#Republican oligarchs control the Supreme Court

[republicansaredomesticterrorists]

😡

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Joan McCarter at Daily Kos:

The conservative Supreme Court has gone rogue. It has “cemented its place in history as the most radical Supreme Court ever,” in the words of historian Kevin Kruse. It handcuffed all federal regulatory agencies last week, and elevated the president to king on Monday. They’ve done so on behalf of the American oligarchs who have bankrolled the lavish lifestyle of at least two of the justices. They have also done so on behalf of twice-impeached convicted felon Donald Trump. If there is any hope of salvaging our republic out of this mess, President Joe Biden and Democrats have to fight back, immediately, in the campaign and in action. That means setting aside the trust institutionalists like Biden and Senate Judiciary Chair Dick Durbin have in the system and in the basic decency of people like Chief Justice John Roberts. It means directly taking on the corrupt court and making the case to the American people that it has to be stopped. Biden made a start Monday evening, giving a short prime-time address to the nation to point out the “dangerous precedent” of placing “virtually no limits on what a president can do.”

“This decision,” Biden said, “has continued the court’s attack in recent years on a wide range of long-established legal principles in our nation, from gutting voting rights and civil rights to taking away a woman’s right to choose to today’s decision that undermines the rule of law of this nation.” In perhaps the most chilling words a president has uttered since the Civil War, Biden starkly defined where we’re at as a nation.  “[I]t will depend on the character of the men and women who hold that presidency that are going to define the limits of the power of the presidency,” he said, “because the law will no longer do it.” 

[...] There are plenty of good ideas for reshaping the court from expanding it to imposing term limits to create a stable of justices that rotate in and out of the court. The solutions are there—Democrats need to embrace them. And run on them. That can start with rallying around Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s impeachment resolution against the justices who perpetrated this “assault on American democracy.” No, it won’t move forward in a Republican-controlled House, but it can help unite Democrats for an immediate course of action should they regain the House.

House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries echoed that, saying Democrats plan to “engage in aggressive oversight and legislative activity” to determine that “extreme, far-right justices in the [Supreme Court] majority are brought into compliance with the Constitution.” The Senate has to take the lead in the coming months, and it has to come from Durbin, who failed in his first task of responding to the devastating ruling. He complained over spilled milk, that Thomas and Alito “brazenly refused to recuse themselves from this case.” He scolded Roberts for not using “his existing authority to enact an enforceable code of conduct.” It’s a lot too late for that. Durbin and his colleagues need to get on the same page as House Democrats, because they actually are in an oversight position and need to start using it. No, they can’t fix the Supreme Court now, but they can start building the case for it. 

Joan McCarter of Daily Kos has a solid banger of a piece on why Democrats must run a campaign against the ethics-challenged MAGA Majority on SCOTUS.

[misfitwashere]

June 28, 2024 

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUN 29

There is huge news today: in the case of Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the Supreme Court overturned the Chevron defense doctrine that underpins the administrative state. 

I am putting that down as a marker because I’ve had a very busy week of travel and writing (the paperback edition of Democracy Awakening is coming out in October and I am working on a new afterword) and I am just too tired to cover it and its history well tonight. 

Instead, tonight I want to make a note of something that has been nagging at me for weeks now: Trump’s focus on 32-year-old Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who was arrested by Russian officers in March 2023 and is currently on trial for the trumped-up charge of espionage. The State Department considers him “wrongfully detained,” a rare designation indicating that the person is being held by a hostile government as a bargaining chip. That designation means the U.S. government will do all it can to secure his release. 

At least three times now, Trump has interfered with those negotiations by vowing that Russian president Vladimir Putin will release Gershkovich for him and him alone. He said it in last night’s CNN debacle, where he also made a big deal out of the idea that Putin will do it as a favor, without an exchange of money.  

He said something else last night in his slurry of words that jumped out. Somewhere in his discussion of Putin’s invasion of eastern Ukraine in February 2022, Trump said: “Putin saw that, he said, you know what, I think we’re going to go in and maybe take my—this was his dream. I talked to him about it, his dream.”

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 2019 report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election explained that Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager and then conduit to Russian operatives, in summer 2016 “discussed a plan to resolve the ongoing political problems in Ukraine by creating an autonomous republic in its more industrialized eastern region of Donbas, and having [Viktor] Yanukovych, the Ukrainian President ousted in 2014, elected to head that republic.” 

Manafort had helped to get the pro-Russian oligarch Yanukovych into office, and when Yanukovych fled to Russia after the Ukrainian people threw him out, Manafort was left unemployed and in debt to other oligarchs. When he went to work for Trump, for free, he promptly wrote to his partner Konstantin Kilimnik, whom the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee identified in 2020 as a Russian operative, asking how “we” could use the appointment “to get whole,” and made sure that the Russian oligarch to whom he owed the most money knew about his close connection with the Trump campaign (p. 135). 

The Mueller Report continued: “That plan, Manafort later acknowledged, constituted a ‘backdoor’ means for Russia to control eastern Ukraine” (p. 140). The region that Putin wanted was the country’s industrial heartland. He was offering a “peace” plan that carved off much of Ukraine and made it subservient to him. This was the dead opposite of U.S. policy for a free and united Ukraine, and there was no chance that former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who was running for the presidency against Trump, would stand for it. But if only Trump were elected….

And, in November 2016, he was.

According to the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee, Manafort’s partner and Russian operative Kilimnick wrote that "[a]ll that is required to start the process is a very minor 'wink' (or slight push) from D[onald] T[rump] saying 'he wants peace in Ukraine and Donbass back in Ukraine' and a decision to be a 'special representative' and manage this process." Following that, Kilimnik suggested that Manafort ‘could start the process and within 10 days visit Russia ([Yanukovych] guarantees your reception at the very top level, cutting through all the bullsh*t and getting down to business), Ukraine, and key EU capitals.’ The email also suggested that once then–Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko understood this ‘message’ from the United States, the process ‘will go very fast and DT could have peace in Ukraine basically within a few months after inauguration’” (p. 99).

According to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the men continued to work on what they called the “Mariupol Plan” at least until 2018.

In last night’s debate, Trump insisted that Putin never would have invaded Ukraine on his watch (although Putin in fact continued his 2014 assault during Trump’s term, and Trump tried to withhold support for Ukraine). 

After Russia invaded Ukraine again in 2022, Jim Rutenberg published a terrific and thorough review of this history in the New York Times Magazine, pointing out that Putin’s attack on Ukraine looked different with this history behind it. Once Biden took office in 2021, the many efforts of the people around Trump, including most obviously Rudy Giuliani, to influence Ukrainian politics through their ties to the White House were over. 

“Thirteen months later,” Rutenberg wrote, “Russian tanks crossed the Ukrainian frontier.” Once his troops were there, Putin claimed he had annexed Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson, two of which were specifically named in the Mariupol Plan, and instituted martial law in them, claiming that the people there had voted to join Russia.   

Last night, Trump claimed that the Ukrainians are losing the war and described how sad it was that their country is being destroyed (without mentioning that it is Putin’s unprovoked war that is doing that damage). He also significantly exaggerated how much money the U.S. has contributed to Ukraine’s defense. 

That misrepresentation lines up with Putin’s offer of Friday, June 14, 2024, in a “peace proposal” to Ukraine: Ukraine would give up Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson, including far more territory than Putin’s troops occupy, in exchange for a ceasefire. Putin said, “If Kyiv and the Western capitals refuse it, as before, then in the end, that’s their…political and moral responsibility for the continuation of bloodshed.” He also demanded an end to all sanctions and that Ukraine abandon its plan to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). (Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky rejected the plan and noted that there is no reason to think Putin will stop his land grab once his forces regroup.) 

So when Trump last night said about the 2022 invasion, “Putin saw that, he said, you know what, I think we’re going to go in and maybe take my—this was his dream. I talked to him about it, his dream,” it sounded as if he had been in on the Mariupol Plan. And when he talked about how the war needed to end, especially in light of Putin’s recent “peace” plan, it sounded as if perhaps he still is. 

And he promised, yet again, that he and he alone could get Gershkovich released.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Our former President and the presumptuous GOP candidate is a Russian agent. An agent of our enemy. Isn't that the definition of treason?

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Russia, Russia, Russia... but I'm sure it's pure coincidence.

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

June 28, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUN 29, 2024

There is huge news today: in the case of Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the Supreme Court overturned the Chevron defense doctrine that underpins the administrative state. 

I am putting that down as a marker because I’ve had a very busy week of travel and writing (the paperback edition of Democracy Awakening is coming out in October and I am working on a new afterword) and I am just too tired to cover it and its history well tonight. 

Instead, tonight I want to make a note of something that has been nagging at me for weeks now: Trump’s focus on 32-year-old Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who was arrested by Russian officers in March 2023 and is currently on trial for the trumped-up charge of espionage. The State Department considers him “wrongfully detained,” a rare designation indicating that the person is being held by a hostile government as a bargaining chip. That designation means the U.S. government will do all it can to secure his release. 

At least three times now, Trump has interfered with those negotiations by vowing that Russian president Vladimir Putin will release Gershkovich for him and him alone. He said it in last night’s CNN debacle, where he also made a big deal out of the idea that Putin will do it as a favor, without an exchange of money.  

He said something else last night in his slurry of words that jumped out. Somewhere in his discussion of Putin’s invasion of eastern Ukraine in February 2022, Trump said: “Putin saw that, he said, you know what, I think we’re going to go in and maybe take my—this was his dream. I talked to him about it, his dream.”

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 2019 report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election explained that Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager and then conduit to Russian operatives, in summer 2016 “discussed a plan to resolve the ongoing political problems in Ukraine by creating an autonomous republic in its more industrialized eastern region of Donbas, and having [Viktor] Yanukovych, the Ukrainian President ousted in 2014, elected to head that republic.” 

Manafort had helped to get the pro-Russian oligarch Yanukovych into office, and when Yanukovych fled to Russia after the Ukrainian people threw him out, Manafort was left unemployed and in debt to other oligarchs. When he went to work for Trump, for free, he promptly wrote to his partner Konstantin Kilimnik, whom the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee identified in 2020 as a Russian operative, asking how “we” could use the appointment “to get whole,” and made sure that the Russian oligarch to whom he owed the most money knew about his close connection with the Trump campaign (p. 135). 

The Mueller Report continued: “That plan, Manafort later acknowledged, constituted a ‘backdoor’ means for Russia to control eastern Ukraine” (p. 140). The region that Putin wanted was the country’s industrial heartland. He was offering a “peace” plan that carved off much of Ukraine and made it subservient to him. This was the dead opposite of U.S. policy for a free and united Ukraine, and there was no chance that former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who was running for the presidency against Trump, would stand for it. But if only Trump were elected….

And, in November 2016, he was.

According to the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee, Manafort’s partner and Russian operative Kilimnick wrote that "[a]ll that is required to start the process is a very minor 'wink' (or slight push) from D[onald] T[rump] saying 'he wants peace in Ukraine and Donbass back in Ukraine' and a decision to be a 'special representative' and manage this process." Following that, Kilimnik suggested that Manafort ‘could start the process and within 10 days visit Russia ([Yanukovych] guarantees your reception at the very top level, cutting through all the bullsh*t and getting down to business), Ukraine, and key EU capitals.’ The email also suggested that once then–Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko understood this ‘message’ from the United States, the process ‘will go very fast and DT could have peace in Ukraine basically within a few months after inauguration’” (p. 99).

According to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the men continued to work on what they called the “Mariupol Plan” at least until 2018.

In last night’s debate, Trump insisted that Putin never would have invaded Ukraine on his watch (although Putin in fact continued his 2014 assault during Trump’s term, and Trump tried to withhold support for Ukraine). 

After Russia invaded Ukraine again in 2022, Jim Rutenberg published a terrific and thorough review of this history in the New York Times Magazine, pointing out that Putin’s attack on Ukraine looked different with this history behind it. Once Biden took office in 2021, the many efforts of the people around Trump, including most obviously Rudy Giuliani, to influence Ukrainian politics through their ties to the White House were over. 

“Thirteen months later,” Rutenberg wrote, “Russian tanks crossed the Ukrainian frontier.” Once his troops were there, Putin claimed he had annexed Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson, two of which were specifically named in the Mariupol Plan, and instituted martial law in them, claiming that the people there had voted to join Russia.   

Last night, Trump claimed that the Ukrainians are losing the war and described how sad it was that their country is being destroyed (without mentioning that it is Putin’s unprovoked war that is doing that damage). He also significantly exaggerated how much money the U.S. has contributed to Ukraine’s defense. 

That misrepresentation lines up with Putin’s offer of Friday, June 14, 2024, in a “peace proposal” to Ukraine: Ukraine would give up Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson, including far more territory than Putin’s troops occupy, in exchange for a ceasefire. Putin said, “If Kyiv and the Western capitals refuse it, as before, then in the end, that’s their…political and moral responsibility for the continuation of bloodshed.” He also demanded an end to all sanctions and that Ukraine abandon its plan to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). (Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky rejected the plan and noted that there is no reason to think Putin will stop his land grab once his forces regroup.) 

So when Trump last night said about the 2022 invasion, “Putin saw that, he said, you know what, I think we’re going to go in and maybe take my—this was his dream. I talked to him about it, his dream,” it sounded as if he had been in on the Mariupol Plan. And when he talked about how the war needed to end, especially in light of Putin’s recent “peace” plan, it sounded as if perhaps he still is. 

And he promised, yet again, that he and he alone could get Gershkovich released.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[rjzimmerman]

These departures from the global ESG group Climate Action 100 + are primarily from US-based financial institutions, reflecting the influence of election money, the republican party and the trump cult on the financial services industry in the US. Do you think a win by Kamala Harris as President will make a difference? Hardly a whisper in the wind, or crickets. What about if the Dems maintain control over the Senate and somehow assume control in the House? I contend same outcome: whispers, if not crickets. So long as our elections favor and reward big money, from and to our own oligarchs or from or to corporations, thanks to the right-wing Supreme Court, and so long as that big money rewards politicians from all parties, Dems and republicans, expect nothing to change. Do you really think the "typical" US politician will shut down the pipeline of money to that "typical" politician? Nope, not without an outcry from the citizenry, and I don't see that happening anytime soon.

Excerpt from this story from Inside Climate News:

Over the past few months, a string of large American asset managers have left Climate Action 100+, a global investor group created to ensure that the largest corporate emitters of greenhouse gases take action on climate change. Their departure coincides with intensifying political debate over sustainable investing, as a variety of Republicans have sought to crack down on what they call a “climate cartel.” 

The backlash and withdrawal, experts say, is unique to the United States. As more investors join the climate initiative abroad, the exodus shines a spotlight on America’s political crusade over Environmental, Social and Governance investing, which the GOP denounces as “woke capitalism”—a means of advancing liberal social goals, Republican politicians contend, at the expense of investor returns. 

Climate Action 100+ comprises over 600 financial institutions seeking to engage companies they invest in on climate issues. In February, JPMorgan Chase, State Street, and bond manager PIMCO left the initiative. At the same time, BlackRock transferred its participation to BlackRock International. Last month, Goldman Sachs, Nuveen and other asset managers joined the exodus. 

Despite those prominent American departures, Climate Action 100+ is growing. Overall, 87 financial institutions signed onto the initiative since June 2023, more than double the amount of departures. Nearly 60 percent of the new members are based in Europe. 

Climate Action 100+ is still the largest investor collaboration around climate risk in the world, said Kirsten Spalding, vice president of the investor network at Ceres, one of the groups leading the initiative. 

Some of the U.S. signatories have also reiterated their support for the alliance. Commitment is particularly strong among asset owners including pension plans, churches and universities in both the U.S. and Europe. In July, asset owners representing $5.5 trillion globally signed a letter reiterating their commitment to the initiative. 

The last round of exits happened after companies received a letter of inquiry from the Republican chairmen of the House Judiciary Committee and one of its subcommittees in June. Sent to 130 U.S. companies, the letter requested documents about their goals for Environmental, Social and Governance investing, or ESG, and involvement in Climate Action 100+. 

The inquiry came a month after the House Judiciary Committee published a report and one of its subcommittees held a hearing alleging that financial firms had “colluded to force American companies to decarbonize and reach net zero.” 

The investors have not pointed to the inquiry as a reason for leaving, but the intensifying political pressure over ESG cannot be ignored, Spalding said. JPMorgan, State Street, Goldman Sachs and Nuveen did not respond to requests for comment. 

[pashterlengkap]

Jennifer Aniston blasts J.D. Vance’s misogynist “childless cat ladies” comments

Jennifer Aniston had some strong words this week for former President and current Republican nominee Donald Trump’s running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH). Like so many in the U.S., the Friends star was apparently shocked by Vance’s wildly misogynist comments belittling several prominent Democrats, including current Vice President and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, as “childless cat ladies,” which recently resurfaced on social media.   Related J.D. Vance calls Kamala Harris a “miserable cat lady” The mega-MAGA VP pick says having no kids means you can’t run the country. On Wednesday, Aniston took to Instagram, re-posting a clip from Vance’s July 29, 2021, appearance on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show. Your LGBTQ+ guide to Election 2024 Stay ahead of the 2024 Election with our newsletter that covers candidates, issues, and perspectives that matter. Subscribe to our Newsletter today “We’re effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too,” Vance told Carlson in the clip. “And it’s just a basic fact. You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?” It’s worth noting that less than a month after Vance’s comments, Buttigieg announced on social media that he and husband Chasten were in fact in the process of becoming parents. In September 2021, they announced that they had adopted fraternal twins Penelope Rose and Joseph August. One could reasonably chalk Vance’s assumption that Buttigieg couldn’t or wouldn’t have children up to homophobic ignorance, but his presumption about then-31-year-old Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) was just categorically asinine. Aniston seemed to agree. “I truly can’t believe this is coming from a potential VP of The United States,” Aniston commented in her Instagram story. “All I can say is… Mr. Vance, I pray that your daughter is fortunate enough to bear children of her own one day. I hope she will not need to turn to IVF as a second option. Because you are trying to take that away from her, too.” Aniston may have been referring to Vance’s recent opposition to the “Right to IVF Act.” The bill was introduced by Sens. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), Patty Murray (D-WA), and Cory Booker (D-NJ) earlier this year in the wake of the Alabama Supreme Court’s unprecedented February ruling that effectively outlawed in-vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment in the state. The “Right to IVF Act” would have ensured access to IVF and other forms of assisted fertility treatment nationwide. In June, Vance was one of 47 Senate Republicans to vote against the bill, which needed 60 votes to pass. The issue is personal for Aniston, who after years of tabloid speculation about her struggle to have children, opened up to Allure about her journey with IVF. “It was a challenging road for me, the baby-making road,” she told the magazine in 2022. “All the years and years and years of speculation… It was really hard. I was going through IVF, drinking Chinese teas, you name it. I was throwing everything at it. I would’ve given anything if someone had said to me, ‘Freeze your eggs. Do yourself a favor.’ You just don’t think it. So here I am today. The ship has sailed.” “I have zero regrets,” she added. “I actually feel a little relief now because there is no more, ‘Can I? Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.’ I don’t have to think about that anymore.” Vance’s opposition to a nationwide right to IVF doesn’t just affect cisgender women and others who can carry children. IVF is the most common method of assisted reproduction and, according to Dr. Eve Feinberg, associate professor of reproductive endocrinology and… http://dlvr.it/TB7SXb

[kp777]

By Thom Hartmann

Common Dreams

May 17, 2024

The ideology of the Republican Party and the stranglehold of powerful corporations of our political system overall has transformed America from a democracy into a late-stage oligarchy, and the point of no return is now visible.

The headline in this week’s Fortune reads:

“Billionaire investor Ray Dalio warns U.S. is ‘on the brink’ and estimates a more than 1 in 3 chance of civil war”

Billionaires and civil war? A billionaire-funded Supreme Court Justice flew the American flag upside down outside his house after January 6th in apparent support of Donald Trump‘s attempt to overthrow our government.

Americans for Tax Fairness reports that 50 billionaire families have, at this early stage, already injected almost a billion dollars into our political system — the overwhelming majority of it going to Republicans and in support of Donald Trump — in an effort to maintain enough control of our political system that their taxes won’t go up. And that total is just what’s reported: it doesn’t count the billions in unknowable dark money that’s sloshing around the system thanks to Citizens United.

Back in the day, the late Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis warned us:

“We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.”

The number one movie in America last month was Civil War. Right wing militias are on the march. More than half of Republicans say they are “expecting” a civil war.

How did we get here? And what does oligarchy have to do with civil war?

The clear result of five corrupt Republicans on the 1978 and 2010 Supreme Courts legalizing political bribery of politicians (and Supreme Court justices) by both corporations and the morbidly rich is that America is now well past the halfway mark of a fatal-to-democracy slide into oligarchy and the strongman autocracy typically associated with it. And the conflict that can follow that.

You can see the consequence in any contemporary survey. The majority of people want things — gun control, a strengthened social safety net, a cleaner and safer environment, quality, free education, higher taxes on the rich — that Congress refuses to do anything about because it is in thrall to great wealth.

As President Jimmy Carter told me eight years ago:

“It [Citizens United] violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. … So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election’s over.”

For example, just last week, Donald Trump solicited a $1 billion bribe from a group of fossil fuel executives in exchange for undoing all of President Biden’s climate regulations.

In a testament to how today’s form of transactional oligarchy has become normalized in America, the only national news organization that reported this shocking story was MSNBC; every other news outlet thought it was entirely normal for an American politician to have their hand out in exchange for legislative or policy changes. As Media Matters reported this week:

“CNN, Fox News Channel; ABC’s Good Morning America, World News Tonight, and This Week; CBS’ Mornings, Evening News, and Face the Nation; and NBC’s Today, Nightly News, and Meet the Press” all completely ignored the story.

What we are watching is the final stage of the 40-year neoliberal transition of our nation from a forward-looking and still-evolving democratic republic into a white supremacist ethnostate ruled by a small group of fascist oligarchs.

Some years ago, Trump economic adviser Stephen Moore (before he was Trump’s advisor) was a guest on my radio/TV program. I asked him, “Which is more important, democracy or capitalism?“

Without hesitation, Moore answered, “Capitalism.” He went on to imply this was how the Founders wanted things. After all, as George Orwell said:

“Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future.”

That philosophy and a phony American history have held the Republican Party in its thrall for the past 40+ years and have brought America to this moment of great crisis and danger.

It has transformed America from a democracy into a late-stage oligarchy, and the point of no return is now visible. Which presents a true crisis for America, because oligarchy is almost always merely a transitional phase in the evolution to full-blown tyranny and/or fascism, and often civil war.

Oligarchies are inherently unstable forms of government because they transfer resources and power from working people to the oligarchs. Average people, seeing that they’re constantly falling behind and can’t do anything about it, first become cynical and disengage, and, when things get bad enough, they try to revolt.

That “revolution” can either lead to the oligarchy failing and the nation flipping back to democracy, as happened here in the 1860s and the 1930s, or it can flip into full-blown strong-man tyranny, as happened recently in Hungary, Turkey, and Russia, and nearly happened here on January 6th.

Oligarchies usually become police states, where any average person who dares seriously challenge the ruling oligarchs is squashed like a bug either legally or financially; the oligarchs themselves are immune from prosecution and get to keep their billions regardless of how many people’s lives are ruined or die because of their crimes.

Oligarchic governments almost always do a few predictable things, as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy:

— They change monopoly laws and regulations so their rich buddies can take control of most of the nation’s businesses and media. — They stack the courts and regulatory agencies with oligarch-friendly ideologues or outright corrupt toadies, while eliminating regulatory protections for average citizens. — They cut taxes on the rich and drive wages low on working people while criminalizing and cracking down on dissent, particularly if it involves any sort of direct action or property damage. — They distract voters from their own looting by demonizing minorities and encouraging racism, religious/gender conflict, and regionalism. — They reinvent history to argue that the country was “always an oligarchy and that’s the way the nation’s founders wanted it. It’s what works best.” — They actively suppress the vote among people inclined to oppose them (typically minorities and the young), or outright rig the vote to insure their own victory. — And they transform their nations into police states, heavily criminalizing demonstrations, nonviolent resistance, or “direct action” while radicalizing and encouraging right wing vigilante “militias” to put down the inevitable pro-democracy rebellions as people realize what’s happening.

To the end of cementing their own oligarchy here, the billionaires who own the GOP are now actively promoting the same sort of revisionist history the Confederacy did, claiming that the Founders were all rich guys who hated taxes, wanted rich men to rule America, and wrote the Constitution to make that happen. It was a story popular in the South leading up to the Civil War, now part of the “Lost Cause” mythology.

To that end, they’re purging our schools and colleges of books and history courses; professors and teachers who don’t toe their line that America was designed from its founding to be an oligarchy are being fired as you read these words. In this, they’re promoting — for their own benefit — a dangerous lie.

A lie that rationalizes oligarchy.

While there were some in America among the Founders and Framers who had amassed great land holdings and what was perceived then as a patrician lifestyle, Pulitzer Prize winning author Bernard Bailyn suggests in his brilliant 2003 book To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders that they couldn’t hold a candle, in terms of wealth, to the true aristocrats of England.

With page after page of photographs and old paintings of the homes of the Founders and Framers, Bailyn shows that none of those who created this nation were rich by European standards. After an artful and thoughtful comparison of American and British estates, Bailyn concludes bluntly:

“There is no possible correspondence, no remote connection, between these provincial dwellings and the magnificent showplaces of the English nobility...”

Showing and describing to his readers the mansions of the families of power in 18th century Europe, Bailyn writes:

“There is nothing in the American World to compare with this.”

While the Founders and Framers had achieved a level of literacy, creativity, and a depth of thinking that rivaled that of any European states or eras, nonetheless, Bailyn notes:

“The Founders were provincials, alive to the values of a greater world, but not, they knew, of it – comfortable in a lesser world but aware of its limitations.”

As Kevin Phillips describes in his masterpiece book Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich:

“George Washington, one of the richest Americans, was no more than a wealthy squire in British terms.”

Phillips documents that it wasn’t until the 1790’s — a generation after the War of Independence — that the first American accumulated a fortune that would be worth one million of today’s dollars. The Founders and Framers were, at best, what today would be called the upper-middle-class in terms of lifestyle, assets, and disposable income.

In 1958, one of America’s great professors of history, Forrest McDonald, published an extraordinary book debunking Charles Beard’s 1913 hypothesis that the Constitution was created exclusively of, by, and for rich white men. McDonald’s book, titled We the People: The Economic Origins of the Constitution, bluntly states:

“Economic interpretation of the Constitution does not work.”

Over the course of more than 400 meticulously researched pages, McDonald goes back to original historical records and reveals who was promoting and who was opposing the new Constitution, and why. So far as I can tell, he is the first and only historian to do this type of original-source research, and his conclusions are startling.

McDonald notes that a quarter of all the delegates to the Constitutional Convention had voted in their own state legislatures for laws that would have helped debtors and the poor and thus harmed the interests of the rich.

“These [debt relief laws] were the very kinds of laws which, according to Beard’s hypothesis, the delegates had convened to prevent,” says McDonald. He adds: “Another fourth of the delegates had important economic interests that were adversely affected, directly and immediately, by the Constitution they helped write.”

While Beard theorizes that the Framers were largely drawn from the class of wealthy bankers and businessmen, McDonald shows that wasn’t true at all:

“The most common and by far the most important property holdings of the delegates were not, as Beard has asserted, mercantile, manufacturing, and public security investments, but agricultural property.”

Most were farmers or plantation owners and, as noted earlier, owning a lot of land did not always make one rich in those days, particularly compared to the bankers and mercantilists of New York and Boston.

“Finally,” McDonald concludes, “it is abundantly evident that the delegates, once inside the convention, behaved as anything but a consolidated economic group.”

After dissecting the means and motivations of the Framers who wrote the Constitution, McDonald goes into an exhaustive and detailed state-by-state analysis of the constitutional ratifying conventions that finally brought the U.S. Constitution into law.

For example, in the state of Delaware, which voted for ratification:

“[A]lmost 77 percent of the delegates were farmers, more than two-thirds of them small farmers with incomes ranging from 75 cents to $5.00 a week. Slightly more than 23 percent of the delegates were professional men – doctors, judges, and lawyers. None of the delegates was a merchant, manufacturer, banker, or speculator in western lands.”

In other states, similar numbers showed up. Of the New Jersey delegates supporting ratification, 64.1 percent were small farmers. In Maryland, “the opponents of ratification included from three to six times as large a proportion of merchants, lawyers, and investors in shipping, confiscated estates, and manufacturing as did the [poorer] delegates who favored ratification.”

In South Carolina it was those in economic distress who carried the day: “No fewer than 82 percent of the debtors and borrowers of paper money in the convention voted for ratification.” In New Hampshire, “of the known farmers in the convention 68.7 percent favored ratification.”

But did farmers support the Constitution because they were slave owners or the wealthiest of the landowners, as Charles Beard had guessed back in 1913?

McDonald shows that this certainly wasn’t the case in northern states like New Hampshire or New Jersey, which were not slave states.

But what about Virginia and North Carolina, the two largest slave-holding states, asks McDonald rhetorically. Were their plantation owners favoring the Constitution because it protected their economic and slave-holding interests?

“The opposite is true,” writes McDonald. “In both states the wealthy planters – those with personality interests [enslaved people] as well as those without personality interests – were divided approximately equally on the issue of ratification. In North Carolina small farmers and debtors were likewise equally divided, and in Virginia the great mass of the small farmers and a large majority of the debtors favored ratification.”

After dissecting the results of the ratification votes state by state — the first author in history to do so, as far as I can determine — McDonald sums up:

“Beard’s thesis — that the line of cleavage as regards the Constitution was between substantial personality interests [wealth and slave ownership] on the one hand and small farming and debtor interests on the other — is entirely incompatible with the facts.”

Here we find the explanation for James Madison sealing his notes on the Constitutional Convention until every man who participated was dead (they were finally published more than 50 years later in 1840). He and many others at the convention were essentially betraying their own economic class in favor of democracy. Something today’s wealthy Americans apparently can’t imagine doing.

No matter how hard Republicans try to reinvent the Founders and Framers of this nation in the image of their libertarian billionaire patrons, and no matter how imperfect and even brutal their time was, the simple reality is that in 1770’s America this nation’s Founders undertook American history’s first truly great progressive experiment.

And they all put their lives on the line to do it: when they signed their names on the Declaration, a death warrant was issued against each one of them by the largest and most powerful empire in the world.

And then, four generations later, we backslid.

The only other time in American history when an entire region of America was converted from a democracy into an oligarchy was the 1830-1860 era in the South. It’s why Republicans are so fond of the Confederate flag and Civil War memorial monuments.

The invention of the Cotton Gin made a few hundred families of southern planters richer than Midas; they seized political control of the region and then destroyed democracy in those states. Even white men who dared stand up to them were imprisoned or lynched, ballot boxes were stuffed, and social mobility came to a standstill.

By the 1840s, the South had become a full-blown police state, much like Trump and his acolytes would like America to become in the near future.

Offended and worried by the democratic example of the Northern states, the Confederacy declared war on the United States itself with the goal of ending democracy in America altogether. Almost 700,000 people died defending our form of government.

And now, for a second time in American history, we’re confronted with a near-complete takeover of about half of our nation by America’s oligarchs.

And with it has come not just the threat of political violence, but the reality, from the death of Heather Heyer to the George Floyd protests to January 6th and the assault on Paul Pelosi.

All driven by oligarchs determined to pit us against each other so we won’t recognize how they’re robbing us blind.

Unless and until our tax laws are changed and the Supreme Court’s legalization of political bribery is reversed, we’ll continue this disintegrative slide into fascism and the danger of domestic armed conflict.

This fall we’ll have the opportunity to elect politicians who actively oppose oligarchy and fascism while embracing the true spirit of American egalitarianism.

President Biden is the first president in 80 years to consequentially raise taxes on both rich people and corporations. That political bravery has brought him powerful enemies: this fall’s election will be hard fought.

Make sure everybody you know is registered to vote, and if you live in a Republican-controlled state double-check your voter registration every month at vote.org.

America’s future — and the integrity of our history — depend on it.

[tomorrowusa]

Republicans increasingly understand that it's getting harder for them to win elections when they aren't allowed to prevent people who don't like them from legally voting.

Elon Musk, who is homophobe Ron DeSantis's biggest tech fanboy, thinks that voting should be restricted to people who have children. Of course Musk is known for having sired numerous kids – in and out of wedlock – who he then stigmatizes with idiotic sounding names.

Elon Musk, of his various unconventional and controversial policy preferences, seems to have added a new one to his list: limiting voting to parents. The father of 10 responded to a Twitter user on Saturday who commented on Musk’s affirmation that “the childless have little stakes in the future” by saying, “Democracy is probably unworkable long term without limiting suffrage to parents. Helps solve the procreation problem, too.” Musk seemed to have endorsed the idea, offering a “Yup” in response to it, though he did not directly state the desire to limit voting.

Since Musk restricted viewing Twitter only to people who are logged in, I don't go there any more. I made that screenshot from the linked Daily Beast article.

Musk is not the only Republican advocating radical restrictions to voting.

One of the many candidates for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination proposed in May that the voting age should be raised to 25.

2024 GOP hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy proposes raising voting age to 25

Ramaswamy is another rightwing tech oligarch. Authoritarian control freaks make up a substantial percentage of that cohort.

It's not just Republican tech lords trying to keep people from voting. Red state legislatures are old pros at it. The most recent example is in North Carolina.

North Carolina voting rights 'still in five-alarm fire' despite supreme court ruling Republicans failed to defend a fringe legal theory, but they are already pushing through new state election legislation

The US supreme court ruled in favor of North Carolina voting rights groups last week, which celebrated with one breath and with the next condemned the new election laws and political maps being pushed by the state’s Republican-controlled legislature. “We are still in a five-alarm fire here in North Carolina,” said Gino Nuzzolillo, campaign manager for the state’s Common Cause branch, which was one of the plaintiffs that won in the case the supreme court ruled on. North Carolina Republicans, including Tim Moore, the speaker of the state’s house of representatives whose name is on the case, Moore v Harper, had asked the supreme court to take up a highly controversial legal theory that would have given him and legislators around the country immense power over setting state-level federal election laws. Even though the high court rejected that theory in a 6-3 vote, preventing a nationwide shift in checks and balances over writing election laws, North Carolina’s Republican legislators can already act largely unchecked by the other branches of state government. They have a veto-proof supermajority in the state legislature and the now Republican-controlled state supreme court signaled it would not act as a check on legislative power, including by taking the rare step to reverse two recent decisions by the previously Democrat-controlled court to re-allow partisan gerrymandering and require voter ID. [ ... ] North Carolina is the only state where the governor cannot veto election maps drawn by the legislature, meaning that not even split-party leadership of the executive and legislative branches is a check on gerrymandering.

State government, and state legislatures in particular, have been neglected far too long by progressives. Gaining control of state legislatures needs to get the same priority as gaining and keeping control of Congress. State legislatures can create laws for or against abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, and access to voting. And they basically draw their own legislative maps.

The first step in gaining control is to find out who is doing what. A good starting point is discovering just who represents you in your state's legislature. This works in every state except Montana where they seem to be working on a new legislative map...

Find your Local Legislator.

^^^ It also works for identifying your US House member.

Don't wait for the next person to save democracy.

[sparksinthenight]

Americans, please vote

If any American decides to not vote because Bernie won’t be on the ballot ... please don’t. I know Biden sucks but he’s better than Trump. 

Please if you can vote in the upcoming election do so.

I know the situation is not ideal. 

But we can’t have more years under Trump. He got millions of innocent people killed. Biden isn’t ideal but for fuck’s sake he’s better. 

Trump: 

•He tortured children and toddlers and babies by separating them from their families and holding them in incredibly abusive circumstances. Some kids died. Every child was deeply traumatized for the rest of their lives.   •He subjected asylum seekers to violence, lack of adequate services, and other human rights abuses with his “remain in Mexico” policy. People got raped and kidnapped and killed. They got sick and died. They were under incredibly stressful circumstances. 

•He made it so America took in way less refugees. Refugees that are fleeing for their lives and freedom, and dealing with crippling poverty within their displacement. 

•Donald Trump increased spending on harmful, homophobic, transphobic, and misogynistic abstinence-only sex education. This will make it so less teenagers know how to be sexually confident and healthy. It will perpetuate homophobia and rape culture. 

•Donald Trump put a fucking rapist on the Supreme Court.

•He sexually abused dozens of women and girls and he admitted to it. 

•Donald Trump is accused of rape by many women. 

•Trump used unnecessarily destructive war tactics in Syria that lead to the death of millions of completely innocent people, including children and babies, and wasn’t even effective against ISIS. He decimated an entire city. If he has used better tactics he could have avoided the vast majority of those civilian deaths and been more effective against the actual enemy.    

•Trump is giving weapons to Saudi Arabia which the country then uses to bomb Yemini school kids. 

•Donald Trump supported and encouraged many dictators, autocrats and oligarchs instead of doing anything to stand up for human rights, despite the US having a long history of speaking out against autocrats. This lead to governments around the world ramping up the repression of their people. 

•Trump removed many environmental protection laws. We are in the midst of an ecological crisis.  •He removed many consumer protection laws. This exposed people to harmful carcinogenic chemicals.        

•Trump removed labour protection laws. Workers deserve rights and dignity.

•He almost started a war which would’ve killed millions, caused instability, and ended up strengthening terrorist groups.

•He supports the use of weapons that cause human rights abuses. 

•Donald Trump has been incredibly, blatantly racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, classist, and xenophobic multiple times.  •He succeeded at instating his Muslim ban.  •Hd defunded many vital public services many people rely on.  •He defunded international aid programs so freaking much, especially programs for women’s health.  •He showed support to Nazi groups. Back groups. He sorted and ambled ducking Nazis. 

•Under him, racist hate groups have been empowered and hate crime levels have soared. Including violent hate crimes. 

•He got a man out of prison who was arrested for using his authority as a police sheriff to randomly arrest minorities and hold them in appalling prisons.

•Under him, ICE deported thousands of people, breaking their families and communities apart and leaving them with very little resources in a foreign land. Like, ICE quite literally deported the mothers of young children.  •Remember this is the guy who proposed a Muslim registry. 

•This is the guy behind the transgender military ban. 

•Donald Trump didn’t take Covid-19 seriously, leading to unnecessary deaths and an out-of-control pandemic. 

•The list goes on. It literally goes on forever. He is hurting everyone, especially the world’s most vulnerable, and he will continue to do so. 

 Yeah, Biden is racist, classist, homophobic, misogynistic and terrible, But not nearly as much. Not a NEARLY s much. He’s the normal amount of evil. Trump is pure, concentrated, saturated evil. 

And I know, I know we all wanted an anti capitalist Jewish man with a long history for standing up for the marginalized. I know we wanted someone who would fix the environment, fix the economy, end discrimination, and destroy the 1% and their henchmen. But just because we can’t have that right now doesn’t mean we can help Trump win by not voting against him. 

I know it will be difficult for a lot of you to cast your ballots. It would definitely be difficult for me if I was in a similar situation.

But please, if you genuinely care about any left-wing issue you'll see that Trump being stopped is more important than making a statement about the Democratic Party. I know the Democratic Party is problematic. The Republicans are worse though.  

You guys need to vote. Please vote. 

Please, for the love of everything good, fucking vote. 

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

13 Keys to the White House: Final Update

Original (May 25)

Update (June 2)

The results are in, Professor Allan Lichtman has released his official prediction for the 2020 presidential election, and he has called it for Joe Biden.

Lichtman has successfully predicted every election since 1984, and his method retroactively accounts for every election since 1860.  He understands that voters are not monoliths, they don’t just follow the leader blindly, they will reward an punish the president based on how they have driven the country.  Lichtman asks 13 yes/no questions, the 13 keys, to assess the performance of the incumbent party over the last few years; if less than 5 of the keys are false, the incumbent party wins another term.  If 6 or more are false, the challenging party takes over.

He predicted Ronald Reagan would win re-election in 1982, well before the Democrats had even chosen a candidate.  He predicted George H.W. Bush would win in early 1988, when he was trailing behind Michael Dukakis.  The only hiccup came from the year 2000, when he predicted that Al Gore would win, which by all rights he did!  He won the popular vote, and had the Florida recount not been stopped by W’s brother and the conservative majority Supreme Court, he would have won the electoral college too.  Lichtman even predicted that Gonad Lump would win in 2016.  His track record is impeccable.

The Keys are as follows:

Party Mandate:  After the midterm elections, the incumbent party holds more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives than after the previous midterm elections.  FALSE (Democrats took control of the House in 2018)

Contest:  There is no serious contest for the incumbent party nomination. TRUE (Trump had no challengers)

Incumbency: The incumbent party candidate is the sitting president.  TRUE (barring a debilitating brain aneurysm, he’s the Republican nominee)

Third party:  There is no significant third party or independent campaign. TRUE (The Libertarians and the Greens aren’t being given nearly as much spoiler traction as they were in 2016, and Kanye West is a joke)

Short-term economy: The economy is not in recession during the election campaign.  FALSE (Welcome to the Great Shutdown, the second once-in-a-lifetime economic collapse in the last 15 years, and we’re still in the first half of it)

Long-term economy:  Real per capita economic growth during the term equals or exceeds mean growth during the previous two terms.  FALSE (The GDP has fallen so much that growth is in the red; it took George W. Bush 8 years to tank the economy, but Trump did it in 3 1/2.  Even if we get another stimulus package, it will take years to dig ourselves out of this hole.)

Policy change: The incumbent administration effects major changes in national policy. TRUE (Trump has alienated out allies and flattered our enemies.  His foreign policy advances the interests of dictators, and his domestic policies help only the oligarchs.  Because Congress is split, no laws are being passed, so he has been signing a record number of Executive Orders to do whatever he wants with no repurcussions; EOs are law until Congress or the courts strike them down, but Congress can’t do anything, and he and Bitch McConnell have packed the courts in his favor.  The country has taken a total 180 in the last 4 years)

Social unrest:  There is no sustained social unrest during the term. FALSE  (The George Floyd Protests have been going strong for almost 3 months now, with no end in sight.  The media has stopped reporting on them, but the people are resilient; they will not take it lying down anymore! 2020 will go down in history as the new 1968.  Change is coming, sooner rather than later)

Scandal:  The incumbent administration is untainted by major scandal.  FALSE (Russia, Ukraine, Saudi Arabia, impeachment, enemies list, bribing porn stars, tax returns, perjury, underlings indicted/jailed, the post office, and 170000 people are DEAD)

Foreign/military failure:  The incumbent administration suffers no major failure in foreign or military affairs. TRUE (America hasn’t technically been defeated, though pulling out of Syria so the Turks can kill the Kurds is pretty shitty if you ask me)

Foreign/military success:  The incumbent administration achieves a major success in foreign or military affairs. FALSE (we’re still in Afghanistan, North Korea still hasn’t gotten rid of its nukes, and the US has lost its all credibility on the world stage in record time.)

Incumbent charisma: The incumbent party candidate is charismatic or a national hero.  FALSE (His base reveres him as the second coming of Christ, but he has never had majority approval.  In fact, he has consistently had majority DISAPPROVAL.  Even Republicans are getting tired of him; the Lincoln Project is very good at getting under his skin!  Charisma is subjective, but Lichtman compares candidates to the likes of the Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, JFK, and Ronald Reagan.  Trump doesn’t even come close)

Challenger charisma:  The challenging party candidate is not charismatic or a national hero.  TRUE (Joe Biden is the Walter Mondale of Al Gores.  He’s the Jimmy Carters of John Kerrys.  He’s the Michael Dukakis of Hillary Clintons.  He is old and unappealing to anyone under the age of 45, “competent,” but not extraordinary.  Liberals and moderates love him, but he’s way too conservative for progressives.  Republicans are acting like he’s a radical left-wing socialist when he is pretty much a Republican in all but name!  They would have no problem with him if he wore a red tie instead of a blue one, they just don’t want to concede an inch.  They want to shift the overton window so far to the right that Joe Biden looks like Joe Stalin; in a few years, Republicans will nominate someone so conservative they’ll make Donald Trump look like Bernie Sanders.  2024 is going to be a dark year for our Republic)

The final tally is 6 true, and 7 false.  Trump needed 8 true to win, so Biden is predicted to take the White House in November!

Of course, it’s entirely possible that Biden will win the popular vote and lose the electoral college a la 2000/2016.  He’s pulling ahead in the swing states, but it only takes a little fuckery to undo his progress; Florida is notorious for stopping election counts (Gore won in 2000, and Gillum won in 2018, but they just decided to stop counting in several blue cities), so it’ll come down to the Big 3; Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.  They were super close in 2016, and up until that point they were considered part of the Blue Wall, impenetrable Democratic strongholds.  The fact that they flipped for Trump would be like if Georgia and Texas flipped for Clinton.

Only time will tell.

[dragoni]

NYTimes, Stop being PC. “Republicans Are Stuck in Neutral” is a LIE even according to the stats in the article. Mitch McConnell and the Republican controlled Senate are to BLAME — the Senate is a “legislative graveyard”. 

The House passed  H.R. 8: Bipartisan Background Checks Act of 2019 in Feb 2019 — 7 months and 2 MASSACRES LATER  — McConnell STILL WON’T ALLOW A VOTE because the NRA paid their minions $1.6 Million to block H.R.8  #ElPasoMassacre  #DaytonMassacre  #NRABloodMoney

The number of Senate roll call votes on amendments — a key indicator of whether lawmakers are engaged in free and open debate — plummeted to only 18 this year, according to a review of congressional data. During the same time period in the 10 previous Congresses, senators took anywhere from 34 to 231 amendment votes.

McConnell isn’t doing the people’s business — he’s doing the business of donors  — stacking the courts — creating a Dystopian America run by Republican Oligarchs and Corporatocracy.   #TaxCutsForTheRich

In his effort to remake the courts, Mr. McConnell is succeeding; so far this year, the Senate has confirmed 13 circuit court nominees, for a total of 43 since Mr. Trump took office in 2017, and 46 of his district court nominees, for a total of 99. By contrast, during the last two years of President Barack Obama’s administration, with Republicans running the Senate, only 22 judicial nominees were confirmed.

Never forget, PRESIDENT Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland was stolen by #MoscowMitch and given to #TRE45ON — Brett Kavanaugh  — #ChristineBlaseyFord

“The Senate was supposed to be the great deliberative body,” said G. William Hoagland, the senior vice president of the Bipartisan Policy Center and a one-time adviser to Bill Frist, the former Republican leader. “You offered the amendments, and you debated the amendments and you actually had a debate. I got more out of last night’s Democratic debate on some policy issues than I’ve gotten the last few months out of the Senate.” 

“It’s totally dysfunctional.”, Senator Josh Hawley, a freshman Republican from Missouri  #OathOfOffice

“We’re at a complete standstill on the big stuff.”,  Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina

So racist Lindsey Graham found time to target asylum seekers and their kids!

Mr. Graham, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, pushed through an immigration measure that would extend family detentions, over the vociferous objections of committee Democrats.

“Mr. McConnell declined to be interviewed”

#RussianMoney  #LenBlavatnik   #OlegDeripaska  #EnemyOfThePeople

[republicansaredomesticterrorists]

This is just what we know about. This is the Neo-Nazi billionaire oligarch that owns Clarence Thomas. He flies Ted Cruz, Clarence Thomas, and other Republican politicians and judges around on his private jet. He has an autographed copy of Hitler’s book. He also has a “dictator garden” filled with larger than life sculptures of infamous dictators. Harlan Crow needs to be separated from his position of power. A small handful of billionaire oligarchs control the entire Republican Party and the illegitimate SCOTUS.

These oligarchs have been using their unlimited dark money to introduce legislation and decide cases in front of the Supreme Court for decades. They have been shaping America in their image since the 1960’s. If Trump wins or the Republicans take both houses of Congress it will be game over and welcome to Project 2025 and the end of democracy.

[arpov-blog-blog]

How Democrats can best use Joe Biden in the midterms

Milk toast Democrats lost control of Congress under BHO because they were afraid of the Tea Party. If Democratic candidates want to protect democracy, they had better not treat Biden the same way. Republicans trashed the economy during the Bush Presidency and Democrats corrected the problem.

DJT and Republican policies lead to the messy withdrawal from Afghanistan, the COVID related supply chain debacle, and price gouging inflation. Democrats should not allow Republicans to pin these on Biden. They should call out the authoritarian oligarchic policies of DJT and Republicans for their failures. Tax cuts only benefit the wealthy....."Democrats’ coolness toward Biden echoes the way they treated then-President Barack Obama in 2014. Democrats had already lost control of the House in a 2010 “shellacking.” With the Senate on the line as well, candidates were wary about linking themselves with the president. Beyond just not wanting him to campaign for them, candidates ran ads highlighting the differences they had with him, with one candidate refusing to say if she’d voted for Obama at all.

As you may recall, that strategy didn’t work out for the Democrats. Their losing the Senate gave the GOP the power it used to block a Supreme Court nominee and dozens of other seats on the federal bench. Many Democrats in 2014 preferred Biden.

“I’ve been invited to go into, well, over 128 races so far,” Biden told CNN back then. “And so there are some places the president is considerably more popular than I am, but there’s some places where I can go in and the president can’t.” My, how the tables have turned, as Obama, not Biden, is prepared to headline a Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee fundraiser next week.

A key difference between now and then, though, is that unlike the Affordable Care Act, the biggest achievement Democrats got through Congress this year isn’t politically toxic. While I would have loved for the Inflation Reduction Act to pass much sooner (and be much larger), its late timing may work in Democrats’ favor. It gives them a boost among previously unimpressed voters, shows that they can achieve results, and it came too late for Republicans to spend the summer tearing it down as they did with Obamacare in 2010."

[phroyd]

Under NO Circumstances can we permit an Article V Constitutional Convention be Convened! It would become a Disaster of Conservative and Corporate destruction to our basis of Law.  It would also precipitate the next Civil War. - Phroyd

In a nation governed by a supreme law of the land, a “law” every politician recites a “so help me god” oath to support and defend, it is a sad state that the political party running the government rejects that “supreme law” out of hand. Even worse, since Trump’s poorly attended inauguration, more Republicans are coming out against the U.S. Constitution with no outrage among the population. The party’s standard bearer, dirty Don Trump, boldly claimed the “supreme law” is bad for Americans and “archaic” to set the stage for Republicans to create a new modern law of the land. As of late, an increasing number of Republicans claim their truly archaic religious rule book, or some bastardized interpretation of it, supersedes the law of the land; anything in the Constitution stating otherwise is “unconstitutional.”

It is unfortunate, but the number of politicians dreaming of abolishing the U.S. Constitution for a new set of “god-bestowed” laws includes the entirety of the Republican Party; the Koch brothers have been greatly increasing their already very substantial funding for the campaign to “rebirth the Constitution.” This movement has been in the works for a long time, and of course the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has been instrumental in the crusade to transform the current Constitution into a document amenable to the demands of the libertarian Kochs and Christian Dominionists. The movement became mainstream in GOP circles when the RNC included an entire section devoted to creating a new evangelical and Koch-friendly constitution in its official 2016 platform.

Of course then, like now, many Americans claim a Republican platform is just a “guideline,” or wish-list of their Utopian vision of more perfect GOP Union. But they are well beyond a “guideline” and well on their way towards “replacing” the U.S. Constitution. Like Americans’ apathy at the creeping theocracy threatening their way of life,  there is little to no outrage or abject fear in the population at the demise of the document that informs this nation.

There is a concerted, and very well-funded, crusade among Republican-controlled states to be proactive in anticipating the addition of 5 states to successfully call for a constitutional convention. The requirement to convene a constitutional convention is 34 states and exactly a year ago Wyomingbecame the 29th state to pass a resolution “requesting a convention of the states”  to rewrite the law of the land.

There was little-to-no reporting about two weeks ago that another Republican state joined the others in passing an initiative to convene a constitutional convention to conform to the Koch brothers’ vision of America. In Iowa, the Senate passed “Joint Resolution 8” calling for a convention of the states to impose the Koch-libertarian-evangelical created Constitution on the American people.

This action is not by a rogue state or outlier by any stretch and if Republicans gain control of four or five more states, they will invoke Article 5 of the current Constitution and begin dismantling the administrative state (government). And because they intend to create a new constitution, they will enshrine protections to ensure the federal government will never return.

Iowa Republicans claim their intent is imposing “fiscal restraints” to limit federal government spending to only what Republicans want, and severely limit the authority and the jurisdiction of the federal judiciary and Congress. This is a common theme among the states’ “initiatives,” but as Bill Meyers noted, when Republicans states are the sole participants in “amending” the Constitution, they will not limit their efforts to one item and a “runaway convention” will be a certainty.

If Americans were aware of what the Kochs and evangelicals really intend for the new law of the land, they may wake up and revolt. But the population as a whole is inherently ignorant or we would not be on the brink of a new America and a two-bit corrupt celebrity would not be in the White House.

Of course the Kochs and evangelicals intend to have a federal government, but only to tax the people just enough to pay for an army, a federal police force, and the church. If any American doesn’t believe it, consider that “fiscal responsibility” is code for the Republicans’ long sought-after “balanced budget amendment.” Republicans will mandate a budget that cannot exceed tax revenue, and according to the earliest reporting on the recent and drastic revenue shortfall due to the Heritage Foundation’s tax reform, there will not even be enough budget to fund the military or federal police; of course “the church” funding has not been affected. Any part of government unrelated to waging wars or religion will have to be eliminated for lack of revenue according to the Koch’s libertarian agenda.

What may be worse is the insertion of what Republicans denote as “god” rights and laws. An excerpt from the 2016 RNC platform clearly portends an end to equal rights, religious freedom and signals the imposition of an evangelical theocracy as the law of the land. It says that the new “rebirthed” Constitution will guarantee:

“That God bestows certain inalienable rights on every individual; that government exists first and foremost to protect those inalienable [god] rights; that man-made law must be consistent with God-given, natural rights; and that if God-given rights come in conflict with government, court, or human-granted rights, God-given, natural, rights always prevail.” (author bold)

It doesn’t take a genius to notice the number of “god” references or that, as evangelical fanatics scream mercilessly, that “god” prevails over everything. What that means for a new America is that all laws will have to conform with “god” law and the concept of church-State separation will cease to exist. Republicans and evangelical leaders have claimed loudly that god created America and he is the law of the land and that absurd notion will be the new law of the land’s overriding theme. Those radical  evangelicals directing Republicans will not pass up a chance to make the Bible the constitution and America a Christian nation.

As Mr. Moyers points out, since Republicans states will convene the constitutional convention, they will have the right to set the rules and the agenda. That includes creating a new ratification process by reducing the number of states needed to approve the new Constitution and removing Congress from the approval process altogether. Republicans can, and will, reserve participation to Republican leaders and their corporate and evangelical advisors, and there is nothing any Supreme Court, U.S. Congress, or masses of people can do to stop them. In fact, there is even talk of the new Constitution allowing states to nullify any past, present or future Supreme Court ruling that the evangelical right or Republicans don’t consider valid or “god” approved. It would not be a shock if they just disband the federal judiciary and adhere to the Oathkeepers’ mentality and make the Constitutional sheriff the sole criminal justice system and arbiter of the law of the land.  

Republicans are serious about transforming America and the Koch brothers and a few oligarchs provide unlimited funds, much of it dark money, to accomplish the dirty deed. Evangelicals do their part by supplying voters, and Trump created a perfect conduit for corporate money to influence elections through tax deductible church SuperPACs.

It is stunning that this truly existential threat to Americans’ way of life, and their nation as it has prospered for over 230 years, has progressed this far to actually become a terrifying reality. It is not pleasant to contemplate, but America’s days as a nation other country’s citizens admired are over. Sadly this pitiful country is only five Republican states away from officially being over as the Founding Fathers created it. Because without the current U.S. Constitution there is no United States of America. This like everything else happening to Americans was in the works long before Trump, but he has done his part by declaring the Constitution is “bad for America” to make the Kochs, evangelicals, and Republicans heroes for crusading to replace it.

Phroyd

[capricorn-0mnikorn]

Pondering: “How did we (the U.S.) get here?”

[Putting the conclusion first, for TL;DR reasons (repeated, in proper prose, below):

The Republican Party is symbiotically bonded with Evangelical Christianity, and, through the vehicle of the GOP, Evangelical Christians are trying to impose Christian religious law across the board;

Evangelical Christianity started its mass infiltration of government during Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign.

Ronald Reagan was the first Republican elected to the presidency since Richard Nixon resigned under threat of impeachment.

The Impeachment proceedings against Nixon, in the Senate and the House, were proof that the checks and balances put in place by the framers of the U.S. Constitution, can actually work.

And (personal opinion, here) I fear the Republicans are trying to make sure the Constitution never works again.]

And I’ll also put this above the line (copied from below):

Therefore: if the Republicans retain control of all branches of government -- especially the House and Senate -- after November 6, this year, I wouldn’t be surprised if 45 tries to revoke presidential term limits. After all, he’s already praised Xi Jinping for doing the same thing. And I don’t have any faith that fellow Republicans would try to stop him.

Vote!!!

(Links to sources and Wikipedia articles on the history embedded in the post below the cut)

As I was getting up, yesterday morning (28 June, 2018), listening to NPR’s reporting on Anthony Kennedy’s retirement from the Supreme Court, I was thinking about the comment I made to @inthedayglo, in this thread:

I haven’t felt this pessimistic about the future since Reagan – and back then, I high key believed the world – or at least, the majority of human civilization – would end in a global thermonuclear war.

…So that’s saying something.

And realizing that, no -- that’s not hyperbole.

Now, when Reagan was first elected, I was sixteen, going on seventeen -- just like the archetypal (if not the actual majority) blogger of Tumblr, today. And just like today’s teens, I was full of angst and passion.  I thought it very likely I, and much of my cohort, would die before we reached the age of our parents.

So, here I was, listening to the news, and puzzling through why the dread I’m feeling now is worse than the dread I was feeling almost 40 years ago. And then, it dawned on me:

Back in the day, our greatest fear was someone starting a nuclear war by accident.

But ever since 45th’s ascension to the White House, I’ve been increasingly convinced the Oligarchs are pushing us to catastrophe on purpose: Denying Climate Change, starting trade wars, alienating our allies, trying to repeal healthcare, repealing Net Neutrality (And passing Article 13 -- it’s all part of the same trend).

What I couldn’t understand is why. Why would you lock yourself inside your house, and then set it on fire?  Undoing Obama’s legacy out of spite could be a mighty motivation. But you can’t exactly enjoy your gloat if you’re dead. What about all the potential grand-babies the old, white, surviving Baby Boomers are wringing their hands over?

And then, two weeks ago, @ok2befat said this in her video response to Jeff Sessions’ and Sarah Sanders’ claim that stealing children from their parents at the border is the Christian thing to do:

"[Evangelical Christians are] in a literal Death Cult. Like, they want the world to end, and everyone to die -- including themselves -- so that Jesus can come back. [. . .] They don't care if the whole thing goes off a cliff.  [. . .] If we were headed for a metaphor cliff, they would be the ones stomping on the gas, 'cause they want to go off the cliff sooner!" (Source: cued to 16:11 in a roughly 18 min. video; cw for swear words)

As she points out, there are more Evangelical Christians in 45′s cabinet than any previous administration.

So... yeah: it’s not just my imagination. They’re doing this on purpose.

But it didn’t start with 45. Evangelical Christians made their first mass entries into politics, through the so-called “Moral Majority,” in Ronald Reagan’s first campaign (and we come back, full circle, to the start of this post). And they’ve been bonded with the Republican Party, and growing in power, ever since. 

...The demise of the Carter administration, and the way Reagan came into power, is an effin’ trip, and probably deserves at least two posts of their own, just for ranting. ...

And Carter was the only Democrat president between Nixon’s demise via the Watergate Hearings and Reagan’s election. 

Jimmy Carter was far from a perfect president, but among the things he did right, were:

Pardoning all Vietnam War draft dodgers

Presiding over the establishment of the Departments of Energy and Education

(And promoting green, renewable, energy -- we got our solar panels for hot water in those years, with a tax break to help pay for them)

And, even though he, himself, is an Evangelical Christian, he respected the separation of Church and State, because he knew he was President to everyone, not just those in his branch of his faith.

And part of me daydreams about an alternative history, and where we would be today, if he’d gotten elected to a second term, and gotten credit for the freeing of the Iran Hostages.

Maybe we’d still have ended up with Nuclear War... ‘Cause he did escalate things with the Soviets in Afghanistan, and started the gears turning that linked Oil and Capitalism with “national security.” But also maybe his policies to encourage solar and wind energy would have taken root, and the Doomsday Clock would still only be counting down to nuclear war, and not nuclear war plus global warming.

But ever since Nixon’s resignation in shame, Republicans had been saying that the Impeachment Hearings ruined our country, and destroyed our democracy, and I’m convinced that they were so willing to link up with the Moral Majority because allies in the churches would help them make sure the Constitution, which brought down one of their own, wouldn’t ever bring down another.

(In other words, if the Republicans retain control of all branches of government -- especially the House and Senate -- after November 6, this year, I wouldn’t be surprised if 45 tries to revoke presidential term limits. After all, he’s already praised Xi Jinping for doing the same thing. And I don’t have any faith that fellow Republicans would try to stop him.)

[yourreddancer]

Heather Cox Richardson

April 17, 2022 (Sunday)

Today, political scientist and member of the Russian legislative body Vyacheslav Nikonov said, “in reality, we embody the forces of good in the modern world because this clash is metaphysical…. We are on the side of good against the forces of absolute evil…. This is truly a holy war that we’re waging, and we have to win it and of course we will because our cause is just. We have no other choice. Our cause is not only just, our cause is righteous and victory will certainly be ours.” Nikonov was defending the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in which Russian troops have leveled cities, killed thousands, kidnapped children, and raped and tortured Ukrainian citizens.

The intellectual leap from committing war crimes to claiming to be on the side of good might be explained by an interview published in the New Statesman at the beginning of April. Speaking with former Portuguese secretary of state for European affairs Bruno Maçães, Sergey Karaganov, a former advisor to Russian president Vladimir Putin, predicted the end of the western democracies that have shaped the world since World War II. Dictators, he suggested, will take over.

Democracy is failing and authoritarianism rising, Karaganov said, because of democracy’s bad moral foundations. As he put it: “Western civilisation has brought all of us great benefits, but now people like myself and others are questioning the moral foundation of Western civilisation.”

Karaganov’s statement says a lot about why white evangelicals in the U.S. are willing to toss democracy overboard in favor of a one-party state dominated by one powerful leader. They deny the premise of a system in which all people are equal before the law and have the right to have a say in their government.

Putin cemented his rise to power in 2013 with antigay laws that supporters claimed defended conservative values against an assault of “genderless and fruitless so-called tolerance,” which “equals good and evil.” Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, an ally of Putin’s, has been open about his determination to replace the multiculturalism at the heart of democracy with Christian culture, stop the immigration that he believes undermines Hungarian culture, and reject “adaptable family models” for “the Christian family model.”The American right has embraced this attack on our system.

 In October 2021, former vice president Mike Pence spoke in Budapest at a forum denouncing immigration and urging traditional social values, where he told the audience he hoped that the U.S. Supreme Court would soon outlaw abortion thanks to the three justices Trump put on the court. Next month, the American Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) will be held in Budapest, Hungary; Orbán will be the keynote speaker.

Increasingly, Republican lawmakers have called not for the U.S. government to leave business alone, as was their position under President Ronald Reagan, but to use government power to crack down on ”woke” businesses they insist are undermining the policies they value—meaning companies that protect LGBTQ rights, racial justice, reproductive choice, and access to the ballot. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis and his supporters have threatened Disney for its mild defense of LGBTQ rights, insisting the company grooms children for sexual abuse, and Texas Republicans are considering barring local governments from doing business with any national company that provides abortion coverage for its employees. 

To achieve such control in a country where they are a minority, they are skewing the electoral system to install a one-party government. Just like Orbán’s government in Hungary, and Putin’s in Russia, the one-party government they envision will benefit a very small group of wealthy people: witness the Russian oligarchs whose yachts worth hundreds of millions of dollars are being impounded all over the world. And, just like those governments, it will be overseen by a strongman, who will continue to insist that his opponents are immoral.

But here’s the thing: Democracy is a moral position. Defending the right of human beings to control their own lives is a moral position. Treating everyone equally before the law is a moral position. Insisting that everyone has a right to have a say in their government is a moral position. This moral position is hardly some newfangled radicalism. It is profoundly conservative. It is the fundamental principle on which our country has been based for almost 250 years.

In 1776, the nation’s Founders wrote in the Declaration of Independence that all people “are created equal…[and] are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness….” They asserted that governments are legitimate only if those they govern consent to them. The Founders did not live these principles, of course; they preserved the racial, gender, and wealth inequality that enabled them to imagine a world in which white men of property were all equal.

But after World War II, Americans tried to bring these principles to life. It is this attempt for America to realize its ideals that the radicals on the right want to overturn.  After World War II, the Supreme Court began to insist that all Americans really do have a right to self-determination and that they must be treated equally before the law. Using the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee that no state can “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” it began to upend longstanding racial, gender, class, and religious hierarchies.

It is said, for example, that the promise of equality before the law meant that people of color had a right to a jury that was not made up exclusively of white people, that Black and Brown kids had a right to attend the same public schools as their white neighbors, and that white Americans could not kill or assault Black Americans without consequences. It decided that states could not privilege one race or one religion over another and that people have the right to marry whom they wish, across racial and gender lines. It decided that people themselves, not the state, had a right to plan their families. 

Then, to ensure that states were truly democratic, in 1965, Congress protected the right of all Americans to vote, giving them an equal say in their government and bringing to life the concept in the Declaration of Independence that governments are legitimate only when they derive their power from the consent of the governed.

Americans who had seen the horrors of the Holocaust—which was, after all, the logical and ultimate outcome of a society based on hierarchies—saw their defense of equality as a moral position. It recognizes the inherent worth of individuals without privileging one race, one gender, one religion, or the wealthy. It works to bring the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution to life, stopping the violence that certain white Christian men in the past visited on those they could dominate with impunity.

Those radicals who are now taking away the right of self-determination, the right to equality before the law, and the right to vote because they are “questioning the moral foundation of Western civilisation” are launching a fundamental attack on our nation. In his day, responding to a similar attack, Abraham Lincoln noted that accepting the idea of inequality was an act of destruction that would “transform this Government into a government of some other form.”

Arguments based in the idea that some people are not capable of making their own decisions “are the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world,” Lincoln said in 1858. “I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it[,] where will it stop…. If that declaration is not the truth, let us get the Statute book, in which we find it and tear it out[.]”