#Republicans work to hurt average Americans

[scottguy]

The American people are NOT crying out for overpriced insulin. Republicans are just sucking up to their big pharma donors.

Republicans think that enough of their voters are brainwashed enough to still believe that right-wing politicians give a single damn about average Americans.

Prove them wrong and vote blue.

A party should EARN your vote by passing laws that help you, not that HURT you!

GQP - Wrong side of every issue

[chamerionwrites]

President Biden issued an executive order on Tuesday that prevents migrants from seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border when crossings surge, a dramatic election-year move to ease pressure on the immigration system and address a major concern among voters.

The measure is the most restrictive border policy instituted by Mr. Biden, or any other modern Democrat, and echoes an effort in 2018 by President Donald J. Trump to cut off migration that was blocked in federal court.

In remarks at the White House, Mr. Biden said he was forced to take executive action because Republicans had blocked bipartisan legislation that had some of the most significant border security restrictions Congress had considered in years.

“We must face a simple truth,” said the president, who was joined by a group of lawmakers and mayors from border communities. “To protect America as a land that welcomes immigrants, we must first secure the border and secure it now.”

Aware that the policy raised uncomfortable comparisons, Mr. Biden took pains to distinguish his actions from those of Mr. Trump. “We continue to work closely with our Mexican neighbors instead of attacking them,” Mr. Biden said. He said he would never refer to immigrants as “poisoning the blood” of the country, as Mr. Trump has done.

Still, the move shows how drastically the politics of immigration have shifted to the right in the United States. Polls suggest there is support in both parties for border measures once denounced by Democrats and championed by Mr. Trump as the number of people crossing into the country has reached record levels in recent years.

The restrictions kick in once the seven-day average for illegal crossings hits 2,500 per day. Daily totals already exceed that number, which means that Mr. Biden’s executive order could go into effect right away — allowing border officers to return migrants across the border into Mexico or to their home countries within hours or days.

Typically, migrants who cross illegally and claim asylum are released into the United States to wait for court appearances, where they can plead their cases. But a huge backlog means those cases can take years to come up.

The new system is designed to deter those illegal crossings.

The border would reopen to asylum seekers only when the number of crossings falls significantly. The figure would have to stay below a daily average of 1,500 for seven days in a row. The border would reopen to migrants two weeks after that.

The American Civil Liberties Union said it planned to challenge the executive action in court.

“The administration has left us little choice but to sue,” said Lee Gelernt, a lawyer at the A.C.L.U, which led the charge against the Trump administration’s attempt to block asylum in 2018 and resulted in the policy being stopped by federal courts. “It was unlawful under Trump and is no less illegal now.”

There would be limited exceptions to the restrictions announced Tuesday, including for minors who cross the border alone, victims of human trafficking and those who use a Customs and Border Protection app to schedule an appointment with a border officer to request asylum.

But for the most part, the order suspends longtime guarantees that give anyone who steps onto U.S. soil the right to seek a safe haven.

The executive action mirrors the legislation that Republicans blocked in February, saying it was not strong enough. Many of them, egged on by Mr. Trump, were loath to give Mr. Biden a legislative victory in an election year.

“Donald Trump begged them to vote ‘no’ because he was worried that more border enforcement would hurt him politically,” Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman, said in a statement on Tuesday. He added: “The American people want bipartisan solutions to border security — not cynical politics.”

Immigration advocates and some progressive Democrats have expressed concern that Mr. Biden was abandoning his promise to rebuild the asylum system.

“By reviving Trump’s asylum ban, President Biden has undermined American values and abandoned our nation’s obligations to provide people fleeing persecution, violence, and authoritarianism with an opportunity to seek refuge in the U.S.,” said Senator Alex Padilla, Democrat of California.

Tuesday’s decision is a stark turnaround for Mr. Biden, who came into office attacking Mr. Trump for his efforts to restrict asylum. During a 2019 debate, Mr. Biden, then a candidate running against Mr. Trump for the first time, excoriated his rival’s policies.

“This is the first president in the history of the United States of America that anybody seeking asylum has to do it in another country,” Mr. Biden said at the time.

[centrally-unplanned]

To narrow in on the limits of campaigning, lets take the classic Yglesias axe to grind:

Republican elites were profoundly divided on the wisdom of renominating Trump and obviously plenty of them think it was a mistake. But the decision has been made, and now they either vocally support that call or they stay politely quiet. When Trump feints to the center, those who favor the move loudly amplify it and exaggerate the extent of Trump's moderation, those who don't stay politely quiet and hope for the best. The Dem coalition, by contrast, is tchetchy and every constituent element feels that everything is up for constant renegotiation on a day-to-day basis — everyone's priority is on standing within the coalition not on doing the work to win.

In practice, what is being described here is that Republican organizations have fallen in line. Politicians are campaigning for Trump, activist groups are saying to vote, the media is full court press in his favor. They actively silence and push away from problems, focus on strengths, campaign on the ground, etc. This is effective for mobilizing voters and persuading sympathetic-but-undecideds. I agree with that.

The critique is that the democrats haven't done that, right? In practice, it means politicians aren't campaigning on the ground, media isn't shutting up about his issues, activists are sniping their own coalition instead of getting out the vote, and so on. And that is hurting Biden.

Or is it? It is to some degree, this critique is correct at some margin. If Biden could have a unified party going full-throttle, his polls numbers would be higher by X%. And some actors should switch behavior due to that. But I don't think, realistically, X is at all that high? Because the political parties in the US are just very, very different.

How would "dem media falling in line" look? What media?? The New York Times is not a dem establishment! Its incredibly liberal-left leaning, but its committed to neutrality as a core of its brand (and dissident snootiness as the other core of its brand). If it abandoned that its readers would *leave*, they have other options. And so on down the chain - a lot of the "dem voters" actively want balanced coverage and dissent. If I read a news source never criticizing Biden I would quit it, no way, this news isn't good.

And so on down the chain again, activist groups "driving out the voter?" What does that mean? I don't listen to activist groups, that is fucking cringe. Yeah, sure, they can drive some vote, but most of their affiliated members are loose, they don't listen that much to them. To the extent that they do not reflect the desires of their members, they will fall apart. Is Nancy Pelosi not supporting Biden? She does! Most dem politicians do. You just don't care, you can make up your own mind.

Dem voters are more of a looser coalition, they are on average better educated/smarter and more independently minded, and they live in places of increased social atomization & independence. They just cannot be mobilized the way republican voters can. Sometimes, you can really "animal spirits" it? Do the 2008 Obama, be a charismatic vessel for their hopes and dreams. But that is not a controllable phenomenon, and very hard for incumbents to pull off. Its not a switch Biden can flip.

So saying "Biden needs to do this to campaign better" on this topic is a bit of a chicken and egg thing, like yeah I too would like to fix the inherent inequality in the American voting public! Hopelessly unbudgeable, no, but the margins here are probably smaller than the wonk strategist types want to admit. You could never, in any world, have gotten the "Israel/Palestine left bloc" to "fall in line". That is a fundamental misunderstanding of the American body politic.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

September 5, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Sep 06, 2024

The U.S. government continues to tighten the screws against Russian malign activity. This morning the Department of Justice announced an indictment charging Dimitri Simes for violating U.S. sanctions against Russia. Simes allegedly worked for a sanctioned Russian television station and laundered the money from his work. Simes advised Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. 

A second indictment charged Simes’s wife, Anastasia, with sanctions violations and money laundering through the purchase of fine art. 

The Justice Department also issued a grand jury’s superseding indictment against six Russian computer hackers. Five were officers in Russia's military intelligence agency; one is a civilian. The six are charged with hacking into and leaking information from, as well as destroying, Ukrainian computer systems. The hackers also attacked systems in European countries that support Ukraine and in the U.S.

The State Department has offered a $10 million reward for information on the defendants’ locations or their malicious cyberactivity.

The fallout from yesterday’s revelation that six powerful right-wing media figures were on the Russian payroll continues. One of the right-wing commenters referred to in yesterday’s indictment, Tim Pool, has pushed the idea that the U.S. is in a civil war, interviewed Trump on his podcast in May, and has been fervently against American aid to Ukraine. Today, he posted: “Upon reflection I now understand that Ukraine is our Greatest ally[.] As the breadbasket of Europe and a peace loving people we cannot allow the Fascist Russians to continue their crimes against humanity[.] We must redouble our efforts and provide and additional $200b at once[.]”

By this evening, though, he was making a joke of the news that his paycheck had come from Russia.

Notably, Trump posted on his social media site a rant that tied his own 2016 campaign to yesterday’s indictments, although the indictment itself did not do so. He accused “Comrade Kamala Harris and her Department of Justice” of “resurrecting the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, and trying to say that Russia is trying to help me, which is absolutely FALSE.”

Vice President Harris is not in charge of the Department of Justice.

By tying yesterday’s indictments to his campaign’s involvement with Russian operatives in 2016, Trump might have been trying to suggest the story was old news, but it does highlight the parallels between Russia and right-wing operatives trying to get him reelected. Along with his colleague Donie O’Sullivan, Jake Tapper put it like this on CNN: “Today, the U.S. government is trying to peel back more layers of what officials say are massive and complex efforts underway to influence your vote in the upcoming election. One part of these alleged plots: replacing your average 2016 Russian social media bots with actual conservative Americans, right-wing influencers with a combined millions of followers, influencers promoted by Elon Musk, some visited by Republican politicians such as former president Trump.” 

Then Trump fell back on the old trope that his opponents are communists, posting on his social media platform: “We are fighting true COMMUNISM in this Country. We have to save our Elections, our System of Justice, our Constitution, and our FREEDOM, but that can only be done after we win BIG on November 5th, and proceed to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.” 

Economists for Goldman Sachs Group Inc. say that a Trump win in November would hurt the U.S. economy, while a Harris win—if she also gets Democratic control of the House and the Senate—would make it grow. 

Trump’s 2024 campaign is not at all about reality; it’s about a worldview. When asked at an event at the New York Economic Club “what specific piece of legislation will you advance” to make child care affordable, the 78-year-old Trump answered:

“Well I would do that. And we’re sitting down. You know I was somebody. We had Senator Marco Rubio, and my daughter Ivanka was so impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that because—look, child care is child care. It’s—couldn’t, you know, it’s something you have to have it—in this country you have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to—but they’ll get used to it very quickly—and it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country. Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s going to take care. We’re going to have—I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time, coupled with the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country, because I have to stay with child care. I want to stay with child care, but those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth, but growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just told you about. We’re going to be taking in trillions of dollars, and as much as child care is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in. We’re going to make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people, and then we’ll worry about the rest of the world. Let’s help other people, but we’re going to take care of our country first. This is about America first. It’s about Make America Great Again, we have to do it because right now we’re a failing nation, so we’ll take care of it.” 

There is no specific legislation here, or even a grasp of the specific nature of the problem of paying for child care. What there is, apparently, is an argument that high tariffs will solve all of the nation’s problems. In the New York event, Trump called again for slashing taxes on the wealthy and insisted that new, high tariffs of 20% on all imports, and as much as 60% on Chinese imports, will end federal deficits and bring trillions of dollars into the country, although he is wrong about how tariffs work. 

Trump insists that tariffs are taxes on foreign countries, but they are not. They are essentially taxes on imported products, and they are paid by consumers. Trump’s running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, recently tried to claim that economists disagree about whether consumers bear the cost of tariffs, but as Michael Hiltzik explained in the Los Angeles Times yesterday, economists agree on this.

When he was in office, Trump launched a trade war in 2018 by putting tariffs of up to 25% on $50 billion worth of Chinese products. The next year he added another set of 10% tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese imports, and the next year he did it again, this time on an additional $112 worth of Chinese products. The nonpartisan Tax Foundation calculates that this amounted to an $80 billion tax a year on American consumers, costing the average household about $300 a year and costing the U.S. about 142,000 jobs.

There are reasons to use tariffs. They can be used to protect a new industry from cheaper foreign products until the new industry can compete, or to stop foreign countries from flooding a country with cheap products that destroy a domestic industry. When he took office, Biden kept those of Trump’s tariffs that protected certain industries.

Trump’s insistence that tariffs will solve everything is not about economics, it’s about pushing a worldview from the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, one embodied by the 1890 McKinley Tariff. “If you look at McKinley,” Trump told right-wing media host Mark Levin on Sunday, “he was a great president. He made the country rich.” In fact, McKinley (R-OH) pushed through the tariff named for him while he was in the House of Representatives from his position as a spokesperson for wealthy industrialists. They insisted that high tariffs were imperative to the survival of the country, that such tariffs were good for workers because they protected wages, and that anyone who disagreed was a socialist. But in an era without business regulation, industrialists actually kept wages low and used the tariffs to protect high prices that they passed on to consumers. 

In the late 1880s, the American people demanded a lower tariff, but when Republicans in Congress went to “revise” it, they made it higher. In May 1890, in a chaotic congressional session with members shouting amendments, yelling objections, and talking over each other, Republicans passed the McKinley Tariff without any Democratic votes. They cheered and clapped at their victory. “You may rejoice now,” a Democrat yelled across the aisle, “but next November you’ll mourn.” 

Democrats were right. In the November 1890 midterm elections, angry voters repudiated the Republican Party. They gave the Democrats a two-to-one majority in the House—McKinley himself lost his seat. Republicans managed to keep the Senate by four seats, but three of those seats were held by senators who had voted against the McKinley Tariff, and the fourth turned out to have been stolen.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[meret118]

I'm so sick of all these articles saying that Democrats need to support and reconnect with the working class to be successful. I'm over 50. The Democrats under Biden did more to help the working class than any president in my lifetime, and would have done even more if the Republicans hadn't stopped them. Republicans on the other hand have done nothing but hurt the bank accounts of average americans. They only want to help the rich, and are willing to rob everyone else and destroy the world to do so.

Trump won because the party of bigotry almost always controls the US! When the Democrats were the segregationist party, they were in control for decades. When LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act he said he was signing away the South to the Republicans. Nixon devised the Southern Strategy to turn the south red, and Reagan sealed the deal. Its not a coincidence reagan gave a speech praising states rights, a coded message meaning segregation and slavery, near where the civil rights workers Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were murdered. Trump Jr made a speech there in 2016 too.

The years the more liberal party is in power are the exceptions, not the rule.

[yourreddancer]

The wrecking-ball crew and the looting of America

History guarantees that Trump’s billionaires will overreach

Robert Reich

Nov 18

Friends,

What do card sharks, magicians, pickpockets, and tyrants do to hide their tricks? They deflect your attention. “Look over here!” they say, as they create a commotion that preoccupies your mind while they bamboozle you.

At first, I thought Trump’s gonzo nominations were intended to flood the zone — overwhelm us, demoralize us, cause us to lose our minds.

Alternatively, I thought, they had a strategic purpose: Smoke out Senate Republicans who might stand in Trump’s way on other issues — such as allying with Putin and destroying NATO — so Trump could purge the holdouts through primary challengers and angry MAGAs.

But while flooding the zone and purging recalcitrant Senate Republicans may be part of it, I’ve come to think there’s a larger plan at work.

Trump wants to deflect our attention while he and his fellow billionaires loot America.

As he consolidates power, Trump is on his way to creating a government of billionaires, by billionaires, for billionaires.

Trump intuitively knows that the most powerful and insidious of all alliances is between rich oligarchs and authoritarian strongmen.

Two billionaires are leading his transition team. The richest person in the world and another billionaire will run a new department of “efficiency.” Other billionaires are waiting in the wings to be anointed to various positions.

America is now home to 813 billionaires whose cumulative wealth has grown a staggering 50 percent since before the pandemic.

Apologists for these mind-boggling amounts argue they’re not a zero-sum game where the rest of us must lose ground in order for billionaires to prosper. Quite the contrary, they say: The billionaire’s achievements expand the economic pie for everyone.

But the apologists overlook one important thing. Power is a zero-sum game. The more power in billionaire hands, the less power in everyone else’s. And power cannot be separated from wealth, or wealth from power.

The shameless feeding frenzy that has already begun at the troughs of Trump — planning for more tax cuts for the wealthy, regulatory rollbacks to make the wealthy and their corporations even wealthier, subsidies for the wealthy and their enterprises — constitute a zero-sum power game that will hurt average Americans.

The pending tax cuts will explode the national debt. As a result, the rest of America will have to pay more in interest payments to the holders of that debt — who, not incidentally, are wealthy Americans.

This will require that the middle and working classes either pay higher taxes or sacrifice some benefits they rely on (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act).

Meanwhile, regulatory rollbacks will make workplaces less safe, products more dangerous, our air and water more polluted, national parks less welcoming, travel more hazardous, and financial transactions riskier for average people.

Trump has tapped Elon Musk, who invested some $130 million to get Trump elected (not to mention in-kind gifts of support from X and a swing-state operation to register right-leaning voters) and former pharmaceutical executive Vivek Ramaswamy, to run a “Department of Government Efficiency.”

Musk calls it DOGE, named after Musk’s favorite cryptocurrency — whose value, not incidentally, has soared since Musk began using its name for his incipient department.

It now appears that DOGE won’t be an actual “Department” but a powerful advisory group outside the official government yet inside the Trump White House. It will announce — presumably posted with great fanfare on X — what Musk allies describe as “slash-and-burn business ideologies to the U.S. government.”

Musk has vowed to cut at least $2 trillion from the federal budget. The richest man in the world explains that “we have to reduce spending to live within our means. And, you know, that necessarily involves some temporary hardship.”

Hardship for whom? Not for Musk. Not for Trump. Not for the billionaires heading Trump’s transition team. Not for all the billionaires who will profit from the planned tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks.

And not for people responding to Musk’s recent X post calling for “super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting. If that’s you, DM this account…. Elon & Vivek will review the top 1% of applicants.”

Musk says we have to reduce spending “to live within our means?” Whose means?

Since Trump’s election victory on November 5, Musk himself has become $70 billion richer due to the rising value of his enterprises.

Why have Musk’s companies — Tesla, SpaceX, and X — risen so much in value? Because investors expect some or all of the 19 known ongoing federal investigations and lawsuits against Musk’s companies to wind down. (Lawsuits involving alleged securities law violations, workplace safety, labor and civil rights violations, violations of environmental laws, consumer fraud, and vehicle safety defects.)

Investors also expect SpaceX to become more profitable from more multibillion-dollar contracts. Musk’s xAI could also reap vast rewards as the new administration considers AI regulations.

Other billionaires who invested in Trump have also been raking it in.

Oracle founder Larry Ellison, the world’s second-richest person — a close friend of Musk’s and a former Tesla board member — is a longtime Republican donor who’s enjoying his own Trump bump. Since the election, Oracle’s share value has increased 10 percent, increasing Ellison’s own wealth by some $20 billion.

Venture capital billionaire Marc Andreessen, who donated at least $4.5 million to a super PAC that supported Trump, expects to cash in by having Trump ease the antitrust crackdown on Big Tech, in which Andreessen has invested heavily. Andreessen’s wish has already been partly monetized: Big Tech has reaped most of the stock market gains since Election Day.

There’s also crypto. Since the election, the price of bitcoin has surged to record levels. The crypto exchange Coinbase, a major contributor to candidates friendly to crypto, expects regulators to keep their hands off it. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has become about $4.5 billion richer since Trump’s victory, as Coinbase shares soared 67 percent.

Oh, there are also the private prison corporations. George Zoley, a top executive at GEO Group and another major donor to Trump, expects Trump’s reelection to drive up demand for empty beds at detention centers the company runs for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Since the election, GEO Group has had the largest surge in its stock price since 2016, after Trump was elected the first time.

GEO Group executives told Wall Street analysts on a recent earnings call that Trump’s election could help GEO Group fill as many as 18,000 empty beds at its facilities, which would generate as much as $400 million in annual business.

Venture capitalists and investors in new military technologies are now swarming around the Defense Department like bees over a vast flower bed. They also donated to Trump and expect a big quid pro quo.

The fossil fuels CEOs who plunked down millions of dollars for Trump in the expectation they’d get a fat return in the form of rollbacks of environmental regulations are also celebrating.

The list of wealthy beneficiaries from Trump’s election goes on and on.

So who will suffer the “hardship” Musk predicts?

I doubt that Musk will recommend cutting the billions of dollars in government contracts Musk’s corporations receive, or the GEO Group’s contracts for private prison space, or the military budget. Quite the contrary: Government spending on all these will increase.

Instead, Musk will want to cut the enforcement of antitrust laws, securities laws, workplace safety laws, labor laws, civil rights laws, laws against consumer fraud, laws mandating vehicle safety, tax laws, and environmental laws.

And because there’s no other place to find anything close to the $2 trillion he’s promising to cut from the federal budget, I expect Musk will turn to cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits.

Here’s where the trick comes in. We’ll all be so distracted by what Gaetz is doing at the Justice Department, Gabbard to national intelligence, and RFK Jr. to public health, that we may not notice.

After all, the next months will be filled with Trump theatrics — a major fight in the Senate over the Gaetz nomination, another fight over recess appointments, another over RFK Jr. and his plans for destroying public health.

Meanwhile, Musk and company will be recommending all sorts budget cuts that cause hardship for hardworking Americans but almost no one will notice because of the distractions.

I prefer to end this post on a hopeful note, so here goes.

There has always been a close relationship in America between wealth and power, but it has usually been thought slightly shameful — something to be hidden or elided — because it contradicts the basic tenets of democracy.

Recall the admonition credited to Justice Louis Brandeis that America has a choice: either great wealth in the hands of a few, or democracy — but we cannot have both.

Hence, American politicians typically play up their humble origins. CEOs and bankers minimize their political clout. The wealthy refrain from overt displays of power.

But in Gilded Ages — such as the one that dominated the turn of the 20th century and the one we’re now in — the ultra-rich abandon such humility. The linkages between wealth and power becomes apparent for all to see. Conspicuous consumption becomes the handmaiden of conspicuous clout.

In such times, the wealthy brag about their access to politicians, talk openly about how many tens of millions of dollars they’ve donated to campaigns and about the “return” on these “investments,” and want everyone to know how they’ve turned their affluence into influence and their influence into even more affluence.

Ultimately, these insults to democracy — delivered by the new oligarchs shamelessly, openly, and arrogantly — go too far. They invite a backlash.

If history is any guide, at some point the public will become revolted by the stench of legalized bribery. It will not abide the quid pro quos of billionaire campaign donations for tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks.

The public will also become fed up with brazen billionaire propaganda delivered through billionaire ownership of key media, such as Musk’s X, right-wing radio, and Murdoch’s Fox News, New York Post, and editorial pages of the The Wall Street Journal.

More than a century ago, this sort of revulsion generated what historians refer to as the “Progressive Era.” It was responsible for pushing Teddy Roosevelt to break up the monopolies, institute the nation’s first income tax, stop corporations from funding candidates for president and Congress, and create the Food and Drug Administration.

And when the excesses finally caused the economy to collapse, another upsurge in progressivism prompted Teddy’s fifth cousin, Franklin D., to raise taxes even further on the affluent, create the 40-hour workweek with time-and-a-half for overtime, force corporations to negotiate with unions, institute unemployment insurance, create a minimum wage, and establish Social Security.

If history is any guide, there is no limit to how greedy the greedy will get when the guardrails are lifted. So Gilded Age excesses are almost guaranteed.

And when the corruption and ensuing hardship become so blatant that they offend the values of the majority of Americans, that majority will once again demand systematic reforms that bring us closer to those values.

[newstfionline]

Friday, May 26, 2023

Expect big crowds for the summer travel season—and big prices, too (AP) The unofficial start of the summer travel season is here. The number of people going through U.S. airports hit pandemic-era highs last weekend, and those records are almost certain to be broken over the Memorial Day holiday. AAA predicts that 37 million Americans will drive at least 50 miles (80 kilometers) from home this weekend, an increase of more than 2 million from Memorial Day last year. With more travel comes more expense. The average rate for a U.S. hotel room last week was $157 a night, up from $150 in the same week last year, according to hotel data provider STR. And the average daily rate for other short-term rentals such as Airbnb and Vrbo rose to $316 last month, up 1.4% from a year ago, according to AirDNA, which tracks the industry.

DeSantis Declares (1440) Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) made his long-anticipated jump into the 2024 presidential race yesterday, making the announcement in a livestreamed conversation with Twitter CEO Elon Musk. DeSantis has positioned his campaign as focused on conservative populism with an emphasis on effective governing and joins a field of seven other candidates seeking the Republican nomination.

ChatGPT maker OpenAI calls for AI regulation, warning of ‘existential risk’ (Washington Post) The leaders of OpenAI, the creator of viral chatbot ChatGPT, are calling for the regulation of “superintelligence” and artificial intelligence systems, suggesting an equivalent to the world’s nuclear watchdog would help reduce the “existential risk” posed by the technology. In a statement published on the company website this week, co-founders Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever, as well as CEO Sam Altman, argued that an international regulator would eventually become necessary to “inspect systems, require audits, test for compliance with safety standards, (and) place restrictions on degrees of deployment and levels of security.” They made a comparison with nuclear energy as another example of a technology with the “possibility of existential risk,” raising the need for an authority similar in nature to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the world’s nuclear watchdog. The OpenAI team wrote, “In terms of both potential upsides and downsides, superintelligence will be more powerful than other technologies humanity has had to contend with in the past. We can have a dramatically more prosperous future; but we have to manage risk to get there.”

Fuel shortages slam Cuba’s countryside (AP) Rosa López, a 59-year-old housewife, lit a charcoal stove to boil sweet potatoes and prepare scrambled eggs for her grandchildren. The gas cylinders she normally uses to cook her meals have not been available for almost two months in Mariel, a port town west of Havana. Not far from there, on the highway to Pinar del Río and under a scorching sun, Ramón Victores spent one week waiting in line at a gas station, hoping to fuel up the 1952 red Chevrolet he uses for work, moving produce from one town to another. Cuba’s most recent fuel shortage has crippled an already fragile economy, but it is hitting rural villages particularly hard, with residents resorting to coal fires to cook their food, scrambling to find transport to take them to work and spending days—and nights—at the gas station waiting to fuel up. With food and medications already in short supply amid an economy that was severely hurt by the COVID-19 pandemic, the end of the country’s two-currency system and a tightening of U.S. sanctions, the lack of fuel and cooking gas is perceived by many Cubans in the island’s countryside as the last straw.

As Protesters Die, a Nation’s Security Forces Face Little Scrutiny (NYT) In the adobe house she built with her husband in a small village in Peru, Antonia Huillca pulled out a stack of documents that once represented a glimmer of hope. They were part of an investigation into the death of her husband, Quintino Cereceda, who left one morning in 2016 to join a protest against a new copper mine and never returned. Ms. Huillca can’t read, but she can identify a photo of her husband’s body, a bullet wound to his forehead; the question-and-answer format in which police officers describe firing live ammunition as protesters threw rocks; the logo of the mining company sending convoys of trucks over unpaved roads, sparking protests among villagers fed up with the dust. But today, the investigation has gone cold. “All these years and no justice,” Ms. Huillca, a 51-year-old Quechua farmer, said. “It’s as if we don’t exist.” For years, scores of similar cases in Peru have met a familiar fate: Investigations into the killing of unarmed civilians at protests where security forces were deployed, most of them in poor Indigenous and rural areas, are opened when they attract headlines, only to be closed quietly later, with officials often citing a lack of evidence. Now, the unusually high death toll during antigovernment demonstrations after the removal of the country’s president last year has put accusations of abuse by security officials in the global spotlight, raising questions about why so many previous killings remain unsolved.

