#U.S. Chamber of Commerce

[jobkash]

Events Internship, Spring 2025

We are pleased to offer an outstanding and substantive internship program for the nation’s best and brightest young leaders.At the Chamber, you will obtain a hands-on, meaningful work experience designed to meet your academic and career goals. Our internships offer opportunities in research, writing, database management, policy, communications, and event preparation.During the internship, you…

[nationallawreview]

The DOJ’s New Corporate Whistleblower Awards Pilot Program: A Victory for Wall Street – A Setback for Accountability

On August 1, 2024, the U.S Department of Justice announced the rules governing its new corporate whistleblower program. Unfortunately for whistleblowers, the Justice Department based its new program on proposals long advocated by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Wall Street special interests. These Wall Street-friendly features contain most of the major elements of a long dreamed of “wish list”…

[minnesotafollower]

Negative Impact on Minnesota of Donald Trump’s Proposed Immigration Restrictions

Candidate Donald Trump’s proposed immigration changes would “send shock waves through [Minnesota’s] economy” according to the StarTribune’s Emma Nelson and Christopher Vondracek. Those changes would bar refugees, carry out mass deportations and limit birthright citizenship. [1] Here are the perceived impact of such proposed changes on the State of Minnesota. “Minnesota’s unemployment rate is…

[hislop3]

FTC Bans Employment Non-Compete Provisions - Healthcare Implications Aplenty

On Tuesday, the Federal Trade Commission issued a final rule effectively, banning non-compete agreements, provisions, etc. for employees, including executives. The final rule contains separate provisions defining unfair methods of competition for the two subcategories of workers. Specifically, the final rule provides that, with respect to a worker other than a senior executive, it is an unfair…

[empiricalscotus]

Two Pieces to the Puzzle: Long Conference Petitions and Granted Cases for OT 2023

[completed with the help of Jake Truscott who gathered data for this post] The 2022 Supreme Court term concluded this past June. Since then, the Justices have been on break. In the past several justices go on vacation (some of the downsides to such travel have been documented as well) while others teach in exciting locations in and outside of the U.S.  This summer it appears that the justices…

[zvaigzdelasas]

"We heard from employees who, because of noncompetes, were stuck in abusive workplaces," she said. "One person noted when an employer merged with an organization whose religious principles conflicted with their own, a noncompete kept the worker locked in place and unable to freely switch to a job that didn't conflict with their religious practices."

These accounts, she said, "pointed to the basic reality of how robbing people of their economic liberty also robs them of all sorts of other freedoms." The FTC estimates about 30 million people, or one in five American workers, from minimum wage earners to CEOs, are bound by noncompetes. It says the policy change could lead to increased wages totaling nearly $300 billion per year by encouraging people to swap jobs freely.

The ban, which will take effect later this year, carves out an exception for existing noncompetes that companies have given their senior executives, on the grounds that these agreements are more likely to have been negotiated. The FTC says employers should not enforce other existing noncompete agreements.

The vote was 3 to 2 along party lines. The dissenting commissioners, Melissa Holyoke and Andrew Ferguson, argued that the FTC was overstepping the boundaries of its power. Holyoke predicted the ban would be challenged in court and eventually struck down.

Shortly after the vote, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said it would sue the FTC to block the rule, calling it unnecessary, unlawful and a blatant power grab.

Huh [23 Apr 24]

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Paul Blest at More Perfect Union:

Thousands of workers at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee have voted to join the United Auto Workers, defying an all-out union-busting effort from the state’s political leaders and marking a key victory for the United Auto Workers in their renewed effort to organize the South and non-union plants.

Unofficial results tallied Friday showed that after three days of voting, more than two-thirds of workers voted to join the UAW. The win in Chattanooga is the first successful attempt to organize a non-union automaker in decades and comes after multiple failed attempts to organize the plant, including in 2014 and 2019. More than 4,300 workers were eligible to vote this week.  “I can't explain it. It's not like the first times,” Renee Berry, who has worked at the Chattanooga plant for 14 years and through two prior facility-wide votes, told us in the lead-up to the election. “The first few times was hell…now it's like we can roll our shoulders back, because we got it.”  Volkswagen is the world’s largest auto company by revenue, and until today, every one of its plants around the globe has been unionized except for one.

"This is going to be in history books down the road. This is huge—forever huge,” Robert Soderstrom, a worker at the plant, told More Perfect Union. “People recognize for the first time in a long time, on a mass scale, that there's got to be some changes. And some of the power and stuff that's gone to the corporate world needs to come back to us little guys.” The victory in Tennessee continues a winning streak for the UAW, which negotiated record contracts at the Detroit Three of Ford, GM, and Stellantis last year following a lengthy “stand-up” strike. After passing the contracts, UAW President Shawn Fain announced a $40 million effort to organize non-union U.S. plants, largely based in right-to-work states like Tennessee and owned by auto companies based in Europe, Japan, and South Korea, as well as EV manufacturers like Tesla and Rivian. 

Since launching that new effort, more than 10,000 autoworkers around the country have signed union cards, according to the UAW. Earlier this month, workers at a Mercedes plant in Vance, Alabama became the second group to file for an election, which will be held from May 13 to 17. Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey and the state Chamber of Commerce have forcefully opposed the unionization effort, claiming it would hurt Alabama autoworkers—who, even before the pandemic, were making less than they did in 2002 when adjusted for inflation. The same dynamic has played out in Tennessee. Gov. Bill Lee, who denounced the last unsuccessful union campaign in 2019, said it would be a “mistake” for workers at the Chattanooga plant to unionize and boasted about the state’s “right-to-work” law. 

🚨🚨 BREAKING:🚨🚨 Workers at the Volkswagen (VW) plant in Chattanooga have voted yes to join the United Auto Workers (UAW) after 2 failed attempts in 2014 and 2019. #UAW #VWChattanooga #1u

[jstor]

Alexander Miles, a prominent African-American inventor of the late 19th century, is best known for his groundbreaking invention - elevator doors that could open and close automatically. This invention transformed the safety of elevator rides, with automatic doors now considered a standard feature in modern elevators.

Born on May 18, 1838, in Circleville, Ohio, Alexander Miles was the son of Michael and Mary Miles. As a young adult, he relocated to Waukesha, Wisconsin, where he worked as a barber throughout the 1860s. It was while living in Winona, Minnesota, in 1870, that he met Candace J. Dunlap from New York City, who later became his wife. After the birth of their daughter, Grace, the family moved to Duluth, Minnesota.

In Duluth, Miles enjoyed significant success as a barber, setting up a barbershop in the four-story St. Louis Hotel. He smartly invested his savings into purchasing a real estate office. His business acumen led to him becoming the first Black member of the Duluth Chamber of Commerce. In 1884, Miles constructed a three-story brownstone building in an area that later came to be known as the “Miles Block.”

While taking elevator rides in his buildings, Miles noticed the dangerous risks associated with manually operated elevator shaft doors being left open. Determined to solve this problem, he invented a mechanism that allowed elevator shaft doors to operate at the correct times. The mechanism, which involved a flexible belt attached to the elevator cage touching drums positioned along the elevator shaft, automated the elevator doors through a series of levers and rollers. On October 11, 1887, Alexander Miles was granted a patent for his life-saving invention (U.S. Patent 371,207).

In 1899, Miles and his family moved to Chicago, Illinois, where he started The United Brotherhood, a life insurance company for Black customers who were denied coverage by White-owned firms. Eventually, Miles relocated to Seattle, Washington. Prior to his death on May 7, 1918, he was considered the wealthiest Black person in the Pacific Northwest area, largely due to the income from his invention. In recognition of his contributions, Alexander Miles was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2007.

Read more about Alexander Miles here.

[robertreich]

Debunking “No One Wants To Work Anymore” 

I keep hearing "no one wants to work anymore."

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, corporate America’s biggest lobbying group, claims there are over 10 million job openings right now in the US for which employers can’t find workers.

Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell says the U.S. is dealing with a “structural labor shortage” that won’t be resolved anytime soon.

But here’s the truth: there is no labor shortage.

There is a shortage of jobs paying sufficient wages to attract workers to fill them.

When a problem is wrongly described, the solutions posed often turn out to be equally wrong.

For most Americans, real inflation-adjusted wages continue to drop. Any pay increases workers may have earned in the past few years have actually been pay cuts, because wages have lagged behind the rising costs of basic necessities — like housing, food, childcare, and healthcare.

You don’t have to be a financial wizard to see why some workers might say the hell with it.

So, what should be done about the difficulty employers are having finding workers?

Simple. If employers want more workers, they should pay them more.

Many corporations are raking it in right now, they can clearly afford to.

Of course Jerome Powell and his colleagues at the Fed don’t want to hear this. They’re aiming to deal with the so-called “labor shortage” by slowing the economy so much that employers can find all the workers they need without raising wages.

But the Fed increasing interest rates to slow the economy will prevent millions of people from getting desperately-needed raises and cause millions more to lose their jobs — disproportionately low-wage workers, women and people of color.

Meanwhile, Republicans and some corporate economists blame the “labor shortage” on overly generous unemployment benefits. They say the way to get more people into jobs is to make their lives outside jobs less tolerable.

Rubbish. Most unemployed people are already hard up.

Pandemic benefits are long over, and even before COVID, America’s unemployment system was already the least generous of any rich nation.

Taken to its logical extreme, the corporate Republican argument holds water only if you don’t give a damn about workers.

Sure…you could eliminate all safety nets and at some point people without jobs will hurt so much they’ll have to take any available job, at any wage, whatever it demands.

But do this, and we’ll end up with an economy that’s even crueler than today’s economy.

Look: If we want more people to take jobs — AND we wish to live in a moral society where people can maintain decent lives — the answer is to pay people more.

Instead of saying “no one wants to work anymore,” we should be saying, “no one wants to be exploited anymore.”

[probablyasocialecologist]

While home interiors depicted a blissful atomic future, their occupants lived in an age of revanchist conservatism. American society had become increasingly atomized and patriarchal during this time. Women were important contributors to wartime atomic science: Maria Goeppert-Mayer worked on the Manhattan project, and was awarded a Nobel Prize for her contributions to science by 1963; Leona Woods Marshall Libby worked in Enrico Fermi’s lab at the University of Chicago, where she demonstrated the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. When men returned from war, many women were discouraged from continuing their careers as scientists, technologists, and academics. As mainly white working women became wives in picket-fenced suburbia, they turned to the domestic affairs of the home to regain some control. As such, the demand for Atomic Age style was created by these women’s purchasing decisions. Atomic aesthetics in the home eventually served to “feminize” the atom, further domesticating its image.

[...]

Beauty queens and pin-up girls proliferated after World War II. The new vogue for radioactivity reached pageantry, with new beauty contests celebrating all things nuclear. From Miss Atomic Blast to Miss Atomic Bomb, this cheerful embodiment of lethal nukes has been described variously as commercializing, feminizing, and disarming the atom. By 1955, atomic pageantry had diversified to celebrate and normalize uranium mining and nuclear energy, as Colorado and Utah became home to expansive uranium mining programs. In a contest sponsored by the Uranium Ore Producers Association and the Grand Junction Chamber of Commerce to celebrate Colorado’s uranium mining boom, the winning Miss Atomic Energy was rewarded with a truckload of uranium ore worth approximately $5000 in today’s money — and a trophy in the shape of Rutherford’s iconic atomic model. The bikini bathing suit debuted in 1946, taking its name from Bikini Atoll, where the U.S. undertook its first nuclear weapon detonations since Hiroshima. Louis Réard’sdesignwas itself derived from a less revealing French design created by Jacques Heim, known as “L’atome.” Both garments played with the semiotics of nuclear warfare. Models were initially scandalized by the bikini’s skimpiness and refused to wear it. By 1951, however, a bikini round had been integrated into the annual Miss World competition, further linking the atom with ideals of feminine beauty. 

[jobkash]

Legal Affairs Internship, Spring 2025

About Us:If you are passionate about the ability of American business to improve lives, solve problems, and strengthen society, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is the place for you. As the world’s largest business organization, we believe in building a future that gives everyone the opportunity to pursue a better tomorrow. We make it our job today–and every day–to build the strongest relationships…

[nationallawreview]

The New Cross-Cultural Playbook for Global Arbitration

Cross-cultural differences and the misunderstandings that often arise from them play a powerful role in how businesses build relationships and conduct their commercial and legal affairs. At a time of expansive growth in transnational business, trade, and investment, a lack of knowledge about local culture, values, and customs in business and legal dealings are leading to ever more complex and…

[darkmaga-returns]

By Todd and Erik Gregory

Supreme Court justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, both of whom belong on the Mount Rushmore of Supreme Court justices, have earned a well-deserved retirement. (Preferably, Chief Justice John Roberts retires as well). Let’s get three young constitutional conservatives confirmed to the SCOTUS while we still have a majority GOP senate.

Have Elon Musk, Ron Paul, Vivek Ramaswamy, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and others take a hatchet to the U.S. federal government and its various redundant, nonperforming, and outright destructive bureaucracies. Lay off as many federal employees as possible, and take away their undeserved pensions. Eliminate whole cabinets where possible (the morally noxious, fiscally incontinent, and gender dysphoria-promoting Department of Education is an excellent place to start).

Build a real wall along the southern border; we want deliverables this time, not more excuses about how Congress can’t appropriate the funds or how the chamber of commerce says it can’t be done.

Voter ID/paper ballots/same day voting/citizen only voting on future election days. Make election day a federal holiday, if necessary.

Fire every single U.S. attorney in the U.S. attorneys’ offices of the corrupt and ideologically weaponized Justice Department. Take away their taxpayer-funded pensions, and prosecute the many who torpedoed democracy by engaging in insurrectionary lawfare against a duly elected president and many of his voters from 2016-2020, and in the years since then as well.

Intelligence community spooks (FBI, CIA, NSA, et al.) who engaged in a sustained palace coup with phony whisper campaigns against Donald Trump, his surrogates, and his supporters, need to be prosecuted, convicted, and imprisoned for their unconstitutional crimes against the American people.

Pardon all January 6 political prisoners currently held in federal gulags immediately upon taking office on January 20, even those who allegedly smashed windows, sat in Nancy Pelosi’s sacred chair, or walked through open doors to take selfies after Capitol police invited them inside the Rotunda.

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from the New York Times:

Dozens of environmental, labor and health care groups banded together on Monday to file a petition to push the Federal Emergency Management Agency to declare extreme heat and wildfire smoke as “major disasters,” like floods and tornadoes.

The petition is a major push to get the federal government to help states and local communities that are straining under the growing costs of climate change.

If accepted, the petition could unlock FEMA funds to help localities prepare for heat waves and wildfire smoke by building cooling centers or installing air filtration systems in schools. The agency could also help during emergencies by paying for water distribution, health screenings for vulnerable people and increased electricity use.

“Major disaster declarations really open up the broadest pockets of funding that FEMA has available,” said Jean Su, a senior attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group, and the lead author of the petition. “State and local governments are severely ill equipped and underfunded to even deal with emergency measures.”

A Forecast for Heat

It’s been the hottest year on record, the Northeast is bracing for its first severe heat of the year and the Times is tracking extreme heat around the world.

The support of major labor groups like the A.F.L.-CIO and the Service Employees International Union is part of a broader strategy from unions to create protection for the tens of millions of people working outside or without air-conditioning during heat waves. Unions want the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to require employers to protect workers from extreme temperatures. The White House has pushed officials at the Labor Department, which oversees OSHA, to publish a draft heat regulation this summer. But major business and industry groups, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, are opposed to any new requirements.

Labor groups and workers’ rights organizations hope that, if the petition to FEMA is accepted, there would be more pressure for employers to address heat in the workplace.

[handeaux]

A Secret Organization Scoured Cincinnati For Bolsheviks But Found Only A Schoolgirl

It is inevitable, once you have created an organization to snitch on your neighbors, that you will find neighbors to snitch on. So it was with the American Protective League.

The American Protective League emerged from the jingoistic fervor that gripped America during the First World War. According to Steven L. Wright [Queen City Heritage, Winter 1988]:

“The American Protective League (APL) organized in Chicago in March 1917, had units in 600 cities and a membership roster of nearly 100,000. And by 1918 membership had grown to 250,000. Its membership consisted of bankers, businessmen, attorneys, chamber of commerce leaders and insurance company executives. Because of their ‘high’ position, they easily obtained information concerning ‘troublesome’ citizens, especially those who opposed the draft.”

Nationally, the APL received quasi-legal status as an affiliate of the federal Department of Justice. Locally, the Cincinnati branch of the APL was instrumental in arresting thirteen socialists who were charged with treason for circulating literature opposed to the military draft. Those charges would eventually be dismissed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1924.

With the conclusion of hostilities, the APL technically disbanded on 31 January 1919 when Gerson J. Brown, the wholesale tobacconist who led the Cincinnati chapter, turned over all League records to Calvin S. Weakley, special agent of the Department of Justice. Even though the organization ceased to exist, however, some members insisted on carrying on the work of the League. Germany’s surrender had revealed, according to these men, a new and even more sinister enemy working to conquer America – Bolshevism. John L. Richey, head of the Cincinnati Association of Credit Men, announced through several very public speeches that his position as chief investigator of the American Protective League had revealed to him that Bolshevism was alive and well in Cincinnati. According to the Enquirer [9 January 1919]:

“Mr. Richey declared speakers at recent meetings in Cincinnati had advocated immediate revolution and deliberate assassination of public officials who could not be influenced as part of the Bolshevist doctrine. There has been an increase, Mr. Richey said, in the Bolshevist movement in Cincinnati from 500 members 60 days ago, to a membership of a few more than 3,000 today.”

Not quite a week later, the Cincinnati Post [14 January 1919] announced that Richey now estimated a Cincinnati cabal of Bolshevists, International Workers of the World, and various other radical fellow travelers had more than 7,000 members. Richey pledged to continue his investigative work in Cincinnati despite the dissolution of the American Protective League through a new “secret patriotic organization.” According to Richey:

“Members of these groups of radicals, or revolutionists, are guided by a national head, who directs from New York and Philadelphia. Cincinnatians in the organizations principally are foreign born. There are Germans, Italians, Russians, and Hungarians, with some malcontent Americans.”

In a statement that foreshadowed the Red-baiting tactics of Senator Joseph McCarthy thirty years later, Richey predicted that eight to ten Cincinnati officials would soon resign once the Justice Department digested the reports submitted by the American Protective League. By February 1919, Richey’s estimate of Cincinnati radicals had reached 10,000, holding regular meetings to urge the “seizure of banks, manufacturing plants, and private property.”

Richey repeatedly asserted that the Cincinnati Board of Education fanned the flames of Bolshevism here by allowing teachers to spread radical propaganda. After all his stomping and fuming, Richey had trouble producing a single Bolshevik. Nevertheless, he told the Cincinnati Post [3 February 1919], he knew exactly where to find one:

“The home of a Cincinnati school girl, the alleged meeting place of supporters of Bolshevism, is being watched by the secret patriotic organization of which John L. Richey is head, he said Monday. Richey told of existence of a Bolshevik school where students are taught principles of Bolshevism and urged to spread them in educational institutions. A Woodward High School pupil is leader in the movement, according to Richey.”

The moment Richey made that accusation, the city turned against him and his “secret patriotic organization.” The pupil in question was Rose Simkin, aged 19, who had immigrated from Russia six years earlier. Since that time, she had been employed at the Cross Overall Company while studying in the morning before work and in the evening after work at Woodward High School, hoping to earn citizenship. She told the Post [7 February 1919]:

“I hardly know what Bolshevism means. I am an American. I didn’t even know it was I who was being talked about until told so by the school authorities. Ever since I have been in America and lived in this free country I have thought of nothing except what a wonderful land this is.”

Miss Simkin pointed to her bookshelves, filled with volumes by Poe, Shakespeare and other classic authors and defied Richey to find any hint of subversive literature.

Helen T. Wooley of the Cincinnati School Board was outraged by Richey’s accusations against Rose Simkin.

“There has been excessive zeal in trying to uncover un-American plots and in this case they have hit an innocent girl.”

The American Israelite pointed out that Rose Simkin’s brothers were serving in Palestine as part of the British army there and that Richey may not have known the difference between Zionism and Bolshevism – a not-so-subtle accusation of anti-Semitism. Mainline organizations such as the City Club and the Women’s City Club passed resolutions condemning Richey’s accusations.

As the Simkin debacle faded, so did Richey’s “secret patriotic organization.” When Richey died in 1962, his obituary made no mention of the American Protective League or his secret organization.

In 1920, Rose Simkin married Edward Trieman, her father’s partner in a Race Street haberdashery. She lived to be 70 and gave birth to a son who became a doctor. Her tombstone identifies her as “A Devoted Daughter In Israel.”

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

April 30, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

MAY 01, 2024

This morning, Time magazine published a cover story by Eric Cortellessa about what Trump is planning for a second term. Based on two interviews with Trump and conversations with more than a dozen of his closest advisors, the story lays out Trump’s conviction that he was “too nice” in his first term and that he would not make such a mistake again. 

Cortellessa writes that Trump intends to establish “an imperial presidency that would reshape America and its role in the world.” 

He plans to use the military to round up, put in camps, and deport more than 11 million people. He is willing to permit Republican-dominated states to monitor pregnancies and prosecute people who violate abortion bans. He will shape the laws by refusing to release funds appropriated by Congress (as he did in 2019 to try to get Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to smear Hunter Biden). He would like to bring the Department of Justice under his own control, pardoning those convicted of attacking the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and ending the U.S. system of an independent judiciary. In a second Trump presidency, the U.S. might not come to the aid of a European or Asian ally that Trump thinks isn’t paying enough for its own defense. Trump would, Cortelessa wrote, “gut the U.S. civil service, deploy the National Guard to American cities as he sees fit, close the White House pandemic-preparedness office, and staff his Administration with acolytes who back his false assertion that the 2020 election was stolen.”

To that list, former political director of the AFL-CIO Michael Podhorzer added on social media that if Trump wins, “he could replace [Supreme Court justices Clarence] Thomas, [Samuel] Alito, and 40+ federal judges over 75 with young zealots.” 

“I ask him, Don’t you see why many Americans see such talk of dictatorship as contrary to our most cherished principles?” Cortellessa wrote. No, Trump said. “‘I think a lot of people like it.” 

Time included the full transcripts and a piece fact-checking Trump’s assertions. The transcripts reflect the former president’s scattershot language that makes little logical sense but conveys impressions by repeating key phrases and advancing a narrative of grievance. The fact-checking reveals that narrative is based largely on fantasy. 

Trump’s own words prove the truth of what careful observers have been saying about his plans based on their examination of MAGA Republicans’ speeches, interviews, Project 2025, and so on, often to find themselves accused of a liberal bias that makes them exaggerate the dangers of a second Trump presidency. 

The idea that truthful reporting based on verifiable evidence is a plot by “liberal media” to undermine conservative values had its start in 1951, when William F. Buckley Jr., fresh out of Yale, published God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom.” Fervently opposed to the bipartisan liberal consensus that the federal government should regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, protect civil rights, and promote infrastructure, Buckley was incensed that voters continued to support such a system. He rejected the “superstition” that fact-based public debate would enable people to choose the best option from a wide range of ideas—a tradition based in the Enlightenment—because such debate had encouraged voters to choose the liberal consensus, which he considered socialism. Instead, he called for universities to exclude “bad” ideas like the Keynesian economics on which the liberal consensus was based, and instead promote Christianity and free enterprise.

Buckley soon began to publish his own magazine, the National Review, in which he promised to tell the “violated businessman’s side of the story,” but it was a confidential memorandum written in 1971 by lawyer Lewis M. Powell Jr. for a friend who chaired the education committee of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that insisted the media had a liberal bias that must be balanced with a business perspective. 

Warning that “the American economic system is under broad attack,” Powell worried not about “the Communists, New Leftists and other revolutionaries who would destroy the entire system.” They were, he wrote, a small minority. What he worried about were those coming from “perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians.” 

Businessmen must “confront this problem as a primary responsibility of corporate management,” he wrote, launching a unified effort to defend American enterprise. Among the many plans Powell suggested for defending corporate America was keeping the media “under constant surveillance” to complain about “criticism of the enterprise system” and demand equal time. 

President Richard Nixon appointed Powell to the Supreme Court, and when Nixon was forced to resign for his participation in the scheme to cover up the attempt to bug the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Hotel before the 1972 election, he claimed he had to leave not because he had committed a crime, but because the “liberal” media had made it impossible for him to do his job. Six years later, Ronald Reagan, who was an early supporter of Buckley’s National Review, claimed the “liberal media” was biased against him when reporters accurately called out his exaggerations and misinformation during his 1980 campaign. 

In 1987, Reagan’s appointees to the Federal Communications Commission abandoned the Fairness Doctrine that required media with a public license to present information honestly and fairly. Within a year, talk radio had gone national, with hosts like Rush Limbaugh electrifying listeners with his attacks on “liberals” and his warning that they were forcing “socialism” on the United States. 

By 1996, when Australian-born media mogul Rupert Murdoch started the Fox News Channel (FNC), followers had come to believe that the news that came from a mainstream reporter was likely left-wing propaganda. FNC promised to restore fairness and balance to American political news. At the same time, the complaints of increasingly radicalized Republicans about the “liberal media” pushed mainstream media to wander from fact-based reality to give more and more time to the right-wing narrative. By 2018, “bothsidesing” had entered our vocabulary to mean “the media or public figures giving credence to the other side of a cause, action, or idea to seem fair or only for the sake of argument when the credibility of that side may be unmerited.”

In 2023, FNC had to pay almost $800 million to settle defamation claims made by Dominion Voting Systems after FNC hosts pushed the lie that Dominion machines had changed the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, and it has since tried to retreat from the more egregious parts of its false narrative. 

News broke yesterday that Hunter Biden’s lawyer had threatened to sue FNC for “conspiracy and subsequent actions to defame Mr. Biden and paint him in a false light, the unlicensed commercial exploitation of his image, name, and likeness, and the unlawful publication of hacked intimate images of him.” Today, FNC quietly took down from its streaming service its six-part “mock trial” of Hunter Biden, as well as a video promoting the series. 

Also today, Judge Juan Merchan, who is presiding over Trump’s criminal trial for election fraud, found Trump in contempt of court for attacking witnesses and jurors. Merchan also fined Trump $1,000 per offense, required him to take down the nine social media posts at the heart of the decision, and warned him that future violations could bring jail time. This afternoon, Trump’s team deleted the social media posts. 

For the first time in history, a former U.S. president has been found in contempt of court. We know who he is, and today, Trump himself validated the truth of what observers who deal in facts have been saying about what a second Trump term would mean for the United States.

Reacting to the Time magazine piece, James Singer, the spokesperson for the Biden-Harris campaign, released a statement saying: “Not since the Civil War have freedom and democracy been under assault at home as they are today—because of Donald Trump. Trump is willing to throw away the very idea of America to put himself in power…. Trump is a danger to the Constitution and a threat to democracy.” 

Tomorrow, May 1, is “Law Day,” established in 1958 by Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower as a national recognition of the importance of the rule of law. In proclaiming the holiday today, Biden said: “America can and should be a Nation that defends democracy, protects our rights and freedoms, and pioneers a future of possibilities for all Americans. History and common sense show us that this can only come to pass in a democracy, and we must be its keepers.” 

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON