastrophe.

Normal is a GOP that for years has been actively suppressing minority votes and embracing white supremacists. Normal is a Democratic Party that for years has been abandoning the working class.

Given the road we were on, Trump and Covid were not aberrations. They were inevitabilities. The moment we are now in – with Trump virtually gone, Biden assembling his cabinet, and most of the nation starting to feel a bit of relief – is a temporary reprieve.

If the underlying trends don’t change, after Biden we could have Trumps as far as the eye can see. And health and environmental crises that make the coronavirus another step toward Armageddon.

Hence the paradox. America wants to return to a reassuring normal, but Biden can’t allow it. Complacency would be deadly. He has to both calm the waters and stir the pot.

It’s a mistake to see this challenge as placating the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. It’s about dealing with problems that have worsened for decades and if left unattended much longer will be enormously destructive.

So the central question: In an exhausted and divided America that desperately wants a return to normal, can Biden find the energy and political will for bold changes that are imperative?

[weheartchrisevans]

BOSTON — So you're Tim Scott, the Republican senator from South Carolina who opposes Roe v. Wade and wants to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and you get a call from Chris Evans, a Hollywood star and lifelong Democrat who has been blasting President Trump for years. He wants to meet. And film it. And share it on his online platform. Can anybody say "Borat?" “I was very skeptical,” admits Scott. “You can think of the worst-case scenario.”But then Scott heard from other senators. They vouched for Evans, most famous for playing Captain America in a series of films that have grossed more than $1 billion worldwide. The actor also got on the phone with Scott’s staff to make a personal appeal.

It worked. Sometime in 2018, Scott met on camera with Evans in the nation’s capital, and their discussion, which ranged from prison reform to student loans, is one of more than 200 interviews with elected officials published on “A Starting Point,” an online platform the actor helped launch in July. Not long after, Evans appeared on Scott’s Instagram Live. They have plans to do more together.

“While he is a liberal, he was looking to have a real dialogue on important issues,” says Scott. “For me, it’s about wanting to have a conversation with an audience that may not be accustomed to hearing from conservatives and Republicans.”

Evans, actor-director Mark Kassen and entrepreneur Joe Kiani launched “A Starting Point” as a response to what they see as a deeply polarized political climate. They wanted to offer a place for information about issues without a partisan spin. To do that, they knew they needed both parties to participate.

Evans, 39, sat on the patio outside his Boston-area home on a recent afternoon talking about the platform. He wore a black T-shirt and jeans and spent some of the interview chasing around his brown rescue dog. Nearly 100 million people didn’t vote in the 2016 general election, Evans says. That’s more than 40 percent of those who were eligible.He believes the root of this disinterest is the nastiness on both sides of the aisle. Many potential voters simply turn off the news, never mind talking about actual policy.“A Starting Point” is meant to offer a digital home for people to hear from elected officials without having the conversation framed by Tucker Carlson or Rachel Maddow.

“The idea is . . . ‘Listen, you’re in office. I can’t deny the impact you have,’ ” says Evans. “ ‘You can vote on things that affect my life.’ Let this be a landscape of competing ideas, and I’ll sit down with you and I’ll talk with you.”

Or, as Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who has appeared on the site, puts it, “Sometimes, boring is okay. You’re being presented two sides. Everything doesn’t have to be sensational. Sometimes, it can just be good facts.” Evans wasn’t always active in politics. At Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School, he focused on theater, not student government. And he moved away from home his senior year, working at a casting agency in New York as he pushed for acting gigs. His uncle, Michael E. Capuano, served as a congressman in Massachusetts for 20 years, but other than volunteering on some of his campaign, Evans wasn’t particularly political.

In recent years, he’s read political philosopher Hannah Arendt and feminist Rebecca Solnit’s “The Mother of All Questions” — ex-girlfriend Jenny Slate gave him the latter — and been increasingly upset by Trump’s policies and behavior. He’s come to believe that he can state his own views without creating a conflict with “A Starting Point.” When he and Scott spoke on Instagram, the president wasn’t mentioned. In contrast, recently Evans and other members of the Avengers cast took part in a virtual fundraiser with Democratic vice-presidential nominee Kamala D. Harris.

“I don’t want to all of a sudden become a blank slate,” says Evans. “But my biggest issue right now is just getting people to vote. If I start saying, ‘vote Biden; f Trump,’ my base will like that. But they were already voting for Biden.”

(In September, Evans accidentally posted an image of presumably his penis online and, after deleting it, tweeted: “Now the I have your attention . . . Vote Nov. 3rd!!!”)

Evans began to contemplate the idea that became “A Starting Point” in 2017. He heard something reported on the news — he can’t remember exactly what — and decided to search out information on the Internet. Instead of finding concrete answers, Evans fell down the rabbit hole of opinions and conflicting claims. He began talking about this with Kassen, a friend since he directed Evans in 2011’s “Puncture.” What if they got the information directly from elected officials and presented it without a spin? Kassen, in turn, introduced Evans to Kiani, who had made his fortune through a medical technology company he founded and, of the three, was the most politically involved.

Kiani has donated to dozens of Democratic candidates across the country and earlier this year contributed $750,000 to Unite the Country, a super PAC meant to support Joe Biden. But he appreciated the idea of focusing on something larger than a single race or party initiative. He, Kassen and Evans would fund “A Starting Point,” which has about 18 people on staff.

“There’s no longer ABC, NBC and CBS,” Kiani says. “There’s Fox News and MSNBC. What that means is that we are no longer being censored. We’re self-censoring ourselves. And people go to their own echo chamber and they don’t get any wiser. If you allow both parties to speak, for the same amount of time, without goading them to go on into hyperbole, when people look at both sides’ point of view of both topics, we think most of the time they’ll come to a reasonable conclusion.”

“What people do too often is they get in their silos and they only watch and listen and read what they agree with,” says John Kasich, the former Ohio governor and onetime Republican presidential candidate. “If you go to Chris’s website, you can’t bury yourself in your silo. You get to see the other point of view.” As much as some like to blame Trump for all the conflicts in Washington, Sen. Christopher A. Coons (D-Del.) says he’s watched the tone shifting for decades. He appreciated sitting down with Evans and making regular submissions to “Daily Points,” a place on the platform for commentary no longer than two minutes. During the Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Coons recorded a comment on Judge Amy Coney Barrett and the Affordable Care Act.“ ‘A Starting Point’ needs to be a sustained resource,” Coons says. “Chris often talks about it being ‘Schoolhouse Rock’ for adults.”

It’s not by chance that Evans has personally conducted all of the 200-plus interviews on “A Starting Point” during trips to D.C. Celebrities often try to mobilize the public, whether it’s Eva Longoria, Tracee Ellis Ross and Julia Louis-Dreyfus hosting the Democratic National Convention or Jon Voight recording video clips to praise Trump. But in this case, Evans is using his status in a different way, to entice even the most hesitant Republican to sit down for an even-toned chat. And he’s willing to pose with anyone, even if it means explaining himself on “The Daily Show” after Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas posted a selfie with Evans. (Two attempts to interview Trump brought no response.) Murkowski remembers when Evans came to Capitol Hill for the first time in 2018. She admits she didn’t actually know who he was — she hadn’t yet seen any Marvel movies. She was in the minority.“We meet interesting and important people but, man, when Captain America was in the Senate, it was all the buzz,” she says. “And people were like, ‘Did you get your picture taken?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I sat down and did the interview.’ ‘You did an interview? How did you get an interview with him?’ ”What impressed Murkowski wasn’t his star power. It was the way Evans conducted the interview.“It was relaxing,” she says. “You didn’t feel like you were in front of a reporter who was just waiting for you to say something you would get caught on later. It was a dialogue . . . and we need more dialogue and less gotcha.”

“Starting Points” offers two-minute answers by elected officials in eight topic areas, including education, the environment and the economy. This is where the interviews Evans conducted can be found. “Daily Points” has featured a steady flow of Republicans and Democrats. A third area, “Counterpoints,” hosts short debates between officials on particular subjects. Eric Swalwell, a Democrat from California, debated mail-in voting with Dusty Johnson, the Republican congressman from South Dakota.

“Most Americans can’t name more than five members of the United States House,” says Johnson. “ ‘A Starting Point’ allows thoughtful members to talk to a broader audience than we would normally have.”

The platform’s social media team pushes out potentially newsworthy clips, whether it’s Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) discussing his meeting with Barrett just before he tested positive for the coronavirus, or Angus King, the independent senator from Maine, criticizing Trump for his comments on a potential peaceful transfer of power after November’s election. Kassen notes that the King clip was viewed more than 175,000 times on “A Starting Point’s” Twitter account, compared with the 10,000 who caught in on CNN’s social media platform.

“Because it’s short-form media, we’re engineered to be social,” says Kassen. “As a result, when something catches hold, it’s passed around our audience pretty well.”

The key is to use modern tools to push out content that’s tonally different from what you might find on modern cable news. Or on social media. Which is what Evans hopes leads to more engagement. He’s particularly proud that more than 10,000 people have registered to vote through “A Starting Point” since it went online.

“If the downstream impact or the byproduct of this site is some sort of unity between the parties, great,” says Evans. “But if nobody’s still voting, it doesn’t work. We need people involved.”

[deborahdeshoftim5779]

MYTH Human Rights Watch has proven Israel is an “apartheid” state. FACT In its longstanding campaign of demonization of Israel, Human Rights Watch (HRW) adopted a new tack in its latest report. Knowing the absurd and ineffective efforts of anti-Israel propagandists to compare Israel to Afrikaner South Africa, HRW decided to write a new definition of “apartheid” it could selectively apply to one state – the Jewish state. HRW relies on definitions that apply to the systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group. Neither Jews nor Palestinians are racial groups so HRW expands the definition to include groups – actually only Palestinians – that share descent, national or ethnic origin. As Professor Gerald Steinberg noted, “Beyond South Africa, no other regime or government has been deemed to meet the international definition of apartheid, not even murderous and oppressive regimes practicing separation based on race, religion, and gender such as Saudi Arabia and China” (Gerald Steinberg, “Human Rights Watch demonizes Israel via propaganda of apartheid,” Jerusalem Post, April 27, 2021). “The report mocks the history of apartheid by using its hateful memory to describe a grab bag of policies that HRW happens to disagree with, and in many cases are not in effect, or were never in effect. Apartheid is not just a term for policies one dislikes,” the Kohelet Policy Forum wrote in its response to the report (“HRW Crosses the Threshold into Falsehoods and Anti-Semitic Propaganda,” KPF, April 26, 2021). For its part, the Biden administration wasted no time rejecting HRW’s conclusion: “It is not the view of this administration that Israel’s actions constitute apartheid,” a State Department spokesperson said (“US disagrees that Israel carrying out ‘apartheid,’” France24,” April 28, 2021). Too often, however, truth does not matter. When a human rights organization, even one with a long history of anti-Israel bias, makes an inflammatory accusation it is assured of attracting media coverage, as was the case with HRW’s report. Journalists rarely factcheck the material before quoting the report and its authors in stories with incendiary headlines. By the time the information is evaluated by third parties, it is too late because the original, unverified story has been transmitted around the world to become fodder for Israel’s detractors. Graphic courtesy Elder of Zion Thus, you are unlikely to see any quotes about the report from Judge Richard Goldstone, who was appointed to the Constitutional Court of South Africa by Nelson Mandela, played an important role in that country’s transition to democracy, and was appointed by the UN Human Rights Council to investigate alleged crimes committed during Israel’s operation in Gaza in 2009. In a New York Times essay, “Israel and the Apartheid Slander,” Goldstone wrote, “In Israel there is no apartheid. Nothing there comes close to the definition of apartheid under the 1998 Rome Statute” used by HRW in an effort to get around the specious comparison to South Africa (New York Times, October 31, 2011). In a rebuke to the equally fallacious claims made in the recent B’Tselem report, Goldstone noted, “there is no intent to maintain ‘an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group.’ This is a critical distinction, even if Israel acts oppressively toward Palestinians there. South Africa’s enforced racial separation was intended to permanently benefit the white minority, to the detriment of other races. By contrast, Israel has agreed in concept to the existence of a Palestinian state in Gaza and almost all of the West Bank, and is calling for the Palestinians to negotiate the parameters.” Presciently anticipating the similarly misguided argument of John Brennan, Goldstone notes, “until there is a two-state peace, or at least as long as Israel’s citizens remain under threat of attacks from the West Bank and Gaza, Israel will see roadblocks and similar measures as necessary for self-defense, even as Palestinians feel oppressed.” Speaking to those who demonize Israel while claiming to be interested in peace, Goldstone concluded, “The charge that Israel is an apartheid state is a false and malicious one that precludes, rather than promotes, peace and harmony.” Hirsh Goodman, another native South African, said HRW “is blind to fact and reality.” He called the report, “a disgrace to the memory of the millions who suffered under that policy in South Africa” (Hirsh Goodman, “I left apartheid South Africa. Applying the term to Israel is disingenuous,” Forward, April 27, 2021). Goodman noted that HRW is an advocate of discrimination against Jews, supporting the anti-Semitic BDS movement, and that the report came out as an Israeli Arab, a member of an Arab party in the Knesset, and an Islamist no less, had the potential to determine who would be Israel’s next prime minister. In the previous election, a coalition of Arab parties was the third largest faction in the Knesset. This is discrimination? What about Palestinians who are not Israeli citizens? They have the opportunity to vote for their leaders in Palestinian elections, which were last held in 2006 (the one scheduled for May was just cancelled because the president, serving the 16th year of his four-year term, is afraid of losing). HRW apparently has no problem with the fact that a Jew cannot vote in a Palestinian election even though the outcome will affect Israel or that a Palestinian who has acquired Israeli citizenship also cannot vote in the Palestinian Authority (Elder of Ziyon, “Another Double Standard: Palestinian Law Excludes Israelis From Voting,” Algemeiner, March 26, 2021). HRW condemns Israel for treating Palestinians in the disputed territories and Israeli citizens differently, but Israel has no obligation to treat them the same. In the Oslo Accords, Israel agreed the Palestinians should be responsible for their own lives in virtually all areas except security; hence, about 98 percent of Palestinians are governed by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. The fact that both deny their own people civil and human rights goes unmentioned by HRW. HRW also ignores reality while applying a standard that would make nearly every country, including the United States, guilty of apartheid. Take, for example, the report’s criticism of the Law of Return. Yes, it grants automatic citizenship to Jews, but non-Jews are also eligible to become citizens under naturalization procedures similar to those in other countries. More than two million non-Jews are Israeli citizens and 21% of the population are Arabs who enjoy equal rights under the law with Jewish citizens. Meanwhile, Ireland has a law allowing immigrants of “Irish descent or Irish associations” to be exempt from ordinary naturalization rules while Bulgaria, Croatia, Germany and a number of other democratic states also have policies similar to Israel’s Law of Return and yet are not labeled by HRW as apartheid. HRW apparently has no problem with Arab nations that have laws that facilitate the naturalization of foreign Arabs, with the exception of Palestinians, or with Jordan’s “law of return that provides citizenship to all former residents of Palestine – except Jews. Graphic courtesy Elder of Zion For HRW it is a crime for Israelis to want a Jewish majority in the Jewish state. Are Muslim states equally guilty for not accepting a non-Muslim majority? The report castigates Israel for placing restrictions on the movement of Palestinians, ignoring that checkpoints and the security fence were created to protect Israeli citizens – Jews and non-Jews from terrorists. It accuses Israel of “Judaization” of Jerusalem, the Galilee and the Negev, implying that Jews should not be allowed to live in parts of Israel where there are “significant Palestinian populations” (which is not the case in the Negev), including its capital. Israel is also condemned for not agreeing to commit suicide by allowing the 5.7 million Palestinians UNRWA calls “refugees” to live in Israel. To refute the charge that Israel is therefore discriminating against Palestinians simply refer to the thousands of Palestinians who left the country and were allowed to return and become citizens (“Israel Claims 184,000 Palestinian Refugees have Returned since 1948,” Al Bawaba, January 1, 2001). Israel has also repeatedly offered to accept a limited number of Palestinians as part of a peace agreement (Gene Currivan, “ISRAEL TO ACCEPT 100,000 REFUGEES; Offer, to Go Into Effect When Peace Comes, Is Delivered to Arabs at Lausanne,” New York Times, July 30, 1949). Summarizing the absurdity of HRW’s argument, one writer tweeted: “Israel: The only country that’s shrinks when it colonizes, grows the population it’s genociding, fattens the people it starves and consistently increases quality of life and freedoms on every metric for the people it apartheids” (@TheMossadIL, April 29, 2021). Contrast Israel’s behavior with that of the Arab states which deny Palestinians living within their borders, sometimes for decades, the right to become citizens. The Lebanese government goes even further by denying Palestinians a host of rights and placing limits on where they can live and work (Lisa Khoury, “Palestinians in Lebanon: ‘It’s like living in a prison,’” Al Jazeera, December 16, 2017). If you want to talk about discrimination, consider that it is a crime for a Palestinian to sell land to a Jew and a fatwa was issued by the preacher of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, Sheikh Ikrimah Sabri, saying it is permitted to kill the seller (“Khatib Al-Aqsa issues a Sharia fatwa regarding the diversion or sale of real estate to settlement associations,” Sama News Agency, April 8, 2021). Ironically, the author of the HRW report, Omar Shakir, was happy to live in Israel (imagine a black person choosing to live under the Afrikaner regime) until the Supreme Court revoked his residency permit. He is an advocate of the BDS campaign, which raises the question, Why would HRW choose someone who objects to Israel’s existence as the arbiter of its behavior (Ben-Dror Yemini, “A most dangerous and mendacious report,” Ynet, April 27, 2021)? Highlighting HRW’s hypocrisy, the Jerusalem Post reported that one of the organization’s board members runs a venture-capital fund that invests in Israeli start-ups (Lahav Harkov, “Human Rights Watch chairman invests in Israel as he calls it ‘apartheid,’” Jerusalem Post, May 2, 2021). It is also worth remembering that HRW uses its anti-Israel record as a fundraising tool, as we learned when Sarah Leah Whitson, the director of HRW’s Middle East and North Africa division, went to Saudi Arabia to raise money by highlighting the group’s demonization of Israel (David Bernstein, “Human Rights Watch Goes to Saudi Arabia,” Wall Street Journal, July 15, 2009). The founder of HRW, Robert Bernstein, said in 2009 the organization had become devoted to “helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state.” Contrasting Israel with the countries HRW once focused on, he noted it had “at least 80 human rights organizations, a vibrant free press, a democratically elected government, a judiciary that frequently rules against the government, a politically active academia, multiple political parties and, judging by the amount of news coverage, probably more journalists per capita than any other country in the world.” Writing in the context of a biased HRW investigation into Israeli actions in Gaza, Bernstein lamented that “Israel, the repeated victim of aggression, faces the brunt of Human Rights Watch’s criticism” (Robert L. Bernstein, “Rights Watchdog, Lost in the Mideast,” New York Times, (October 19, 2009). Israel’s government is not immune to criticism and many of its policies are subject to vigorous debate and, in some cases, harsh condemnation by Israelis. What distinguishes Israel from the countries HRW should be investigating is the internal democratic processes that lead to self-examination, more enlightened policies and, where legally warranted, punishment for criminal activity. Nevertheless, Israel’s detractors and anti-Semites will use the report to reinforce their existing prejudices and try to convince the uninformed of HRW’s alternative reality. It also feeds into the BDS narrative by arguing it is not just the “occupation” that is bad; Israel itself “is intrinsically racist and evil” and therefore should be dismantled (Herb Keinon, “The HRW apartheid report: Does it matter?” Jerusalem Post, April 27, 2021).

Jewish Virtual Library refutes the odious myths perpetrated by “Human Rights Watch” (except Jewish rights) in their latest edition of “Myths versus Facts”. 

[toshootforthestars]

A system that funnels rapid antigen tests through various companies trying to make money off them, for instance, isn’t one that cares about us at all, although it is the one in which we must participate in pursuit of that care. Sure, we have the miracle of the vaccine, but as I am being promised that we will be “returning to normal” soon and that the country is “reopening,” I don’t feel optimistic. The normal we had before was bad for most people.

After two years of misery, going back to it just does not feel like enough. The vaccines are miraculous, but they cannot and will not fix what actually ails us.

The minimum wage is still atrociously low. Cops are still shooting black people in the streets. School shootings are only down because the students are learning virtually. Everything is more expensive and not any nicer. Our experiences of buying things are also bad. The government’s relationship with the people is that of a disapproving and forgetful grandparent with a very young and very naughty child.

The country is in shambles, and everyone can feel it.

Here is the trauma of this generation, the moment in which the present became so oppressive and deadly and bad that there was no choice but to envision a better future.

*     *     *     *     *

The people in charge, it seems clear, never wanted things to get better.

Since the earliest days of the pandemic they have given us vague instructions, asked us to sacrifice our lives and our happiness for the faint promise of Getting Back To Normal. If we suffered gamely enough, for long enough, we might win back… the same country we had before.

It’s the same threat the Democratic party makes every election cycle now. ​​”We’ve got to vote like the future of our democracy depends on it,” a letter from Michelle Obama published this week read. The Republican party is making a very real effort to restrict voting rights and make future frauds easier to perpetuate, but the opposition’s promise isn’t a better future or a better life.

The Democrats are now the party of only trying to stop things from getting worse; they currently control the House, the Senate, and the Presidency and yet they have accomplished very little, either because they are so corrupt or so self-defeating or so uninterested as to have accepted the idea that Accomplishing Very Little is what they are there to do. Because there is no link between “saving democracy” and the policies this so-called democracy might pass to make our lives better, it once again feels like we are being threatened. That’s a nice brutal and untenable status quo you’ve got there, it leers, be a shame if you did something that let it get somehow even worse.

We have now endured almost two full years of all this hardship, and stand to get nothing but its (contingent) end in return.

Time does not run backwards. The virus exists now and will continue to exist. But in order to continue underserving the people they represent, elected officials need us to believe that the past was an idyllic time to which we should want to return.

They need us to look at the cotton gin and praise American innovation, instead of seeing an instrument of violence. They need us to idealize the past because the system blithely fails most people in the present. They need us to feel like it is our fault that the things schoolchildren are told make the United States different, and great, quite obviously no longer work at all.

Standing in the pharmacy this week, I remembered how early in the pandemic there was a small hope that maybe, because everyone was sick, insurance companies would somehow go bankrupt.

Maybe, we would finally get some kind of healthcare to rival every other democracy in the world.

I remembered this because for months I have been fighting with my insurance. I need to take 450 mg of a drug. My initial prescription was for three 150 mg pills, but the insurance I pay so much fucking money for argues with the pharmacist every single month because they want me to take one 300 mg pill and one 150 mg pill. The prescription has been fixed to this inane, ridiculous requirement for months now, but still the insurance flags it and creates some kind of problem that the overworked but very kind pharmacist then has to solve for me. Every single person in the line in front of me had an issue like this.

The pharmacy wasn’t chaotic because the people behind the counter weren’t doing their jobs. The pharmacy is chaotic because the system in which it exists pushes it towards that chaos.

The chaos was caused by a poor vaccine rollout program that forced extra work onto pharmacists without extra staffing or resources. It was caused by a terrible healthcare system that makes it difficult for them just to fill prescriptions in the first place.

It was caused by poor, lazy information distribution, which made it unclear when children could be boosted and how.

It was not caused by people who, after being ground down for two years, just didn’t have the bandwidth to think about other people.

You have to put your own oxygen mask on first so that you can help the people around you.

*   *   *   *   *

We pay taxes, theoretically, so that the oxygen masks will (at a bare minimum) drop from the ceiling before the plane crashes. But the masks are not dropping and we are rapidly losing altitude. The option of paying $40 for a mask that should be handed to us is dangled in our faces while a $2.1 billion fighter jet lands safely beneath us.

The government, whose only purpose is to help us work better than we work alone, is fundamentally failing us. Of course it is infuriating.

The problem is no longer just the pandemic. It is, more precisely, that our government is blaming the pandemic for problems that it created.

We do not deserve to go back to a normal that is so terribly bad for most people. We do not deserve to pay more for worse things. We do not deserve to be sold the lie that it is just more important for companies to make money than it is for us to live. Certainly no one would choose that, if they felt they had a choice.

We deserve a country that uses our tax dollars to make our lives richer, and better, and easier. We deserve a country that can promise a future that improves upon some glorified, false version of our past. We deserve, simply, a country that makes it easier to be alive.

That is what a society is supposed to be—people working together to help each other and make the places they live better. It is what we wait for, what keeps the lines orderly.

It is supposed to get better.

Kelsey McKinney:  Back To Normal Isn’t Enough 

Defector Media  /  Jan 2022

(source)     (source)

[mariacallous]

A First Amendment precedent

Adam Liptak is the Supreme Court reporter for The Times.

Four years ago, at his Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch indicated that a 1964 precedent protecting press freedom was secure. “That’s been the law of the land for, gosh, 50, 60 years,” he said of the decision, New York Times v. Sullivan, which made it very hard for government officials to win libel suits.

But last month, Gorsuch said it was time for the Supreme Court to take another look at the case. “What started in 1964 with a decision to tolerate the occasional falsehood to ensure robust reporting by a comparative handful of print and broadcast outlets,” he wrote in a dissenting opinion, “has evolved into an ironclad subsidy for the publication of falsehoods by means and on a scale previously unimaginable.”

He is not alone in calling for reconsideration of the decision, which has only one rival as the most important legal triumph for the press in American history, also involving The Times, the Pentagon Papers decision in 1971. Justice Clarence Thomas, for instance, has repeatedly called for the Supreme Court to reconsider Sullivan and rulings extending it, saying they were “policy-driven decisions masquerading as constitutional law.”

‘The wrath of press and media’

In March, Judge Laurence H. Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit endorsed that view in a dissent but said that overturning Sullivan would be a heavy lift. “I recognize how difficult it will be to persuade the Supreme Court to overrule such a ‘landmark’ decision,” he wrote. “After all, doing so would incur the wrath of press and media.”

The press is biased, he wrote, and so does not deserve Sullivan’s protections. “Two of the three most influential papers (at least historically), The New York Times and The Washington Post, are virtually Democratic Party broadsheets,” Silberman wrote. “And the news section of The Wall Street Journal leans in the same direction.”

There are echoes of Donald Trump’s frustration with modern defamation law in some of these critiques.

“We’re going to open up those libel laws,” Trump said on the campaign trail in 2016. “So when The New York Times writes a hit piece which is a total disgrace or when The Washington Post, which is there for other reasons, writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money instead of having no chance of winning because they’re totally protected.”

Extensions of Sullivan

It is certainly true that Sullivan imposed a daunting standard, one that favors free speech over protecting reputation. It requires proof that the disputed statements were made with “actual malice” — that is, with knowledge of their falsity or with serious subjective doubts about their truth.

The Sullivan decision was limited to public officials. Later decisions required “public figures” — celebrities and people caught up in public controversies — to make the same showing.

In a 1993 book review, Justice Elena Kagan, then a law professor at the University of Chicago, said those were “questionable extensions.”

“In extending Sullivan,” she wrote, “the court increasingly lost contact with the case’s premises and principles.”

In his recent dissent, Gorsuch cited Kagan’s article, twice, making a similar point. “Rules intended to ensure a robust debate over actions taken by high public officials carrying out the public’s business,” he wrote, “increasingly seem to leave even ordinary Americans without recourse for grievous defamation.”

But the debate over the proper scope of the Sullivan rule is no reason to do away with it, said RonNell Andersen Jones, a law professor at the University of Utah.

“There is a reason that Donald Trump and other politicians hate the Sullivan standard so much,” she said. “It is a key way that we make sure that government officials and other people in power can’t silence their critics. It would be a massive blow to American-style free speech to lose it.”

[theculturedmarxist]

@expatiating​

>Literally anyone who lived in a communist or socialist regime: it was terrible..... 16 year old white girl on tumblr: yeah but that wasn’t real communism :///

You mean anyone like this, you stupid fucking asshole?

Oppressive and grey? No, growing up under communism was the happiest time of my life

When people ask me what it was like growing up behind the Iron Curtain in Hungary in the Seventies and Eighties, most expect to hear tales of secret police, bread queues and other nasty manifestations of life in a one-party state.

They are invariably disappointed when I explain that the reality was quite different, and communist Hungary, far from being hell on earth, was in fact, rather a fun place to live.

The communists provided everyone with guaranteed employment, good education and free healthcare. Violent crime was virtually non-existent.

But perhaps the best thing of all was the overriding sense of camaraderie, a spirit lacking in my adopted Britain and, indeed, whenever I go back to Hungary today. People trusted one another, and what we had we shared.

Learn from Cuba, Says World Bank

The island's economy, which suffered devastating losses in production after the Soviet Union withdrew its aid, especially its oil supplies, a decade ago, has yet to fully recover. Annual economic growth, fuelled in part by a growing tourism industry and limited foreign investment, has been halting and, for the most part, anaemic.

Moreover, its economic policies are generally anathema to the Bank. The government controls virtually the entire economy, permitting private entrepreneurs the tiniest of spaces. It heavily subsidises virtually all staples and commodities; its currency is not convertible to anything.  It retains tight control over all foreign investment, and often changes the rules abruptly and for political reasons.

At the same time, however, its record of social achievement has not only been sustained; it's been enhanced, according to the WDI.

It has reduced its infant mortality rate from 11 per 1,000 births in 1990 to seven in 1999, which places it firmly in the ranks of the western industrialised nations. It now stands at six, according to Jo Ritzen, the Bank's Vice President for Development Policy who visited Cuba privately several months ago to see for himself.

By comparison, the infant mortality rate for Argentina stood at 18 in 1999; Chile's was down to ten; and Costa Rica, 12. For the entire Latin American and Caribbean region as a whole, the average was 30 in 1999.

Similarly, the mortality rate for children under five in Cuba has fallen from 13 to eight per thousand over the decade. That figure is 50 percent lower than the rate in Chile, the Latin American country closest to Cuba's achievement. For the region as a whole, the average was 38 in 1999.

"Six for every 1,000 in infant mortality - the same level as Spain - is just unbelievable," according to Ritzen, a former education minister in the Netherlands. "You observe it, and so you see that Cuba has done exceedingly well in the human development area."

Indeed, in Ritzen's own field the figures tell much the same story. Net primary enrolment for both girls and boys reached 100 percent in 1997, up from 92 percent in 1990. That was as high as most developed nations, higher even than the US rate and well above 80-90 percent rates achieved by the most advanced Latin American countries.

"Even in education performance, Cuba's is very much in tune with the developed world, and much higher than schools in, say, Argentina, Brazil, or Chile."

It is no wonder, in some ways. Public spending on education in Cuba amounts to about 6.7 percent of gross national income, twice the proportion in other Latin America and Caribbean countries and even Singapore.

There were 12 primary pupils for every Cuban teacher in 1997, a ratio that ranked with Sweden, rather than any other developing country. The Latin American and East Asian average was twice as high at 25 to one.

The average youth (ages 15-24) illiteracy rate in Latin America and the Caribbean stands at seven percent. In Cuba, the rate is zero. In Latin America, where the average is seven percent, only Uruguay approaches that achievement, with one percent youth illiteracy.

"Cuba managed to reduce illiteracy from 40 percent to zero within ten years," said Ritzen. "If Cuba shows that it is possible, it shifts the burden of proof to those who say it's not possible."

Similarly, Cuba devoted 9.1 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) during the 1990s to health care, roughly equivalent to Canada's rate.  Its ratio of 5.3 doctors per 1,000 people was the highest in the world.

The question that these statistics pose, of course, is whether the Cuban experience can be replicated. The answer given here is probably not.

"What does it is the incredible dedication," according to Wayne Smith, who was head of the US Interests Section in Havana in the late 1970s and early 1980s and has travelled to the island many times since.  "Doctors in Cuba can make more driving cabs and working in hotels, but they don't.  They're just very dedicated," he said.

This amazing video and documentary, produced by Neighbor Democracy, details the evolving communal organs within the Rojava Revolution, from security to health care.

This 40 minute video is an in-depth look into the inner workings of the commune system of Rojava and how they work in practice. Rojava is the colloquial name for the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria (DFNS), a multi-ethnic, pluralist, women’s liberationist, and radically democratic autonomous zone that has grown out of the context of the Syrian Civil War. While there is frequent and thorough reporting on the military aspects of the Revolution in Rojava, especially their fight against Daesh (ISIS) and the Turkish State, the social revolution as it relates to the everyday lives of the people living there is rarely given anything more than a cursory overview, even in radical circles.

This video is one attempt to make up for that gap in easily digestible information about the way the day-to-day autonomous organizing affects daily life in Rojava. It also closes with a call for people in the US and elsewhere to build communes along similar lines, while discussing some possible contextual considerations specific to North America.

The communes in the DFNS are birthed out of tireless organizing by everyday people, predominately Kurdish women, in an effort that started clandestinely in the days of the Regime, but has since led to structures that could fill the power vacuum left in the war. The people of the DFNS are working out in practice through trial-and-error the culmination of 40 years of theoretical and practical knowledge built through the Kurdish struggle, and most thoroughly laid out by the imprisoned PKK leader, Abdullah Ocalan.

The communes have many similarities to the neighborhood assemblies that were the focus of the late American communalist Murray Bookchin, who was an inspiration for Ocalan. There are an estimated 4,000 communes in Rojava today, run through direct democracy of all the residents (50-150 families). The work of the commune is divided up into committees which anyone can join. The most common committees are explored in-depth in this video, and their timestamps can be found below. Each committee covered in the video can be found in its own short clip on the Neighbor Democracy channel so that these short, easy-to-digest videos can me shared in discussions about specific topics relating to communal approaches to various aspects of life.

Marinaleda: Will 'free homes' solve Spain's evictions crisis? 

In the wake of Spain's property crash, hundreds of thousands of homes have been repossessed. While one regional government says it will seize repossessed properties from the banks, a little town is doing away with mortgages altogether.

In Marinaleda, residents like 42-year-old father-of-three, David Gonzalez Molina, are building their own homes.

While he burrows with a pneumatic drill into the earth, David nonchalantly says it "should take a couple of years".

However, when his new house is finished he will have paid "absolutely nothing".

Free bricks and mortar

The town hall in this small, aesthetically unremarkable town an hour-and-a-bit east of Seville, has given David 190 sq m (2,000 sq ft) of land.

He and others are only eligible after they have been registered residents of Marinaleda for at least two years.

The bricks and mortar are also a gift, this time from the regional government of Andalusia.

Only once his home is finished will he start paying 15 euros (£13) a month, to the regional government, to refund the cost of other building materials.

Of course, most people do not know how to build a house, so the town hall in Marinaleda throws in some expertise.

It employs several professional builders and plumbers, a couple of whom work alongside David, to help him construct his house.

HOMAGE TO CATALONIA 

This was in late December 1936, less than seven months ago as I write, and yet it is a period that has already receded into enormous distance. Later events have obliterated it much more completely than they have obliterated 1935, or 1905, for that matter. I had come to Spain with some notion of writing newspaper articles, but I had joined the militia almost immediately, because at that time and in that atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable thing to do. The Anarchists were still in virtual control of Catalonia and the revolution was still in full swing. To anyone who had been there since the beginning it probably seemed even in December or January that the revolutionary period was ending; but when one came straight from England the aspect of Barcelona was something startling and overwhelming. It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and café had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said ‘Señior’ or ‘Don’ or even ‘Usted’; everyone called everyone else ‘Comrade’ and ‘Thou’, and said ‘Salud!’ instead of ‘Buenos dias’. Tipping was forbidden by law; almost my first experience was receiving a lecture from a hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy. There were no private motor-cars, they had all been commandeered, and all the trams and taxis and much of the other transport were painted red and black. The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs of mud. Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town where crowds of people streamed constantly to and fro, the loudspeakers were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night. And it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small number of women and foreigners there were no ‘well-dressed’ people at all. Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls, or some variant of the militia uniform. All this was queer and moving. There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for. Also I believed that things were as they appeared, that this was really a workers' State and that the entire bourgeoisie had either fled, been killed, or voluntarily come over to the workers' side; I did not realize that great numbers of well-to-do bourgeois were simply lying low and disguising themselves as proletarians for the time being.

Together with all this there was something of the evil atmosphere of war. The town had a gaunt untidy look, roads and buildings were in poor repair, the streets at night were dimly lit for fear of air-raids, the shops were mostly shabby and half-empty. Meat was scarce and milk practically unobtainable, there was a shortage of coal, sugar, and petrol, and a really serious shortage of bread. Even at this period the bread-queues were often hundreds of yards long. Yet so far as one could judge the people were contented and hopeful. There was no unemployment, and the price of living was still extremely low; you saw very few conspicuously destitute people, and no beggars except the gipsies. Above all, there was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom. Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine. In the barbers' shops were Anarchist notices (the barbers were mostly Anarchists) solemnly explaining that barbers were no longer slaves. In the streets were coloured posters appealing to prostitutes to stop being prostitutes. To anyone from the hard-boiled, sneering civilization of the English-speaking races there was something rather pathetic in the literalness with which these idealistic Spaniards took the hackneyed phrases of revolution. At that time revolutionary ballads of the naivest kind, all about proletarian brotherhood and the wickedness of Mussolini, were being sold on the streets for a few centimes each. I have often seen an illiterate militiaman buy one of these ballads, laboriously spell out the words, and then, when he had got the hang of it, begin singing it to an appropriate tune.

Feel free to unfuck yourself you class cuck.

[patriotsnet]

What Percentage Of Republicans Are On Welfare

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/what-percentage-of-republicans-are-on-welfare/

What Percentage Of Republicans Are On Welfare

Democrats Return The Favor: Republicans Uninformed Or Self

Republican States Are Mostly on Welfare

The 429 Democratic voters in our sample returned the favor and raised many of the same themes. Democrats inferred that Republicans must be VERY ill-informed, or that Fox news told me to vote for Republicans.;;Or that Republicans are uneducated and misguided people guided by what the media is feeding them.

Many also attributed votes to individual self-interest whereas GOP voters feel Democrats want free stuff, many Democrats believe Republicans think that I got mine and dont want the libs to take it away, or that some day I will be rich and then I can get the benefits that rich people get now.

Many used the question to express their anger and outrage at the other side.;;Rather than really try to take the position of their opponents, they said things like, I like a dictatorial system of Government, Im a racist, I hate non-whites.;

Average Spending Of Welfare Recipients

Compared to the average American household, welfare recipients spend far less money on all food consumption, including dining out, in a year. As families with welfare assistance spend half as much on average in one year than families without it do, there are some large differences in budgeting. Families receiving welfare assistance spent half the amount of families not receiving welfare assistance in 2018.

The Gop Push To Cut Unemployment Benefits Is The Welfare Argument All Over Again

The White House is on the defensive over accusations from Republicans that expanded federal unemployment benefits, which were extended through Sept. 6 as part of Bidens $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package, are too generous. The GOP argument is that people receiving the $300 weekly benefit have little incentive to return to work. The criticism from Republicans has gotten louder in the wake of a disappointing jobs report.

Its an argument that echoes similar claims conservatives have been making about government assistance programs for decades that people are taking advantage of the system in ways that allow them to collect checks while sitting back and relaxing.

As Washington pays workers a bonus to stay unemployed, virtually everyone discussed very real concerns about their difficulties in finding workers, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Monday. Almost every employer I spoke with specifically mentioned the extra-generous jobless benefits as a key force holding back our recovery.

But Democrats counter that millions of Americans need that money to get by. More than 20 million jobs were lost in the early months of the pandemic; 10 million American workers are currently unemployed, the Labor Department says.

Democrats say the sudden demand for more workers from businesses is outpacing the number of workers that can get back into those jobs, especially since many schools arent fully open, and many workers cant afford child care.

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The Politics And Demographics Of Food Stamp Recipients

Democrats are about twice as likely as Republicans to have received food stamps at some point in their livesa participation gap that echoes the deep partisan divide in the U.S. House of Representatives, which on Thursday produced a farm bill that did not include funding for the food stamp program.

Overall, a Pew Research Center survey conducted late last year found that about one-in-five Americans has participated in the food stamp program, formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. About a quarter lives in a household with a current or former food stamp recipient.

Of these, about one-in-five of Democrats say they had received food stamps compared with 10% of Republicans. About 17% of political independents say they have received food stamps.

The share of food stamp beneficiaries swells even further when respondents are asked if someone else living in their household had ever received food stamps. According to the survey, about three in ten Democrats and about half as many Republicans say they or someone in their household has benefitted from the food stamp program.

But when the political lens shifts from partisanship to ideology, the participation gap vanishes. Self-described political conservatives were no more likely than liberals or moderates to have received food stamps , according to the survey.

Among whites, the gender-race gap is smaller. Still, white women are about twice as likely as white men to receive food stamp assistance .

How Democrats And Republicans Differ On Matters Of Wealth And Equality

A protester wears a T-shirt in support of Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont who is part of … a group of Democrats looking to beat Trump in 2020. Photographer: John Taggart/Bloomberg

If youre a rich Democrat, you wake up each day with self-loathing, wondering how you can make the world more egalitarian. Please tax me more, you say to your elected officials. Until then, the next thing you do is call your financial advisor to inquire about tax shelters.

If youre a poor Republican, however, you have more in common with the Democratic Party than the traditional Wall Street, big business base of the Republican Party, according to a survey by the Voter Study Group, a two-year-old consortium made up of academics and think tank scholars from across the political spectrum. That means the mostly conservative American Enterprise Institute and Cato were also on board with professors from Stanford and Georgetown universities when conducting this study, released this month.

The fact that lower-income Republicans, largely known as the basket of deplorables, support more social spending and taxing the rich was a key takeaway from this years report, says Lee Drutman, senior fellow on the political reform program at New America, a Washington D.C.-based think tank.

Across party lines, only 37% of respondents said they supported government getting active in reducing differences in income, close to the 39% who opposed it outright. Some 24% had no opinion on the subject.

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Bases Of Republicans Antidemocratic Attitudes

shows how Republicans antidemocratic responses in the January 2020 survey were related to education, political interest, and locale. These relationships provide only modest support for the hypothesis that allegiance to democratic values is a product of political activity, involvement and articulateness, as McClosky had it . Although people with postgraduate education were clearly less likely than those with less education to endorse violations of democratic norms, the overall relationship between education and antidemocratic sentiments is rather weak. Similarly, people in big cities were only about 5% less likely than those in rural areas to endorse norm violations, while people who said they followed politics most of the time were about 7% more likely to do so than those who said they followed politics hardly at all. Given the distributions of these social characteristics in the Republican sample, the most typical antidemocrats were not men and women whose lives are circumscribed by apathy, ignorance, provincialism and social or physical distance from the centers of intellectual activity , but suburbanites with some college education and a healthy interest in politics.

Social bases of Republicans antidemocratic attitudes.

Key indicators of latent dimensions

Political bases of Republicans antidemocratic attitudes

Translation of ethnic antagonism into antidemocratic attitudes in Republican subgroups

Welfare Accounts For 10% Of The Federal Budget

Many Republicans claim that social services expenditures are crippling the federal budget, but these programs accounted for just 10% of federal spending in 2015.

Of the $3.7 trillion the U.S. government spent that year, the largest expenditures were Social Security , health care , and defense and security , according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities .

Several safety net programs are included in the 10% spent on social services:

Supplemental Security Income , which provides cash support to the elderly and disabled poor

Assistance with home energy bills

Programs that provide help to abused and neglected children

In addition, programs that primarily help the middle class, namely the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit, are included in the 10%.

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At Least 60 Afghans And 13 Us Service Members Killed By Suicide Bombers And Gunmen Outside Kabul Airport: Us Officials

Two suicide bombers and gunmen attacked crowds of Afghans flocking to Kabul’s airport Thursday, transforming a scene of desperation into one of horror in the waning days of an airlift for those fleeing the Taliban takeover. At least 60 Afghans and 13 U.S. troops were killed, Afghan and U.S. officials said.

Welfare Spending By President And Congress From 1959 To 2014

Republicans’ Facts About Welfare Are “Not Factually True”

America faces many problems today. The current economic recovery has been the slowest since the Great Depression, the national debt has surpassed $18 trillion, and the federal government continues to spend more than it collects. While its not unusual, unethical, or unconstitutional for the federal government to operate with deficits at times, the question is why does Washington continue to overspend? Is there a legitimate reason or is it neo-politics? In this article, well take a look at spending on welfare programs during each presidents term from J.F.K. to Obama. Well also look at the party in control of Congress. Which one was the biggest spender as it pertains to welfare programs?

The Dark Side of Social Benefits

Politicians love to sing their own praises and for a very good reason. Otto von Bismarck, the first Chancellor of Germany, made an astute political observation in the 1880s when he stated, A man who has a pension for his old age is much easier to deal with than a man without that prospect. Bismarck openly acknowledged that this was a state-socialist idea and went on to say, Whoever embraces this idea will come to power. Thus, the strategy of using legislation to gain votes was forever embedded in the political landscape.

Welfare Spending

Lets take a thorough look at federal welfare spending from 1959 through 2013. The following graph includes spending for two data points:

Democrats in control: 13.7%

Republicans in control: 3.5%

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What Is Governments Role In Caring For The Most Needy

Nearly six-in-ten Americans say government has a responsibility to take care of those who cannot take care of themselves. Do these views vary depending on whether the respondent has personally benefited from a government entitlement program?

These data suggest the answer is a qualified yes. Overall, those who have received benefits from at least one of the six major programs are somewhat more likely than those who havent to say government is responsible for caring for those who cannot help themselves .

When the analysis focuses just on just the respondents who have received benefits from at least one of the four programs that target the needy, the gap between entitlement recipients and other adults increases to eight percentage points .

Some larger differences in attitudes toward governments role emerge when the results are broken down by specific program, though in every case majorities of both recipients and non-recipients affirmed that government has the obligation to help those most in need.

For example, nearly three-quarters of those who ever received welfare benefits say government has a duty to care for those who cannot care for themselves. In contrast, less than six-in-ten of those who have never been on welfare agree.

Similar double-digit gaps surface between non-recipients and those who ever received food stamps and Medicaid .

How Come We Are Red And Blue Instead Of Purple

Republicans to live outside of urban areas, while Democrats tend to prefer living inside of urban areas.

Rural areas are almost exclusively Republican well strong urban areas are almost exclusively democratic.

Republicans also tend to stress traditional family values, which may be why only 1 out of 4 GLBTQI individuals identify with the GOP.

63% of people who earn more than $200k per year vote for Republicans, while 63% of people who earn less than $15k per year vote for Democrats.

64% of Americans believe that labor unions are necessary to protect working people, but only 43% of GOP identified votes view labor unions in a favorable way.

The economics of the United States seem to have greatly influenced how people identify themselves when it comes to their preferred political party. People who are concerned about their quality of life and have a fair amount of money tend to vote Republican. Those who have fallen on hard times or work in union related jobs tend to vote for Democrats. From 2003 to today, almost all of demographic gaps have been shifting so that Republicans and Democrats are supported equally. The only true difference is on the extremes of the income scale. The one unique fact about Democrats is that they are as bothered by their standard of living as Republicans tend to be.

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States Have Shifted To The Right

Democrats are floating a plan to tax stock buybacks.

Even excluding health insurance which some experts argue should not count people in this patch of Appalachia draw between a fifth and a third of their income from the public purse.

Perhaps the politics of welfare is changing up to a point. Democrats made big gains this year in elections for the House and several statehouses, running largely on the promise that they would protect the most recent addition to the safety net: the Affordable Care Act, including the expansion of Medicaid in many states. But championing the safety net does not necessarily resonate in the places that most need it.

Take Daniel Lewis, who crashed his car into a coal truck 15 years ago, breaking his neck and suffering a blood clot in his brain when he was only 21. He is grateful for the $1,600 a month his family gets from disability insurance; for his Medicaid benefits; for the food stamps he shares with his wife and two children.

Every need I have has been met, Mr. Lewis told me. He disagrees with the governors proposal to demand that Medicaid recipients get a job. And yet, in 2016, he voted for Mr. Trump. It was the lesser of two evils, he said.

About 13 percent of Harlans residents are receiving disability benefits. More than 10,000 get food stamps. But in 2015 almost two-thirds voted for Mr. Bevin. In 2016 almost 9 out of 10 chose Mr. Trump.

Program Goals And Demographics

Larger group differences emerge when the results are broken down by age and income levelsdifferences that are often directly related to the goals of specific benefits programs.

For example, adults 65 and older are nearly three times as likely to have received an entitlement benefit during their lives as those adults under the age of 30 . Thats not surprising, since nearly nine-in-ten older adults have received Social Security and78% have gotten Medicare benefits. Both programs were specifically created for seniors with age requirements that limit participation by younger adults.

Similarly, Americans with family incomes of less than $30,000 a year are significantly more likely as those with family incomes of $100,000 or more to have gotten entitlement help from the government . Again, this difference is not surprising, as assisting the poor is the primary objective of such financial means-tested programs as food stamps, welfare assistance and Medicaid.

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Which Party Are You

The average Republican is 50, while the average Democrat is 47.

55% of married women will vote Republican.

GOP candidates earn 59 percent of all Protestant votes, 67 percent of all white Protestant votes, 52 percent of the Catholic vote, making them a Christian majority party.

Only 1 out of 4 Jewish voters will support Republicans.

If you are white and have a college education, there is a 20% greater chance that you will be a Republican instead of a Democrat.

American Republicans have been found to be among the most generous people on earth, and not just financially. Republicans also provide more volunteer hours and donate blood more frequently.

Here is what we really come to when it comes to political party demographics. It doesnt matter if youre a Republican or a Democrat. What matters is that everyone is able to take advantage of the diversity that makes the United States so unique. Instead of trying to prove one way is the only correct path, both parties coming together to work together could create some amazing changes for the modern world. Until we learn to compromise, however, the demographic trends will continue to equalize and polarize until only gridlock remains. If that happens, then nothing will ever get done and each party will blame the other.

Taking The Perspective Of Others Proved To Be Really Hard

The divide in the United States is wide, and one indication of that is how difficult our question proved for many thoughtful citizens. A 77-year-old Republican woman from Pennsylvania was typical of the voters who struggled with this question, telling us, This is really hard for me to even try to think like a devilcrat!, I am sorry but I in all honesty cannot answer this question. I cannot even wrap my mind around any reason they would be good for this country.

Similarly, a 53-year-old Republican from Virginia said, I honestly cannot even pretend to be a Democrat and try to come up with anything positive at all, but, I guess they would vote Democrat because they are illegal immigrants and they are promised many benefits to voting for that party. Also, just to follow what others are doing. And third would be just because they hate Trump so much. The picture she paints of the typical Democratic voter being an immigrant, who goes along with their party or simply hates Trump will seem like a strange caricature to most Democratic voters. But her answer seems to lack the animus of many.;;

Democrats struggled just as much as Republicans. A 33-year-old woman from California told said, i really am going to have a hard time doing this but then offered that Republicans are morally right as in values, going to protect us from terrorest and immigrants, going to create jobs.

Recommended Reading: Did Trump Say Republicans Were Dumb

[southeastasianists]

The last week has seen a wave of huge protests around Indonesia against the new so-called omnibus law—a massive law that amends 79 existing statutes and is touted by the government as easing investment and facilitating job creation, but which critics say strips rights from workers and makes it easier for companies to violate environmental standards. The passage of the law prompted violent clashes around the country. According to the Legal Aid Institute, police used violence against demonstrators in at least 18 provinces; by 7 October police were reporting they had arrested more than 1,000 people in Jakarta and surrounding regions alone. Alongside labour groups and various other activist coalitions, the leading force in the protests has been students.

This wave of protest comes about a year after a similar outpouring of unrest when students and others protested against attempts to amend or introduce various laws—most of which changes were later rolled into the omnibus law—and against the gutting of Indonesia’s Corruption Eradication Commission. These two sets of protests are important signs of resistance to the slow-motion decline of Indonesian democracy that has accelerated during the presidency of Joko Widodo.

The prominence of students in both waves of protest is noteworthy, and deserves attention in its own right.

The return of student protest on such a scale marks the dramatic resumption of an important Indonesian political tradition. For much of the past two decades, students have not been a particularly important political force, at least not in their own right. To be sure, from time to time students have mobilised in large numbers—such as during protests against the removal of fuel subsidies under the presidency of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. But these protests did little to set the national political agenda.

And students have until recently largely failed to act cohesively as students. Instead, students have tended to pursue diverse interests and affiliations, joining or supporting the various political parties, social movements and activist groups that populate Indonesia’s democratic political landscape. The very idea of a cohesive and distinctive student movement seemed to be slowly fading.

It was not always like this. Student protest played a key role in regime change during two periods of political transition in Indonesia: the 1965-66 downfall of President Sukarno’s Guided Democracy, and the collapse of President Suharto’s New Order regime in 1998. During the three decades of authoritarianism under Suharto, students were repeatedly at the forefront of anti-government opposition, pioneering new forms of political action, and often being at the receiving end of repression as a result.

When the Asian financial crisis hit Indonesia in 1997-98, students not only led the Reformasi protests that ultimately ended Suharto’s rule. They also played a key role in transforming the inchoate anger of the streets into a rough political program that demanded not only Suharto’s resignation but also the abolition of the military’s political role, the repeal of repressive political laws, and a transition to full democracy.

Why students? So why are the students so prominent in protest once again?

One reason is organisational. One legacy of the Reformasi period is that students now find it much easier to mobilise. During the Suharto regime, the government put in place numerous political restrictions on campuses, as in other spheres of Indonesian life. In particular, representative student councils were controlled under so-called Normalisation of Campus Life (Normalisasi Kehidupan Kampus, NKK) policies introduced in the late 1970s. The result was that, by the 1980s and 1990s, anti-government student action was mostly expressed through an array of informal and subterranean discussion clubs, activist groups and coalitions (for one analysis from that time, click here).

Now Student Executive Bodies (Badan Eksektutif Mahasiswa, BEM) are freely elected bodies in each faculty and campus and they can coordinate student actions with a strong claim to representative legitimacy. Once a sufficient number of students and their elected leaders get mobilised around a set of issues—as they have in 2019 and 2020—it is now relatively easy for them to organise on a national scale. One sign of this is the prominence of BEM in many of the latest wave of protests, as is the leading role played of the national coalition of these bodies, the BEM SI (All-Indonesia Student Executive Bodies – see its Facebook page here).

Another obvious reason for the return of student mobilisation is the history alluded to above: the story of Indonesian student activism provides a compelling narrative and source of inspiration for today’s generation. Unlike in most countries, university students in Indonesia are socialised into a political world in which they know that their forebears have repeatedly played a critical role in shaping the course of national events.

More specifically, today’s students have grown up in an Indonesia where democracy is itself a tangible legacy of the Reformasi protests pioneered by students in 1998-99. One of the galvanising slogans of the protests last year and now is Reformasi dikorupsi—Reformasi corrupted—suggesting that the historic achievements of Indonesian reform—and Indonesian students—are now being traduced by a self-serving and corrupt governing elite.

Viewed in a broader perspective, student protest is often a feature of polities in which civilian political competition is poorly institutionalised. Where varied political parties and social movements compete in the public sphere, the tendency is for university students to go their separate ways and affiliate to whichever groups express their individual interests. As a result, cohesive student movements tend to fade as democracies consolidate and civilian politics becomes entrenched. As noted above, this seemed to be the trend during the first decade or so of Indonesian democracy.

The return of student protest can itself thus be seen as yet one more sign that Indonesia’s democracy is going awry. That a new generation of students feels compelled to save the achievements of an earlier generation suggests that such aspirations are not being expressed through more institutionalised political channels—notably, through political parties. Instead, the protestors allege, the parties are colluding with Indonesia’s oligarchs not only to push through the pro-business provisions of the omnibus law, but to degrade the quality of Indonesia’s democracy overall.

A familiar script The return of the students is not the only echo of the past in the current protests. So is the government response.

I used to research student activism back in the late New Order period, so these echoes ring particularly loudly for me. But any long-time observer of Indonesian politics cannot help but be struck by the drift back toward New Order patterns of political management in the response to these protests.

This drift is, of course, most obvious in the general recourse to repressive measures, and in the increasingly politicised role of the security apparatus. This topic warrants lengthy analysis in its own right, for now one example can suffice: the national police in response to the protests circulated a telegram to officers ordering them to take various actions, one of which was: “Generate narratives to counter issues which discredit the government.” Such an approach is an obvious violation of political neutrality, one of the key pillars of security sector reform in the years following the downfall of Suharto.

At the same time, Indonesian media have also reported that security officials have been adopting various informal approaches to dealing with protests. For example, they have been making quiet visits to protest organisers to “dissuade” them from taking action. On campuses, there have been many signs that government officials are pressuring university authorities to constrain dissent and rein in their unruly students.

Some of the old techniques have not yet been revived: in the past, for example, leading student activists were often tried for subversion. But the parallels with the indirect methods the New Order regime used to deal with opposition are very clear.

Equally striking has been the government’s discursive response. Many government leaders have responded to protestors not by addressing directly their concerns, but instead by focusing on the alleged presence of shadowy forces manipulating them. When doing so, officials use language that is more than merely reminiscent of the language used by leaders of the New Order– it is a virtual carbon copy.

For example, as quoted by numerous Indonesian news sites, the Coordinating Minister for Economic Affairs, Airlangga Hartarto, said “Actually, the government knows who is behind the demonstrations. We know who is mobilising them. We know who the sponsors are, we know who is paying for them.” The powerful Coordinating Minister for Maritime Affairs and Investment (and former general) Luhut Binsar Panjaitan made similar remarks, alleging that the protests are being ditunggangi (ridden—as when someone rides a horse) by ambitious political figures whom he declined to name. The State Intelligence Agency (BIN) has stated it knows the names of the dalang (the puppet master in Javanese shadow theatre) of the demonstrations. The police, in turn, have pinned the blame on members of so-called anarchist groups (kelompok anarko), claiming to have arrested 796 such individuals  across seven provinces by 9 October.

Such language is virtually identical to New Order discourse. Back in the 1980s or 1990s, whenever students or other groups organised protests, it was standard response for security officers to accuse the protestors of being ditunggangi and to point to mysterious dalang manipulating them for personal gain. Sometimes, the implicit accusation was that the dalang was the banned Indonesian Communist Party or other leftist groups (in the final two years of the New Order, the leftist People’s Democratic Party (Partai Rakyat Demokratik, PRD) was the regime’s preferred scapegoat). More often than not officials would not name the alleged dalang. The vagueness of the accusation added to its menace.

The same script is being played out today. There is a contemporary twist insofar that the government, including the president himself, is placing much of the blame for the protests on hoaxes and disinformation spread on social media. But the effects are similar. As in the past, one effect is to suggest that protestors are dupes, who don’t fully understand the issues at stake. The wider effect of the accusations of manipulation—now as in the past—is to deprive protestors of agency and deny the legitimacy of their grievances.

Back to the future

For years, scholars of Indonesian politics have stressed that we should not conflate current trends of democratic regression with a drift back toward a revived version of New Order rule. It would not be easy to a restore New Order-style authoritarianism. That system was built around a relatively narrow core, consisting of the military and a group of civilian allies. The base of the current regime is much broader, with a wide range of political parties represented in government, each with networks reaching up into Indonesia’s wealthy elite and down into society through a myriad of formal and informal linkages. In parallel with this, the scope of repression used against civilian forces today is targeted far more narrowly than it was in the past. Recompressing the governing coalition to New Order dimensions would not be easy.

But analysts also need to point out when New Order techniques of governance are making even a partial comeback. Indonesia’s reformasi never represented a complete break with its authoritarian past. Senior government ministers—including Airlangga and Luhut—have direct links back to that old regime. In the government’s response to the current wave of protest, a return of distinctive New Order patterns of political management is becoming obvious. Little wonder, then, that some of the old patterns of political dissent—including a powerful student movement—are also experiencing a revival.

The post Indonesian protests point to old patterns appeared first on New Mandala.

[ill-will-editions]

FEVER DREAMING IN THE NEW GENERAL ANTAGONISM 

Neal Miller 

March 22, 2020

We are living in the political fever dreams of COVID-19. Fredric Jameson’s oft-cited quip – “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism” – is obsolete.[1]  Having spread across the globe, the coronavirus has become the background phenomenon and concern of every passing moment. And along with it has come the imagination of an end of capitalism. However contagious and deadly COVID-19 is as a virus, its existence as the virtual object of the world’s attention and inattention has proven far more viral in its capacity to change society – mostly by cancelling our sensibility for realism. The dull weight of the everyday has lifted to unleash nightmares and dreamscapes that have magnetized the attention of our species with a measure of universality thought to be obsolete in our post-hegemonic world.

The continuous streams of news and commentary can hardly keep up with the latest collapse of everyday life. They give us the mise en scène in which to play the endangered protagonist of a canned Hollywood disaster flic and yet we’re told to stay home, keep calm, and practice good hygiene. Stories like the one about the recent missile strikes in Iraq are quickly phone-scrolled into oblivion by the latest notifications about the disease. And so we find ourselves reawakening with disbelief to the same new reality each day. 

Following Michel Foucault’s Discipline & Punish, one might say that we live our reality as though caught between two fever dreams, which alternate depending on the nature of the immune response to the virtual presence of the virus. On the one hand, there is the suffocating nightmare of the global “plague city,” of governments securing human “life” by identifying all bodily movement and contact with disorder and death. The dream of governments today is to “return” us to a new normal in which they have won surpluses of legitimacy and control. The other dream is a dream of upheaval that won’t let go of all the vital signs of freedom amidst the pandemic. It wants to make irreversible all of the revived forms of class war, mutual aid, and social welfare, along with all of the autonomous means of survival not yet invented. 

The general antagonism today is the war on COVID-19. And whether we like it or not, we have been enlisted to the immune systems of global humanity. Yet the politics of today concerns the decision before us. Will our collective immune response intensify our cynicism about our dependency on governments? Or will we experiment with novel forms of relief and this newfound disbelief in the black magic of the economy? Will we dare to play in the festival-dream of new forms of collective life and reliance upon one another? 

The Nightmare of Governmental Realism

Today, quarantine lockdown extends from the “non-essential” flows of commuters to the fluids and gestures of our bodies, which have become paranoid colonial-style occupations of themselves. My body experiences itself as if on the other side of a gulf of unhygienic habits cracked open by the virtual omnipresence of COVID-19: I catch myself touching my face, I catalog the surfaces I’ve recently touched, and my proximity to others spontaneously triggers a quantitative calculation (“was it a distance of six feet or ten that was recommended?”). The new universal phenomenon is the object of a panicked consciousness immersed in a world that has been reduced to the medium for a disease vector. 

As for the engineers of the new order, China and Israel represent the nightmare line toward the most grim extreme of plague politics. Both have employed the metadata of people’s smart-phones to track their movements and all points of social contact. Each new case is a profile whose recent social history is rounded up for quarantine. The horizon here would be something like Chris Marker’s film La jetée (or Terry Gilliam’s remake, 12 Monkeys): humanity survives, but at the cost of complete imprisonment and dependency upon a specialized medical government.

We glimpse this suffocating nightmare in the undecidable decision facing governments with respect to their incarcerated populations: do they relieve themselves of having to manage and care for their masses of concentrated and confined bodies? Or, do they give the prison guards and wardens a blank check to administer order by any means necessary? Whereas Iran temporarily released 54,000 prisoners on March 4th, two weeks later Massachusetts prisoners lost the right to be free of cruel and unusual punishment when a moratorium was announced on all disciplinary measures for prison staff. The undecidability here is no doubt due to the intensification of what Foucault called the carceral continuum, or the fact that the “inside” of the prison extends “outside” into the racialized ghettos of urban metropolises. The quarantine regime of social distancing and “shelter in place” lockdowns has turned the “outside” into a vast space of confinement, however gilded. 

The Festival Dream of Relief

Against this new confinement, efforts at self-organization are cropping up all over in food distribution networks, rent strikes, requisitions of abandoned housing, and calls for debt jubilees. Such earnest efforts at organized care finds its parodic inversion in the devil-may-care attitudes of Spring Breakers migrating South, as well as paranoid social media speculation about riots breaking out amidst mass hoarding. All of it tracks with what Foucault called the “whole literary fiction of the festival [that] grew up around the plague.”[2] 

Things we struggled for only weeks ago have been given outright – and much more besides. In the U.S., conservative food stamp policies have been lifted, unemployment safety nets reinforced, moratoriums on various costs of living instituted, and political parties are fighting not over whether to give UBI, but how much. Those immunized in their home-bubbles are offered an increasing amount of freely circulating intellectual property, while, in Chicago, parking has been made free, evictions courts are on hold, and utility companies are giving away electricity.

The black magic of the economy has revealed itself in its very withdrawal from our lives, tempering our panic and fear with a small modicum of relief. As Dan Kois recently argued, this relief has shown just how much of American society and its ‘death on the installment plan’ is a sham.[3] The mask has come off and the wand behind the conjurations now appears in the simple arbitrariness of its operations. Why don’t all of the other ways we get sick, fear hunger, or struggle to stay afloat count as reasons for having free access to high-quality food, health-care, and shelter? If all it took was a wand waving to put a stop to bills, evictions, and the like, does this not make all of our sufferings and hardships under normal circumstances seem meaningless?  

Just as we let out our sighs, however, the nightmare visions from abroad come closer and remind us that the only continuity between what was once normal and the current state of exception is the power of governments based on our dependency. We feel this dependency whether we panic or not, whether we trust their assurances and injunctions not to hoard or whether the sight of emptied shelves floods our heads with visions of the broken supply chains and interrupted logistics that we rely on to eat. As Chuang rightly noted, the arrival of COVID-19 in Wuhan induced a paradoxical form of general strike: there is a profound work stoppage, but it is hollowed out and devoid of any subject of history. The subject of history: not even the coronavirus can assume this mantle. Our continued dependency makes the strike false.

Yet one cannot help but read the ‘New Deal’ on offer as a symptom of faltering government legitimacy and the fits of market confidence. In the U.S., the government is betting that an avalanche of compromises with Democrats will cover over the truther-response of the Trump administration and the stock sell-offs of Senate Republicans. As belief in the forces of order goes into convulsions, one thinks, ‘If they cannot guarantee our survival, all bets are off.’ As we take all these “gifts” coming down from on high, we ought to remember that the social welfare state of the 1930s New Deal was a warfare state. And what will become of our newfound alleviation without the invisible enemy that has, with its own magic, cancelled society?

A New Universal? 

On the brighter side of things, it’s worth observing that we have been given a hint to the riddle handed down from the failures of 20th century revolutionaries. For one fundamental limit of all struggles since the 1960s has been their scale. It has been a very long time since we’ve been able to think what might connect struggles happening all across the world. Despite being geographically dislocated from one another, the revolts of 2019 showed promise simply in their synchronic co-existence and their ability to repeat each others’ tactics under the maxim “Be water.” Yet not only were the problems at the heart of these struggles locally particular (despite their many commonalities), they were never able to flow together in a global strategy.

Against such a backdrop, COVID-19 portends a new universal frame of war. For however uneven the experience of vulnerability may be, the global spread of the coronavirus amounts to the generalization of the new antagonism. When was the last time we were able to share our experience of dependency on the world of governments as a crisis? The multi-generational time-scale of the climate catastrophe has so far prevented it from mobilizing all of the humanity that it dooms. Yet whether it is glowing from our screens or hanging in the ambient disquiet while we distract ourselves in quarantine, the new reality for everyone is that reality has fallen apart. 

In these fever dreams where trust in the authorities is in shorter supply than food and the means of punishment alternate between melting into air and locking down hard, it is perhaps possible to take the wand from the magician and begin conjuring a reality of our own. What is frightening about COVID-19 is how little we know about it. But just as uncertain is how governments will react to us amidst this legitimacy crisis and how peoples will respond when the repression of governments comes down too hard. 

How can we flee our dependency on the old world while “sheltering in place”? If the world is cancelled, what are all these bills, digital parking meters, and universities but the fossils and tombs of a dead world? What new uses can we still invent for what stands idle and unused around us – what role can they play in the new dream? How can we breathe new life into existing spaces of immunity, like vehicles and homes? And what new immunity spaces remain to be invented? What new forms of action at a distance are called for? We are already venturing tentative answers to these questions. We try to flow like water where we still can. However, against a virus that fills our lungs with fluid and against governments seeking to return us to the earth of realism, perhaps we should consider the element of breath, levity, relief, and jubilation: air. 

[1] Jameson, Fredric. “Future City.” New Left Review, 21, May-June 2003, 65-79.

[2] Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. New York: Vintage, 1995, 197.

[3] Kois, Dan. “America Is a Sham.” Slate, March 14, 2020. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/03/coronavirus-tsa-liquid-purell-paid-leave-rules.html  

[reading-writing-revolution]

Heather Cox Richardson

January 2, 2021 (Saturday)

Today the fight to pick up Trump’s supporters continued. Eleven senators, led by Ted Cruz (R-TX), said they would object to certifying certain state electoral votes when Congress meets on Wednesday, January 6, to count them. They want a commission appointed to audit the results. This attempt is separate from the one launched yesterday by Josh Hawley (R-MO) to object to the counting of the electoral votes from Pennsylvania, but both are a transparent attempt to court Trump voters before 2022 and 2024.

The senators signing onto the effort are: Ron Johnson (R-WI), James Lankford (R-OK), Steve Daines (R-MT), John Kennedy (R-LA), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), and Mike Braun (R-IN), and Senators-Elect Cynthia Lummis (R-WY), Roger Marshall (R-KS), Bill Hagerty (R-TN), and Tommy Tuberville (R-AL).

President-Elect Joe Biden’s transition spokesperson Michael Gwin called their efforts a “stunt.” He isn’t wrong. This plan is unfounded. Biden won the election by more than 7 million votes and by a margin of 306 to 232 in the Electoral College. The Trump campaign tried to challenge the results in the courts, and lost or had dismissed for lack of evidence 60 out of 61 cases, including two they tried to take to the Supreme Court, where three justices appointed by Trump himself sit. Although Trump supporters grabbed headlines with their accusations of irregularities and fraud when they made them in conference rooms and in parking lots in front of landscaping companies, they could produce no evidence in courtrooms, where there are penalties for lying. The suggestion that there is somehow a problem with this election, when they could produce no evidence of wrongdoing in front of judges in 60 cases, is laughable.

But there is more to their efforts than just creating a show to attract the future support of Trump voters. The attempt of these Trump Republicans to launch yet another baseless investigation is in keeping with their use of investigations to discredit Democrats since at least the 2012 attack on two U.S. government facilities in Benghazi, Libya, which killed four Americans. Ten investigations of the circumstances that led to that attack resulted in no evidence that members of the Obama administration acted inappropriately in that crisis. But the constant repetition of accusations convinced many Americans that something had gone terribly wrong and Obama’s people, especially Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, were to blame.

As House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, then in running for Speaker of the House, said to Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity in 2015, “Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she's untrustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened, had we not fought."

The repeated Republican investigations into then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails were similar. Although the State Department’s final report on Clinton’s email use, issued in October 2019, declared there was no systematic or deliberate mishandling of classified information, the constant barrage of accusations made the email story the most important story of the 2016 election. It outweighed all the scandals involving then-candidate Donald Trump: the ones involving sexual assault, financial corruption, mocking of a disabled reporter, attacks on immigrants, and so on.

A study by Duncan J. Watts and David M. Rothschild in the Columbia Journalism Review noted that in the 2016 election season there were 65,000 sentences in the media about Clinton’s email use but only 40,000 about all of Trump’s scandals combined. There were twice as many sentences about Clinton’s emails than about her policies. The authors wrote, "in just six days, The New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election.” The email scandal likely cost Clinton the 2016 election, and even now, after the State Department cleared her of wrongdoing, many Americans still think Clinton mishandled classified information in her emails.

Trump tried the same tactic in 2020. Smearing an opponent through investigations was at the heart of the Ukraine scandal of 2019. Trump pressured new Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky, not to start an investigation of Hunter Biden and the company on whose board he had sat, but rather simply to announce that he was starting an investigation. An announcement would be enough to get picked up by the American news media so that story after story would convince voters that Hunter Biden and, by extension, his father were involved in corruption, even without evidence.

Then, just before the election, Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani drummed up the story that Hunter Biden had left a laptop that contained incriminating evidence against both Bidens at a repair shop, and Republican leadership clamored for investigations-- this time to no avail because the story was so outrageous.

Now, they are alleging the need for an investigation into irregularities in the 2020 election, although they have failed repeatedly to produce any evidence of such irregularities in court. Their argument is that the country needs an investigation to relieve people’s worries about the legitimacy of the election, but those worries have been created precisely by the unjustified accusations of Republican leaders. An investigation would simply convince people that the election results are questionable. They are not.

The attempt of the senators to get Congress to appoint an investigatory committee into alleged fraud in the election is dangerous and unprecedented, and they know it. In their statement, they tried to suggest they are simply following the precedent established by Congress after the chaotic 1876 election, but the two situations are very different.

In 1876, elections were organized by the parties themselves and were notoriously corrupt. Parties printed their own ballots in a distinctive color with only their own slate of electors. Men dropped the ballots for their party, unmarked, into a box, but their votes were not secret: how men voted was obvious from the colored ballots, at the very least. Politicians watching the polls knew exactly what the counts would be, and it was not unusual for ballot boxes to be either stuffed or broken open before results were reported.

In Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina in 1876, Democrats appeared to have won the election, but there was no dispute that they had terrorized Republican voters to keep them from the polls. The results were a hopeless mess: in South Carolina, for example, 101% of all eligible voters cast ballots. Florida and Louisiana both reported more reasonable numbers of voters, but they each sent competing sets of electors to Congress. In both states, different officials signed off on different certificates of election, so it was not at all clear which certificate was the official one. In this utter confusion, Congress established a committee to figure out what had actually happened.

None of that is the case today. The processes were transparent and observed by Republicans as well as Democrats. The Trump campaign had the right to challenge vote counts and did so; each turned up virtually the same result as the original count: Biden won, by a lot. Each state in the country has delivered to Congress certified results that have been signed by the state governors, who nowadays have the final say in the state certification process.

This should be a done deal. But Trump Republicans are trying to undermine the election, and Biden’s administration, with a disinformation campaign. This is about more than this particular election. It is clear that a faction of today’s Republican Party refuses to accept the legitimacy of a Democratic president, no matter how big the victory. They are working to smear Biden by investigation, as has become their signature move.

Democracy depends on a willingness to transfer power peacefully from one group of leaders to another. By revealing that they refuse to do so, the members of the “Sedition Caucus,” as they are being called on social media, are proving they are unworthy of elected office.