Immigration to Britain reaches record high in 2022 (AP) The number of people moving to Britain reached a record high of more than 600,000 in 2022, government figures showed Thursday. The statistics office said the record level was due to a “series of unprecedented world events throughout 2022 and the lifting of restrictions following the coronavirus pandemic.” As well as people coming to Britain to work, the figure includes tens of thousands of international students and almost 200,000 people who have arrived under special programs for people fleeing war in Ukraine and China’s clampdown in Hong Kong. The high figure will renew debate about Britain’s departure from the European Union, which was motivated in part by the arrival of hundreds of thousands of people from across Europe in the years before the 2016 Brexit referendum.

Europe Faces a Food Shock (WSJ) Fresh out of an energy crisis, Europeans are facing a food-price explosion that is changing diets and forcing consumers across the region to tighten their belts—literally. This is happening even though inflation as a whole is falling thanks to lower energy prices. New data on Wednesday showed inflation in the U.K. fell sharply in April as energy prices cooled, following a similar pattern around Europe and in the U.S. But food prices were 19.3% higher than a year earlier. The continued surge in food prices has caught central bankers off guard and pressured governments to come to the rescue.

Prigozhin’s warning (Washington Post) Fresh off his claim of victory in capturing the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, Russian mercenary boss Yevgeniy Prigozhin warned that Moscow’s brutal war could plunge Russia into turmoil similar to the 1917 revolution unless its detached, wealthy elite become more directly committed to the conflict. In a lengthy interview with Konstantin Dolgov, a political operative and pro-war blogger, Prigozhin, the founder and leader of the Wagner mercenary group, also asserted that the war had backfired spectacularly by failing to “demilitarize” Ukraine, one of President Vladimir Putin’s stated aims of the invasion. He also called for totalitarian policies. “We are in a situation where we can simply lose Russia,” Prigozhin said, using an expletive to hammer his point. “We must introduce martial law. We unfortunately … must announce new waves of mobilization; we must put everyone who is capable to work on increasing the production of ammunition,” he said. “Russia needs to live like North Korea for a few years, so to say, close the borders … and work hard.” Instead of demilitarization, he said, the invasion turned “Ukraine’s army into one of the most powerful in the world” and Ukrainians into “a nation known to the entire world.”

Turkish voters weigh final decision on next president (AP) Two opposing visions for Turkey’s future are on the ballot when voters return to the polls Sunday for a runoff presidential election that will decide between an increasingly authoritarian incumbent and a challenger who has pledged to restore democracy. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a populist and polarizing leader who has ruled Turkey for 20 years, is well positioned to win after falling just short of victory in the first round of balloting on May 14. He was the top finisher even as the country reels from sky-high inflation and the effects of a devastating earthquake in February. Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the leader of Turkey’s pro-secular main opposition party and a six-party alliance, has campaigned on a promise to undo Erdogan’s authoritarian tilt. The 74-year-old former bureaucrat has described the runoff as a referendum on the direction of the strategically located NATO country, which is at the crossroads of Europe and Asia and has a key say over the alliance’s expansion. “This is an existential struggle. Turkey will either be dragged into darkness or light,” Kilicdaroglu said. “This is more than an election. It has turned into a referendum.”

Beijing can’t take a joke (Foreign Policy) A Chinese comedian’s mild joke about the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) last week led to a $1.9 million fine for his entertainment company. Li Haoshi, a stand-up comedian known as “House” onstage, joked that watching his dogs chase a squirrel reminded him of the PLA slogan “Fight to win!” Beijing authorities intervened after audio was shared on social media, fining the company that represents Li and confiscating the profits of weekend shows. Li is now under investigation for insulting the PLA and causing “bad social impact.” Around the same time, China suspended the Weibo and Bilibili accounts of a popular British Malaysian comedian after he made a joke about Chinese surveillance. One of the reasons that Chinese censorship has become so petty is that years of crackdowns under Xi quashed most dissident content years ago. The authorities must now go after the inconsequential to justify their own existence.

South Korea, US troops to hold massive live-fire drills near border with North Korea (AP) The South Korean and U.S. militaries were set to begin massive live-fire drills near the border with North Korea on Thursday, despite the North’s warning that it won’t tolerate what it calls such a hostile invasion rehearsal on its doorstep. Thursday’s drills, the first of the allies’ five rounds of firing exercises until mid-June, mark 70 years since the establishment of the military alliance between Seoul and Washington. North Korea has typically reacted to such major South Korean-U.S. exercises with missile and other weapons tests. Since the start of 2022, North Korea has test-launched more than 100 missiles but none since it fired a solid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missile in mid-April. North Korea has argued its torrid pace of tests was meant to respond to the expanded military drills between the U.S. and South Korea, but observers say the North aims to advance its weapons development then wrest greater concessions from its rivals in eventual diplomacy.

What about those who can’t flee fighting in Sudan? (AP) Mahmoud almost never leaves his small apartment in east Khartoum. Electricity has been out for most of the past month, so he swelters in the summer heat. When he does venture out to find food, he leaves his mobile phone behind because of looters in the street. Otherwise, he hunkers down in fear, worried that an artillery shell could burst into his home. Since the conflict broke out last month, more than 1.3 million people have fled their homes to escape Sudan’s fighting, going elsewhere in the country or across the borders. But Mahmoud and millions of others remain trapped in Khartoum and its sister cities of Bahri and Omdurman, unable to leave the central battleground between Sudan’s military and the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary. For them, every day is a struggle to find food, get water and charge their phones when electricity is cut off. All the while, they must avoid the fighters and criminals in the streets who rob and brutalize pedestrians, loot shops and storm into homes to steal whatever of value they can find.

Paralysis Breakthrough (1440) Swiss neuroscientists have successfully utilized a brain-spine interface to enable a paralyzed man to walk using his thoughts, according to a study released yesterday. The breakthrough development expands on recent innovations using spinal implants to generate movement in patients with immobilizing spinal injuries. Gert-Jan Oskam, a Dutch 40-year-old who was paralyzed 12 years ago, received two brain implants and one on his spine, creating a so-called “digital bridge” across the injured nerves. A portable computer decodes his brain’s electrical signals and relays them to a spinal pulse generator, resulting in the perception that his lower body movements are voluntary. Combined with regular therapy, the procedure allows Oskam to walk and climb stairs with a natural gait aided by a walker, at times without the digital bridge activated. The procedure further opens the possibility for victims of paralysis to regain control of their legs, with researchers hoping to reduce the size and invasiveness of the implants.

[misfitwashere]

Can the Muskrat shut the United States government?

Sure looks that way. The richest person in the world has turned his wealth into raw power. That's what oligarchy looks like. 

ROBERT REICH

DEC 19

Friends,

If the government shuts down Saturday, Elon Musk will be largely to blame.

Musk went on a daylong rampage yesterday against the continuing resolution drafted by House Speaker Mike Johnson and his leadership team to keep the government going. 

Musk posted nearly nonstop on his social media platform X about how lawmakers must kill it. “Any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in 2 years!” Musk wrote in one post.

Musk — the richest person in the world — was joined in his posting spree by another billionaire, Vivek Ramaswamy, whom Trump asked to partner with Musk in an effort to slash government spending and reduce the federal budget deficit. 

Republicans gauging support for the legislation said they were bleeding votes as a result of Musk’s barrage.

Then, after Musk spent the day telling Republicans not to support the bill, Trump weighed in against it, too. That put the bill on life support.

If this isn’t oligarchy, I don’t know what is.

You may not get access to services you depend on just before the holidays because an unelected billionaire shadow president wanted it that way.

Funding for essentials will be jeopardized — disaster relief, clean water protections, food safety inspections, cancer research, and nutrition programs for children.

Federal workers like air traffic controllers will be required to work without pay just as air travel is about to pick up. 

The same goes for members of our military.

Musk effectively blocked a government spending bill by mobilizing his 205 million followers on X and then using his influence on Trump —influence he bought by spending more than $270 million getting Trump elected. 

Yet Musk’s concern about the federal deficit seems to disappear whenever Trump and MAGA Republicans talk about passing tax cuts that will disproportionately benefit billionaires like Musk. Tax cuts, I might add, that will balloon the deficit by nearly $5 trillion.

We’re getting a preview of what the next four years will look like — dysfunction in D.C. that will make your life worse, driven by a petulant billionaire with an unquenchable thirst for wealth and power. 

A billionaire wielding his influence over the rest of us proves we are in a Second Gilded Age.

But there may be a silver lining to this Gilded Age cloud. The lesson of the First Gilded Age is that when concentrated wealth, corruption, and ensuing hardship for average working Americans become so blatant that they offend the values of the majority of us, we rise up and demand real, systemic change. 

It’s only a matter of time. A government shutdown that hurts average working people, engineered by the richest person in the world, might just hasten it.

What do you think?

[welcometomypov]

I hope you’re okay. I’m probably not the kind of person you talk to often in your day to day life. I’m a leftist organizer and volunteer.

I know liberals out there are like “enjoy the handmaidens tale.” And wishing ill on you and I know they’re telling republican women that they hope Trump “grabs them by the pussy.”

but I want to extend an olive branch here. As an actual leftist I hate liberals so I’m gunna look for common ground with you.

Conservative people say that some of the moral decline in America can be contributed to losing faith. I actually kind of agree to an extent. (Communists can believe in god I don’t think the average conservative has ever actually met a real card carrying communist)

But here’s the thing: they’ll cite fewer people in church as proof that America is losing faith. I’d argue that actually the main reason people stopped going to church is because more and more people started having to work on Sunday. Wages haven’t increased in nearly 45 years adjusting for inflation.

Did you know that Americans who are so poor that they live in apartments aren’t allowed to do ANY basic repairs?

In every single apartment that I have ever lived in if I even tried to patch drywall I’d lose my deposit?

In every single lease I’ve ever signed I also had to agree not to do any repairs in my own car. NOT EVEN AN OIL OR TIRE CHANGE.

(They don’t want people to improperly dispose of oil or getting hurt on their property)

the end result of this is that you get a lot of liberal city folks who can’t even change a tire. You get people that don’t know how the world works.

But here’s the thing conservatives don’t understand:

Renters and poor people who’s only exposure to the world is TV and advertising and public school are now MOST of America. During the time of the founding fathers 9/10 families were RURAL farmers or fishermen or some other necessary trade.

It is now 1/10. Completely flipped.

When a commie says “you don’t understand America you stupid conservative”

yes they are being assholes but also on a literal level you DONT understand America because America is a nation of 360 million people. If the only way to understand someone is to try and get in their shoes you will literally never be able to do that for most of America unless you could live for a thousand years.

Conservative politicians like Trump SAY they’ll fight to keep god in America. But what they really want to do is make money.

Why is it that the only party that openly defends Christian and family values is the party that cuts Bill gates taxes and lets George Soros buy all the land? Deregulation sounds great until there’s no law that says The Rothschilds can’t buy literally every home and force your children to rent until they die.

Stock market does better under republicans no doubt. But the stock market isn’t a “human quality of life” market. Technically slavery was AMAZING for stocks.

Would you rather invest in a company that literally doesn’t pay a dime in labor? A company that is sheer profit? Or would you invest in the company that’s gunna unionize?

If you’re a normal human with a conscience maybe you’d invest in the company that has less money to return on your investment.

But Jeffery Epstein proved that being successful on Wall Street doesn’t make you a good person.

I’m begging you to vote for and support candidates that want to help your family. The ones who want to give you the freedom to choose. The ones who want to put in free breakfast programs.

God himself gave humans the freedom to do terrible things.

If a politician wants to give you free healthcare like Bernie but also wants you to have the choice to have an abortion.. you have the moral guidance of god to make the decision to keep the baby.

Here’s the thing tho: yes you can make it so that nobody can ever kill an any baby ever again.

But the cost is higher teen pregnancies and premarital sex.

The cost is more people working overtime on a Sunday skipping church and beating their families in an alcoholic rampage.

The price is, like I mentioned earlier, losing the ability to buy a home and being forced to rent.

The price is more women being forced to stay with the men who raped them because the baby needs income and rapists don’t make money in jail so they get to go to work and come home to (an often underage) wife.

The price is ironically more abortions but just by taking poisonous herbs.

(There’s actually a verse in numbers in the Bible on how to induce a miscarriage if your wife cheats on you but conservatives do ignore that part of the Bible.)

The price is more meat recalls and price increases because the government won’t be able to investigate price gouging.

I guess the bottom line is that economic leftism is not bad. Being for universal healthcare is not turning your back on god.

Democrats are evil but if you pay attention there are some democrats that the party leadership hates.

These democrats actually want to fight for you. The good democrats that JFK died for are still there.

You don’t have to like Bernie and I have my problems with him but look at what he ran on in his campaign.

Banning landlords from buying up all the good houses and forcing Americans to rent them.

Free breakfast at schools.

Better subsidies for farmers.

Better drinking water.

Sure he’s a tree hugger but like. Is that really the end of the world?

Weren’t we told anytime we went out in nature not to litter?

Why not hold big companies to the same standard?

I’m not asking you to abandon your conservative values . You can still believe that illegal immigration needs to be dealt with and promote a nuclear family but please please stop voting economically conservatively. It’s genuinely going to hurt America.

Remember ELECTED democrats and republicans are both evil. The rest of republicans and democrats are just American.

Plus Trump is like definitely a rapist. Like there are so many pics of him with both Epstein and Diddy, Trump refused to release all the Epstein info while he was in office, and Jeffery mysteriously killed himself while Trump was in office. Before he could stand trial.

Like democrats are definitely pedos but I don’t think that Kamala is one of them, she’s stupid sure but at least her platform would’ve forced corporate America to pay better overtime and let more people go to church on Sunday. I promise you America is not weak enough for a cop like Kamala to destroy it.

As the first probably real leftist you have ever talked to I really really do hope you have a good night and chew over some of the stuff I said.

If you have any questions or think I’m being unfair I’d love to have a dialogue with you. But really do think about the fact that there are democrats that Obama and Clinton and Nancy Pelosi hate. Just like how I know not every conservative agrees with every little dumb thing Trump said. You can work with us. We have to.

Thank you for this!!

I actually do talk to leftist people! Not as often as I'd like considering how anxious talking to any person makes me, but I love hovering near leftist booths or tables on my Democrat campus to listen to them discuss issues with the passerbys. It's interesting to listen to anothers' perspective or to a fellow Republican's, even.

(Except for abortion booths, but only because I've been harassed by abortionists trying to make me to sign their petition and now I can't break the wall of anxiety that comes with seeing them on campus).

(There’s actually a verse in numbers in the Bible on how to induce a miscarriage if your wife cheats on you but conservatives do ignore that part of the Bible.)

There is a favorable explanation about that part of Numbers that I've heard before, but I can't remember what the explanation was. I may ask some other Catholics or my parish's priest about it.

I disagree with the notion that Trump is 'definitely' a rapist, but I concede that it's possible that he could be a rapist.

I appreciate how much thought was put into this! You've given me a ton to think over and look into. I really appreciate the neural consideration that you put into this.

I can tell supporting this economics stance means a lot to you and I want to give it real thought instead of just spewing answers and arguments off the top of my head.

Again, thank you for this!

[particularj]

Is…is the Fed Chair going to be the unexpected hero we need this time around?

Let me explain…

The Fed Chair is an early Trump appointee from 2017 — you know, when some of the people were actually somewhat competent, if conservative, subject matter experts. Powell has pointed out that the law doesn’t require him to resign if asked, and that the President lacks the power to remove or demote him — only appoint.

Why does this matter?

Resistance to Trump’s illegal actions, especially in deference to the letter of the law, will be key. Republicans, especially older ‘rule of law,’ classic conservatives may be unlikely allies at a time of unhinged MAGA bulldozing.

By resisting a potential Trump request, he is showing how we can all resist.

Trump himself cannot or would not physically force Powell out of his office - he’s not going down to that office to kick him out like a security guard. And if others that might have that task given to them - police, security, National Guard, etc. - ultimately decide they won’t do it either, because Powell has a right to be there, there’s very little Trump can actually, literally do.

This is one method of resistance - if Trump’s requests don’t have enough eager and willingness participants, little will happen. Again, Trump is but one man. Remember how pathetic that fast food dinner was for whatever championship sport team was invited to the White House, when the White House cooks weren’t around because of the government shut down?

That is how many of his demands can play out: pathetically. He can’t run the government himself.

Republicans are going to pass hurtful conservative policies, cutting taxes for the rich, rolling back environmental protections, etc. I’m not sure, with a potential Republican trifecta, there is much we can do about these.

But we can work to convince enough Republicans to keep the guardrails in place and resist in similar ways. And some might be willing to, not fully ready to capitulate to Trump fascism and destroy American democracy. Average government employees, average national guard members and troops and their leaders - who built a career dedicated to country and not Trump, average civil servants, maybe even some Republican politicians.

Our united goal is to survive and for damage control / harm reduction. We have to recognize we lost and will lose on policy for at least 2 years. I hate it, but that would be the case with any Republican administration. We have to slow down his attempt to blitz and become a dictator, through any means possible.

And he’s tired, he’s 78, he’s ailing. If he doesn’t make it two more years, I don’t think JD will have the political Teflon, power and recognition, or ability to keep the teardown of democracy going. Nobody’s taking dictatorial orders from a man who can’t even order donuts in a normal way.

[contemplatingoutlander]

BTW, do MAGA people realize that if Trump creates a literal "war" on drug cartels, and also follows through on his plans to round up migrants into detention camps, he will have to spend billions of dollars to make his plans come to fruition?

That money is going to have to come from somewhere. And as we all know, Trump will not raise taxes on the wealthy. In fact, he will probably push another tax cut that primarily benefits the wealthy.

Republicans will use their need to fund the new Trump police state as an excuse to destroy what remains of the social safety net and privatize Social Security and Medicare.

In other words, average Americans will be hurt so that Trump can turn America into a police state to attack cartels, round up and deport migrants, and to deny the rights of citizenship to migrant children who were born in this country.

Any working class family that is living paycheck to paycheck is foolish to support Trump and the GOP, who have NEVER been interested in actually helping the working class--only in using them to gain power by lying to them and playing on their prejudices.

The conservative conference embraced Trump’s signature promise to inflict pain on people who are in the US without authorization

Anti-migrant rhetoric took center stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference as right-wing pundits and politicians unleashed a torrent of xenophobia over the course of several days, signaling the central role that nativism will likely play in the 2024 presidential election.

With former President Donald Trump now the de facto Republican presidential candidate, the entire right-wing media ecosystem has embraced his signature anti-immigrant positions. At CPAC, which took place just outside of Washington, D.C., this week, speakers baselessly blamed migrants for a host of perceived social ills and proposed radical policies to punish them and their home countries.

Fox News contributor Tom Homan, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement under Trump, pledged that his former boss would bomb Mexican drug cartels if given a second term.

“President Trump will declare them a terrorist organization, he will send a Hellfire rocket down there, and he’ll take the cartels out,” Homan said.

Even though launching missiles at the United States' neighbor and largest trading partner poses a number of obvious risks, Homan has long supported designating Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations to empower federal law enforcement to wage war against cartels on their home soil. Under Trump, Homan was one of the architects of the administration’s family separation policy, and he has extensive ties to the nativist Tanton network.

[yourreddancer]

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

September 5, 2024 (Thursday)

The U.S. government continues to tighten the screws against Russian malign activity. This morning the Department of Justice announced an indictment charging Dimitri Simes for violating U.S. sanctions against Russia. Simes allegedly worked for a sanctioned Russian television station and laundered the money from his work. Simes advised Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

A second indictment charged Simes’s wife, Anastasia, with sanctions violations and money laundering through the purchase of fine art.

The Justice Department also issued a grand jury’s superseding indictment against six Russian computer hackers. Five were officers in Russia's military intelligence agency; one is a civilian. The six are charged with hacking into and leaking information from, as well as destroying, Ukrainian computer systems. The hackers also attacked systems in European countries that support Ukraine and in the U.S.

The State Department has offered a $10 million reward for information on the defendants’ locations or their malicious cyberactivity.

The fallout from yesterday’s revelation that six powerful right-wing media figures were on the Russian payroll continues. One of the right-wing commenters referred to in yesterday’s indictment, Tim Pool, has pushed the idea that the U.S. is in a civil war, interviewed Trump on his podcast in May, and has been fervently against American aid to Ukraine. Today, he posted: “Upon reflection I now understand that Ukraine is our Greatest ally[.] As the breadbasket of Europe and a peace loving people we cannot allow the Fascist Russians to continue their crimes against humanity[.] We must redouble our efforts and provide and additional $200b at once[.]”

By this evening, though, he was making a joke of the news that his paycheck had come from Russia.

Notably, Trump posted on his social media site a rant that tied his own 2016 campaign to yesterday’s indictments, although the indictment itself did not do so. He accused “Comrade Kamala Harris and her Department of Justice” of “resurrecting the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, and trying to say that Russia is trying to help me, which is absolutely FALSE.”

Vice President Harris is not in charge of the Department of Justice.

By tying yesterday’s indictments to his campaign’s involvement with Russian operatives in 2016, Trump might have been trying to suggest the story was old news, but it does highlight the parallels between Russia and right-wing operatives trying to get him reelected. Along with his colleague Donie O’Sullivan, Jake Tapper put it like this on CNN: “Today, the U.S. government is trying to peel back more layers of what officials say are massive and complex efforts underway to influence your vote in the upcoming election. One part of these alleged plots: replacing your average 2016 Russian social media bots with actual conservative Americans, right-wing influencers with a combined millions of followers, influencers promoted by Elon Musk, some visited by Republican politicians such as former president Trump.”

Then Trump fell back on the old trope that his opponents are communists, posting on his social media platform: “We are fighting true COMMUNISM in this Country. We have to save our Elections, our System of Justice, our Constitution, and our FREEDOM, but that can only be done after we win BIG on November 5th, and proceed to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.”

Economists for Goldman Sachs Group Inc. say that a Trump win in November would hurt the U.S. economy, while a Harris win—if she also gets Democratic control of the House and the Senate—would make it grow.

Trump’s 2024 campaign is not at all about reality; it’s about a worldview. When asked at an event at the New York Economic Club “what specific piece of legislation will you advance” to make child care affordable, the 78-year-old Trump answered:

(WORD SALAD FOLLOWS!!!!!)

“Well I would do that. And we’re sitting down. You know I was somebody. We had Senator Marco Rubio, and my daughter Ivanka was so impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that because—look, child care is child care. It’s—couldn’t, you know, it’s something you have to have it—in this country you have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to—but they’ll get used to it very quickly—and it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country. Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s going to take care. We’re going to have—I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time, coupled with the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country, because I have to stay with child care. I want to stay with child care, but those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth, but growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just told you about. We’re going to be taking in trillions of dollars, and as much as child care is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in. We’re going to make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people, and then we’ll worry about the rest of the world. Let’s help other people, but we’re going to take care of our country first. This is about America first. It’s about Make America Great Again, we have to do it because right now we’re a failing nation, so we’ll take care of it.”

There is no specific legislation here, or even a grasp of the specific nature of the problem of paying for child care. What there is, apparently, is an argument that high tariffs will solve all of the nation’s problems. In the New York event, Trump called again for slashing taxes on the wealthy and insisted that new, high tariffs of 20% on all imports, and as much as 60% on Chinese imports, will end federal deficits and bring trillions of dollars into the country, although he is wrong about how tariffs work.

Trump insists that tariffs are taxes on foreign countries, but they are not. They are essentially taxes on imported products, and they are paid by consumers. Trump’s running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, recently tried to claim that economists disagree about whether consumers bear the cost of tariffs, but as Michael Hiltzik explained in the Los Angeles Times yesterday, economists agree on this.

When he was in office, Trump launched a trade war in 2018 by putting tariffs of up to 25% on $50 billion worth of Chinese products. The next year he added another set of 10% tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese imports, and the next year he did it again, this time on an additional $112 worth of Chinese products. The nonpartisan Tax Foundation calculates that this amounted to an $80 billion tax a year on American consumers, costing the average household about $300 a year and costing the U.S. about 142,000 jobs.

There are reasons to use tariffs. They can be used to protect a new industry from cheaper foreign products until the new industry can compete, or to stop foreign countries from flooding a country with cheap products that destroy a domestic industry. When he took office, Biden kept those of Trump’s tariffs that protected certain industries.

Trump’s insistence that tariffs will solve everything is not about economics, it’s about pushing a worldview from the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, one embodied by the 1890 McKinley Tariff. “If you look at McKinley,” Trump told right-wing media host Mark Levin on Sunday, “he was a great president. He made the country rich.” In fact, McKinley (R-OH) pushed through the tariff named for him while he was in the House of Representatives from his position as a spokesperson for wealthy industrialists. They insisted that high tariffs were imperative to the survival of the country, that such tariffs were good for workers because they protected wages, and that anyone who disagreed was a socialist. But in an era without business regulation, industrialists actually kept wages low and used the tariffs to protect high prices that they passed on to consumers.

In the late 1880s, the American people demanded a lower tariff, but when Republicans in Congress went to “revise” it, they made it higher. In May 1890, in a chaotic congressional session with members shouting amendments, yelling objections, and talking over each other, Republicans passed the McKinley Tariff without any Democratic votes. They cheered and clapped at their victory. “You may rejoice now,” a Democrat yelled across the aisle, “but next November you’ll mourn.”

Democrats were right. In the November 1890 midterm elections, angry voters repudiated the Republican Party. They gave the Democrats a two-to-one majority in the House—McKinley himself lost his seat. Republicans managed to keep the Senate by four seats, but three of those seats were held by senators who had voted against the McKinley Tariff, and the fourth turned out to have been stolen.

[uboat53]

In the wake of Kanye West (or Ye) expressing admiration for Adolf Hitler and multiple figures and institutions on the right having to rapidly cut ties with him I think it's time we examine the way racism and antisemitism have infiltrated the right-wing of our country and the Republican Party in particular. Consider this a LONT RANT (TM).

BACKGROUND

In case you missed it, Kanye West went on Infowars recently and expressed his open admiration for Adolf Hitler. However, this is really only the far end of a journey that has seen him express opinions about Jewish control of business, entertainment, and politics, wear symbols associated with white supremacy like a shirt that said "white lives matter", and express other dog-whistle opinions that match those expressed by other figures on the political right.

That same period has also seen major figures and institutions on the political right and in the Republican Party embrace West including pundit Tucker Carlson, former President Donald Trump, and even the Republican side of the US House Judiciary Committee.

SPEAKING IN CODE

So here's the question, if you believe that a cabal of "globalists" are scheming with George Soros to take over the world, overthrow American democracy, and implement some kind of tyranny, is that racist?

Well, on the face of it, you might be tempted to say "no", but the answer is, in the vast majority of cases, actually "yes". Here's how that actually works.

"Globalist" may sound race-neutral, but it's not. It's meant to sound like a term that refers to people who want to put the interests of other nations ahead of or at least equal to that of the United States, but its history is far darker than that. It actually refers to an ancient conspiracy theory known as "blood libel". In this conspiracy theory there is a world-wide cabal of Jews who are enacting rituals that include blood sacrifice around the world in order to bring about the downfall of... well, it varies, but it's certainly not portrayed as a good thing.

One of the key giveaways here is the use of George Soros, a Jewish Holocaust survivor as the personification of this idea. Why George Soros and not any other wealthy liberal? The decision is not by accident.

All of this is what is known as a "dog-whistle", which refers to a racist statement that is meant to be heard as such by other racists but not by the average listener. Dog whistles in recent American history have included "state's rights", "welfare queens", and "international bankers". And you don't need to take my word for it, here's former Republican strategist Lee Atwater discussing the strategy that allowed Nixon to win the South in the 1968 election, the first time a Republican had ever managed to do so:

"You start out in 1954 saying 'Nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968, you can't say 'nigger' - that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like 'forced busing', 'state's rights', and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now, you're talking about cutting taxes. And all those things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites... But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me - because obviously sitting around saying saying 'we want to cut this' is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than 'nigger, nigger'."

Source

Words like "globalist" and "George Soros" and even "new world order" are the new dog whistles.

REDEFINING RACISM

One of the key things that the modern right and much of the Republican Party has done of late is to basically deny the existence of dog whistling despite it being a well known and well documented phenomenon. Basically, in their formulation, racism can only be racism if a person EXPLICITLY says something that cannot be denied as racism.

It's no longer enough if a person only uses words that could, technically, mean other things or advocates for policies that would harm the interests of minorities; in this Republican world the only people who are racists are the ones who explicitly tell you that they are racists.

In this world, someone can use coded words which are known and documented to be used by racists, can support policies that are known to disproportionately and negatively impact minorities, and even pal around with people who ARE acknowledged to be out and out racists and still not be considered racists themselves. The list of people who fit this criteria include Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), former President Donald Trump, popular pundit Tucker Carlson, popular entertainer Alex Jones, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) to name a few. You'll also note that these aren't fringe figures, many of them hold significant power both within the party and within the nation.

WHAT THIS MEANS

Well, it's fairly straightforward. It means that the Republican Party is full of people who may or may not be racist, they just haven't said the magic words yet to be branded as such by the party. Kanye West did not become racist the moment he spoke of his admiration for Hitler, he was a racist already, but it was only once those magic words were spoken that he was actually acknowledged as such.

What this means is that you have a lot of people who share language with racists, who share policy ideas with racists, who even share dinner tables, conversations, and ideas with racists, and who may themselves someday be "revealed" as racists if they say the right words are making policy and laws that affect the entire country. The Republican Party has decided that the risk of allowing racists to make policy is acceptable in order to not have to address questions of racism that are even the slightest bit difficult, only acknowledging racism in the most obvious and impossible to deny cases.

CONCLUSION

After having used coded language for decades to gain the support of people with racist ideas and intentions, the Republican Party and the right side of American politics as a whole have decided to refuse to acknowledge it. In doing so, it has empowered racists to take key positions within the party and impact national policymaking as long as they avoid saying a narrow and specific set of words.

Kanye West is not the first, nor will not be the last conservative "revealed" to the movement to have been racist all along long after everyone else had realized it; the Republican and conservative policy of not acknowledging any of the known indicators of racism has left it in a position where racists can easily infiltrate the movement and the party to positions of high influence where they can then propagate racist policies and ideas across the nation at large.

Not all Republicans are racist (I maintain that I know several of them who are not and such blanket assertions often miss nuance in any case) but the party has a racism problem. The only way forward is for it to remove the blinders that prevent it from even acknowledging the existence of racism until it is far too late and to start the painful process of clearing out all of the members, including powerful members, that it has allowed in its ranks.

I'm pretty confident this won't happen, so we're probably going to see this happen again and again for quite some time. For better or for worse the Republican Party has decided to be a haven for racists for the foreseeable future, it's time that the country at large acknowledged it even if the party won't.

[beardedmrbean]

Conservatives on Twitter were not buying President Joe Biden’s recent speech assessing the pandemic and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as the two main issues behind the United States’ economic woes.

Around noon on Tuesday, Biden addressed the American public on the state of the economy. In addition to saying that his administration has made "extraordinary progress" with the economy, Biden blamed all economic hardship on COVID-19 and Russia.

"I want us to be crystal clear about the problem," Biden stated. "There are two leading causes of inflation we’re seeing today. The first cause of inflation is a once-in-a-century pandemic. Not only did it shut down our global economy, it threw the supply chains and the demand completely out of whack."

SEN. RICK SCOTT HITS BACK AT BIDEN'S ATTACKS: HE TOOK NO RESPONSIBILITY

He then explained the other cause. "And this year we have a second cause, Mr. Putin’s war in Ukraine." He added, "We saw in March that 60% of inflation that month was due to price increases at the pump for gasoline."

In response to reporters’ question about taking any "responsibility" for inflation, Biden stated, "I think our policies help, not hurt."

Exasperated with the Biden narrative that blamed external forces for inflation, conservatives took to Twitter to mock the president’s words.

"This is what Joe Biden's policies have done to prices in just one part of the economy," tweeted Townhall.com editor Spencer Brown, along with an infographic of the national average gas prices.

Fox News contributor Guy Benson, tweeted, "This speech is listless and somewhat adrift. Totally predictable talking points, filled with familiar specious claims."

Shortly ahead of the speech, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, shared a Reuters article claiming that Biden will blast Republicans for having no plan to stop inflation during the speech. He captioned the post with his own assessment about how Biden is harming the economy.

"Stop…spending…MONEY!!" Cruz tweeted.

Writer Kyle Becker blasted the entirety of Biden’s address, tweeting, "Biden is lying about his ‘solutions’ for inflation and the non-existent Republican plan for a ‘middle class tax hike.’ This gaslighting won’t work because the policies won’t work."

"Joe Biden will blame anyone and anything for inflation," tweeted MRCTV’s account. 

Washington Free Beacon reporter Joe Gabriel Simonson mocked one of Biden’s proposed inflation solutions, tweeting, "I am enjoying Biden acknowledging that higher taxes -- which sucks money out of the economy -- could theoretically ease inflation. excited to see where this thought takes him."

Conservative commentator Greg Price tweeted, "Biden says that he is taking inflation ‘very seriously’ before once again blaming it on covid and Putin." 

Breitbart White House correspondent Charlie Spiering tweeted similarly, writing, "’I want every American to know I'm taking it seriously,’ says Joe Biden about inflation before blaming the pandemic and Putin for all of the problems."

In another tweet Spiering described Biden’s address as a "Very defensive speech," and added, "So far Joe Biden hasn’t offered a single new solution to inflation even though he says it's his ‘top domestic priority’ A lot of shuffling and rehashing of previous efforts."

[diavolaangelica]

Trump is a blight on U.S politics... all his rallies are centered around fear mongering and deflecting attention away from talking about policy. The reason he is doing it, is because if he tells the American citizens his real agenda, he will lose votes. They have been moving in the shadows planning this shit for a long time now. He stacked the Supreme court, appointed MAGA prone judges in different circuits around the U.S, and as a result, many things are changing that will negatively affect how our governing bodies and agencies are run. We need to get back to a working 2 party system. Traditional Republicans knew how to work with the other side of the isle on bipartisan deals that benefited the American people. These MAGA republicans in the senate and congress do nothing but waste taxpayer dollars, and are so counterproductive. So when people say why didn't Joe Biden do this or that during his presidency, it's not for lack of trying.. it's because all those Trump loyalists would rather block something good, in order to make Biden look bad; and call him a failure. Like Biden's student loan forgiveness program, it was ruled unconstitutional by a Trump appointed judge, therefore blocked. Things that would benefit us are not their priority. Their priority is fluffing Donald Trump's massive ego, soothing his hurt feelings, and trying to save him from facing the legal consequences of his criminal behavior. The man is an incoherent mess, he can't even string a simple thought process together. He's stuck on attacking Haitian migrants that are LEGALLY there in Springfield Ohio, on a debunked claim, or screaming about Aurora Colorado and the Venezuelans.. also false claims; and he still hasn't gotten over the fact that he lost his mind on a live debate, because of a "crowd size" reality check. He says he won "by a lot", and the "audience" cheered.. there was no audience. The man is insane, and he doesn't want to BE president. He wants the title, perks, the get out of jail free card, and to collect all the money he can to enrich himself and his family. He'd sell us for a corn chip, if it benefited him. He is lazy, and doesn't have the mental capacity to make the right decisions for the average working American citizens that are the backbone of this country. It's all about him and his wealthy friends. "Friends"... it's just business, people probably tolerate him, because they are already salivating with the taste those huge tax breaks in their mouths if he wins.

after claiming in the recent presidential debate that he has nothing to do with project 2025, footage from trump’s keynote speech at the Heritage Foundation in 2022 proves the opposite: that project 2025 is “critical” and has “laid the groundwork” for what he plans to do if re-elected

project 2025 is very real and if you don’t think he’s going to use it or that it won’t impact you in any way, you are wrong

read it, get informed, and go vote

[misfitwashere]

The wrecking-ball crew and the looting of America 

History guarantees that Trump’s billionaires will overreach

ROBERT REICH

NOV 18

Friends,

What do card sharks, magicians, pickpockets, and tyrants do to hide their tricks? They deflect your attention. “Look over here!” they say, as they create a commotion that preoccupies your mind while they bamboozle you. 

At first, I thought Trump’s gonzo nominations were intended to flood the zone — overwhelm us, demoralize us, cause us to lose our minds. 

Alternatively, I thought, they had a strategic purpose: Smoke out Senate Republicans who might stand in Trump’s way on other issues — such as allying with Putin and destroying NATO — so Trump could purge the holdouts through primary challengers and angry MAGAs. 

But while flooding the zone and purging recalcitrant Senate Republicans may be part of it, I’ve come to think there’s a larger plan at work. 

Trump wants to deflect our attention while he and his fellow billionaires loot America. 

As he consolidates power, Trump is on his way to creating a government of billionaires, by billionaires, for billionaires. 

Trump intuitively knows that the most powerful and insidious of all alliances is between rich oligarchs and authoritarian strongmen. 

Two billionaires are leading his transition team. The richest person in the world and another billionaire will run a new department of “efficiency.” Other billionaires are waiting in the wings to be anointed to various positions. 

America is now home to 813 billionaires whose cumulative wealth has grown a staggering 50 percent since before the pandemic. 

Apologists for these mind-boggling amounts argue they’re not a zero-sum game where the rest of us must lose ground in order for billionaires to prosper. Quite the contrary, they say: The billionaire’s achievements expand the economic pie for everyone. 

But the apologists overlook one important thing. Power is a zero-sum game. The more power in billionaire hands, the less power in everyone else’s. And power cannot be separated from wealth, or wealth from power. 

The shameless feeding frenzy that has already begun at the troughs of Trump — planning for more tax cuts for the wealthy, regulatory rollbacks to make the wealthy and their corporations even wealthier, subsidies for the wealthy and their enterprises — constitute a zero-sum power game that will hurt average Americans. 

The pending tax cuts will explode the national debt. As a result, the rest of America will have to pay more in interest payments to the holders of that debt — who, not incidentally, are wealthy Americans. 

This will require that the middle and working classes either pay higher taxes or sacrifice some benefits they rely on (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act). 

Meanwhile, regulatory rollbacks will make workplaces less safe, products more dangerous, our air and water more polluted, national parks less welcoming, travel more hazardous, and financial transactions riskier for average people. 

Trump has tapped Elon Musk, who invested some $130 million to get Trump elected (not to mention in-kind gifts of support from X and a swing-state operation to register right-leaning voters) and former pharmaceutical executive Vivek Ramaswamy, to run a “Department of Government Efficiency.”

Musk calls it DOGE, named after Musk’s favorite cryptocurrency — whose value, not incidentally, has soared since Musk began using its name for his incipient department. 

It now appears that DOGE won’t be an actual “Department” but a powerful advisory group outside the official government yet inside the Trump White House. It will announce — presumably posted with great fanfare on X — what Musk allies describe as “slash-and-burn business ideologies to the U.S. government.” 

Musk has vowed to cut at least $2 trillion from the federal budget. The richest man in the world explains that “we have to reduce spending to live within our means. And, you know, that necessarily involves some temporary hardship.”

Hardship for whom? Not for Musk. Not for Trump. Not for the billionaires heading Trump’s transition team. Not for all the billionaires who will profit from the planned tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks. 

And not for people responding to Musk’s recent X post calling for “super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting. If that’s you, DM this account…. Elon & Vivek will review the top 1% of applicants.”

Musk says we have to reduce spending “to live within our means?” Whose means? 

Since Trump’s election victory on November 5, Musk himself has become $70 billion richer due to the rising value of his enterprises. 

Why have Musk’s companies — Tesla, SpaceX, and X — risen so much in value? Because investors expect some or all of the 19 known ongoing federal investigations and lawsuits against Musk’s companies to wind down. (Lawsuits involving alleged securities law violations, workplace safety, labor and civil rights violations, violations of environmental laws, consumer fraud, and vehicle safety defects.)

Investors also expect SpaceX to become more profitable from more multibillion-dollar contracts. Musk’s xAI could also reap vast rewards as the new administration considers AI regulations.

Other billionaires who invested in Trump have also been raking it in. 

Oracle founder Larry Ellison, the world’s second-richest person — a close friend of Musk’s and a former Tesla board member — is a longtime Republican donor who’s enjoying his own Trump bump. Since the election, Oracle’s share value has increased 10 percent, increasing Ellison’s own wealth by some $20 billion.

Venture capital billionaire Marc Andreessen, who donated at least $4.5 million to a super PAC that supported Trump, expects to cash in by having Trump ease the antitrust crackdown on Big Tech, in which Andreessen has invested heavily. Andreessen’s wish has already been partly monetized: Big Tech has reaped most of the stock market gains since Election Day.

There’s also crypto. Since the election, the price of bitcoin has surged to record levels. The crypto exchange Coinbase, a major contributor to candidates friendly to crypto, expects regulators to keep their hands off it. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has become about $4.5 billion richer since Trump’s victory, as Coinbase shares soared 67 percent. 

Oh, there are also the private prison corporations. George Zoley, a top executive at GEO Group and another major donor to Trump, expects Trump’s reelection to drive up demand for empty beds at detention centers the company runs for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Since the election, GEO Group has had the largest surge in its stock price since 2016, after Trump was elected the first time. 

GEO Group executives told Wall Street analysts on a recent earnings call that Trump’s election could help GEO Group fill as many as 18,000 empty beds at its facilities, which would generate as much as $400 million in annual business.

Venture capitalists and investors in new military technologies are now swarming around the Defense Department like bees over a vast flower bed. They also donated to Trump and expect a big quid pro quo. 

The fossil fuels CEOs who plunked down millions of dollars for Trump in the expectation they’d get a fat return in the form of rollbacks of environmental regulations are also celebrating. 

The list of wealthy beneficiaries from Trump’s election goes on and on. 

So who will suffer the “hardship” Musk predicts? 

I doubt that Musk will recommend cutting the billions of dollars in government contracts Musk’s corporations receive, or the GEO Group’s contracts for private prison space, or the military budget. Quite the contrary: Government spending on all these will increase. 

Instead, Musk will want to cut the enforcement of antitrust laws, securities laws, workplace safety laws, labor laws, civil rights laws, laws against consumer fraud, laws mandating vehicle safety, tax laws, and environmental laws.

And because there’s no other place to find anything close to the $2 trillion he’s promising to cut from the federal budget, I expect Musk will turn to cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits.

Here’s where the trick comes in. We’ll all be so distracted by what Gaetz is doing at the Justice Department, Gabbard to national intelligence, and RFK Jr. to public health, that we may not notice. 

After all, the next months will be filled with Trump theatrics — a major fight in the Senate over the Gaetz nomination, another fight over recess appointments, another over RFK Jr. and his plans for destroying public health. 

Meanwhile, Musk and company will be recommending all sorts budget cuts that cause hardship for hardworking Americans but almost no one will notice because of the distractions. 

I prefer to end this post on a hopeful note, so here goes.

There has always been a close relationship in America between wealth and power, but it has usually been thought slightly shameful — something to be hidden or elided — because it contradicts the basic tenets of democracy. 

Recall the admonition credited to Justice Louis Brandeis that America has a choice: either great wealth in the hands of a few, or democracy — but we cannot have both.

Hence, American politicians typically play up their humble origins. CEOs and bankers minimize their political clout. The wealthy refrain from overt displays of power. 

But in Gilded Ages — such as the one that dominated the turn of the 20th century and the one we’re now in — the ultra-rich abandon such humility. The linkages between wealth and power becomes apparent for all to see. Conspicuous consumption becomes the handmaiden of conspicuous clout. 

In such times, the wealthy brag about their access to politicians, talk openly about how many tens of millions of dollars they’ve donated to campaigns and about the “return” on these “investments,” and want everyone to know how they’ve turned their affluence into influence and their influence into even more affluence. 

Ultimately, these insults to democracy — delivered by the new oligarchs shamelessly, openly, and arrogantly — go too far. They invite a backlash. 

If history is any guide, at some point the public will become revolted by the stench of legalized bribery. It will not abide the quid pro quos of billionaire campaign donations for tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks.

The public will also become fed up with brazen billionaire propaganda delivered through billionaire ownership of key media, such as Musk’s X, right-wing radio, and Murdoch’s Fox News, New York Post, and editorial pages of the The Wall Street Journal. 

More than a century ago, this sort of revulsion generated what historians refer to as the “Progressive Era.” It was responsible for pushing Teddy Roosevelt to break up the monopolies, institute the nation’s first income tax, stop corporations from funding candidates for president and Congress, and create the Food and Drug Administration. 

And when the excesses finally caused the economy to collapse, another upsurge in progressivism prompted Teddy’s fifth cousin, Franklin D., to raise taxes even further on the affluent, create the 40-hour workweek with time-and-a-half for overtime, force corporations to negotiate with unions, institute unemployment insurance, create a minimum wage, and establish Social Security. 

If history is any guide, there is no limit to how greedy the greedy will get when the guardrails are lifted. So Gilded Age excesses are almost guaranteed. 

And when the corruption and ensuing hardship become so blatant that they offend the values of the majority of Americans, that majority will once again demand systematic reforms that bring us closer to those values.