Heather Cox Richardson

[milliefink]

April 14, 2023 (Friday)

The Biden administration today announced a series of actions it has taken and will continue to take to disrupt the production and distribution of illegal street fentanyl around the world. The efforts involve the Department of Justice, including the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation; the State Department; the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), including U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP); the Office of National Drug Control Policy; and the Office of Foreign Assets Control in the Treasury Department.

On a press call today, various administration officials gave an overview of the crisis. Calling street fentanyl “the deadliest drug threat that our country has ever faced,” an official from the DEA explained that all of the street fentanyl in the U.S. comes from Mexico at the hands of two cartels: the Sinaloa and the Jalisco.

Most of the street fentanyl in the U.S. is distributed by the Sinaloa cartel, which operates in every U.S. state and in 47 countries. This cartel used to be led by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, who began serving a life sentence in a U.S. prison in 2019 after Mexican authorities arrested him and extradited him to the U.S. Now four of his sons run it: Ovidio, Iván, Joaquín, and Alfredo, who are known as the “Chapitos.” DEA administrator Anne Milgram said they took their father’s “global drug trafficking empire” and “made it more ruthless, more violent, more deadly—and they used it to spread a new poison, fentanyl.”

According to the DEA official, the Chapitos started the manufacture and trafficking of street fentanyl and are behind the flood of it into the U.S. in the past 8 years. It is a global business. While illicit drugs used to be plant-based, newer ones like street fentanyl are made with synthetic chemicals. The cartels import the chemicals necessary to make fentanyl from China into Mexico and Guatemala. Then they manufacture the drug, distribute it in the U.S., and launder the money, much of it through cryptocurrency.

They have hundreds of employees and are equipped with military-grade weapons. The Department of Justice added that they “allegedly used cargo aircraft, private aircraft, submarines and other submersible and semi-submersible vessels, container ships, supply vessels, go-fast boats, fishing vessels, buses, rail cars, tractor trailers, automobiles, and private and commercial interstate and foreign carriers to transport their drugs and precursor chemicals. They allegedly maintained a network of couriers, tunnels, and stash houses throughout Mexico and the United States to further their drug-trafficking activities…to import the drugs into the United States,” where they kill as many as 200 people a day.

Rather than simply targeting individual traffickers, which would leave the operation intact, the DEA mapped the cartel’s networks in 10 countries and 28 U.S. cities. Its officers identified the cartel’s supply chain and all its leaders, including the people in China and Guatemala supplying them with chemicals to make the illegal fentanyl, the production managers, the enforcers around the world, the trafficker leaders who moved both drugs and guns, and the money launderers.

That information has enabled the Department of Justice to bring new charges against 28 of the cartel’s key figures (some were already facing charges) for fentanyl trafficking, narcotics, firearms, and money laundering. Seven of them were arrested in Colombia, Greece, and Guatemala several weeks ago and are in extradition proceedings. Mexican authorities arrested Ovidio even before that.

At the same time, the State Department increased the reward money offered for information that leads to the arrest or conviction of drug traffickers operating in other countries, and said it is working with partners to disrupt the supply chain for the drug’s manufacture, by which it appears to mean the precursor chemicals and manufacturing equipment coming from China. The White House also released a joint statement from Canada, Mexico, and the United States vowing to work together to stop the inflow of chemicals and manufacturing equipment to Mexico from China, a vow that somewhat gives Mexico a way to deflect blame for the crisis away from the factories in its own country to the supply chains based in China.

The Department of Homeland Security noted today that seizures of illegal fentanyl by U.S. Customs and Border Protection are up 400% since September 2019 and continue to increase. DHS has seized more fentanyl and arrested more traffickers in the past two years than it did in the previous five.This increased interception comes from new inspection equipment to find the drug in vehicles, and also from a focus on finding those incoming chemicals in plane and ship cargoes. It has also focused on catching equipment—pill presses, for example—whose loss stops production.

In March the Department of Homeland Security announced Operation Blue Lotus, which in its first month of operation seized more than 2,400 pounds of illegal fentanyl at U.S. ports of entry—as well as more than 3,500 pounds of methamphetamines and nearly 1,000 pounds of cocaine—and arrested 156 people. CBP has captured another 800 pounds of fentanyl. To build on these operations, the Department of Homeland Security has stationed labs at ports of entry to test substances instantly.

Notably, the Treasury Department added its own weight to this effort. It announced sanctions against two companies in China and five people in China and Guatemala who, they allege, provide the Mexican cartels with the chemicals to make fentanyl. Acknowledging that it’s been hard for U.S. officials to talk to their counterparts in China, administration officials say U.S. diplomats have been working with friends and partners to pressure China to stop the export of the chemicals that make drugs not only because it hurts the U.S., but because it is hurting the world.

Asking for support against drug trafficking on moral grounds is fair enough, but the sanctions against the chemical producers and the money launderers will bite. All properties the sanctioned companies and people have in the U.S. are blocked; their owners cannot do business with anyone in the U.S.

For all that the effort to neutralize the scourge of illegal fentanyl is vital to our country, what jumped out at me about this story was the power of the Treasury Department to disrupt what drug trafficking is really about: money. At the end of the day, for all their violence and deadliness, the Chapitos are businessmen, and the U.S. can cut them off at the knees through our financial power.

But that power is not guaranteed. Today, Sarah Ferris and Jordain Carney of Politico reported that House speaker Kevin McCarthy and House Republicans continue to insist they will refuse to lift the debt ceiling unless they get massive spending cuts and policy changes. These are not normal budget negotiations, which Biden and the Democrats welcome, but a threat to let the U.S. default on its debt. Their willingness to hold the Treasury hostage until they get their way threatens to rip the foundation out from our global financial power.

As I read about the U.S. Treasury sanctions on fentanyl supply chains today and then thought about how Treasury sanctions against Russia have hamstrung that nation without a single shot from U.S. military personnel, I wondered if people really understand how much is at stake in the Republicans’ attack on our financial system.

[milliefink]

April 15, 2023 (Saturday)

After all the action of the past several weeks and in anticipation of more action still to come, it seems to me tonight is definitely a night for a breather.

Last week, Buddy and I ran away up the coast to see Campobello, just over the Maine border in Canada, where FDR had a summer home. The house was cool to see (and freezing cold to visit that day!) and so was the hiking we did along the Maine coast.

I am not a painter, but I have always imagined that one of the reasons Maine has sported so many artists is the extraordinary light. On one of our evening hikes, just about every shot I took looked like this.

Going to take the night off. I’ll see you tomorrow.

[milliefink]

April 16, 2023 (Sunday)

A few quick notes tonight about some ongoing stories:

There is more news about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his misreporting of his financial connections. This morning, Shawn Boburg and Emma Brown of the Washington Post reported that for twenty years, Thomas has reported rental income totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars from a real estate firm that was shut down in 2006.

The misstatement might be dismissed as a problem with paperwork, the authors note. “But it is among a series of errors and omissions that Thomas has made on required annual financial disclosure forms over the past several decades, a review of those records shows. Together, they have raised questions about how seriously Thomas views his responsibility to accurately report details about his finances to the public.”

The cascade of stories about Thomas threatens to continue to undermine the legitimacy of this Supreme Court.

Last night, the nation suffered one mass shooting in Dadeville, Alabama, that killed four people and wounded twenty-eight others, and another in Louisville, Kentucky, that killed two and wounded four. On Friday, Republican hopefuls for the 2024 presidential nomination courted members of the National Rifle Association, the NRA, at the organization’s 2023 annual convention, promising looser gun laws.

South Dakota governor Kristi Noem complained about liberals who “want to take our guns,” and boasted that her granddaughter, who is not yet two, has a shotgun and a rifle.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration continues to focus on rebalancing the Indo-Pacific to counter China. Just two weeks after the fiftieth anniversary of the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam and nearly thirty years after the restoration of diplomatic ties in 1995, the U.S. has broken ground on a new $1.2 billion embassy compound in the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh yesterday and vowed to “broaden and deepen” relations between the two countries.

Vice President Kamala Harris, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai, U.S. Agency for International Development administrator Samantha Power, and members of Congress have all visited Vietnam recently as part of a long-term strategy to help area friends and allies counterbalance China in the Indo-Pacific region.

Yesterday, Blinken emphasized how the U.S. and Vietnam, working together, “can advance a free and open Indo-Pacific, one that is at peace and grounded in respect for the rules-based international order.” But, as Vietnam has a one-party communist government, he explained, “When we talk about ‘free and open,’ we mean countries being free to choose their own path and their own partners and that problems will be dealt with openly; rules will be reached transparently and applied fairly; and goods, ideas, and people will flow freely across land, the seas, the skies, and cyberspace.”

Vice President Harris spoke yesterday at a march for reproductive rights in Los Angeles, where she emphasized how deeply our international standing depends on our commitment to freedom at home. “I’ve been traveling around the world as your Vice President,” she said. “When we, as Americans, walk in those rooms around the world, we have traditionally walked in those rooms, shoulders back, chin up, having some authority to talk about the importance of rule of law, human rights.

“But here’s the thing we all know about what it means to be a role model: People watch what you do to see if it matches what you say. So let us understand that what is happening in our nation right now, by extension, can impact people around the world who dare to say, ‘I want my country to be like the United States and protect rights.’ And those autocrats and those dictators might look at those folks and say, ‘What are you pointing to as the example?’”

“We are seeing, around the country, in a myriad of ways, those who would dare to attack fundamental rights and, by extension, attack our democracy,” Harris said. “Around our country, supposed so-called extremist leaders…dare to silence the voices of the people.”

“A United States Supreme Court, the highest court in our land, that took a constitutional right that had been recognized from the people of America.

“We have seen attacks on voting rights; attacks on fundamental rights to love and marry the people that you love; attacks on the ability of people to be themselves and be proud of who they are.

“And so, this is a moment that history will show required each of us, based on our collective love of our country, to stand up and fight for and protect our ideals…. [W]e have been called upon to be the next generation of the people who will help lead and fight in this movement for freedom and liberty based on our love of our country…. [W]e stand for our democracy. And we stand for foundational and fundamental principles that have everything to do with freedom, liberty, and equality for all people.”

[DukeTrout]

@milliefink

an official from the DEA explained that all of the street fentanyl in the U.S. comes from Mexico at the hands of two cartels: the Sinaloa and the Jalisco.

This isn’t true. A DEA report shows a significant percentage of fentanyl is produced in China and arrives in North America from a variety of routes including passenger air, air cargo, and oversea cargo.

It’s not just precursors and not just through Mexico

[milliefink]

April 17, 2023 (Monday)

House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) was in New York City today, trying to calm jitters among investors by explaining to members of the New York Stock Exchange that the Republicans will not allow the government to default on its debts even as he insisted that the Republican Party must use the debt ceiling to enact legislative policies it can’t win through normal political negotiations.

The debt ceiling is an artificial limit to how much the Treasury can borrow to pay existing obligations to which Congress has already committed. It has nothing to do with future spending, which is hammered out in budget negotiations.

But McCarthy has not offered a budget proposal because the Republican conference cannot agree on one. Yesterday, for example, McCarthy floated the idea of cuts to food assistance for millions of low-income Americans, which Senate Republicans want no part of. Unlike House members, many of whom represent such gerrymandered districts they feel insulated from any backlash to extreme proposals, Senators run at-large. For them, cutting food support while backing tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations would be politically dangerous.

Instead, McCarthy is trying to use the threat of national default to extract the cuts extremist members of his conference want. The Biden administration has made it clear that it will not negotiate over paying the nation’s bills, especially since about a quarter of the debt was accumulated under former president Trump, $2 trillion of it thanks to tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. In those years, Congress raised the debt ceiling three times. Biden presented his own long, detailed budget, full of his own priorities, as a start to negotiations in March, and he says he is eager to sit down and hammer out the budget once McCarthy produces his own plan. McCarthy is trying to deflect from his inability to do that but is confusing the issue, suggesting that he has the right to negotiate instead over whether or not to pay our bills.

Since defaulting, or even approaching default, would devastate both the U.S. and the global economy, not even all Republicans back McCarthy’s threats. When Sara Eisen of CNBC asked McCarthy if he had the support of his party for what he is proposing, McCarthy answered, “I think I have the support of America,” and that he would “get the party behind it.”

Meanwhile, when asked about a potential default, Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, told Tony Romm of the Washington Post, “It will be financial chaos…. Our fiscal problems will be meaningfully worse.… Our geopolitical standing in the world will be undermined.”

Today, McCarthy offered to kick the can down the road by a year, raising the debt ceiling so long as the Democrats agree to cuts that he described only vaguely. Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) rejected this idea out of hand, saying: “If Speaker McCarthy continues in this direction, we are headed to default.” Schumer reiterated that the Democrats will be happy to negotiate with McCarthy over the budget when he can produce a detailed plan that can get the 218 votes it needs to pass the House. He noted that McCarthy’s vague proposals are “a recycled pile of the same things he’s been saying for months, none of which has moved the ball forward an inch.”

In part, McCarthy’s problem is that many of the members of his conference are in the majority for the first time. They are discovering that it is much easier to say no when opponents are in charge than it is to hammer coalitions together to advance realistic legislation. In the New York Times today, editorial board member Michelle Cottle called many of the current House Republicans “chaos monkeys” but noted that it is McCarthy’s fault that he gave them so much power by promising things he can’t deliver—like refusing to hike the debt ceiling without cuts—and by putting them at the head of important committees.

Ohio representative Jim Jordan, for example, sits at the head of the Judiciary Committee, as well as the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, and his investigations so far have not produced the results he promised the Republican base. As Jesse Watters of the Fox News Channel put it last month: “Make me feel better, guys. Tell me this is going somewhere. Can I throw someone in prison? Can someone go to jail? Can someone get fined?”

Instead, Democrats on the committees have met Jordan’s wild rapid-fire accusations with facts that show the difference between unchallenged myth-making on right-wing media and actual governance. Today, at Jordan’s insistence, the Judiciary Committee held a hearing in New York City, a venue Jordan suggested was chosen to highlight how the policies of Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg had exacerbated violent crime, although in reality, Jordan’s attacks on Bragg for investigating former president Trump started even before Trump’s indictment in that jurisdiction.

Jordan set out to argue that Bragg was neglecting violent crime in New York City only to have Democrats point out that New York City is “not only safer than most large cities in America, it is safer than most cities of any size, and on a per capita basis, New York City is safer than most of the states of the members sitting…on the majority side,” as Jim Kessler, the co-founder and senior vice president for policy for Third Way, explained. Indeed, in 2020, Ohio’s murder rate was higher than the rate in New York City. Representative David Cicilline (D-RI) asked Jordan if the hearing could be moved to Ohio.

If one part of McCarthy’s problem is his extremist colleagues, another is that his argument is out of date. In what Catie Edmondson and Jim Tankersley of the New York Times called “a speech that was sprinkled with misleading statements and erroneous assertions,” McCarthy told the Wall Street executives, “We’re seeing in real time the effects of reckless government spending: record inflation and the hardship it causes….”

In reality, the inflation that plagued the U.S. as it reopened from the worst days of the Covid-19 pandemic has slowed dramatically, making it clear that the policies of the Biden administration are working. As Jennifer Rubin noted yesterday in the Washington Post, the annual inflation rate for producers is 2.7%—the lowest rate in more than two years—while consumer price increases are at their lowest point since May 2021: 5%. Gasoline prices have dropped 17.4% since the high prices that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The overall declines mark nine months of slowing inflation.

At the same time, labor force participation is at record high levels and unemployment is at a 50-year low of 3.5%. Black unemployment, which stands at 5%, has never been lower. Real incomes—that is, incomes after inflation is factored in—have risen 7% for those making $35,000 a year or less and 1.3% across the whole economy. Meanwhile, the deficit has dropped more than $1.7 trillion in two years.

The successes of Biden’s policies would seem worth considering in negotiations, but as Sarah Longwell noted in Bulwark+ today, the Republican Party has abandoned normal democratic politics. She notes that it is a mistake to look at the Trump years as a wild period from which the party will return to normality. Instead, she notes, “You have to think of Trump’s election as year zero” because “Republican voters say they don’t want any part of a Republican party that looks anything like it did before 2016.”

Trump’s administration was a culmination of forty years of Republican attempts to get rid of taxes and regulations by insisting that anyone calling for business regulation and a basic social safety net was a socialist who wanted to redistribute tax dollars from hardworking white men to minorities and women. But the racism, sexism, and religion in that formula used to be the quieter undertones of the call for small government. Now, though, the party is openly embracing the replacement of democracy with a strong government that would make white Christian nationalism the law of the land.

In illustration of that position, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who has used the government to impose a Christian agenda on his state, today continued his crusade against the Walt Disney Company. A year ago, angry that then–chief executive officer Bob Chapek opposed his measure limiting discussion of gender identity in public school classrooms, DeSantis tried to take control of the company’s special self-governing district through a new board. Shortly before the takeover, Disney CEO Bob Iger outfoxed DeSantis by legally changing the terms of the agreement under which it has operated for decades, limiting the power of the board in perpetuity.

After Trump officials mocked him for being beaten by Mickey Mouse, DeSantis today suggested he is determined to use the power of the government to force Disney, a private company, to bend to his authority. He threatened to build a rival amusement park or a state prison on land next to Disney’s Florida park.

Disney promptly responded by advertising a “first-ever Disneyland After Dark” LGBTQIA+ themed event night at its California Disneyland resort, and former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele tweeted: ”When families stop visiting & Disney’s $75.2B economic impact & $5.8B tax revenues drop; its 75K employees face layoffs & 463K jobs are also imperiled what would your analytics say caused that to happen? WTF, Dumbo.”

[gatto]

@milliefink

As Jesse Watters of the Fox News Channel put it last month: “Make me feel better, guys. Tell me this is going somewhere. Can I throw someone in prison? Can someone go to jail? Can someone get fined?

well, there is a specific orange someone we all have in mind…

[milliefink]

April 18, 2023 (Tuesday)

“I love Northern Ireland. I love the people. I love the place. They’ve been extraordinarily generous and hospitable to me and my wife, my family,” former senator George Mitchell of Maine told Jill Lawless of the Associated Press today at Queen’s University, located in Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland.

Mitchell, who is 89 years old and is being treated for leukemia, has avoided public events for three years, but he traveled to Belfast this week to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement that he helped to hammer out in 1998.

This anniversary is no small thing.

In April 1998, after 30 years of violence that became known as “the Troubles,” Mitchell helped to broker a peace between the British government, the Irish government, and eight political parties from Northern Ireland. It was not an easy negotiation. Northern Ireland remained part of the United Kingdom when the rest of Ireland became an independent state in 1921. From the 1960s until the 1990s, Northern Ireland was torn between those who wanted it to stay part of the United Kingdom-—mostly Protestants—and those who wanted it to join the rest of Ireland, who were mostly Catholics.

The conflict between the two looked much like a civil war, and more than 3,500 people, mostly civilians, died in the violence.

In 1995, Mitchell had just retired from his position as Democratic Senate majority leader when then-president Bill Clinton asked him to become a special envoy to Northern Ireland. For the next five years, Mitchell would chair three separate sets of peace talks. “It seemed like 50 years at the time,” he told Lawless. “But we persevered and prevailed.”

By spring 1996, Mitchell had gotten most sides to agree on six principles, including renouncing violence, and then talks began. From the start, Mitchell told the participants that neither the U.S. president nor the British prime minister could impose peace: it would have to come from the leaders in Northern Ireland themselves.

“Mostly, it was listening on my part,” Mitchell told Paul Kane of the Washington Post. The different sides called him to vent about the other sides, and Mitchell listened. Taking counsel from his brief time as a federal judge, he would not socialize with any of the different participants to avoid looking as if he were playing favorites. Occasionally, he would issue “rulings” to the opposing sides about their positions, as if he were a judge.

After two years, in early 1998, one leader called to say he was ready to move forward. After his years as a Senate leader, Mitchell recognized that “when you get the votes, you should hold the vote,” he recalled in his interview with Kane. He told the 10 different parties that they had until Good Friday to agree to a settlement.

“I had no authority to impose it,” he told Kane. But two years of listening had paid off: all the different sides trusted him. “He listened us to agreement,” one of the political leaders said.

The Good Friday Agreement set up a new government for Northern Ireland, with a parliament that represented both those who wanted to stay in the U.K. and those who wanted to join Ireland. Much of the day-to-day responsibility for Northern Ireland fell on this new parliament rather than coming from the U.K. government. The new lawmakers set out to show the world how to heal a deeply divided society.

Boston College professor Robert Savage, who specializes in Irish History, told me that Mitchell, with Clinton’s support, “chaired talks that dragged on and on but led to compromises by unionists and nationalists that ended the conflict. In many ways the stars were aligned. Tony Blair, the Labour prime minister, had been elected with a huge majority in Parliament. And the Irish prime minister or Taoiseach was also willing to take chances for peace.”

“Northern Ireland is still challenged by all sorts of tensions,” Savage wrote. “But the shooting and bombing that left over 3,500 dead and many more [wounded] both physically and emotionally has ended. The Good Friday Agreement is now 25 years old and what it delivered was not perfect but it greatly moved a peace process forward.”

The tensions lie in the reality that for many of the poor on both sides, the peace did not bring the social services, education, or health care they had hoped it would. Still, schools and sports teams have reached across the old lines to create communities, and international immigrants have brought new diversity.

The Good Friday Agreement “remains a remarkable achievement,” Savage wrote. Clinton “has earned the respect of the Irish people and many in Britain for his role in cajoling all sides to engage in a difficult dialogue that produced an agreement that ended 30 years of bloodshed.”

Last week, President Biden spoke at Ulster University in Belfast. “It’s good to see Belfast, a city that’s alive with commerce, art—and, I’d argue, inspiration,” he said. “The dividends of peace are all around us.” He continued: “Twenty-five years ago this week, the landmark Belfast/Good Friday Agreement was signed. And it wasn’t easy…. [T]here were no guarantees that the deal on paper would hold. No guarantees that it would be able to deliver the progress we celebrate today. And it took long, hard years of work to get to this place. It took a people willing to come together in good faith and to risk boldly for the future…. At the time, it seemed so distant.

“I think sometimes, especially [with] the distance of history, we forget just how hard-earned, how astounding that peace was at the moment. It shifted the political gravity in our world…. In 1998, it was the longest-running conflict in Europe since the end of World War Two. Thousands of families had been affected by the Troubles. The losses were real. The pain was personal…. Peace was not inevitable…. As George Mitchell often said, the negotiations had…‘Seven hundred days of failure and one day of success.’ But they kept going because George and all the many others never stopped believing that success was possible.”

In the 25 years since the agreement was signed, Biden noted, Northern Ireland’s gross domestic product has doubled, and Northern Ireland “is a churn of creativity, art, poetry, theater.” And, he added, “All the immense progress we see around us was built through conversation and compromise, discussion and debate, voting and inclusion. It’s an incredible attestation to the power of democracy to deliver the needs for all the people.”

“And now I know better than most how hard democracy can be at times,” Biden noted. “We in the United States have firsthand experience how fragile even longstanding democratic institutions can be. You saw what happened on January the 6th in my country.”

“We learn anew with every generation that democracy needs champions.”

[milliefink]

April 19, 2023 (Wednesday)

The debt ceiling crisis has brought the difference between Biden Democrats and the modern Republican Party into sharp relief.

The debt ceiling is not about future spending; future spending is debated when Congress takes up the budget. The debt ceiling is a curious holdover from the past, when Congress actually wanted to enable the government to be flexible in its borrowing rather than holding the financial reins too tightly. In the era of World War I, when the country needed to raise a lot of money fast, Congress stopped passing specific revenue measures and instead set a cap on how much money the government could borrow through all of the different instruments it used.

Beginning in the 1980s, though, Republicans began to use the debt ceiling as a political cudgel because if it is not raised when Congress spends more than it has the ability to repay, the country will default on its debts. Republicans focused on cutting taxes, initially promising that tax cuts would not require any cuts to services because they would nurture the economy so effectively that tax revenues would increase despite the cuts. Immediately, though, both deficits—the difference between what the government spends and what it takes in—and the debt, which is the total sum that the government owes, ballooned.

That skyrocketing debt means that Congress repeatedly has to increase the amount that the Treasury borrows to pay the country’s bills. That is, it must lift the debt ceiling. Congress has raised the debt ceiling more than 100 times since it first went into effect, including 18 times under Ronald Reagan as well as 3 times under former president Donald Trump.

The United States has never defaulted on its debt. When Republicans threatened to push a debt crisis in late 2021, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned that a default “could trigger a spike in interest rates, a steep drop in stock prices, and other financial turmoil. Our current economic recovery would reverse into recession, with billions of dollars of growth and millions of jobs lost.” It would jeopardize the status of the U.S. dollar as the international reserve currency. Financial services firm Moody’s Analytics warned that a default would cost up to 6 million jobs, create an unemployment rate of nearly 9%, and wipe out $15 trillion in household wealth.

Now House Republicans under speaker Kevin McCarthy are insisting they will force the country into default unless Biden and the Democrats abandon their legislative program and do what the Republicans want. And what they want is to enact a drastic version of the Republican platform of the past 40 years. Today, McCarthy introduced a 320-page measure that would address the deficit and growing debt by drastic cuts to government programs across the board.

It is largely a wish list of right-wing demands such as a repeal of key measures of the Inflation Reduction Act, including those addressing climate change and funding the Internal Revenue Service; additional requirements to qualify for benefit programs; and getting rid of the program to forgive certain student debt. It would lift the debt ceiling only for a year, meaning the government would be right back to negotiating over it almost immediately.

There are two things at work behind this demand. The first is that the Republicans are in such extraordinary disarray that they are unable to put forward a budget—which is part of the normal process of funding the government—because they are unable to agree on one that can get enough votes to pass the House. Different factions in the party want cuts that, even if they could get through the House, would never pass the Senate, and the farthest-right group of lawmakers have indicated they won’t agree to anything. With this grab-bag measure, McCarthy is trying to cover all his bases, but already some of his conference is torn that it goes too far…or not far enough.

That inability to get their way through normal political channels illustrates the larger story behind the Republicans’ position: they want to destroy the government as it has existed since 1933, but since that government is actually quite popular, they cannot get the cuts they want by going through normal legislative procedures. Instead, they are trying to get their demands by holding the rest of us hostage. It is notable that while the Republicans are willing to slash education, food safety, and so on, they want to preserve the Trump tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations that cost the Treasury $2 trillion. Their stated concern for financial responsibility is also undermined by the reality that repealing the funding for the woefully understaffed IRS is expected to cost the Treasury $124 billion as wealthy tax cheats continue to avoid enforcement.

McCarthy is doubling down on his debt ceiling demands in part because the Republican base is wedded to Trump, which means the Republican Party is now wedded to Trump, and Trump insists that Republicans must use the debt ceiling to get what they want. Early hopes that they could run a Trump-like candidate without the Trump baggage—someone like Florida governor Ron DeSantis—are starting to fade. Today, Matt Dixon of NBC News reported that although the DeSantis team asked him to hold off on an endorsement, the co-chair of the Florida congressional delegation, Vern Buchanan, has endorsed Trump.

Buchanan said that Trump will “get our economy back on track,” including lowering taxes and “promoting America-first trade deals.” A former chair of the Florida Chamber of Commerce, Buchanan is one of the wealthiest members of Congress. He clearly continues to believe that the key to boosting the economy is more tax cuts and is willing to accept all the other pieces of another Trump presidency—Trump has recently called for vengeance against his enemies, replacing civil servants with his own loyalists, and attacking Mexico—so long as the United States government embraces the supply side economics the Republicans have advanced since 1981.

President Joe Biden contrasted his own vision for the United States to that of the Republicans when he spoke today at the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 77 in Accokeek, Maryland, in a corrugated-steel garage. His own vision, he reiterated, calls for building the economy from the middle out and the bottom up, not from the top down. He outlined how the Democrats’ many investments in infrastructure and manufacturing have benefitted working- and middle-class Americans, while Republicans have sought to cut those investments and cut taxes for the wealthy. Biden wants to address the deficit by rolling back Republican tax cuts on the wealthy and on corporations, saying it’s high time they paid their fair share.

McCarthy is trying to spin the crisis in his own conference as Biden “playing partisan games,” and Republicans say they hope that passing their measure will force Biden to negotiate over the debt ceiling. But Biden has steadfastly refused to negotiate over the credit of the government, although says he is quite happy to negotiate over the budget, which is part of the normal legislative process. House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries backed up Biden, saying: “The United States of America must always pay bills already incurred without gamesmanship, brinksmanship, or partisanship. House Democrats will oppose any effort to hold the economy hostage as part of any scheme by Extreme MAGA Republicans to jam its right-wing agenda down the throats of the American people.”

Their refusal to negotiate over the nation’s finances puts them in good company. We have seen a scenario just like this one before. In 1879, when the positions of the parties were reversed, Democratic former Confederates won control of Congress for the first time since the Civil War. Once in power, they banded together, demanded the leadership of key committees—which the exceedingly weak speaker gave them—and set out to make the Republican president, Rutherford B. Hayes, stop protecting Black voters by refusing to fund the government until he caved.

Southern Democrats told newspapers they had blundered when they fought on the battlefields: far better to control the country from within Congress. Extremist newspapers threatened violence as they called for Congress members to “drive or starve Mr. Hayes into signing a bill that sweeps these obnoxious laws out of existence.” House minority leader James Garfield (R-OH) noted: “They will let the government perish for want of supplies.” “If this is not revolution, which if persisted in will destroy the government, [then] I am wholly wrong in my conception of both the word and the thing.” A Civil War veteran who had seen battle at Shiloh and Chickamauga, Garfield understood revolution.

Hayes stood firm, recognizing that allowing a radical minority of the opposition party to dictate to the elected government by holding it hostage would undermine the system set up in the Constitution. The parties fought it out for months until, in the end, the American people turned against the Democrats, who backed down. In the next presidential election, which had been supposed to be a romp for the Democrats, voters put Garfield, the Republican who had stood against the former Confederates, into the White House.

[milliefink]

April 20, 2023 (Thursday)

There were a whole bunch of seemingly unrelated stories in the news that all seem to point to an important theme:

Josh Dawsey and Amy Gardner of the Washington Post reported that lawyer Cleta Mitchell, who was deeply involved in Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election, this weekend told Republican donors that the party must restrict access to the vote for young voters. Gen Z voters were the key element in providing the extraordinary 11-point victory for pro-choice Wisconsin supreme court candidate Janet Protasiewicz, and they are central to the movement to enact gun safety legislation.

Far from being ostracized for her attempt to overthrow our democratic system, Mitchell is advising the Republican National Committee. In her presentation she declared: “Our constitutional republic’s survival is at stake.”

Dawsey and Gardner appear to have gotten their information from someone who was there.

In Georgia, the fake electors who prepared a false set of electoral votes for Donald Trump in 2020 have begun to turn on each other while also accusing the lawyer who represented ten of them of failing to inform them of immunity offers.

An arbitration panel ordered My Pillow chief executive officer Mike Lindell, who was also deeply involved in Trump’s crusade to overturn the election, to hand over a $5 million payment to an expert who took him up on his challenge to prove that his data did not reflect the 2020 election. According to Lindell’s deposition in the case, he offered the money simply to draw attention to his accusations, and he did not expect anyone to meet his criteria.

Robert Zeidman, a software developer, did. He sued for the money and won, saying that he is a “conservative Republican” but wanted to call out election lies.

The vice-chair of the Republican caucus in the Tennessee House of Representatives resigned today, “effective immediately,” after a NewsChannel 5 investigation confronted him with the story that a secret ethics subcommittee had found him guilty of sexually harassing at least one intern, and likely two. Thirty-nine year old Scotty Campbell, who voted to expel Justin Jones and Justin J. Pearson for protesting the body’s refusal to take up gun safety legislation, had not previously borne any penalties for his actions, although taxpayers have: they funded the relocation of one of the interns to put distance between her and Campbell.

For his part, Campbell said: “I had consensual, adult conversations with two adults off property.”

Meanwhile, Judd Legum’s discovery that Tennessee House speaker Cameron Sexton appears to live in Nashville although he represents a district two hours away has raised questions about whether Sexton is legally in office.

News has also broken that federal judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, who recently tried to unwind the approval by the Food and Drug Administration of the drug mifepristone, which is used for medical abortions among other things, misled senators during his confirmation process. He did not disclose that he had removed his own name from a law journal article criticizing protections for abortion and transgender people, and he did not disclose that he had given at least two interviews with Christian talk radio about his right-wing opinions about abortion, gay rights, divorce, and the sexual revolution, although he was required to.

Kacsmaryk said he did not recall the recordings, but Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) said: “You want to talk about the ultimate bait and switch? I feel like I got duped. I feel like I voted for somebody based on what had been presented to me. And you do this? That is totally, totally wrong.”

On Tuesday, David French of the New York Times reports, Dominion Voting Systems won a substantial victory over the Fox Corporation that supports the Fox News Channel. Dominion sued Fox for defamation after its hosts lied about Dominion as part of their support for Trump’s attempt to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election. In the runup to the settlement, Dominion appeared already to have proven that Fox News Channel hosts had lied, but Dominion’s claims for more than $1 billion in damages in future earnings were weak, French argued, since Dominion had earned just $118.3 million between 2017 and 2019. A $787.5 million settlement was a major victory.

Meanwhile, the process of discovery badly damaged any credibility the Fox News Channel claimed, as its hosts privately disparaged the claims they made on air. And Fox is still on the hook for that discrepancy. Another voting machine company, Smartmatic, is suing Fox News, Fox hosts Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro, former Fox host Lou Dobbs, and Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, for $2.7 billion.

Finally, a devastating piece today by Jay Kirk in the New York Times told the story of the crime-scene investigators who documented the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, on December 14, 2012, where a gunman killed twenty first graders, the principal, the school psychologist, and four teachers. It recounted the trauma the investigators endured as they cataloged the massacre. That story, along with the details of the lives and deaths of the victims, shed light on the reality of gun deaths that has usually been obscured in an attempt to protect the victims’ families.

It hit me as I read through all this news that a key theme seems to be a new shift toward transparency and accountability. It jumps out at me that people are talking to lawyers and to the press about illegalities, irregularities, and, in the Sandy Hook case, horrors that in the past they have kept quiet.

Whether it comes from disgust at the excesses of those who are attacking our democracy or from fear of the law, that transparency reminds me of the pivotal importance of McClure’s Magazine in the early twentieth century. Reformers had expressed philosophical concerns about the concentration of wealth and power at the top of American society for decades, but those concerns could be ignored until the investigative journalists working for McClure’s began to explore the specifics of political corruption and its cost to ordinary Americans. Dismissed as “muckrakers” by politicians, those journalists nonetheless helped to shift the weight of social value from keeping secrets to spilling them.

When that shift happened, the walls protecting the country’s entrenched leaders crumbled fast.

[docosc]

@milliefink

this weekend told Republican donors that the party must restrict access to the vote for young voters.

Saying the quiet part out loud. Minority voters, poor voters, these are (relatively) easy to restrict, thanks to segregated housing legacies. But women and young people are more likely to be white. That makes it a lot trickier. Already trying to prevent college kids from voting, but that is only a small part of the Gen Z cohort. Look for more “just take over the machinery and throw out districts that we don’t like” kind of laws. It’s pretty much their only hope at this point.

[gatto]

@docosc

But women and young people are more likely to be white

i was curious about this. it looks like young voters are more likely to be white, but young people, within the next year or two, are equally split…

( and an equal split is quite a bit different than it has been, so excluding them all together would definitely help the gop )

2020 Youth Voter Turnout by Race/Ethnicity and Gender

two things that stood out:

young women of color don’t just vote at higher rates than their male peers; they are more engaged in elections and civic life generally… At the other side of the spectrum, we see the lowest youth voter turnout among young men of color, especially young Black men, who are disproportionately locked out of the voting process due to felony convictions.

a majority of young white men actually preferr[ed] former President Trump

never let it be said that racism will automatically vanish once the oldsters pass on…

[gatto]

@milliefink

Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) said: “You want to talk about the ultimate bait and switch? I feel like I got duped. I feel like I voted for somebody based on what had been presented to me. And you do this? That is totally, totally wrong.”

murkowski, going through life, perpetually surprised.

[subextraordinaire]

I like her use of the phrase “bait and switch” when she could just come out and said that he flat out lied to her.

Also, that’s what you get for supporting judicial appointments that have the backing of the Federalist Society.

[milliefink]

April 21, 2023 (Friday)

Tomorrow is Earth Day, celebrated for the first time in 1970. Coming the same week that House Republicans demanded that Congress rescind the money Democrats appropriated in the Inflation Reduction Act to address climate change, Earth Day in 2023 is a poignant reminder of an earlier era, one in which Americans recognized a crisis that transcended partisanship and came together to fix it.

The spark for the first Earth Day was the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. A marine biologist and best-selling author, Carson showed the devastating effects of people on nature by documenting the effect of modern pesticides on the natural world. She focused on the popular pesticide DDT, which had been developed in 1939 and used to clear islands in the South Pacific of malaria-carrying mosquitoes during World War II. Deployed as an insect killer in the U.S. after the war, DDT was poisoning the natural food chain in American waters.

DDT sprayed on vegetation washed into the oceans. It concentrated in fish, which were then eaten by birds of prey, especially ospreys. The DDT caused the birds to lay eggs with abnormally thin eggshells, so thin the eggs cracked in the nest when the parent birds tried to incubate them. And so the birds began to die off.

Carson was unable to interest any publishing company in the story of DDT. Finally, frustrated at the popular lack of interest in the reasons for the devastation of birds, she decided to write the story anyway, turning out a highly readable book with 55 pages of footnotes to make her case.

When The New Yorker began to serialize Carson’s book in June 1962, chemical company leaders were scathing. “If man were to faithfully follow the teachings of Miss Carson," an executive of the American Cyanamid Company said, “we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth.” Officers of Monsanto questioned Carson’s sanity.

But her portrait of the dangerous overuse of chemicals and their effect on living organisms caught readers’ attention. They were willing to listen. Carson’s book sold more than half a million copies in 24 countries.

Democratic president John F. Kennedy asked the President’s Science Advisory Committee to look into Carson’s argument, and the committee vindicated her. Before she died of breast cancer in 1964, Carson noted: “Man’s attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself? [We are] challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves.”

Meanwhile, a number of scientists followed up on Carson’s argument and in 1967 organized the Environmental Defense Fund to protect the environment by lobbying for a ban on DDT. As they worked, Americans began to pay closer attention to human effects on the environment, especially after three crucial moments: First, on December 24, 1968, William Anders took a color picture of the Earth rising over the horizon of the moon from outer space during the Apollo 8 mission, powerfully illustrating the beauty and isolation of the globe on which we all live.

Then, over 10 days in January–February 1969, a massive oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, poured between 80,000 and 100,000 barrels of oil into the Pacific, fouling 35 miles of California beaches and killing seabirds, dolphins, sea lions, and elephant seals. Public outrage ran so high that President Nixon himself, a Republican, went to Santa Barbara in March to see the cleanup efforts, telling the American public that “the Santa Barbara incident has frankly touched the conscience of the American people.”

And then, in June 1969, the chemical contaminants that had been dumped into Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River caught fire. A dumping ground for local heavy industry, the river had actually burned more than ten times in the previous century, but with increased focus on environmental damage, this time the burning river garnered national attention.

In February 1970, President Richard M. Nixon sent to Congress a special message “on environmental quality.” “[W]e…have too casually and too long abused our natural environment,” he wrote. “The time has come when we can wait no longer to repair the damage already done, and to establish new criteria to guide us in the future.”

“The tasks that need doing require money, resolve and ingenuity,” Nixon said, “and they are too big to be done by government alone. They call for fundamentally new philosophies of land, air and water use, for stricter regulation, for expanded government action, for greater citizen involvement, and for new programs to ensure that government, industry and individuals all are called on to do their share of the job and to pay their share of the cost.”

Nixon called for a 37-point program with 23 legislative proposals and 14 new administrative measures to control water and air pollution, manage solid waste, protect parklands and public recreation, and organize for action. “As we deepen our understanding of complex ecological processes, as we improve our technologies and institutions and learn from experience, much more will be possible,” he said. “But these 37 measures represent actions we can take now, and that can move us dramatically forward toward what has become an urgent common goal of all Americans: the rescue of our natural habitat as a place both habitable and hospitable to man.”

Meanwhile, Gaylord Nelson, a Democratic senator from Wisconsin, visited the Santa Barbara oil spill and hoped to turn the same sort of enthusiasm people were bringing to protests against the Vietnam War to efforts to protect the environment. He announced a teach-in on college campuses, which soon grew into a wider movement across the country. Their “Earth Day,” held on April 22, 1970, brought more than 20 million Americans—10% of the total population of the country at the time—to call for the nation to address the damage caused by 150 years of unregulated industrial development. The movement included members of all political parties, rich Americans and their poorer neighbors, people who lived in the city and those in the country, labor leaders and their employers. It is still one of the largest protests in American history.

In July, at the advice of a council convened to figure out how to consolidate government programs to combat pollution, Nixon proposed to Congress a new agency, the Environmental Protection Agency, which Congress created in 1970. This new agency assumed responsibility for the federal regulation of pesticides, and after the Environmental Defense Fund filed suit, in June 1972 the EPA banned DDT. Four months later, Congress passed the Clean Water Act, establishing protections for water quality and regulating pollutant discharges into waters of the United States.

Today, even as Republicans are attacking the EPA by suggesting that Congress cannot delegate major regulatory powers to it, President Joe Biden issued an executive order to promote environmental justice. In the past generation we have come to understand that pollution hits minority and poor populations far harder than it does wealthy white communities: the government and private companies target Indigenous reservations for the storage of nuclear waste, for example, because the reservations are not covered by the same environmental and health standards as the rest of the country.

Today, Biden said, “To fulfill our Nation’s promises of justice, liberty, and equality, every person must have clean air to breathe; clean water to drink; safe and healthy foods to eat; and an environment that is healthy, sustainable, climate-resilient, and free from harmful pollution and chemical exposure. Restoring and protecting a healthy environment—wherever people live, play, work, learn, grow, and worship—is a matter of justice and a fundamental duty that the Federal Government must uphold on behalf of all people.”

Amen.

Happy Earth Day 2023.

[photo: Earthrise, taken on December 24, 1968, by Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders, NASA, Public Domain, gathered from Wikipedia.]

[milliefink]

April 22, 2023 (Saturday)

I have taken the day off entirely, checking the news only for global catastrophes. Since we seem to have mostly avoided them, I am going to finish off a relaxing day by going to bed early.

I’m posting one of Buddy’s photos for tonight both because it is lovely and because there is a bit of a cool story behind it. It is an image from Jordan Pond in Acadia National Park, where we hiked a couple of weeks ago. The pond is beautiful and well-known, but I had never been there before.

When I was a child, I loved a painting my mother had of a scene also captured in a framed photograph she owned, faded by then into grays. The painting was not great art, but it was made up of the blues and browns and greens I have always loved, and the water and mountains spoke to me. Mother always told me the picture was painted by a friend of her father’s— he died when I was a baby— and it was an image of one of their favorite fishing spots, although she had no idea where it was.

Mother gave that painting to me, and I have always had it up in one place or another, so Buddy knows it, too.

A few weekends ago when we stood at this spot at the end of Jordan Pond, we said almost at the same time: “It’s that painting.”

Very cool to stand in the same spot my grandfather’s friend painted in what can’t have been later than the 1930s, and see the same thing he saw. The past is really not that far away.

But what really struck me seeing this view was the inverse of that observation. For my grandfather’s nameless and long-gone fishing buddy, who certainly never knew that the painting he made for his friend would continue to speak to someone a hundred years later, the future wasn’t that far away either.

[Photo by Buddy Poland]

[milliefink]

[Posted by HCR about an hour ago]

This note is not part of the Letters from an American series. It is instead an announcement— which comes from a bit of a place of surprise, to be honest— and a thank you to everyone who reads here.

The announcement is that it appears my new book is a real thing.

It has a cover now (which is what has prompted this note) and will come out in mid-September. It is 30 short chapters in three sections for a total of 250 pages of text, and I think it is… not bad, which is about as far as any writer will— or should— go on a new book.

The book is called Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America, and it tries to explain how we got to this political moment… and how we get out. There is a lot of material in it you all will recognize— on the Trump years, for example, and how we got to them and how we got through them— but there is a lot that is new, too, reflecting how the last several years have made me reconceive the way I think about the meaning of history. In the end, this book makes an argument for a new understanding of U.S. history as an explicitly democratic history, kept alive primarily by marginalized Americans who have worked to expand our rights and bring the principles of the Declaration of Independence to life.

Writing the book was a very odd experience. Because I was writing so much else, I could never focus on the book exclusively as I have for previous books. I would write in the mornings, but every afternoon I would have to pack up whatever was in front of me and start working on the nightly letter. When one chapter was done, I would throw it aside and ignore it while working on the next. It was almost as if I was seeing the project only in my peripheral vision while looking intently at what was in front of me.

Then stuff happened (there was a wedding in there! ) so I took a break from the manuscript before picking it up for the second draft.

When I did turn back to it, I discovered something curious: it was almost as if the chapters had been chatting together while I ignored them, and they demanded an entire reworking. That reworking meant I rewrote close to 80% of the manuscript, and developed a much different thesis than I had set out to write two years ago. It was rather as if I had seen things more clearly out of the corner of my eye than if I had been looking directly at it.

The manuscript turned into a voyage of discovery for me, and it ended up feeling very much like I didn’t have a lot of control over it: I was just bringing a definitive shape to the questions, comments, concerns, and hopes of so many people who have been part of the crazy journey of the past three and a half years.

And that’s where the thank you comes in. This really is your book as much as it ever was mine.

I hope you like it.

[milliefink]

April 23, 2023 (Sunday)

An article by Matthew Lee, Tara Copp, and Aamer Madhani of the Associated Press gave a good overview of today’s evacuation of the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. About 100 U.S. troops used three helicopters to evacuate about 70 U.S. personnel from the embassy, getting them out of Sudan to Ethiopia without major incident. Such a military evacuation is unusual, but the fight between two rival Sudanese leaders has closed the main international airport and given armed fighters control of the roads leading out of the country, making it impossible for U.S. personnel to leave by civilian routes.

Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Saudi Arabia helped to get the Americans to safety. There were no major incidents associated with the evacuation. Other nations have also evacuated their embassies, and the United Nations staffers left by road on a 19-hour trip.

U.S. officials said it would be too dangerous to evacuate the approximately 16,000 private U.S. citizens remaining in the country, whose great size contributes to the difficulty of getting them out. (Significantly larger than Alaska, Sudan is the third largest country in Africa and has more than 45 million people.) According to Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner (D-VA), most of the remaining U.S. civilians there are dual-nationality Sudanese Americans or aid workers. They have been advised to shelter in place while the U.S. government works with other countries to get them out safely.

Vedant Patel, the principal deputy spokesperson for the State Department, noted in a press briefing on April 21 that since August 2021 the department has listed Sudan as under a Level 4 travel advisory, meaning that the U.S. government warned people not to travel there and that the U.S. might have “very limited ability” to aid travelers in a crisis. Since then, he said, “we have communicated to American citizens in the country about safety and security measures and precautions that they can take…. We have not parsed our words or been ignorant or naïve about the delicate and fragile security situation in Sudan.”

The fight in the eastern African country that erupted on April 15 grew from Sudan’s 2019 revolution. In that year, opponents of the ruling government threw out President Omar al-Bashir, who had been in power since 1989 and who had been indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity including murder, extermination, forcible transfer, torture, and rape in his attempt to get rid of rebels in the western region of Sudan, known as Darfur.

Leading that revolt were women, known as “Kandakat” after powerful Nubian queens. In the wake of the revolution, the Sudanese people attempted a transition to democracy. But in 2021, two military leaders, General Abdel Fattah Burhan, who leads the armed forces, and General Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo (known by the nickname Hemedti), who leads a paramilitary group called the Rapid Support Forces that grew out of the Janjaweed militias that terrorized Darfur, launched a military coup and took power.

In the wake of the coup, foreign aid was halted, the economy collapsed, and the United Nations and international negotiators pressured the two generals to turn power back over to civilians this month. But talks dragged on, tensions rose, and now the two men are at war with each other for control of the country. Experts say if the crisis is not solved, and solved fast, Sudan could descend into a civil war. More than 400 people have already died, mostly in Khartoum.

The fighting in Sudan has repercussions around the world. There are signs that Russia’s Wagner group is supporting Hemedti, which would be in keeping with the statement Wagner’s founder, Russian oligarch Yevgeniy Prigozhin, made after his group’s recent losses in Ukraine, saying he planned to concentrate on Africa, where his forces have been propping up authoritarian governments now for a while. They have been in Sudan since 2017, and in addition to the interest of Wagner-linked companies in gold mining there, Russia has long wanted to build a naval base on the Red Sea at Port Sudan, which is currently under the control of the government forces led by Burhan.

The Nile River runs through Sudan, tying Sudan to Egypt and Ethiopia, as well as to eight other African countries. Other international powers are also interested in Sudan’s resources, and in making sure the conflict doesn’t spill over into other countries. Overall, as Patel noted, the violence destabilizes not just Sudan but the region as a whole, hurting civilians and jeopardizing “the will, the aspirations, and the progress that the Sudanese people are hoping to see through some kind of transition to democracy.”

In the New York Times today, Jacqueline Burns, a former advisor to the U.S. special envoy for Sudan and South Sudan and a senior policy analyst at the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank, suggested that the conflict in Sudan had a much broader lesson for the international community.

Since 2005, Burns wrote, international negotiators have focused on splitting power between armed groups rather than civilians. Women and others who were not part of armed military groups were almost entirely excluded, she wrote. “Armed groups and dictatorial regimes know that as long as they are participating in a peace process, international pressures will eventually—often quickly—ebb. If they are pressed into signing an agreement, there are typically very few effective mechanisms to hold them to it.” And while they are pretending to engage in peace processes, armed groups are actually consolidating their political and military power.

This pattern was especially problematic in Sudan, she wrote, where the women who had led the uprising that got rid of al-Bashir were largely excluded from the government that followed; armed groups were at the table instead.

Burns warned the international community that if we are going to stop the “continued cycle of violence and human suffering,” negotiators must stop prioritizing the voices of “the armed and corrupt” over those actually interested in real political reform.

[milliefink]

April 24, 2023 (Monday)

Today, Secretary of State Antony Blinken issued a statement announcing that the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), each trying to wrest control of Sudan from the other, have agreed to a 72-hour cease-fire starting at midnight tonight, local time. During the cease-fire, the statement says, the U.S. will work with regional partners, international partners, and Sudanese civilians to create a committee to negotiate and implement a permanent cease-fire and return Sudan to a path toward democracy.

Meanwhile, White House national security advisor Jake Sullivan today said that the U.S. is working to get U.S. civilians out of Sudan by protecting a land evacuation route from Khartoum to Port Sudan on the Red Sea, where Americans can get transportation out of the region on naval ships from various countries including the United States. While Sullivan said the administration will look at “every conceivable option” to get Americans out of Sudan, it will not send troops inside the country.

Meanwhile, Rachel Chason in the Washington Post reported the concern of U.S. intelligence officials evident in leaked documents that the African country of Chad is at risk from Russia’s paramilitary Wagner Group, which is trying to recruit Chadian rebels to destabilize the country and overthrow the government. The leaked documents suggest that Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin is trying to build a “unified ‘confederation’ of African states” across the continent in the Sahel region, including Burkina Faso, Chad, Eritrea, Guinea, Mali, Niger, and Sudan. Chad is an important U.S. ally in the fight against terrorism, and the attempt to keep it stable and moving toward democracy has raised concerns that the U.S. is overlooking the Chadian government’s own crackdowns on dissenters.

In other concerns about national security, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton published an op-ed in the New York Times today warning that the threat from House speaker Kevin McCarthy to hold the nation’s finances hostage until the president agrees to the wish list McCarthy presented last week has “significant national security implications.” With all the global threats looming, from Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, to rising tensions with China, to future pandemics and climate change, “the world is looking to the United States for strong, steady leadership. Congressional brinkmanship on the debt ceiling sends the opposite message to our allies and our adversaries: that America is divided, distracted and can’t be counted on.”

Drawing on her own experience as secretary of state during the 2011 debt ceiling crisis, Clinton recalled meeting “nervous businessmen” from across Asia at an event in Hong Kong. They worried that the “regional and global stability that America had guaranteed for decades,” “the foundation on which they had built companies and fortunes,” was at risk. If the U.S. walked away from the table, they feared that China would fill the void.

Clinton reassured them that Americans would eventually do the right thing and then, she recalled, “I crossed my fingers and hoped it was true.” In 2011 it was, but now, she writes, the risks are even higher.

"[T]the competition between democracies and autocracies has grown more intense,” she wrote. “And by undermining America’s credibility and the pre-eminence of the dollar, the fight over the debt ceiling plays right into the hands of Xi Jinping of China and Vladimir Putin of Russia.” That the U.S. dollar is the world’s central currency enables the U.S. to use its financial power around the world, imposing sanctions, for example, and undermining that power will significantly weaken the U.S.

Grabbing headlines today at home was the unexpected news that Tucker Carlson is out at the Fox News Channel. The decision was so quick he was not permitted a final show, making Friday’s goodbye his last. There is not yet a clear story about what drove him out, but there are several things that likely contributed.

First is lawsuits: the Fox Corporation’s recent $787.5 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems; the looming lawsuit against the Fox Corporation by another voting systems company, Smartmatic; and another lawsuit from former Carlson producer Abby Grossberg accusing Carlson and other executives of creating “a work environment that subjugates women based on vile sexist stereotypes.” That lawsuit will likely bring up the many appallingly sexist things Carlson has said over the years, including a discussion with a radio shock jock in which he seemed to defend statutory rape and child marriage.

There is the potential for yet another lawsuit, this one from Ray Epps, a Trump supporter who was at the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and around whom Carlson built a conspiracy theory that led to death threats and forced him and his wife into hiding. On Sunday, Epps told 60 Minutes that Carlson was “going to any means possible to destroy my life.” “He’s obsessed with me,” Epps said.

Insurers on the hook for large settlements are likely to demand that Fox clean up its act, especially with Trump running for office again and likely back in the media lineup.

Second is Carlson’s attacks on his colleagues and private dismissal of Fox News Channel programming, revealed in the discovery process of the Dominion lawsuit, which made it quite clear the channel was lying to its audience.

There is also the possibility that FNC head Rupert Murdoch recognizes that the right wing has moved so far right that it is better to cut the extremists loose than to try to keep them from moving toward other far-right platforms, especially as the FNC is trying to renegotiate its cable fees. In a sign that the party might be splitting elsewhere, as well, Georgia governor Brian Kemp announced today that he will not attend the Georgia Republican convention this summer, choosing instead to rally supporters in his own new organization.

Bad news is likely to continue to mount for the far right.

Today, Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis said that she would announce charging decisions in the investigation of the attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election in Georgia sometime during the fourth term of the state Superior Court, which begins July 11 and ends September 1. Tipping her hand that there will be at least some charges, she said she was announcing the timeline to allow the Sheriff’s Office and local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies to prepare. “Open-source intelligence has indicated the announcement of decisions in this case may provoke significant public reaction,” Willis wrote.

Tomorrow, the civil rape trial of former president Trump will begin, in which writer E. Jean Carroll alleges that Trump raped her sometime between fall 1995 and spring 1996. No matter what happens at the trial’s conclusion, the information that will come out will almost certainly not make Trump look good to the suburban women he needs to win an election.

In contrast to the circus of the rape trial tomorrow, President Joe Biden is apparently set to announce his reelection campaign, exactly four years after he announced in 2019, when he warned that the soul of the nation was at stake in the upcoming presidential election.

[Akimbo_NOT]

Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis said that she would announce charging decisions in the investigation of the attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election in Georgia sometime during the fourth term of the state Superior Court, which begins July 11 and ends September 1. Tipping her hand that there will be at least some charges

Wow, I missed this because of all the Carlson grave dancing yesterday. Excellent.

[milliefink]

April 25, 2023 (Tuesday)

Exactly four years after he announced he would challenge then-president Donald Trump for the leadership of the United States, President Joe Biden today announced his reelection campaign, along with running mate Vice President Kamala Harris.

The contrast between the 2019 announcement video and the one released today shows how both the country and Biden have changed over the past four years. The earlier video featured former vice president and presidential hopeful Biden alone. It began by focusing on Charlottesville, Virginia, and the promise of the Declaration of Independence, written by Charlottesville’s famous resident Thomas Jefferson, that all men are created equal. Biden claimed that while we haven’t always lived up to those ideas, we have never walked away from them. They are the foundation of who we are.

In the video, Biden contrasted the ideals in the Declaration of Independence with the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, where Klansmen, white supremacists, and neo-Nazis came out into the open and were met by “a courageous group of Americans.” The resulting clash took the life of counterdemonstrator Heather Heyer. Trump answered the horror over the riot by saying there were “some very fine people on both sides.”

“With those words,” Biden said, “the President of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it. And in that moment,” he continued, “I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I had seen in my lifetime.” We were in “a battle for the soul of this nation.” He urged us to remember who we are.

Biden’s 2019 campaign video was a rallying cry to defend American values from those who were trying to destroy them. Now, four years later, after winning the 2020 election by more than 7 million votes and working with Democrats and some Republicans to pass a raft of legislation to shore up the position of working- and middle-class Americans that rivals that of the New Deal, Biden’s message is different.

Like the previous video, today’s message begins with footage of an attack on the United States, but this time it is the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol to overturn our democracy and keep voters from putting Biden into the White House. But Biden is not the centerpiece of this video; the American people are. The video is a montage of Americans from all races and all walks of life, interspersed with images of President Biden, Vice President Harris, First Lady Jill Biden, and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff talking to people, laughing with them, hugging them, supporting them. It is a picture of community.

Over the image, Biden says that fighting for democracy has been the work of his first term. “This shouldn’t be a red or blue issue,” he says. He has fought “to protect our rights, to make sure that everyone in this country is treated equally, and that everyone is given a fair shot at making it.”

In contrast, the video says, MAGA extremists are threatening our “bedrock freedoms.” They have taken aim at Social Security while cutting taxes on the rich, dictated healthcare decisions for women, banned books, and attacked gay marriage, all while undermining voting rights. We are still in a battle for the soul of the nation, Biden says. The question is whether in the years ahead, “we have more freedom or less freedom. More rights or fewer.”

The video switches to upbeat music and faster energy as Biden says, “I know America. I know we’re good and decent people. I know we’re still a country that believes in honesty and respect, and treating each other with dignity. That we’re a nation where we give hate no safe harbor. We believe that everyone is equal, that everyone should be given a fair shot to succeed in this country.”

“Every generation of Americans has faced a moment when they have to defend democracy. Stand up for our personal freedom. Stand up for the right to vote, and our civil rights. And this is our moment,” