#they will hold the Supreme Court for decades and even if Trump doesn’t try to hold onto power again in four years…

[undeadlobster]

Was watching LOTR last night with my beloved and when we first see Gandalf riding in his cart and singing as he travels down the roads of the Shire I just burst into tears. I didn’t realize how much I’ve been missing that sense of safety and home until that moment

[mariacallous]

Republicans are thrashing around trying to get themselves out of the abortion ban they have tried to win for so many decades. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) was the first. In the fall of 2022, just months after the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, he proposed legislation calling for a national abortion ban after 15 weeks. So far, this bill has gone nowhere. Then, in 2023, gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin of Virginia put the 15-week abortion ban at the center of his campaign to help the GOP take full control of the Virginia legislature. Rather than holding one house and picking up the other, he lost both. Recently, former President Donald Trump—who often brags about appointing the three Supreme Court justices who made possible the repeal of Roe v. Wade—offered his own way out of the thicket by applauding the fact that states now can decide the issue for themselves. And in Arizona, the Republican Senate candidate, Kari Lake, is trying to rally the party around the notion of a 15-week ban instead of the 1864 near total ban their court just affirmed, even though she’s facing criticism for this on the far right. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal came out with a poll showing that abortion was the number one issue—by far—for suburban women voters in swing states.

In each instance (and there will be more) we find Republicans desperately trying to find a position on the issue that makes their base and the other parts of their coalition happy.

It doesn’t exist, and here’s why—abortion is an integral part of health care for women.

Since 2022, when the Supreme Court eviscerated Roe in the Dobbs case, we have been undergoing a reluctant national seminar in obstetrics and gynecology. All over the country, legislators—mostly male—are discovering that pregnancy is not simple. Pregnancies go wrong for many reasons, and when they do, the fetus needs to be removed. One of the first to discover this reality was Republican State Representative Neal Collins of South Carolina. He was brought to tears by the story of a South Carolina woman whose water broke just after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Obstetrics lesson #1—a fetus can’t live after the water breaks. But “lawyers advised doctors that they could not remove the fetus, despite that being the recommended medical course of action.” And so, the woman was sent home to miscarry on her own, putting her at risk of losing her uterus and/or getting blood poisoning.

A woman from Austin, Texas had a similar story—one that eventually made its way into a heart-wrenching ad by the Biden campaign. Amanda Zurawski was 18 weeks pregnant when her water broke. Rather than remove the fetus, doctors in Texas sent her home where she miscarried—and developed blood poisoning (sepsis) so severe that she may never get pregnant again. Note that in both cases the medical emergency happened after 15 weeks—late miscarriages are more likely to have serious medical effects than early ones. The 15-week idea, popular among Republicans seeking a way out of their quagmire, doesn’t conform to medical reality.

Over in Arkansas, a Republican state representative learned that his niece was carrying a fetus who lacked a vital organ, meaning that it would never develop normally and either die in utero or right after birth. Obstetrics lesson #2—severe fetal abnormalities happen. He changed his position on the Arkansas law saying, “Who are we to sit in judgment of these women making a decision between them and their physician and their God above?”

In a case that gained national attention, Kate Cox, a Texas mother of two, was pregnant with her third child when the fetus was diagnosed with a rare condition called Trisomy 18, which usually ends in miscarriage or in the immediate death of the baby. Continuing this doomed pregnancy put Cox at risk of uterine rupture and would make it difficult to carry another child. Obstetrics lesson #3—continuing to carry a doomed pregnancy can jeopardize future pregnancies. And yet the Texas Attorney General blocked an abortion for Cox and threatened to prosecute anyone who took care of her, and the Texas Supreme Court ruled that her condition did not meet the statutory exception for “life-threatening physical condition.”

So, she and her husband eventually went to New Mexico for the abortion.

Obstetrics lesson #4—miscarriages are very common, affecting approximately 30% of pregnancies. While many pass without much drama and women heal on their own—others cause complications that require what’s known as a D&C for dilation and curettage. This involves scraping bits of pregnancy tissue out of the uterus to avoid infection. When Christina Zielke of Maryland was told that her fetus had no heartbeat, she opted to wait to miscarry naturally.

While waiting, she and her husband traveled to Ohio for a wedding where she began to bleed so heavily that they had to go to an emergency room. A D&C would have stopped the bleeding, but in Ohio, doctors worried that they would be criminally charged under the new abortion laws and sent her home in spite of the fact that she was still bleeding heavily and in spite of the fact that doctors in Maryland had confirmed that her fetus had no heartbeat. Eventually her blood pressure dropped, and she passed out from loss of blood and returned to the hospital where a D&C finally stopped the bleeding.

These are but a few of the horror stories that will continue to mount in states with partial or total bans on abortion. As these stories accumulate, the issue will continue to have political punch. We have already seen the victory of pro-choice referenda in deep red conservative states like Kansas, Kentucky, Montana, and Ohio; and in swing states like Michigan and in deep blue states like California and Vermont. In an era where almost everything is viewed through a partisan lens, abortion rights transcend partisanship.

And more referenda are coming in November. The expectation is that at least some, if not most, of the pro-choice voters likely to be mobilized by the abortion issue will help Democrats up and down the ballot. As a result, Democratic campaigns are working hard to make sure the public knows that Republicans are responsible.

[solarbird]

Let’s talk a little about the recently-noticed hatred of in vitro fertilisation coming from Trump’s MAGA base, because while it’s being treated as new, it’s not actually new. It’s only recently risen back up to visibility – ahead, even, of their hatred of contraception – thanks to Trump’s success in overturning Roe v. Wade using his Republican-packed Supreme Court.

I’ve seen a lot of people publicly wonder why the Christofash are so against IVF, given that their whole procedure is about “more babies,” and they say they actually want “more [white] babies.” I’ve also seen people suggest that it’s solely about controlling women, and, well, of course that’s kind of true, because so very very much of what they do is about control over women.

But while there is some “separating procreation and sex is bad” thought out there – particularly amongst far-right Catholics – it’s actually far more consistent than that. At least, in its origins and early discussion.

It is, in fact, the direct result of them finding out more about IVF. They found out that multiple eggs are fertilised at once, with the most apparently healthy being implanted, and the others kept frozen. They then asked themselves a couple of… I hate to say it, but reasonable questions:

If every fertilised egg is a person, why doesn’t that apply in cases of destroyed fertilised eggs left over from IVF treatments? Why aren’t we condemning the destruction of human life that happens as part of IVF?

If you hold their professed beliefs – and some of them actually do – then the answer is obvious. They naturally then came to that obvious conclusion, one that’s entirely reasonable for those who have decided against all reason that a fertilised egg is in fact an actual whole person. They decided that yes, this is the same thing, it is a person, and no, IVF should not be allowed in its current form because yes, it is murder.

All of this is, again, nonsense. But it’s a rare bit of consistent nonsense from them, and you can see how it follows from a certain point of view.

And as they came to this conclusion – some decades ago now – they knew it would be impossible in the near term to even approach it, politically. Certainly not with Roe v. Wade the law of the land, which even to those with a focused interest in IVF was a far, far bigger issue to tackle.

Besides, the people involved in this – the Beverly LaHaye crowd were involved, but not just them – actually did empathise with people trying to have children. The goal, that was fine; the method, however, was not.

So they started a campaign to try to “save” what they started calling “snowflake babies.” It was a campaign, a recruitment effort to find volunteers who would have these leftover zygotes implanted, and then carry them to term as their own. Married heterosexual women only need apply, of course – their secondary worries about IVF included thoughts that it would somehow let THE HOMOSEXUALS have children, and they were, naturally, stridently opposed.

But honestly? If someone wants to get pregnant with a leftover IVF-fertilised egg, great! Go for it. I hate the whole “married heterosexual cisgendered women only” part of course, but the rest? It’s fine! Knock yourselves out.

At the time, it almost sounded like them trying to take positive action themselves for once, rather than just driving hate against others. I even allocated a little bit of hope that maybe it marked the beginning of a healthier trend.

Alas, it did not. But at that time, it couldn’t be ruled out.

Regardless, none of this ever went away. Bush II threw them a token amount of money in his first term to promote the idea, there are some small organisations still promoting “embryo adoption,” and the term “snowflake babies” still shows up once in a while.

Really, though, they see it as a stopgap, or even harm reduction. At its core, their fight is still to define every fertilised egg as a full human being with not just full rights, but more rights than anyone carrying it.

So those aren’t backup or redundant fertilised eggs, those are “snowflake babies,” and therefore cleaning the dish containing them is murder – no matter how many actual, real new parents and actual, real new children IVF procedures help create.

Accordingly, IVF must go, for the heartache of would-be parents pales to nothing next to the God-given inalienable rights of…

…a single frozen cell in a dish, which matters ever so impossibly more than any real child ever could matter to any of them.

Now you know how they got here, and you know that this isn’t a fad, and that it will not be something they easily give up. And since this whole line of thought is absolute batshittery to anyone not buried deep in the inner nooks and crannies of their bizarre cult, hopefully you have a better idea how to use this particular bullshit against them.

Good luck out there, and good hunting.

75 days remain.

[peachyteabuck]

This is NOT a comprehensive guide (that would take...likely 150+ pages, I’m dead serious) but here’s the most important stuff for non-USAmericans watching Succession and trying to understand why everyone is so stressed*: 

First, a lot of Americans don’t take politics seriously. That’s part of why it’s so stressful 

The US of A is not in a parliamentary system, but a presidential system. Similar to a PM, the president sits at the top. This is the “executive branch,” concurrent to it are the judicial branches (the Supreme Court of the United States [scotus] and all lower federal courts) and the congressional branch (house of representatives and senate)

The president is elected separate from congress--presidential elections happens every 4 years (barring extenuating circumstances). Since congress and the executive branch are separate entities, they can choose to work together, or not work together. Working together can be good, but given Mencken’s fascism, if Republicans were to hold congressional majority then we get what it’s like now but...worse

Congressional seats go up for election at different times, and so Mencken’s election emboldens right wing congressional candidates and voters (as seen post-Trump). And, if anyone has seen Leverage, incumbents have a very high success rate (often running unopposed). Why did Steve King (google his name + incest if you don’t know who he is, or his name + racism) get elected so many times? He ran unopposed so many times

This doesn’t just happen at the federal level--all 50 states have their own legislatures. That’s where a lot of important shit (for better or for worse) happens

Presidents pick SCOTUS nominees. If you missed the Trump/Obama/McConnell SCOTUS debacle, the TLDR is that SCOTUS judges set case law for DECADES, and their word is final. They can change their mind (e.g. Roe + Dred Scott), but need a relevant case to do so (meaning, they can’t go “whoopsies our b” and write new laws). SCOTUS is a reactive body, not a proactive one. They also only decide if a law is CONSTITUTIONAL, which, as we all may know, is a document written hundreds of years ago that we’re still held to for ?? reasons?? 

ALSO it’s easier to re-elect an incumbent president. Why was everyone scared of the 2020 election pre-covid? The economy was pretty good, and people don’t like to fuck with the economy. There was no reason to believe Trump wouldn’t win until he fumbled Covid as hard as he did 

The president also picks a ton of important people who are not elected like the AG, HUD Secretary, and DHS Secretary. These people are not elected, but hold the livelihoods of millions of people in their hands at any given moment.

TLDR: You’re not just electing a president. Each president changes history, it just doesn’t all happen at once. 

As to why it’s so complicated: 

Every heard of the USA being “50 different countries in a trench coat?” That’s 100% true, except it’s more than 50. We all fucking hate each other in a way I don’t understand.  

We have the electoral college, so presidents are chosen not by popular vote. We’re tried to erase this via interstate compacts (a fun way of states saying “if you do X, I’ll do Y), but not enough states have signed on to make it functional. 

This is EVEN MORE COMPLICATED by the fact a lot of USAmericans don’t vote (or, more accurately, can’t). Election is on a weekday, not a federal holiday, and states have a lot of purview over how elections function--which is why so hard to get an absentee ballot in many states, and in some states why you can be charged with a crime if you give those waiting in line water/food. 

Meaning, you aren’t trying to get elected by 50 states and their populations. You’re trying to win like 2-3 demographics in 6 or so states.

Also, lobbying means laws are often passed that just...fuck over every day people. Why do we do our taxes ourselves? Why do people hate abortion so much? Why do we not pass gun control? The answer is lobbying 

America is big, and voting is called by county. Gerrymandering +  packing/cracking + voter concentration mean voters have less/more influence over the election depending on location. When Shiv is stressing Milwaukee goes blue** usually, it’s because Milwaukee has enough votes to swing the entire state if it were to go blue. Similarly, in Michigan (another purple state), Wayne County (which holds Detroit) goes blue, and has enough people that it overwhelms the voting from the more conservative areas 

The US is good at passing new laws, but really bad at changing the old laws that made the new ones necessary. I’m not sure if this is elsewhere, but sometimes in the US people will sue to change laws and judges will go “it’s fine under the concept of mootness,” meaning the law just...stays on the books for shits and giggles 

It’s SO MUCH EASIER to fuck over people when shit is complicated. In Detroit, residents who pay for DTE get charged a small fee that goes directly to funding police. How do I know this? A friend works with a group that attends city council meetings to report on them, a necessity since the meetings are hours long, during the work day, and are boring as fuuuuck. If it was easy, it’d be cheaper. If it was cheaper, more people would do it. And if more people would do it, this country may change for the better. 

TLDR: It’s complicated on purpose, and Succession handled what election looks like for the news + everyday people incredibly accurately. 

*Again, this is NOT a comprehensive guide to USAmerican politics. 

**In USAmerican politics, blue = Democrat, red = Republican, purple = swing state, or a state whose electoral votes could go either way. In this way, elections aren’t chosen by all 50 states, they’re chosen by like...6, depending on the election cycle. The episode is accurate in which states are currently purple (MI, GA, AZ, WI to name a few). 

As a non-American, watching last night's Succession episode, I ask this with all sincerity:

Why is the American election system so fucking complicated??

[robertreich]

The Secret to the GOP’s Assault on Your Rights

Democracy is not just under attack in America. In some states, it’s being lost.

Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once suggested that states could serve as laboratories of democracy, but these states are more like laboratories of autocracy.

Take Wisconsin. The GOP has so successfully rigged state elections through gerrymandering that even when Democrats get more votes, Republicans win more seats. In 2018, Republicans won just 45% of the vote statewide, but were awarded 64% of the seats.

******

Btw, if you’d like my daily analyses, commentary, and drawings, please subscribe to my free newsletter: robertreich.substack.com

******

Wisconsin is one of several states where an anti-democracy movement has taken hold.

But it wasn’t always this way. In fact, Wisconsin pioneered the progressive era of American politics at the start of the twentieth century — with policies that empowered workers, protected the environment, and took on corporate monopolies. State lawmakers established the nation’s first unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation, and strict child labor laws.

Teddy Roosevelt called the state a “laboratory for wise … legislation aiming to secure the social and political betterment of the people as a whole.”

But for the last decade, Wisconsin has become a laboratory for legislation that does the exact opposite.

After Republicans took control in 2010, one of the first bills they passed gutted workers' rights by dismantling public-sector unions — which then decimated labor’s ability to support pro-worker candidates.

This move aligned with the interests of their corporate donors, who benefited from weaker unions and lower wages.

This new Wisconsin formula has been replicated elsewhere.

Republicans in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and North Carolina won a minority of votes in 2018, but still won majorities in their state assemblies thanks to gerrymandering.

In Texas, Ohio, and Georgia, Republicans have crafted gerrymanders that are strong enough to create supermajorities capable of overturning a governor’s veto.

Even more alarming, hundreds of these Republican state legislators, “used the power of their office to discredit or try to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election,” on behalf of Donald Trump.

How did this happen? Put simply: years of careful planning by corporate interest groups and their radical allies.

And the corporations enabling these takeovers aren't just influencing the law — their lobbyists are literally writing many of the bills that get passed.

This political alliance with corporate power has given these Republican legislatures free rein to pursue an extreme culture-war agenda — one that strips away rights that majorities of people support — while deflecting attention from their corporate patrons’ economic agendas.

Republicans are introducing bills that restrict or criminalize abortion. They’re banning teachers from discussing the history of racism in this country. They are making it harder to protest and easier to harm protestors. They are punishing trans people for receiving gender-affirming care and their doctors for providing it.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. There are still laboratories of democracy where true public servants are finding creative ways to defend the rights of us all.

Elected officials in Colorado and Vermont are codifying the right to abortion. California lawmakers have proposed making the state a refuge for transgender youth and their families. And workers across the country are reclaiming their right to organize, which is helping to rebuild an important counterweight to corporate power.

But winning will ultimately require a fifty state strategy — with a Democratic Senate willing to reform or end the filibuster to codify Roe v. Wade, protect voting rights, and protect the right to organize nationwide.

America needs a national pro-democracy movement to stop the anti-democracy movement now underway — a pro-democracy movement committed to helping candidates everywhere, including in state-level races.

This is where you come in. Volunteer for pro-democracy candidates — and if you don't have time, contribute to their campaigns.

This is not a battle of left vs. right. It is a battle between democracy and autocracy.

[weheartchrisevans]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

TLDR: Biden is winning, but Trump has a few options to steal it anyway, all of which would undermine our democracy without “technically” breaking any laws.  This would be very, VERY bad.

Trump is losing in Wisconsin and Michigan, and just barely ahead in Pennsylvania, but those states are all still counting mail-in ballots which skew predominantly Democratic.  Biden will almost certainly win all three, which will clinch him the presidency, and Trump is throwing a shit fit over it.  Because he led in same-day votes, he wants to stop the states from counting the mail-in ballots entirely; now keep in mind, these ballots have already been cast, they’re legal votes that arrived on time, they just haven’t been counted yet.  Trump is calling for hundreds of thousands of legal votes to be thrown out because he doesn’t like the results; he’s going to appeal to the Supreme Court to decide on this, and in any other election the decision would be clear cut in Biden’s favor.  Trump would have to show definitive proof of widespread voter fraud or systemic irregularities to invalidate this many votes; the Florida recount was stopped in 2000 because different counties were using different recount standards.  The conservative majority Supreme Court decided 5-4 that this wasn’t fair, and there wasn’t enough time to have a standardized statewide recount, so Bush was able to run out the clock and win on a technicality.  2020 isn’t a recount! Trump isn’t trying to stop a REcount, he’s trying to stop THE count!  The first and only count!  He has no standing, his case should be thrown out just like the Texas curbside ballot fuckery, BUT Trump appointed three of the nine justices, so it’s packed in his favor.  They could delay the count until it’s too late, run out the clock yet again and let the results stand.

If they did this, if all the states were paused where they are now, Biden would just barely eke by with a 270-268 victory, the closest election in history, even closer than 2000 (271-267),  only one point away from a dead even tie.  If this happened, Trump would immediately appeal to faithless electors to abandon Biden and vote for him instead, because he would only need 2; in 2016, there were 7.  Now, all 7 of these electors voted for third party candidates, none of them flipped from Clinton to Trump or vice versa, but there’s a first time for everything.  Trump would only need 2 faithless electors to flip his way to give himself an automatic victory; hell, he’d only really need 1 to vote against Biden for ANY candidate, and it would cause a 269-268-1 deadlock.  Because neither candidate won the 270 majority, it would trigger a contingent election in which the House would pick the president and the Senate would pick the vice president.  Democrats control a majority of seats in the House, so no problem, right?  Wrong.  In contingent elections, the House doesn’t vote as 435 individuals, but as 50 state blocs, meaning either candidate would need 26 states to win.  There are more, smaller red states than blue states, so even though they represent a minority of voters, they control a majority of states, and would give the presidency to Trump.  If the Democrats don’t flip the Senate, then the Republicans would unanimously re-elect Pence; if the Democrats took 50 seats, the vice presidency would remain vacant until the tie was broken or the House-appointed president nominated a new one (which would require the advice and consent of both the House and the Senate, which is even more gridlock); if the Democrats somehow managed to pull 51 votes out of their ass, they would wind up with a Republican President Trump and a Democratic Vice President Harris.  A contingent election would be VERY messy.

It all hinges on Pennsylvania.  If Biden pulls ahead before Trump steps in to fuck it up, then his victory is assured.  If Trump is still in the lead, then the fate of the country is up in the air until sometime between December 14th (when the electors cast their votes) and January 6th (when the new congress counts the votes and would hold a contingent election if necessary).  If Trump takes this, he will be an illegitimate president twice over, the only one to lose the popular vote both times. 

The rest of this post is rampant speculation born out of fear and pessimism, so read at your own discretion

This would trigger civil unrest the likes of which our country has never seen; it would make the George Floyd protests look like child’s play, a glorified slap fight on the playground.  This would be HUGE.  It would lead us to the brink of a full-fleged Civil War, which the Republicans would have an advantage in because they’d be the ones in control of the military and nuclear weapons.  They would brand any anti-government protestors as terrorists, and anyone who actively fought for any kind of organized rebellion would lose all rights as a traitor.  No politicians would want to risk their own safety by standing up against the regime, so they would all denounce the rebels and fall in line behind El Cheato, or else be black-bagged by secret police for conspiracy and collaboration.  It wouldn’t be hard for the media to pick sides either; all the big corporate conglomerates are owned by conservative billionaires, and they profit off of Trump’s crazy.  He’s good for their ratings, and he could rescind their broadcast rights if they ever pissed him off (which would be a violation of the 1st Amendment, but why would that stop him when 70 million American voters couldn’t?).  The media would turn into state sponsored propaganda with only nominal opposition; a few anchors would be allowed to remain independent so that Trump and his stooges had an enemy to constantly attack.  In wrestling terms, they need a Face to go up against their Heel.  They need controlled opposition so they can always look like the champions and the underdogs at the same time.  Every network would be quick to denounce the rebels, again as terrorists, and nobody would be allowed to express sympathy for their cause, lest they too be arrested by the feds.

The Orwellian Police State doesn’t just spring up overnight, it has been decades in the making, this election is just the final crossroads; going left will kick the can down the road to be dealt with again at a later date, but going right will take us beyond the point of no return.

[phroyd]

Oh My, what terrible timing, and what a great loss! Rest In Peace Justice Ginsburg, thank you for all you have done for our country! - Phroyd

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the demure firebrand who in her 80s became a legal, cultural and feminist icon, died Friday. The Supreme Court announced her death, saying the cause was complications from metastatic cancer of the pancreas.

The court, in a statement, said Ginsburg died at her home in Washington surrounded by family. She was 87.

"Our nation has lost a justice of historic stature," Chief Justice John Roberts said. "We at the Supreme Court have lost a cherished colleague. Today we mourn but with confidence that future generations will remember Ruth Bader Ginsburg as we knew her, a tired and resolute champion of justice."

Architect of the legal fight for women's rights in the 1970s, Ginsburg subsequently served 27 years on the nation's highest court, becoming its most prominent member. Her death will inevitably set in motion what promises to be a nasty and tumultuous political battle over who will succeed her, and it thrusts the Supreme Court vacancy into the spotlight of the presidential campaign.

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Just days before her death, as her strength waned, Ginsburg dictated this statement to her granddaughter Clara Spera: "My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed."

She knew what was to come. Ginsburg's death will have profound consequences for the court and the country. Inside the court, not only is the leader of the liberal wing gone, but with the Court about to open a new term, Chief Justice John Roberts no longer holds the controlling vote in closely contested cases.

Though he has a consistently conservative record in most cases, he has split from fellow conservatives in a few important ones, this year casting his vote with liberals, for instance, to at least temporarily protect the so-called Dreamers from deportation by the Trump administration, to uphold a major abortion precedent, and to uphold bans on large church gatherings during the coronavirus pandemic. But with Ginsburg gone, there is no clear court majority for those outcomes.

Indeed, a week after the upcoming presidential election, the court is for the third time scheduled to hear a challenge brought by Republicans to the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare. In 2012 the high court upheld the law by a 5-to-4 vote, with Chief Justice Roberts casting the deciding vote and writing the opinion for the majority. But this time the outcome may well be different.

That's because Ginsburg's death gives Republicans the chance to tighten their grip on the court with another Trump appointment that would give conservatives a 6-to-3 majority. And that would mean that even a defection on the right would leave conservatives with enough votes to prevail in the Obamacare case and many others.

At the center of the battle to achieve that will be Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. In 2016 he took a step unprecedented in modern times: He refused for nearly a year to allow any consideration of President Obama's supreme court nominee.

Back then, McConnell's justification was the upcoming presidential election, which he said would allow voters a chance to weigh in on what kind of justice they wanted. But now, with the tables turned, McConnell has made clear he will not follow the same course. Instead he will try immediately push through a Trump nominee so as to ensure a conservative justice to fill Ginsburg's liberal shoes, even if President Trump were to lose his re-election bid. Asked what he would do in circumstances like these, McConnell said: "Oh, we'd fill it."

So what happens in the coming weeks will be bare-knuckle politics, writ large, on the stage of a presidential election. It will be a fight Ginsburg had hoped to avoid, telling Justice Stevens shortly before his death that she hoped to serve as long as he did--until age 90.

"My dream is that I will stay on the court as long as he did," she said in an interview in 2019.

She didn't quite make it. But Ruth Bader Ginsburg was nonetheless an historic figure. She changed the way the world is for American women. For more than a decade, until her first judicial appointment in 1980, she led the fight in the courts for gender equality. When she began her legal crusade, women were treated, by law, differently from men. Hundreds of state and federal laws restricted what women could do, barring them from jobs, rights and even from jury service. By the time she donned judicial robes, however, Ginsburg had worked a revolution.

That was never more evident than in 1996 when, as a relatively new Supreme Court justice, Ginsburg wrote the court's 7-to-1 opinion declaring that the Virginia Military Institute could no longer remain an all-male institution. True, said Ginsburg, most women — indeed most men — would not want to meet the rigorous demands of VMI. But the state, she said, could not exclude women who could meet those demands.

"Reliance on overbroad generalizations ... estimates about the way most men or most women are, will not suffice to deny opportunity to women whose talent and capacity place them outside the average description," Ginsburg wrote.

She was an unlikely pioneer, a diminutive and shy woman, whose soft voice and large glasses hid an intellect and attitude that, as one colleague put it, was "tough as nails."

By the time she was in her 80s, she had become something of a rock star to women of all ages. She was the subject of a hit documentary, a biopic, an operetta, merchandise galore featuring her "Notorious RBG" moniker, a Time magazine cover, and regular Saturday Night Live sketches.

On one occasion in 2016, Ginsburg got herself into trouble and later publicly apologized for disparaging remarks she made about then-presidential candidate Donald Trump.

But for the most part Ginsburg enjoyed her fame and maintained a sense of humor about herself.

Asked about the fact that she had apparently fallen asleep during the 2015 State of the Union address, Ginsburg did not take the Fifth, admitting that although she had vowed not to drink at dinner with the other justices before the speech, the wine had just been too good to resist. The result, she said, was that she was perhaps not an entirely "sober judge" and kept nodding off.

Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., Ruth Bader went to public schools, where she excelled as a student — and as a baton twirler. By all accounts, it was her mother who was the driving force in her young life, but Celia Bader died of cancer the day before the future Justice would graduate from high school.

Then 17, Ruth Bader went on to Cornell on full scholarship, where she met Martin (aka "Marty") Ginsburg. "What made Marty so overwhelmingly attractive to me was that he cared that I had a brain," she said.

After her graduation, they were married and went off to Fort Sill, Okla., for his military service. There Mrs. Ginsburg, despite scoring high on the civil service exam, could only get a job as a typist, and when she became pregnant, she lost even that job.

Two years later, the couple returned to the East Coast to attend Harvard Law School. She was one of only nine women in a class of over 500 and found the dean asking her why she was taking up a place that "should go to a man."

At Harvard, she was the academic star, not Marty. The couple was busy juggling schedules, and their toddler when Marty was diagnosed with testicular cancer. Surgeries and aggressive radiation followed.

"So that left Ruth with a 3-year-old child, a fairly sick husband, the law review, classes to attend and feeding me," said Marty Ginsburg in a 1993 interview with NPR.

The experience also taught the future justice that sleep was a luxury. During the year of Marty's illness, he was only able to eat late at night; after that he would dictate his senior class paper to Ruth. At about 2 a.m., he would go back to sleep, Ginsburg recalled in an NPR interview. "Then I'd take out the books and start reading what I needed to be prepared for classes the next day."

Marty Ginsburg survived, graduated, and got a job in New York; his wife, a year behind him in school, transferred to Columbia, where she graduated at the top of her law school class. Despite her academic achievements, the doors to law firms were closed to women, and though recommended for a Supreme Court clerkship, she wasn't even interviewed.

It was bad enough that she was a woman, she recalled later, but she was also a mother, and male judges worried that she would be diverted by her "familial obligations."

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is pictured in the justice's chambers in Washington, D.C., during an interview with NPR's Nina Totenberg in September 2016.

A mentor, law professor Gerald Gunther, finally got her a clerkship in New York by promising Judge Edmund Palmieri that if she couldn't do the work, he would provide someone who could. That was "the carrot," Ginsburg would say later. "The stick" was that Gunther, who regularly fed his best students to Palmieri, told the judge that if he didn't take Ginsburg, Gunther would never send him a clerk again. The Ginsburg clerkship apparently was a success; Palmieri kept her not for the usual one year, but two, from 1959-61.

Ginsburg's next path is rarely talked about, mainly because it doesn't fit the narrative. She learned Swedish so she could work with Anders Berzelius, a Swedish civil procedure scholar. Through the Columbia Law School Project on International Procedure, Ginsburg and Berzelius co-authored a book.

In 1963, Ginsburg finally landed a teaching job at Rutgers law school, where she at one point hid her second pregnancy by wearing her mother-in-law's clothes. The ruse worked; her contract was renewed before her new baby was born.

While at Rutgers, she began her work fighting gender discrimination.

The 'Mother Brief'

Her first big case was a challenge to a law that barred a Colorado man named Charles Moritz from taking a tax deduction for the care of his 89-year-old mother. The IRS said the deduction, by statute, could only be claimed by women, or widowed or divorced men. But Moritz had never married.

The tax court concluded that the internal revenue code was immune to constitutional challenge, a notion that tax lawyer Marty Ginsburg viewed as "preposterous." The two Ginsburgs took on the case, he from the tax perspective, she from the constitutional perspective.

According to Marty Ginsburg, for his wife, this was the "mother brief." She had to think through all the issues and how to fix the inequity. The solution was to ask the court not to invalidate the statute but to apply it equally to both sexes. She won in the lower courts.

"Amazingly," he recalled in a 1993 NPR interview, the government petitioned the United States Supreme Court, stating that the decision "cast a cloud of unconstitutionality" over literally hundreds of federal statutes, and it attached a list of those statutes, which it compiled with Defense Department computers.

Those laws, Marty Ginsburg added, "were the statutes that my wife then litigated ... to overturn over the next decade."

In 1971, she would write her first Supreme Court brief in the case of Reed v. Reed. Ginsburg represented Sally Reed, who thought she should be the executor of her son's estate instead of her ex-husband.

The constitutional issue was whether a state could automatically prefer men over women as executors of estates. The answer from the all-male supreme court: no.

It was the first time the court had ever struck down a state law because it discriminated based on gender.

And that was just the beginning.

By then Ginsburg was earning quite a reputation. She would become the first female tenured professor at Columbia Law School, and she would found the Women's Rights Project at the ACLU.

As the chief architect of the battle for women's legal rights, Ginsburg devised a strategy that was characteristically cautious, precise and single-mindedly aimed at one goal: winning.

Knowing that she had to persuade male, establishment-oriented judges, she often picked male plaintiffs, and she liked Social Security cases because they illustrated how discrimination against women can harm men. For example, in Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld, she represented a man whose wife, the principal breadwinner, died in childbirth. The husband sought survivor's benefits to care for his child, but under the then-existing Social Security law, only widows, not widowers, were entitled to such benefits.

"This absolute exclusion, based on gender per se, operates to the disadvantage of female workers, their surviving spouses, and their children," Ginsburg told the justices at oral argument. The Supreme Court would ultimately agree, as it did in five of the six cases she argued.

Over the ensuing years, Ginsburg would file dozens of briefs seeking to persuade the courts that the 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection applies not just to racial and ethnic minorities, but to women as well.

In an interview with NPR, she explained the legal theory that she eventually sold to the Supreme Court.

"The words of the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause — 'nor shall any state deny to any person the equal protection of the laws.' Well that word, 'any person,' covers women as well as men. And the Supreme Court woke up to that reality in 1971," Ginsburg said.

During these pioneering years, Ginsburg would often work through the night as she had during law school. But by this time, she had two children, and she later liked to tell a story about the lesson she learned when her son, in grade school, seemed to have a proclivity for getting into trouble.

The scrapes were hardly major, and Ginsburg grew exasperated by demands from school administrators that she come in to discuss her son's alleged misbehavior. Finally, there came a day when she had had enough. "I had stayed up all night the night before, and I said to the principal, 'This child has two parents. Please alternate calls.'"

After that, she found, the calls were few and far between. It seemed, she said, that most infractions were not worth calling a busy husband about.

The Supreme Court's Second Woman

In 1980 then-President Jimmy Carter named Ginsburg to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Over the next 13 years, she would amass a record as something of a centrist liberal, and in 1993 then-President Bill Clinton nominated her to the Supreme Court, the second woman appointed to the position.

She was not first on his list. For months Clinton flirted with other potential nominees, and some women's rights activists withheld their active support because they were worried about Ginsburg's views on abortion. She had been publicly critical of the legal reasoning in Roe v. Wade.

But in the background, Marty Ginsburg was lobbying hard for his wife. And finally Ruth Ginsburg was invited for a meeting with the president. As one White House official put it afterward, Clinton "fell for her--hook, line and sinker." So did the Senate. She was confirmed by a vote of 96 to 3.

Once on the court, Ginsburg was an example of a woman who defied stereotypes. Though she looked tiny and frail, she rode horses well into her 70s and even went parasailing. At home, it was her husband who was the chef, indeed a master chef, while the justice cheerfully acknowledged that she was an awful cook.

Though a liberal, she and the court's conservative icon, Antonin Scalia, now deceased, were the closest of friends. Indeed, an opera called Scalia/Ginsburg is based on their legal disagreements, and their affection for each other.

Over the years, as Ginsburg's place on the court grew in seniority, so did her role. In 2006, as the court veered right after the retirement of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, Ginsburg dissented more often and more assertively, her most passionate dissents coming in women's rights cases.

Dissenting in Ledbetter v. Goodyear in 2007, she called on Congress to pass legislation that would override a court decision that drastically limited back-pay available for victims of employment discrimination. The resulting legislation was the first bill passed in 2009 after President Barack Obama took office.

In 2014, she dissented fiercely from the court's decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, a decision that allowed some for-profit companies to refuse, on religious grounds, to comply with a federal mandate to cover birth control in health care plans. Such an exemption, she said, would "deny legions of women who do not hold their employers' beliefs, access to contraceptive coverage."

Where, she asked, "is the stopping point?" Suppose it offends an employer's religious belief "to pay the minimum wage" or "to accord women equal pay?"

And in 2013, when the court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, contending that times had changed and the law was no longer needed, Ginsburg dissented. She said that throwing out the provision "when it has worked and is continuing to work ... is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet."

She viewed her dissents as a chance to persuade a future court.

"Some of my favorite opinions are dissenting opinions," Ginsburg told NPR. "I will not live to see what becomes of them, but I remain hopeful."

And yet, Ginsburg still managed some unexpected victories by winning over one or two of the conservative justices in important cases. In 2015, for example, she authored the court's decision upholding independent redistricting commissions established by voter referenda as a way of removing some of the partisanship in drawing legislative district lines.

Ginsburg always kept a backbreaking schedule of public appearances both at home and abroad, even after five bouts with cancer: colon cancer in 1999, pancreatic cancer 10 years later, lung cancer in 2018, and then pancreatic cancer again in 2019 and liver lesions in 2020. During that time, she endured chemotherapy, radiation, and in the last years of her life, terrible pain from shingles that never went away completely. All who knew her admired her grit. In 2009, three weeks after major cancer surgery, she surprised everyone when she showed up for the State of the Union address.

Shortly after that, she was back on the bench; it was her husband Marty who told her she could do it, even when she thought she could not, she told NPR.

A year later her psychological toughness was on full display when her beloved husband of 56 years was mortally ill. As she packed up his things at the hospital before taking him home to die, she found a note he had written to her. "My Dearest Ruth," it began, "You are the only person I have ever loved," setting aside children and family. "I have admired and loved you almost since the day we first met at Cornell....The time has come for me to ... take leave of life because the loss of quality simply overwhelms. I hope you will support where I come out, but I understand you may not. I will not love you a jot less."

Shortly after that, Marty Ginsburg died at home. The next day, his wife, the justice, was on the bench, reading an important opinion she had authored for the court. She was there, she said, because "Marty would have wanted it."

Years later, she would read the letter aloud in an NPR interview, and at the end, choke down the tears.

In the years after Marty's death, she would persevere without him, maintaining a jam-packed schedule when she was not on the bench or working on opinions.

Some liberals criticized her for not retiring while Obama was president, but she was at the top of her game, enjoyed her work enormously, and feared that Republicans might not confirm a successor. She was an avid consumer of opera, literature, and modern art. But in the end, it was her work, she said, that sustained her.

"I do think that I was born under a very bright star," she said in an NPR interview. "Because if you think about my life, I get out of law school. I have top grades. No law firm in the city of New York will hire me. I end up teaching; it gave me time to devote to the movement for evening out the rights of women and men. "

And it was that legal crusade for women's rights that ultimately led to her appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court.

To the end of her tenure, she remained a special kind of feminist, both decorous and dogged.

Phroyd

[kittyluvr42]

I said this in a discord server already but fuck it I’ll post it here too.

RBG died.

RBG was an amazing woman, but, to be blunt, there’s no time to mourn her right now. I wish there was. There isn’t.

I don’t know if yall understand how fucking bad this is. Another trump pick, which is absolutely what this means, makes fucking GORSUCH the swing vote on scotus. This is quite possibly the worst supreme court we’ve ever had, besides maybe the 1857 supreme court that decided Dred Scott. That’s how bad this is. And it is going to be here for decades. The now oldest justice is Kagan, who consistently voted with RBG. The next oldest justice who’s death or retirement will at all improve the balance of power is Clarence Thomas, who’s 72, and even after he dies we’ll just be back to the court before RBG’s death, which was already pretty bad (and that’s assuming Kagen gets a replacement who’s good). This court will be around for decades.

Does it sound callous to be talking about court justices like chess pieces. Probably. People are fucking dying, and people will die. There is no choice but to be callous until we’re out of fucking crisis mode and can heal.

This court is a loss for literally everything we care about. Reproductive rights, lgbt rights, religious freedom (actual religious freedom not the codeword for christian supremacy). Did you know Obamacare’s on the docket for 2021? Texas v California. That’s right, they’re trying to remove healthcare for millions of people in the middle of a fucking pandemic. Maybe I wasn’t blunt enough before. People will die.

So, how do we stop it? How do we get a scotus that is at least a little decent? Well, there are two options.

1. We somehow manage to stop republicans from confirming a replacement. This means we need 3 republicans to vote no, plus at least one more who either votes no or doesn’t show up. A tie goes to pence. Good fucking luck with that. Maybe Romney, Murkowsky, and Collins, but that’s a long shot. I have no clue who the fourth would be.

Ok. That’s not going to happen. What’s our other option?

2. Court-packing. This will require a president who will pick judges who aren’t outright evil, and the only chance for that would be Biden. We also need a senate to confirm those judges, so dems need to take the senate. However, we also need to stop republicans from just packing back by locking in the number of judges after, so that means we need to hold the house to pass a law. But when republicans take congress back they can just repeal that, so what we really need is a supermajority to make it a constitutional amendment.

So please yall. Just fucking vote. Even if you don’t vote Biden. I think that’s the wrong choice, because as much as Biden sucks he’s still our only option, but I get it, and I know I won’t be able to shame you into changing your mind. Please, at least vote down ballot. We can’t let republicans hold the senate, especially because this term is ALSO redistricting, so not only are we deciding the court we’re deciding future elections.

I am begging you, please vote.

Anyway, I’m going to go cry and try and find some room in my anger and fear for at least a little bit of the grief RBG deserves.

[science-fiction-is-real]

STOP TRYING TO GET ME TO VOTE FOR BIDEN.

Okay.  Look.  If you plan to vote for Biden, I won’t stop you.  And I understand.

But I would like to make a few points as to why I personally will NOT be voting for Biden.

We do actually have other options.  Biden is evil, not just “less than perfect,” but actually evil.  Donald Trump is not the cause of our problems, and this becomes especially clear when you look at the behavior of past Democratic presidents and when you apply a little Marxist theory regarding the State. Also A Biden victory is in itself a form of harm, not harm reduction.

1) WE DO ACTUALLY HAVE OTHER OPTIONS BESIDES VOTING FOR BIDEN.

First of all, the fact that you can even mention 3rd and sometimes even 4th and 5th party candidates indicates that: Yes, we LITERALLY DO have other options.  Are they LIKELY to win? 

No.  But only because people don’t vote for them. We are not trapped in a two party system, though we may be trapped psychologically.  It IS actually possible to create new political parties, and for existing small parties to grow into large parties.  This is a long-term goal, and probably not something that will happen by November.  But the first step is to realize that the democratic party are not our friends.

Second, and most important, voting is a tiny plastic water gun in the vast nuclear arsenal we have at our disposal when it comes to political activity.  Historically speaking, even the most nasty and reactionary asshole presidents suddenly start acting REAAAAAL progressive when they are faced with mass populist movements causing civil unrest.  This also applies to senators, congresspersons, and members of the court.  Remember Richard Nixon passing landmark Women’s Rights legislation?  In fact, the level of political activity of the masses is 8 millions times more important than who is in the Whitehouse.

Where we should really be focusing our efforts is in organizing and movement building.  Protest. Go on strike.  Propagandize.  Obstruct.  Disrupt.  And most importantly:

JOIN AN ORG! Join an org.  Join an org. Join an ORG!  Join labor unions.  Join political parties.  Join non-profits.  Becoming a dues-paying member of a Socialist organization is worth a thousand votes.  You will meet experienced comrades who know the ins and outs of political activism, who will show you the ropes, and will put you to work doing something productive.

Join the Democratic Socialists of America.  Join the Industrial Workers of the World. I’m a member of a political party called the Socialist Alternative.

2) BIDEN ISN’T “LESS THAN PERFECT.”  HE IS A MUSTACHE TWIRLING SUPERVILLAIN.

Biden is not a Liberal.  He’s a center-right conservative.  He embraces Neoliberal policies that leave working class people to die in poverty and debt.  He has made no serious attempts to cater toward Bernie’s base.  He is unspeakably Racist, and actually wrote the bill that created Mass Incarceration as we currently know it.

As part of the Obama Administration he was complicit in all of Obama’s abominable atrocities.  From the drone strike program which killed countless civilians, to the escalation of a draconian surveillance state, to the mass deportation of 3 million immigrants.  Obama created the structures that Trump is currently using to terrorize immigrants, minorities, and protestors.  And he created them for the very purpose Trump is using them for.  Biden was there every step along the way.  Biden has espoused violent rhetoric about doing violence against protesters, arresting people with certain political beliefs, and condoning police brutality.

Biden is better MAAAAYYBE better only on 2 issues.  Abortion rights and LBGT rights.  And while those issues are important.  I highly doubt he will make any progress on those issues.

Biden has said over and over again that he would pander to the republicans and compromise with them every chance he gets.  He certainly has stated callous disregard for the lives of working class people.  And we can only assume that he will betray women’s rights and LBGT rights the moment he finds it politically convenient.

And don’t give me crap about RBG.  Biden will not replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg with another liberal.  He will replace her with a centrist, or do what Obama did and let the Republicans pick the replacement for him.   And also the supreme court is a tyrannical, undemocratic institution anyway and should probably just be abolished full-stop.

Joe Biden’s rhetoric isn’t even less fascistic than Trump's either.  He says his racist, sexist, anti-working-class sentiment out loud.

And with his billionaire and corporate backers, he certainly can’t be trusted to act on climate change.

He will not respond positively to the pandemic either.  He has expressed out loud no plan of how HE would handle the pandemic, and if his democratic colleagues in congress give us a clue… well, the Dems have been incredibly stingy with their money, refusing funds for relief for the working class.  They have not put up a serious fight for any measures to actually stop the Virus’s spread.

If he’s the “Lesser of Two Evils.”  He is just evil.  

3) IT DOESN’T ACTUALLY MATTER WHO THE PRESIDENT IS.

Trump is not actually the cause of our problems.  He isn’t.  Donald Trump is a fat asshole with a desk job.  Donald Trump did not invent racism.  He did not invent sexism or xenophobia or hatred against the LBGT+ community.  If Donald Trump died tomorrow, the forces of reaction would carry on their merry way.  Donald Trump is in office because he is willing to carry out policies that are favorable to the ruling class.  And the moment he stopped doing that, he would be quickly disposed of, either by impeachment or by a military coup.

And in fact, the violence we are seeing from the Trump administration comes from the way the government itself is constructed.  Not from some diseased ideology unique to the American Right Wing.

So let’s think about this a little more carefully.  Why do we have a government in the first place?  You know, a government, the “state,”  the law itself?  It’s not to negotiate peace between different conflicting segments of society, because they are obviously very bad at that.  It’s not to ensure the public good and protect the rights of the citizens.  Because the government doesn’t really do that either.

And this isn’t just a problem when Republicans are in power.  See my previous examples of Obama’s unspeakable atrocities.  

The reason we have a government is to enforce and maintain class based society.  The State is nothing more than Armed bodies of men who exist for the purpose of allowing one class to suppress another class.  The government’s job is to suppress uprisings, control the working class, assume risk on behalf of the capitalist class, and to fight wars on behalf of the capitalist class.  That’s why the Feds are kidnapping protestors.  That’s why immigrants are being put in cages.  That’s why the police harass and intimidate Black people.  To maintain and enforce the power structure.

All of these bad things happened when Obama was president.  And All of these bad things will continue to happen if Biden is elected. This violence we’re seeing isn’t the result of Trump.  You can’t even call this violence Fascism, because this is NORMAL. Fascism is a specific political phenomena that occurs under very specific circumstances . This violence is literally just the government doing its job.  It’s worse now because the economy is going through a rough patch, which isn’t the government’s fault, it’s just because Capitalism is unstable.

The Right and Left Parties represent different segments of the ruling class, and the election process is about the ruling class negotiating differences among itself.  The democratic party does not represent the interest of regular people like You and me, and you DO NOT OWE THEM YOUR VOTE.

2) VOTING FOR BIDEN ISN’T HARM REDUCTION.  IT IS ITSELF A HARM.

A Biden Victory could have several negative consequences.

The democratic party will continue its decades-long drift toward the right.  The democratic leadership will see once and for all that they can get away with running any evil sleazy candidate they want who will serve the interest of their corporate benefactors, and that the public will remain loyal as long as they coat their sleeziness with “Woke” rhetoric.  If the Democrats learn that you will vote for them no matter what they do, then your vote loses all of its power.

It could trigger violent backlash from Trump’s far-right base.

It gives legitimacy to an ultimately UNdemocratic system which is breaking at the seams.

It could pacify a lot of the militant, but less educated segments of the working class who have swallowed the rhetoric that Biden is their ally.  They will disperse from the streets, meanwhile Biden is free to continue the violent, racist, war-hawkish, neoliberal agenda that Trump, Obama, and Bush did before him.

CONCLUSION

Joe Biden is not our friend.  The Democratic Party are not our friends.  Trump is awful, and he sucks.  If we DON’T vote for Biden, Trump may very well win the Presidential Race.  But considering that Biden himself is very evil, and that Trump is not the true cause of the violence and hatred we see coming from our government, the stakes in this race are a lot lower than you have been led to believe.

A protest vote could send a strong message to the Ruling Class that we are not satisfied with racist, violent, neoliberal leadership, and that we want real change.  

Also, we actually are NOT stuck in a two party system.  There is a growing movement within the United States to create and grow a worker’s party that represents truly progressive ideas, one where regular people hold party leadership directly accountable, and the party is forced to serve our interests instead of those of the ruling class.  The first step in building such a party is to let the Democrats go, and stop placing our hopes in people who do not care about us.

But the most important thing to remember:

The ballot box is not the end-all and be-all of political activity.  The ruling class has created this little ceremony of “voting,” inviting us working class folks to come and play their little game of “pick the dictator,” and giving us the illusion that this makes a real difference.  But we have no way of holding politicians in office accountable when they break their campaign promises, and we are only allowed to vote for options the ruling class allows us to see on the ballots. 

We DO have power to change the system, but we have to do it outside the ruling-class’s terms.  We have to be organized and active and militant enough that the ruling class believes we pose an actual threat to their authority.

We have to do the type of things we currently see American’s doing in the streets right now.  Causing a major disruption, threatening the capitalists’ profits, and threatening the politicians’ sense of authority and control.

But we have to remain organized and militant even after the current wave of protests dies down.  And we do that by building left wing institutional power -- by JOINING ORGS.

JOIN A GOD DAMN ORG YOU COWARDS.

[politicaltheatre]

Dissent

We’ll know soon enough what kind of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett will be. Senate Democrats will stall the proceedings as much as they can and try to drag things out so a confirmation vote can’t be taken until after the election, but we must accept that the odds and senate protocols are against them.

Publicly, Democrats up and down the ticket are claiming that their fear is that a Barrett confirmation will kill the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in the middle of a pandemic, and they very well may be right. That, however, isn’t their true fear.

The one they’ll voice when Barrett gets in front of them and the TV cameras is that she would support her benefactor Donald Trump in any lawsuit his people file in their attempts to decide the election through the courts, which they most certainly will do.

Trump’s already said as much. It’s part of his campaign pitch. He’s boasting about it at rallies. He’s counting on it.

As stupid as he often appears, and as stupid as he is about so many things, Trump understands corruption. He lives it and breathes it. He is a bona fide expert in it, so we should listen.

What he, Mitch McConnell, and others who embrace corruption understand is what far too many of us refuse to admit, which is that there is no such thing as an independent judiciary, that there is no such thing as an impartial judge.

This is not to suggest that Judge Barrett is corrupt. The awful truth of it is that she doesn’t have to be. She is reliably right wing, which is more than enough.

Barrett clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia. Like her mentor, she believes that the law does not exist to protect the weak from the strong. It does not exist, in their world, to reduce or correct imbalances of power. It is, instead, an instrument and only that, one by which the capable may exercise their will over others.

As brilliant as he was and as brilliant as she may be, theirs is the law of the school debate team. To them, winning isn’t about being right, it’s about domination. You can be wrong, morally and reprehensibly, but know the law and know how to wield it as a weapon and you will dominate your opponent time and again.

It is the triumph of short term thinking. To those embracing this view, there is nothing beyond that victory, no consequence beyond it, and no effect on the world beyond it.

If you think they’re wrong, prove it. Challenge them. Bend precedent to your will. Apply the logic of allowable facts. Prepare better. Go for the jugular. Destroy your enemy or meekly and silently accept your defeat.

Theirs is a faithless law, even more so because it divorces the law from the humans its verdicts, opinions, and decisions affect.

It is strange, then, but not surprising that Republicans and their surrogates have preemptively sought to place resistance to Barrett’s nomination on her religion. Their hope is to obscure the beliefs that truly make her dangerous, the irony being that Catholicism is not truly at the root of it.

Yes, there are strains and sects of Catholicism that preach the virtues of authority and hierarchy. These are the ones that sided with the fascists in their rise to power in Europe and protected sexually abusive clergy for so very, very long.

There are, however, also dissenting branches, including the one currently led by Pope Francis, that preach compassion and the virtues of equality. It was the former that led to those centuries of abuse and institutional corruption; it is the latter, we should all hope Catholics and non-Catholics alike, that will redeem the Church of both.

So, while Barrett’s affinity for a brand of Catholicism that embraces authority and power as chief virtues may inform her legal opinions, it is not what motivates them. That motivation, again, would be an honest, sincere belief that the right to demand accountability resides exclusively with those who have the power to demand it and the resources to dominate those in their way.

Trump may not have thought this through as thoroughly as that. McConnell may not have either, for that matter. All McConnell cares about is having judges in place who will protect him and corrupt people in power just like him. All Trump cares about is having judges who will protect him and him alone.

Oh, and that this pick is big “fuck you” to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg and everyone who adores her still. Trump loves that, too.

What Ginsberg represented, more than simply being a woman with the gumption to tell men like Trump and McConnell that they were wrong, was the power of dissent.

Dissent is more than just an exercise in freedom of speech, it is an act of empowerment, both for those voicing their disagreement and for the institutions in which they voice them. The purpose of dissent is to improve the institution, to save it from the corruption that would bring it down.

Ginsberg believed that whatever was wrong in the United States, it could and should be saved. To suggest that something could and should be improved is not disloyal but courageous. To criticize an institution is not pessimistic but the opposite, because to criticize it you must believe than it has the ability to improve.

That wish for the institution to be saved and to succeed is essential to dissent. It cannot be dissent without it.

By that measure, a lot of kinds of protest are dissent, and a lot of others very much are not. Refusing to wear a mask in a store, for example, is not dissent. Driving your car through a protest is not dissent. Silencing a reporter is not dissent. Cheating on your taxes is not dissent (Actually, cheating on anything is not dissent. Breaking the rules just because you want to win is despicable).

All of these examples undermine the communities in which we live. They pit us against each other and as a result weaken the bonds we need as a society in order to survive.

So, dissent is essential, it is part of our immune system, and in a democracy it is everything.

The legal right to dissent is relatively new to the human experience. Just a few centuries ago, speaking out against an authority’s decision was almost (and literally) unheard of. The opinions and decisions of powerful men and women from monarchs and clerics down to local landowners were absolute. To challenge them was treason and heresy. The penalty for either was the same: a painful, public death.

Around the world today we see example after example of authoritarian regimes denying the right to dissent and punishing it. Whether they are nominally Capitalist, such as Russia or Turkey, or nominally Communist, such as China, suppression of dissent is what truly determines what kind of life those they rule must lead.

To be left wing - truly and properly left wing - is to hold oneself accountable to others because we want them to be accountable to us. The ability to voice and listen to dissent is what makes that work.

With every non-unanimous Supreme Court decision, there is a majority opinion and a minority, “dissenting” one. There may also be concurring opinions to either. They are published together. It is the majority opinion that rules, but the reason for the inclusion of the others is that they may persuade those reading them to change their minds. In this way, each voice on the Court matters, each mind, and each opportunity to influence the voices and minds of those the Court serves.

The Supreme Court is the last federal institution where majority rule still holds true. The Electoral College and Senate disproportionately favor rural, right wing voters and have increasingly done so for decades. That makes this appointment the natural result, and with it will come things the Left correctly fears.

Barrett may very well support overturning decisions on the ACA and Roe v Wade, but, perhaps more disturbingly, she may support overturning the decisions that equalized LGBT rights and banned forced prayer in schools.

Again, this will not be because she is Catholic but because she believes that those in power, be they school boards or business owners, have the right to decide who has rights within their schools and businesses and who does not. If you don’t like that, you’ll just have to gain power yourself, or find a new school, or a new job, or a new bakery.

It will likely be a long time before Justice Barrett has to write a dissenting opinion. It will take the retirement or death of at least one of the right wing justices, and that may not happen for a decade or more.

There has been talk of Democrats stacking the Court with left wing justices. This would be a tragic mistake. Even talking about it is a mistake. If the Democrats did it next year, the Republicans could do it when they took power, and so on, and so on, and so on.

Meanwhile, it would corrupt and erode any confidence in any legal opinion issued by the Supreme Court or any of the lower courts, and with that whatever last shred of trust Americans had in government would be gone.

The better solution, one long overdue, would be to fix the imbalance of power in the Electoral College and the Senate. This would be done by admitting the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico as states and by splitting California into two or three states.

Doing so would add eight or ten senators and at least two voting representatives. This would not only repair some of the imbalance between right wing and left wing voters in this country, it would make it easier to pass new amendments to the Constitution, such as preserving the right to abortion, mandating health care as a right, setting term limits for all federal judges, and eliminating the Electoral College once and for all.

There would be resistance to this, of course. There would be dissent. And those offering genuine dissent should always be listened to. We fail to do so at our own expense.

Dissent is one of the prices we pay for democracy. It is sloppy. It is chaotic. It takes work and it takes time. However, much like our own immune systems, it must be flexible and robust to withstand change and adapt to new conditions.

That is the world Ruth Bader Ginsberg fought for. That is the world we should fight for, too.

- Daniel Ward

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

If there’s one enduring theme about tyrants in myth, literature, and history it is that, for a long time, no one takes them seriously. And there are few better examples of this than Shakespeare’s fictional Richard III. He’s a preposterous figure in many ways, an unsightly hunchback, far down the line of royal accession, socially outcast, riven with resentment, utterly dismissible — until he serially dismisses and/or murders everyone between him and the throne. What makes the play so riveting and often darkly funny is the sheer unlikelihood of the plot, the previously inconceivable ascent to the Crown of this indelibly absurd figure, as Stephen Greenblatt recently explored in his brilliant monograph, Tyrant.

I’ll never forget watching a performance by Antony Sher of Richard decades ago — playing him as a spider, instinctually scuttling on two legs and two black canes, to trap, murder, and ingest his foes. The role is, of course, a fictional portrait, designed to buttress the legitimacy of the Tudor dynasty that followed Richard III and that Shakespeare lived under. But as an analysis of the psychology of tyranny, it’s genius. Like Plato and Aristotle, Shakespeare saw this question not merely as political, but as wrapped up in the darker folds of the human soul, individual and collective.

The background of the drama is England’s “War of the Roses”, the civil war between two regional dynasties from which Richard emerged. And that’s often key in tyrant narratives: it’s when societies are already fractured into tribes, and divisions have become insurmountable, that tyrants tend to emerge, exploiting and fomenting chaos, to reign, however briefly, over the aftermath.

The war seems resolved when the victorious Edward, Richard’s older brother, succeeds to the throne: “For here I hope begins our lasting joy!” And no one thinks the deformed, bitter sibling, of all people, would be a threat. It seems preposterous. But it’s true. And at each unimaginable power grab by Richard — murdering one brother, killing the late king Edward’s young heirs, killing his own wife, and then trying to marry his niece to secure the dynasty — Richard’s peers keep telling themselves that it isn’t really happening. Greenblatt notes: “The principal weapon Richard has is the very absurdity of his ambition. No one in his right mind would suspect that he seriously aspires to the throne.”

But he has one key skill, Greenblatt notes, the ability to lie shamelessly: “‘Why, I can smile and murder whiles I smile, And cry ‘Content!’ to that which grieves my heart, And wet my cheeks with artificial tears, And frame my face to all occasions.’” It’s a skill that serves him well — and there seems no limit to the number of those eager to believe him. His older brother George, Duke of Clarence, told by thugs that Richard wants him dead, exclaims: “Oh no, he loves me, and he holds me dear. Go you to him from me.” At which point the hired goons reply — “Ay, so we will” — and merrily murder him, taking him to Richard as a corpse. (In a good production, that can get a laugh.) One of Clarence’s young sons, told that his own uncle hates him, declares, “I cannot think it.” Others witness obvious depravity but can’t quite call it out. One official receives clearly illegal orders from Richard, and follows them, asking no questions: “I will not reason what is meant hereby, Because I will be guiltless from the meaning.”

Denial. Avoidance. Distraction. Willful ignorance. These are all essential to enabling a tyrant’s rise. And keeping this pattern going is Richard’s profound grasp of the power of shock. He does and says the unexpected and unthinkable in order to stun his opponents into a kind of dazed passivity. It’s this capacity to keep you on your heels, to keep disorienting you with the unacceptable (which is then somehow accepted), that marks a tyrant’s relentless drive. He does this by instinct. He craves chaos, lies, suspense, surprises — not because he’s a genius, but because stability threatens his psyche. He cannot rest. He is not in control of himself. And whenever the dust settles, as it were, he has to disturb it again.

This is what we’ve been dealing with in the figure of Donald Trump now for five years, and it is absurd to believe that a duly conducted election is going to end it. I know, I know. I’m hysterical and over-the-top and a victim of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Trump is simply too incompetent and too lazy to be an actual tyrant, I’m constantly scolded. He’s just baiting me again. And so on. But what I think this otherwise salient critique misses is that tyranny is not, in its essence, about the authoritarian and administrative skills required to run a country effectively for a long time. Tyrants, after all, are often terrible at this. It is rather about a mindset, as the ancient philosophers understood, with obvious political consequences. It’s a pathology. It requires no expertise in anything other than itself.

You need competence if you want to run an effective government, or plan a regular campaign, or master policy with a view to persuading people, or hold power for the sake of something else. You need competence to create and sustain something. But you do not need much competence to destroy things. You just need the will. And this is what tyrants do: they destroy things. Richard III ruled for two short years, ending in his own death in battle, and a ruined country.

This is Trump’s threat. Not the construction of a viable one-party state, but the destruction of practices, norms, civility, laws, customs and procedures that constitute liberal democracy’s non-zero-sum genius. He doesn’t need to be competent to destroy our system of government. He merely needs to be himself: an out-of-control, trust-free, malignant narcissist, with inexhaustible resources of psychic compulsion, in a pluralist system designed for the opposite. All you need is an insatiable pathological drive to avoid any constraint on your own behavior, and the demagogic genius to carry a critical mass of people with you, and our system, designed as the antidote to tyranny, is soon unspooling into incoherence, deadlock, and collapse.

I’m told he’s been ineffective even as a tyrant, so no worries. To which I can only say: really? Once you realize he doesn’t give a shit about any actual policies, apart from doing all he can to wipe the legacy of Barack Obama from planet earth, he’s been pretty competent. Note how he turned Congressional subpoenas into toilet paper; how he crippled and muzzled the Mueller inquiry; how he installed a crony at the Department of Justice to pursue his political enemies and shield him from the law; how effectively he stymied impeachment; how he cucked every previous Republican opponent; how he helped destroy the credibility of news sources that oppose him; how he filled his cabinet with acting secretaries and flunkies; how he declared fake emergencies to claim the power of the purse assigned to the Congress; and how he has reshaped the Supreme Court with potentially three new Justices, whom he sees solely as his loyal stooges if he comes up against the rule of law.

And gotten away with all of it!

In protecting his own power over others, he has been as competent as hell. Imagine where we’d be in four more years. Despite a mountain of criticism, he has not conceded a single error, withdrawn a single statement, or acknowledged a single lie. His party lost the mid-terms, but seriously, what difference did that make? His control of the Republican party, and his cult-like grip on the base, has never been greater than now. Yes, he has said and done racially polarizing things — but the joke is he may yet have more support from blacks and Latinos in 2020 than he did in 2016. Think of his greatest policy failures: the appalling loss of life in the Covid epidemic and the collapse of law and order in the cities. Now recall that on February 1 of this year, Trump was at 43.4 percent approval; 200,000 deaths later, and the wreckage from Seattle to Portland to Minneapolis, and his approval today is at 43.1 percent.

This is, of course, not enough to win re-election. And Trump has no interest in broadening his appeal, because it would dilute the tribalism he feeds off. So he has made it abundantly clear that if the results of the election show him the loser, he will not accept them. Simple, really. He said this in 2016, of course, refusing to honor the result in advance. But this year, he has stumbled upon something quite marvelous for his purposes. Because of Covid19, it is likely that mail-in ballots will be far higher in number than before, and, as Barton Gellman has shown in this essential new piece, this gives Trump an opportunity he has instinctively seized. He has been saying for months now that: “MAIL-IN VOTING WILL LEAD TO MASSIVE FRAUD AND ABUSE … WE CAN NEVER LET THIS TRAGEDY BEFALL OUR GREAT NATION.” In late summer, Gellman noted, Trump was making this argument four times a day: “Very dangerous for our country.” “A catastrophe.” “The greatest rigged election in history.” He is telling us loud and clear that, if he has anything to do with it, this election will not be decided at the ballot box, but at the Supreme Court, which he expects to control.

If you haven’t, read Gellman’s piece closely. It seems inevitable to me that, unless it’s a Biden landslide, Trump will declare himself the winner on election night, regardless of the actual results. Because most mail-in ballots will take more time to count, and several swing states have not changed their laws to allow for counting before election day, and mail-ins are easily challenged, it is quite likely that much of Biden’s vote will remain uncounted or contested — and could remain so for a long time. And after declaring victory within hours of polls closing, Trump will follow the script he used for Florida in 2018: “The Florida Election should be called in favor of Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis in that large numbers of new ballots showed up out of nowhere, and many ballots are missing or forged,” he tweeted, making shit up as usual. “An honest vote count is no longer possible — ballots massively infected. Must go with Election Night!”

I’ve no doubt this bullshit will be challenged by the networks, the press, and many of the states, and other sane people, who will urge patience. I’ve also no doubt that many states will do their best not to pervert the process. But I fear the result will be close (I’m underwhelmed by Biden’s near-invisible campaign), which will give Trump a chance. The fanaticism and alternate reality of a base already addicted to conspiracy theories means a hefty chunk of the country will back him. And it’s perfectly possible that Trump’s pre-emptive strike on the election result could prompt a massive revolt across the country from those who want to defend our democracy. (I will be marching in such a scenario myself). Most presidents would balk at anything close to this kind of scenario. Trump can’t wait. Violence? You can almost feel Trump’s hankering for it.

All he wants is chaos, because in chaos, the strong leader wins. Would he incite violence on his behalf if the votes seem to be drifting away from him? You bet he would. Would he urge his supporters to physically prevent ballot-counting? He already has. Would he try to corral Republican state legislators to back him in electing electors? Gellman has sources. Would he take this country to the brink of civil conflict? Way past it. Will anyone in the GOP do anything to stop him? We know the answer to that already. If they cannot condemn him this week, when would they? And he will do all this not out of some strategic calculation or tactical skill but because he cannot do anything else. He is psychologically incapable of conceding anything. And he has no understanding of collateral damage because his narcissism precludes it.

In every Shakespeare play about tyranny — from Richard III to Coriolanus to Macbeth — the tyrant loses in the end, and often quite quickly. They’re not that competent at governing, or even interested in it. The forces they unleash come back to wipe them from the stage, sooner or later. They flame out. Richard III lasted a mere couple of years on the throne.

But in every case, they leave a wrecked and reeling society in their wake. Look around you now and see the damage already done. Now imagine what we face in the next few months. We are tethered to Trump at this point because he is the legitimate president: the man who cannot control himself is in control of all the rest of us. And that’s why I desperately want to appeal to right-of-center readers at this point in the campaign to do everything they can to vote and to vote for Biden. This is not about left or right. This is about the integrity of a system that can give us such a choice. It really is an existential moment for liberal democracy, and its future, not just here but across the world. The next few months are critical.

It fills me with inexpressible rage that we have been brought to this. But there is no way out now other than through. This was always going to be the moment of maximal danger. And we cannot lose our focus now.

[msclaritea]

Time for our weekly episode of Elections Have Consequences. It feels like 2016 is going to haunt us for a long time. Getting rid of Trump will not immediately fix everything or keep us out of danger. Our SCOTUS is determined to wreck this country so that it only works for themselves.

"Joe Biden promised us an FDR-sized presidency—starting with bold action to halt the spread of COVID-19, end the worst economic downturn in decades, and stop the climate crisis. Biden could use regulation and executive action to move quickly to decarbonize the economy, cancel student loan debt, and raise wages. But a Biden administration has an even bigger problem than two long-shot special elections in Georgia: the new 6–3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court may soon burn down the federal government’s regulatory powers.

At least five conservative justices have signaled that they are eager to revive the “non-delegation doctrine,” the constitutional principle that Congress can’t give (“delegate”) too much lawmaking power to the executive branch. On paper, the rule requires Congress, when delegating power to an agency, to articulate an “intelligible principle” (like air pollution regulation needed “to protect public health”) to guide the agency’s exercise of that power. But in practice, the nondelegation doctrine is effectively dead. The court has only struck down two statutes on nondelegation grounds—and none since 1935.

Today, most of the government’s work is done through the “administrative state,” the administrative agencies and offices, like the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Labor, and the Department of Education, which issue regulations and enforce laws. Congress doesn’t have the capacity to pass laws that nimbly address complex, technical, and ever-changing problems like air pollution, COVID-19 exposure in workplaces, drug testing, and the disposal of nuclear waste. So Congress tasks agencies staffed with scientists and other specialists to craft regulations that directly address those problems. This division of responsibility—Congress legislates policy goals and agencies implement them effectively—is the foundation of functional government.

Take, for example, the Clean Air Act. In 1963, Congress ordered the EPA to regulate air quality standards “at a level that is requisite to protect public health.” Based on that authority, the EPA routinely issues lifesaving regulations limiting lead in the air, air pollutants coming from chemical plants, and, critically, greenhouse gasses. Biden can use the CAA to start tackling the climate crisis on Day One. The dormant nondelegation doctrine is the foundation of thousands of regulations across dozens of agencies, allowing agencies to make technical decisions about, say, hospital reimbursement rates to administer Medicare or wage and hour rules that protect workers from exploitation.

But last year, in a case called Gundy v. United States, four conservative justices announced that they wanted to bring the nondelegation doctrine back to life. Gundy arose out of a national sex offender registry law that explicitly applied to everyone convicted after the law took effect but delegated authority to the Department of Justice to determine when and how it applied to people convicted before the law took effect. Herman Gundy, who was convicted before the registry law took effect, argued that the law violated the nondelegation doctrine. The court upheld the law. But in a dissent joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote that the court should revive the dormant nondelegation doctrine. Gorsuch’s dissent argued that Congress may only delegate policymaking power to agencies under three narrow circumstances: to “fill up the details” of a legislative scheme; for executive fact-finding to determine the application of a rule; and to assign nonlegislative responsibilities to the executive and judicial branches. Alito wrote separately to say he’d like to “reconsider” the nondelegation doctrine—just not in a case about sex offenders’ rights.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh wasn’t on the court in time to hear Gundy. But last fall, in a separate opinion, he signaled his support for Gorsuch’s new, revived nondelegation doctrine. That makes five votes for resurrecting the nondelegation doctrine and taking a hatchet to landmark labor, environmental, and consumer protection law—even without Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who, administrative law experts warn, shares the conservative justices’ hostility to the administrative state.

As Justice Elena Kagan pointed out in Gundy if the conservative justices bring back the nondelegation doctrine, “most of Government is unconstitutional.” Exactly how much government would be unconstitutional, though, isn’t clear. What does Gorsuch mean when he writes that Congress may give agencies the power to “fill up the details” of a legislative scheme? What does Kavanaugh’s test—that Congress may not delegate “major policy questions” to agencies—actually forbid in practice? Would Biden’s EPA be permitted to issue regulations about greenhouse gasses or new, dangerous chemicals leaking into our public waters? Congress relies on OSHA experts to set workplace safety standards that are “reasonably necessary or appropriate to provide safe or healthful employment.” Does that “delegate” too much power to OSHA to act fast to issue COVID-19 safety standards for transportation, grocery stores, and meatpacking workers, as Joe Biden has promised to do? What about the EEOC’s power to interpret anti-discrimination to address workplace dress codes that discriminate against Black women’s natural hair? What about the FDA’s authority under the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act to subject “any” tobacco products to federal regulations—is “tobacco products” narrow enough under Gorsuch and Kavanaugh’s tests? Or would an FDA decision to regulate Juul just like cigarettes be a “major policy question” outside agencies’ powers?

The uncertainty alone could give special interests like fossil fuel companies and Juul grounds to sue to stop, or at least hold up, lifesaving regulations issued by the Biden administration. They’re already trying—just last year, e-cigarette company “Big Time Vapes” argued that the FDA’s power to regulate “any” tobacco product violated the nondelegation doctrine. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit rejected that challenge. But in its opinion, the 5th Circuit hinted that similar challenges could soon be successful, as the Supreme Court “might well decide—perhaps soon—to reexamine or revive the nondelegation doctrine.” And if that happens, all bets are off.

Such a decision would not only threaten existing regulations. It endangers every piece of future progressive legislation, too. Big, transformative legislative packages, like a Green New Deal or “Medicare for All,” would require a million and one technical decisions that Congress is poorly positioned to make. Biden and Congress can pass legislation phasing the United States toward 100 percent clean energy by 2030—but someone will have to actually sweat the details about which engines can be included in which cars."

Government doesn’t work without the administrative state. But that’s sort of the point. The conservative justices have long been hostile to regulation and executive action. And now they may finally have the votes to bring virtually any regulation to a halt. At least five justices are ready to drop a 1,000-pound anvil on any Biden administration rule that displeases them. "

[newstfionline]

Headlines

American tourists face bans and restrictions across the world amid pandemic (Yahoo) The reputation and prestige once associated with a passport from the United States have suffered as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. For Americans right now, traveling is harder than ever before—they aren’t welcome in the majority of the world’s countries because of the U.S. response to the outbreak. As a result, the U.S. passport ranking has fallen 50% in the last year, down from the no. 3 spot to the no. 19 spot in the Passport Index. “The American passport was always in the top five passports over the last five years,” Armand Arton, founder of Passport Index, told Yahoo Money. Pre-pandemic, an American passport holder could access 70% of the world’s countries without a visa. Arton said the “only reason” for America’s sudden fall from grace was the coronavirus. “It is not foreign policy,” he said. “It is not the visa restrictions. It is really the temporary limitation of travel of U.S. citizens, based on the fact that the rest of the world doesn’t want U.S. citizens coming to their countries.”

Millennials and younger are new US majority (AP) Sorry, boomers. Millennials and their younger siblings and children now make up a majority of the U.S. population. A new analysis by the Brookings Institution shows that 50.7% of U.S. residents were under age 40, as of July 2019. The Brookings’ analysis of population estimates released this summer by the U.S. Census Bureau shows that the combined millennial, Generation Z and younger generations numbered 166 million people. The combined Generation X, baby boomer, and older cohorts represented 162 million U.S. residents. Millennials typically are defined as being born between 1981 and 1996. Baby boomers, long considered a primary driver of demographic and social change in the U.S. because of their large numbers, were born between the end of World War II and the arrival of the Beatles in the U.S. in 1964.

The Pandemic Workday Is 48 Minutes Longer and Has More Meetings (Bloomberg) We log longer hours. We attend more meetings with more people. And, we send more emails. From New York City to Tel Aviv, the telecommuting revolution has meant a lot more work, according to a study of 3.1 million people at more than 21,000 companies across 16 cities in North America, Europe and the Middle East. The researchers compared employee behavior over two 8 week periods before and after Covid-19 lockdowns. Looking at email and meeting meta-data, the group calculated the workday lasted 48.5 minutes longer, the number of meetings increased about 13% and people sent an average of 1.4 more emails per day to their colleagues. During the two month time frame, there was one part of working that did improve: Those additional meetings were shorter, according to the analysis by researchers at Harvard Business School and New York University.

Pandemic Is Changing the Military, From Boot Camp to Office Work (Bloomberg) The U.S. military is finding its footing and changing how it operates as cases of the coronavirus keep rising. The services have been forced to continue widespread use of quarantines and to rethink future training, deploying, and day-to-day work. The virus curve has shot up from 10,462 cumulative cases in early June to 37,824 total cases by late July, according to the Defense Department. The figure includes more than 14,300 current infections among active-duty troops, as well as total cases reported among civilian workers, dependents and contractors since the pandemic began.

Seeking refuge in US, children fleeing danger are expelled (AP) When officers led them out of a detention facility near the U.S.-Mexico border and onto a bus last month, the 12-year-old from Honduras and his 9-year-old sister believed they were going to a shelter so they could be reunited with their mother in the Midwest. They had been told to sign a paper they thought would tell the shelter they didn’t have the coronavirus, the boy said. The form was in English, a language he and his sister don’t speak. The only thing he recognized was the letters “COVID.” Instead, the bus drove five hours to an airport where the children were told to board a plane. “They lied to us,” he said. “They didn’t tell us we were going back to Honduras.” More than 2,000 unaccompanied children have been expelled since March under an emergency declaration enacted by the Trump administration, which has cited the coronavirus in refusing to provide them protections under federal anti-trafficking and asylum laws. Lawyers and advocates have sharply criticized the administration for using the global pandemic as a pretext to deport children to places of danger. No U.S. agents looked at the video the boy had saved on his cellphone showing a hooded man holding a rifle, saying his name, and threatening to kill him and his sister, weeks after the uncle caring for them was shot dead in June. And even though they were expelled under an emergency declaration citing the virus, they were never tested for COVID-19, the boy said.

Coronavirus surprise: Remittances to Mexico rise during pandemic (Washington Post) It was an intuitive prediction, supported by virtually every expert who had studied the subject: As the coronavirus pandemic caused the global economy to tumble, remittances to Mexico and Central America would crash. It turns out the forecast was wrong. Instead of collapsing, remittances to Mexico were up year-over-year in five of the first six months of 2020. In June, payments to El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Honduras also increased compared to the same period in 2019, after a dip earlier this year. In March, the month the World Health Organization declared a pandemic, remittances to Mexico topped $4 billion—a record. Across the United States, migrants and the children of migrants say they have prioritized sending money to family in Mexico and Central America during the pandemic.

Economy tanking, Cuba launches some long-delayed reforms (AP) With its airports closed to commercial flights and its economy tanking, Cuba has launched the first in a series of long-promised reforms meant to bolster the country’s struggling private sector. The island’s thousands of restaurants, bed-and-breakfasts, auto mechanics and dozens of other types of private businesses have operated for years without the ability to import, export or buy supplies in wholesale markets. While the communist government began allowing widespread private enterprise a decade ago, it maintained a state monopoly on imports, exports and wholesale transactions. As a result, the country’s roughly 613,000 private business owners have been forced to compete for scarce goods in Cuba’s understocked retail outlets or buy on the black market. That has limited the private sector’s growth and made entrepreneurs a constant target of criminal investigation. With the essential tourism business cut off by the novel coronavirus and the government running desperately low on hard currency, the government last month announced that it would allow private restaurants to buy wholesale for the first time. Ministers also announced that private businesspeople could sign contracts to import and export goods through dozens of state-run companies with import/export licenses.

Former Colombian president placed under house arrest (Economist) Colombia’s Supreme Court ordered that Álvaro Uribe, a conservative former president, be placed under house arrest. It is examining whether Mr Uribe had tried to tamper with witnesses in an investigation that he instigated against a left-wing senator. Mr Uribe, the mentor of Colombia’s current president, Iván Duque, is the first sitting or former president since the 1950s to be detained.

Emergency lockdown in Scotland (Foreign Policy) Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon moved quickly to impose a partial lockdown in the city of Aberdeen on Wednesday, after 54 new cases of COVID-19 were reported. The outbreak was linked to a bar, leading Sturgeon to close all pubs in the city and impose a ban on all non-essential travel. Sturgeon told reporters that the lockdown was a necessary measure. “We need to take decisive action now in order to prevent a larger outbreak and further harm later on,” she said.

Closed for vacation: France faces new virus testing troubles (AP) With virus cases rising anew, France is struggling to administer enough tests to keep up with demand. One reason: Many testing labs are closed so that their staff can take summer vacation, just as signs of a second wave are building. Testing troubles have plagued the U.S. and other countries too. But France’s August ritual of fleeing cities for weeks of holiday rest on seashores, mountainsides or grandma’s country house is an added tangle. “Closed for vacation” signs dangle from door after door across Paris this month, from bakeries to shoe shops and iconic cafes. Doctor’s offices and labs are no exception. Their staff need a rest more than ever this difficult year. But this August, socially distanced lines snake outside the scattered Paris labs that remain open, from the Left Bank to the city’s northern canals. Trying to get a test appointment can take a week or more. So can getting results.

Pakistan stands behind Kashmir (Foreign Policy) On the first anniversary of the Indian government’s decision to revoke Kashmir’s special autonomous status, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan heaped criticism on his Indian counterpart, Narendra Modi, and reiterated his support for Kashmiri self-determination. In a statement, Khan called Indian activity in the region since the move a “crime against humanity,” and in a subsequent address to the legislative assembly, he said Modi has been “exposed in the world.” One year later, the region is still saturated with troops, communications are slow, and arrests are a routine part of daily life.

He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named (Foreign Policy) Anti-government protests took place in Thailand earlier this week as demands for limits on the power of the monarchy grow. Due to strict laws forbidding criticism of royals, the demonstrations featured a happy twist. Many of the 200 activists showed up dressed as Harry Potter and other characters from the popular book and film series in an effort to draw parallels between their fight against the government and Harry Potter’s battle against the totalitarianism of Lord Voldemort.

Survivors mark 75th anniversary of world’s 1st atomic attack (AP) HIROSHIMA, Japan—Survivors of the world’s first atomic bombing gathered in diminished numbers near an iconic, blasted dome Thursday to mark the attack’s 75th anniversary, many of them urging the world, and their own government, to do more to ban nuclear weapons. An upsurge of coronavirus cases in Japan meant a much smaller than normal turnout, but the bombing survivors’ message was more urgent than ever. As their numbers dwindle—their average age is about 83—many nations have bolstered or maintained their nuclear arsenals, and their own government refuses to sign a nuclear weapons ban treaty. The United States dropped the world’s first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, destroying the city and killing 140,000 people. The United States dropped a second bomb three days later on Nagasaki, killing another 70,000. Japan surrendered Aug. 15, ending World War II and its nearly half-century of aggression in Asia. But the decades since have seen the weapons stockpiling of the Cold War and a nuclear standoff among nations that continues to this day.

As Smoke Clears in Beirut, Shock Turns to Anger (NYT) Since an orphaned shipment of highly explosive chemicals arrived at the port of Beirut in 2013, Lebanese officials treated it the way they have dealt with the country’s lack of electricity, poisonous tap water and overflowing garbage: by bickering and hoping the problem might solve itself. But the 2,750 tons of high-density ammonium nitrate combusted Tuesday, officials said, unleashing a shock wave on the Lebanese capital that gutted landmark buildings, killed 135 people, wounded at least 5,000 and rendered hundreds of thousands of residents homeless. Beirut’s governor said the damage extended over half of the city, estimating it at $3 billion. The government has vowed to investigate the blast and hold those responsible to account. But as residents waded through the warlike destruction on Wednesday to salvage what they could from their homes and businesses, many saw the explosion as the culmination of years of mismanagement and neglect by the country’s politicians. And with the country already deep in the throes of a major economic crisis, residents had no idea how they would afford to rebuild. Because of the financial crisis, banks have placed strict limits on cash withdrawals to prevent runs.

U.S. eyes Saudi nuclear program (NYT) American intelligence agencies are scrutinizing efforts by Saudi Arabia, working with China, to build up its ability to produce nuclear fuel. A classified analysis has raised alarms that doing so could be a cover to process uranium and move toward development of a weapon, U.S. officials told The Times. American officials have searched for decades for evidence that the Saudis are moving toward a nuclear weapon, and the kingdom has made no secret of its determination to keep pace with Iran. But the spy agencies have been reluctant to warn of progress, for fear of repeating the colossal intelligence mistake that led to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

[justsomeantifas]

its 11:59 its still technically tonight so

this is gonna be my reference point to questions abt venezuela, at least regarding things pre- May 19 2019. Its a bit scattered and it may get edited down along the road, but yeah.

short version that draws some similar conclusions: https://www.salon.com/2019/05/17/the-plot-to-kill-venezuela_partner/

one difference in scales that’s important to keep in mind: the lifespan of people is 2-7 decades. the lifespan of colonialism lasts centuries. the lifespan of media memory is a couple years, tops.

Most western narratives of venezuela start meaningfully at chavez, which is a mistake. The focus point in history around which the country flowed was the Caracazo. You probably already know about this, but a massive uprising took place in the heart of Caracas, against decades of dictatorship both formal and informal, after severe instability in the global oil market. The people were hungry, the riots were fiery, and the bullets bled. knows the death toll even now, but its estimated well into the thousands.  This happened pre-chavez, and started a cascade of events which brought him into limelight that you can read about here. not gonna go into more venezuelan history, but i talk a bit more here

chavez was democratically elected, multiple times.

   in 2002, after his first democratic election, he was kidnapped by US-backed troops and replaced by someone who threw out the 1999 constitution, which was as legitimate as any other made in venezuela’s colonial and violently capitalist history, seeing as it was the first (aka only, so far) of 26 constitutions actually approved by popular referendum. He was reinstated largely due to massive protests in support of him. Maduro however doesn’t really have as much of the charisma and support of chavez, which is creating problems - as well as exacerbating problems created by the economic crises ramping up just around chavez’s death. In 2015, there were elections to the National Assembly, which ended up with the Opposition winning a majority of the seats (which does show that there’s some degree of fairness in the elections, at least verifiably up til that point, yet that isnt rly accounted for when western media describes it as “undemocratic” - many of whom don’t apply the same scrutiny to their own country: such as this UN Human Rights councilor who also happens to be the crown prince of british-iraq, currently residing in the noted democracy of the Kingdom of Jordan, which has no vested interest or control over any particular export of Venezuela.).        

This turnout showed most of all that maduro had alienated as many as 2 million of his supporters, who didnt end up voting (though many also voted against him - trying to act on their feeling that whatever they want, its “not this”). This decreasing support also accelerates whats known as “Everyday Sabotage” - people not trusting in the government, and look out for their own interests contra everyone else. This is a danger inherent to tying “Socialism” to a primarily state project.       

However 1999 Constitution was never meant as an eternal document & it created mechanisms to call for new popular constitutional referendums to be held. That’s what the “Constituent Assembly” is about, which is what a lot of the western world is describing as him singlehandedly rewriting it (while also being “vague about its contents”), or “created by him”. Elections to the constituent assembly were boycotted by opposition, so that it would be government controlled & look like a sham in the eyes of the broader world. That being said, the assembly was called both as a reaction to losing election but also in response to intensifying crises - it was put forth (i don’t see any reason to believe in bad faith) as a way to come together and figure out how to address the needs that were driving people to protest - to address the desire for “not this”, but bc of the uncertainty, it was easily twistable by reactionaries by putting all emphasis on the former. Also timing corresponds with increasing fears of maduro straying from the path of chavez, the image of scrapping one of his strongest plays for smth unknown is risky - tho if there are other meaningful options given the situation im not sure. And the body’s got at least as much constitutional legitimacy as Guaido  (Chapter III)  

The 1999 constitution also enabled a recall election to be called against maduro in 2016, bc it was written with particular attention to holding public officials accountable - similar noble commitments helped to end the presidency of Rousseff & bring in Bolsonaro (who was also one of the people spurring on the investigations and whipping up a social base).

     (speaking of guaido & bolsonaro)

on Guaido:

part of student group in 2007 protesting against non-renewal of coup-assisting network, who the CFR (one of the major think tanks of the cold war still playing a big role in foreign policy today) considered “most important network”   

close friend of Leopoldo Lopez, the aforementioned coup plotter.

politician since 2010, won a couple small elections

Unknown to majority of general population until 2019, most venezuelans surveyed didnt know him   

Plan Pais       

plans to privatize state owned industry & allow investment from foreign oil companies       

center-right neoliberal draped in platitudes of “stability”, “revitalization”, “security”, and “rescue” - a message seemingly deliberately targeted to become more and more resonant with increased sanctions.

/on Guaido

governing is about the expression of power. I wanna live in a world where that power isn’t expressed, but as long as the exploitation of the global working class continues unabated, id prefer some of that power be put towards helping the poor.     

there is no such thing as a static state of affairs, there’s no “goldilocks zone” out in the political universe where we tweak things finely until we find whats best for everyone, only different rates of change in different dimensions. what we need to do is figure out how we can push that state of affairs in a direction so that everyday people have the power to take control of their lives. re

re: “constitutionality” - if the supreme court calls it constitutional then its constitutional. period. There’s no such thing as a supreme court as an “independent branch” of government, but there are different degrees of integration into the rest of it.       

The Supreme Tribunal of Venezuela has 32 members, (a bit more than a dozen put in by the national assembly, while the PSUV held it), and the opposition holds abt 3 away from a supermajority. Each member of the court holds their spot for 12 years. If that’s “The Most Corrupt In The World” according to Transparency International, i wonder what world the 9-person lifetime-appointed US Supreme Court (2 of which appointed by trump, and save for pulling a Weekend At Ginsbergs, likely 3) is on. In fact, one of the tactics that the more radical circles of democrat voters are putting forward is to pack the Supreme Court. Because thats how shit actually gets done, or at the least how shit is prevented from being committed w the stamp of legality. FDR learned that lesson too, in trying to pass what is today known as “The New Deal”

My comparisons to trump are for specific end: these actions are exerted on levers of liberal democracy, and every single liberal democracy is susceptible to them in some ways.

whats a “dictator”? if hes unelected, the millions of people who participated in the elections dont seem to think so. if maduro is a dictator, then what is donald trump? the majority of ppl didnt vote for him yet hes still governing. macron’s popularity has at several points been less than 1/3, and the yellow vest protestors have been violently attacked - why is he not “a violent dictator with only the support of the military”? These terms are not neutral.

“their elections are highly flawed” So What? show me a country whose elections arent.   

“opposition jailed” - ok but coup plotters don’t get off easy in any liberal democracy. If someone - say Bernie Sanders - said “enough is enough” and succeeded in overthrowing the current government with the help of a foreign government…. you think they’d let him go free? what if ten years later he was getting his supporters all riled up to do it again? how long you think he’d be in jail for (assuming he can survive well into his 100’s)? You think more than 13 years? Think he’d get house arrest? Some US states lock you up for posessing weed up to 10. If you stay long enough around this blog, youll find plenty of other examples of much more cruel and unusual punishments. Look at Chelsea Manning, look at Oscar Riviera…   look at the US protestors saying Guaido is illegitimate

 what we have to keep in mind most of all, is to show that the contradictions being exploited are inherent to Liberalism. Contradictions are just expressed most freely at the margins - the interstices

poor economic decisions happen everywhere - 2008/2009 still affecting the entire world there’s violence thats “natural”, and violence thats “intolerable”. The dividing line is whether we have anything to gain by changing things.

sanctions:    started under obama, originally targeted specific individuals, used as precedent for more generalized. They’re indirect - they have a “squeezing effect”, takes already-existing problems & just makes them markedly worse. also doesn’t necessarily correlate with emigration, bc it takes a lot of money to start a new life somewhere else, and sanctions disproportionately affect the poor.   

war wouldnt likely look like (many) US boots on the ground - we’ve got plenty of other places to be. It’d look like guns being smuggled to counter-protestors. It’d look like sending resources to neighboring countries like Colombia or Brazil who would then use their troops. Colombias ruling party is right wing populists - much of current president’s campaign was run on fearmongering abt venezuelan socialism - they’re raring to go. It’d look like drones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caracas_drone_attack. Also means there likely won’t be a sudden trigger, its a gradually escalating stressful gradually-more-warlike situation.  

If war does break out - where would the refugees go?  In reality the majority would go to Colombia, but if anything significant breaks out there will be a stream of those looking to find shelter in the US, which has advertised itself as a beacon of hope - what would happen to them? some may get taken in as a gesture of showmanship, but nowhere close to the majority.   

speaking of the US - imagine if trump and bolton manage to actually plot a winning coup. Do you think that that wont be his main bullwark against ppl like Bernie? you think the media and rest of the democratic party wont jump on that narrative and “begrudgingly” support a fascist because the alternative might mean supporting single payer and not-having-good-for-ratings-climate-apocalypse?

another term thrown around without regard is “once vibrant” - for whom?

most articles ive seen just take this as an axiom, and dont find any cognitive dissonance when also saying chavez reduced poverty hugely.

 The answer to that rhetorical question: Citgo is venezuelan, before chavez none of the wealth went back to venezuela - thats what “vibrancy” means.  

     many similarities with BP (the-artist-formerly-known-as-the-anglo-iranian-oil-company)

in age of climate change & vocal ppl about phasing out oil, the more one’s livelihood is connected to oil, the more unstable ones country will be - either that, or the more instability ones country will cause.

“Oil exports fell by $2,200 per capita from 2012 to 2016, of which $1,500 was due to the decline in oil prices.”  

The drop in price that affected the venezuelan economy so much in 2014 was largely by US shale fracking

in 1970’s Chile, copper was the main product of Chile - allende nationalized the mines, and in return wall street dropped the

(also worth noting that venezuela’s got non-insignificant untapped shale basins)      

At least venezuela used the oil money to fund social programs instead of like, pad the pockets of Raytheon.

also oil price wars in africa highly correlated w oil (whose annual production doesn’t even combined total venezuelas)

a couple ppl have raised concerns abt my strong stance on equivocal dismissal - if there’s a difference, if there’s some way of reading your statement that says “X country that the State Dept wants to invade is an anomoly in the otherwise free world”, then that’s acting to push the discourse towards normalization & invasion. It’s not “whataboutism”, just basic consistency.   

now more than ever, narratives are affected by people. They may not be ones we had a hand in forging, but the way that we propagate them actually does have measurable effects on the larger-scale political outcomes. Always look for the base assumptions, as well as the direction   

sure denounce Chavez. sure denounce Maduro. denounce Kim, Xi, Castro, anyone. But if there’s no equally or proportionally loud denunciations of the horrors perpetrated by allies - the “assumed”, “natural” violence, then you’re acting to reinforce the narrative of exceptionalism.   

Just make sure after you take a breath, you denounce Saudi Arabia & Yemen, Israel for Palestine, the conditions which brought Argentinian/Brazillian, Brazilian coup, the US for Puerto Rico, the conditions which have murdered dozens of journalists in Mexico per year…  

what people want most of all is stability. “A debate over whether it is mismanagement and corruption by the Maduro government or the sanctions that are the author of the crisis is largely irrelevant. The point is that a combination of the reliance on oil revenues and the sanctions policy has crushed the policy space for any stability in the country.”

government’s errors and tensions   

fixed exchange rate -> black market      

took 5 years to address changing relation between dollar & BsF, all the room between those two curves left a huge room for intensifying crises, though since it also corresponds with the death of chavez, it sorta makes sense.   

antidemocratic actions and remarks by maduro  

scattered responses filled w half-solutions   

diversification needed, but how do you diversify an economy filled with rampant poverty, malnutrition, illiteracy… 

(nominally begrudging) support for mineral extraction 12.4% of territory opened to extraction - “Special Economic Zone” as a method of managing decay       

this is also what much of the reality of “economic diversification” looks like

not enough socialism. (even fox agrees!) Venezuela shows the limits of Social Democracy in countries living outside of the Imperial Core - esp the dangers if you’re in the crosshairs already bc of oil         

started out as populism, gradually grew as confronted more.            shows shaping influence on political organs from actions of foreign actors - if you’ve survived a coup before, you’re gonna become paranoid about any more of them - especially when the coup plotters say “hey lets do more coups”       

also shows the weakness of only having a small number of charasmatic faces representing the movement - if one dies and theres no clear and popular replacement, then you’ll lose ppl who were largely brought in by the charisma, weakening your political project, and creating cracks for reactionary forces to take advantage of - especially in times of transition.       

bourgeoisie still control a majority of the economy.            Capitalist businesses are internally unaccountable, and in this age of intensified global trade, one can punish countries for straying from the pack by moving business & focus away. If you’re looking for dictatorships, look at the thousands of private companies run as dictatorships daily       

capital flight is a real effect, precisely because socialism is fundamentally and irreconcilably against the self-interest of the bourgeoisie. not necessarily against the interest of the humans-who-are-also-bourgeois, but of the impersonal self-sustaining force of capital.           

Have you ever pulled something out of an electrical socket, and seen a quick spark? The reason that occurs is bc of what’s called an induction current, which is a fancy physics word for flowing electricity not liking to suddenly change its flow. If you accidentally touch that spark, you might feel it, but youll live to tell the tale. But if you only take the plug out halfway & touch it, that’s a different story.  Capital flows similarly.

   my country (lithuania) has been facing sky-high emigration since the collapse of the USSR (with an added boost after 08-09), we have also consistently had one of the highest suicide rates in the world (#7), a minimum wage of about 3 Euros an hour (after a recent increase), as well as one of the highest prison populations in Europe (discounting Russia & Belarus… which like….)   

when are we gonna be invaded? when will the US media talk about our pain?  

oh wait, they did. We cried all pretty for the TV cameras, then they got a bozo nobody really knew of to denounce the government, who they called dictatorial (though it was far from ideal, massive bureaucracies dont tend to mix well with single-person-decision-making). And to be fair, the fact that the government was unpopular wasnt entirely undeserved. But what was promised to us was the idea of “Freedom”, “Free Enterprise”; to “Get Rid of Corruption” and institute “Real” Democracy". They said we’d be integrated into the glorious capitalist west, and we understood that to mean that we’d be in the position of a Germany, or at least an Austria or smth. But they never meant to integrate us into the imperial Core, we have always been seen as part of the Periphery - the “assumed” violence that “naturally” happens.    

Then we got to where we our today. Some of the stuffs more available, but expensive. Most of the bureaucracy’s still around, it just helps fewer people. We stand as an example of what to expect, in one of the best case scenarios, you would join our emigrees now making up a significant percentage of underpaid house-servants aka maids across the EU.  

if we want the people of Venezuela to be healthy, safe, and fulfilled, then:

speak out and pointing to the effects of US sanctions is incredibly important. They’ve already killed 40,000 people in the last year, and 300,000 more are in extreme danger (and millions more in long-term risk).

what does it mean when you simultaneously sanction trade with a place but also demand they let you give them humanitarian aid?

if there is to be action taken by the international community, then the US has forfeited its right to speak. They threw it away once in 2002, and obama rhetorically picked it up and dusted it off so that trump could throw it in a bigger dumpster, thats also on fire. However we also still live in a world deeply shaped by US Hegemony, so the opinions of its close trade partners & closest-knit media buds should be seen as influenced as such. Doesn’t mean that theyre wrong on everything too, but they still feel the magnetic pull of the US economy and ecosystem (as well as their own potentially imperial interests) and the effect of that force cannot be discounted.

transitioning our economies away from oil & away from globalized neoliberalism which only values peripheral states by their exports - dissolves tensions of how to produce in unproductive terrain   

socialize medicine in the US, so that drug companies run by dictatorships can’t control their lives & ours. healthcare is especially reliant on imports, sanctions affect especially strongly.  

normalize the ideas of Socialism, without taking the easy way out of “oh no dont think of Venezuela, think of sweden or denmark”. None of them are Socialist, but to avoid the complexities of Venezuela is to imagine that US attempts at socialism wouldn’t involve significant capital flight. If we don’t consider that, if we don’t have solid actionable plans to deal with that, while also facing the inherent complexity of changing material conditions, then we’re gonna waste whatever shot we get.   

redirect conversation normally centered around government towards support of the tens of thousands of small business co-operatives, where people live their daily lives in a democratic manner.

on The Communes:

    “delegating responsibility throughout all members, and bringing important decisions to the whole to work through and find the best possible solution… They create “collective criteria” together; agreements stipulating whether individuals have power over certain decisions or whether it is up to the whole group. However, he assures that these “are not rigid, they can change at any moment.” The cooperative I lived with in Venezuela had regular organizational meetings where they informally came to agreement and were even able to come back to re-evaluate decisions that didn´t seem to be satisfactory for the whole group in this same way. Decisions and decision making, in this way, are viewed as a process not contained by meetings and discussions in board rooms, but are always being analyzed and made better by the process of putting them into action, and not only by thinking them out and writing them down.”

- the “Self Government of the Producers” - aka what it looks like for cooks to govern.   

they have communal councils as well - neighborhood councils in the same vein that so many (rightfully) find inspiring in Kurdistan . They preexisted chavez, but they were able to proliferate and be given legal recognition through him. I understand that legal recognition can act to ‘name’ a body & pin it to smth that doesn’t match its requisite variety - how dynamic it is, but imo as its currently legislated it recognizes a good amount of the autonomy that they had already been excersizing. - liable to change                                government recognition of co-ops has drawbacks too, and correlates negatively with that coop’s success           

           "A good example of this intention is the de-emphasis that cooperatives in Venezuela put on advertising or “marketing” products, and instead push to find more people to become part of the cooperative, and choose the services or products they provide based on community decisions about what is needed. A cooperative I worked in […] was originally a family owned and operated theater group that traveled around the country performing theater pieces that highlighted social and environmental issues. When they joined the […] cooperative, the larger co-op did an analysis and decided they wanted a natural fruit juice concentrate producer and gave the group a loan to acquire capital and start producing. They have been doing this for only a couple of years now but have already paid back the loan to the larger cooperative and are bringing extra money in to support themselves, better their services, and supply extra funds to the larger cooperative for community projects such as the recently [2012] built community health center…                  

The cooperative services I experienced and learned about in Venezuela were health, dental, food, and a separate example of trash services. A dental cooperative […] provides quality dental services (I know because I used them) almost every day for affordable prices. You don´t have to be a member of the cooperative, and you don´t have to make an appointment. It takes only a couple of hours, and emergency situations are treated with urgency. The health center, built with funds provided by all the associated cooperatives[…], works the same way. Anyone can go there, the services are subsidized by the cooperative so they are affordable, the clinic and workspaces are clean and well taken care of, and the quality of the service is great. Worker-members of the cooperative receive health care at the facility without charge except for the massage and acupuncture services that they also provide at a really low price.

           […] food services are priced to provide more access to food for the community in which it exists. The original and persistent intention is to make the best situation for people on all ends of the process. The producers are part of the cooperative and are part of the group that decides the prices that growers get, as well as the prices that the food is sold for. This means that both farmers and workers at the market decide what to charge a person, which ultimately affects how much money the growers receive, as well as if the food is affordable for the people who need to eat who live in the city. In a normal capitalist market system these parties are separated and put up against each other, raising prices for consumers and lowering them for small producers, excluding those people from getting enough money to afford all the necessities that are typically only provided at a high price.

           One communal council, a parallel governing organization of community members linked to investment funds from the national government, in the city of Merida, Venezuela organized themselves to get funds to buy a trash collection truck. The truck at the time was used for a specific waste removal project that removed waste from their community regularly but was not a traditional collection service. However, they did have plans to expand the project to start their own collection service, and this would be provided by the commal council, an anti-capitalist organization which does not require people to pay for the service. Although this is not a “co-operative” as some hardliner co-operative enthusiasts might point out, it is a horizontal anti-capitalist organization widening access of necessary services to the larger community run by community members; following cooperative values of equity, inclusion, and solidarity I believe this to be an example of cooperative economics and action. It appears to me that economic inclusion is much more likely to widen only when those who are being excluded are included in the process of organizing the services and are in control of the economy.“

until the communes, workers cooperatives, and the like are strong enough to rule themselves, having Maduro in power is the only option given to us which doesn’t trigger the control of reactionaries. People make their own history, but not in situations of their choosing - the exact outcome isn’t predetermined, but there’s only a limited number of poles - gravitational attractors - towards which that trajectory is heading at any particular time.   

if maduro acts to squash the power of the communes, then thats a different situation. but until that point, we outside of the country must work to center any discussion on these bodies - they are the heart of the country and of whatever social revolution has occurred/is further possible. They are filled with lessons for us to learn from, and show how rich and dynamic the organized populace can be if they are allowed to control their communities. (ex of dealing with gang violence from @ 22:50)       

This is all said with recognition that many chavistas have acted against communes, the bureaucratic machine acts to co-opt much of their energy, its linguistically obscured the concept of "ownership” with that of “control”, and that the state has changed its messages over time. But the heart of the communes is what’s a priority, and they have acted against the government overstepping its bounds & mis-identifying them. But whats important is that there’s a feedback process in the gvt to actually allow them to assert their autonomy. Liberals will do their utmost to close those channels.

   If Guaido and the Popular Will take control of power, be assured that whatever gains made in organizing the everyday people of Venezuela will be at the top of the chopping block. How effective that suppression turns out to be is undetermined - it might turn out to strengthen the communes, but that outcome would be damage control, not something to try and bullseye.

Effective Propaganda knows that its more effective to control what’s left out than control what’s put in. Keep that in mind, and study trajectories and forces.

other links:

https://next.podbay.fm/podcast/1363342644/e/1551711604

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Voc08vh9cJY

https://www.counterpunch.org/2013/06/21/a-cowboy-in-caracas/

https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2017/08/03/the-tragedy-of-venezuela/

https://www.multpl.com/venezuela-gdp

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/04/fivethirtyeights-venezuela-problem

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-venezeulas-middle-class-is-taking-to-the-streets/

https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/bjkmq8/fiery-protest-leader-leopoldo-lopez-faces-13-year-sentence-in-venezuela

https://potent.media/minimum-sentencing-for-marijuana-possession

https://www.thoughtco.com/core-and-periphery-1435410

https://popularresistance.org/building-the-commune-radical-democracy-in-venezuela/

http://www.antiwar.com/regions/regions.php?c=Venezuela

[bountyofbeads]

https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Politics/1939-law-kellyanne-conway-accused-violating/story?id=63719007&__twitter_impression=true

HAPPENING NOW: House Oversight Committee holds hearing on Kellyanne Conway's alleged Hatch Act violations.

@ABC

https://t.co/MByP72oTdr

MORE: In an unprecedented move, the Office of Special Counsel described Conway as a "repeat offender" of the Hatch Act and recommended she be removed from federal service.

"Ms. Conway's conduct undermines public confidence in the Executive branch and compromises the civil service system that the Hatch Act was intended to protect," Kerner wrote.

"The sheer number of occurrences underscores the egregious nature of her violations."

What you should know about the 1939 law Kellyanne Conway is accused of violating

By Alexander Mallin | Published Jun 14, 2019, 3:21 PM ET |

President Donald Trump rushed to the defense of one of his top political advisers on Friday, after a federal watchdog accused White House counselor Kellyanne Conway of violating a law that bars some government employees of engaging in political activity while acting in their official capacities.

In an unprecedented move, the Office of Special Counsel described Conway as a "repeat offender" of the Hatch Act and recommended she be removed from federal service.

"It looks to me like they’re trying to take away her right of free speech," Trump said in an interview with Fox and Friends Friday. "No, I’m not going to fire her.”

It's not the first time a Trump Administration official has been found to have run afoul of the 1939 law, but the most recent dramatic feud has left many with questions as to what exactly the Hatch Act is, whether it conflicts with First Amendment rights to free speech, and why those close to the president are able to allegedly violate it with no apparent consequences.

What is the Hatch Act?

The Hatch Act was originally passed in 1939 following allegations that employees of a New Deal agency dubbed the Works Progress Administration had used their official positions to benefit the Democratic Party. The act sought to outlaw bribery and coercion of voters by public officials and placed restrictions on federal employees from engaging in certain political activities.

It has been significantly amended in the decades since, and has withstood several challenges in front of the Supreme Court regarding concerns it overly restricts employees' free speech rights.

Under the current version of the law, federal employees in the executive branch are prohibited from using their official positions "for the purpose of interfering with or affecting the result of an election," according to the OSC. In past decades, the Hatch Act has been in the headlines in cases where top officials in the Trump, Obama and Bush administrations have been found to have advocated for a particular party or candidate while acting or being identified by their official titles.

The law generally doesn't prohibit employees from acts such as placing campaign slogans or signage on their personal property, or expressing their political opinions at work as long as that isn't done for the express purpose of engaging in campaign-related activity on behalf of a particular candidate or cause.

Federal employees deemed "further restricted employees" are held to different standards under the act, however, and generally face more stringent conditions regarding their abilities to engage in political activity like attending campaign events or conventions, or handing out fliers at polling places, for instance.

Can you be punished for violating the Hatch Act?

Yes. According to the OSC, all civilian employees serving in the executive branch of government -- with the exception of the President and Vice President, are subject to scrutiny under the Hatch Act.

Federal employees found in violation of the Hatch Act by the independent Merit Systems Protection Board can face punishment such as removal from federal service, a point reinforced in Special Counsel Henry Kerner's letter to Trump regarding Conway's alleged violations.

"If Ms. Conway were any other federal employee, her multiple violations of the law would almost certainly result in removal from her federal position by the Merit Systems Protection Board," said Kerner, who previously served under former Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz on the House Oversight Committee and was appointed to the position by Trump in 2017. "Ms. Conway's violations, if left unpunished, send a message to all federal employees that they need not abide by the Hatch Act's restrictions."

However, presidential appointees who are a part of the Executive Office of the President aren't subject to the same accountability as other executive branch employees and can't be punished or removed in the same fashion as the rest of the executive branch workforce.

In the case of close advisers to the president, as in Conway's case, or even Cabinet officials, the final determination on how to handle Hatch Act violations is left in the hands of the President.

President Barack Obama similarly didn't discipline his former HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in 2012 when she was found in violation of the Hatch Act, or his HUD Secretary Julian Castro, who was found in violation of the Hatch Act for a 2016 interview in which he praised Hillary Clinton.

However, both of those officials released statements apologizing following the OSC's investigations -- while Conway has remained defiant and not apologized or even acknowledged her alleged violations, according to the OSC.

What is Kellyanne Conway accused of doing?

In his 17-page report to the president, Kerner chronicles what he describes as multiple blatant violations of the Hatch Act by Conway in TV appearances and activity on her Twitter account, @KellyannePolls.

The report followed a separate determination by the OSC in March of 2018 that Conway had violated the act when she advocated against Alabama Democratic Sen. Doug Jones' candidacy in his race against Republican Roy Moore.

But that report did not sway Conway from changing her tune in multiple TV interviews this year, in which she attacked other Democratic candidates including Sen. Cory Booker, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Beto O'Rourke and former Vice President Joe Biden.

One of the political tweets from Conway flagged by the OSC displayed a collection of pictures showing the faces of several female Democratic senators watching the president's State of the Union Speech, that was captioned with "He's got this. #2020I'mWithHim."

"By engaging in political activity while speaking in her official capacity, Ms. Conway used her official authority or influence for the purpose of affecting the result of an election in violation of the Hatch Act," the OSC report reads. "The sheer number of occurrences underscores the egregious nature of her violations."

Kerner notes that Conway was recently confronted by a reporter in one instance where she engaged in political speech, to which Conway shot back sarcastically, "Let me know when the jail sentence starts."

Isn't Conway just engaging in First Amendment-protected speech?

President Trump is far from the first person to question whether the Hatch Act puts a muzzle on what most Americans would consider First Amendment-protected speech.

In his letter responding to Kerner's report on Conway, White House counsel Pat Cipollone argued the "OSC's overbroad and unsupported interpretation of the Hatch Act risks violating Ms. Conway's First Amendment rights and chills the free speech of all government employees."

But proponents of the law argue that it does a public service in separating the official functions of the U.S. government from the partisan battles seen in elections.

For instance, a majority opinion issued in a Supreme Court challenge to the Hatch Act in 1947 upheld the law on the basis that political activity could disrupt the very ability for government agencies to function, saying free speech had to be weighed against “the requirements of orderly administration of administrative personnel."

Separately, advocates argue that allowing federal employees to mix their official duties with political advocacy risks corruption, and officials being able to wield their government titles in a way that elevates their voice over the common citizen.

That thinking appears to be reflected in Kerner's report, in which he admonishes Conway as a "repeat offender," and makes the case that if she isn't subject to discipline it could diminish the OSC's ability to enforce the act entirely.

"Ms. Conway's conduct undermines public confidence in the Executive branch and compromises the civil service system that the Hatch Act was intended to protect," Kerner wrote.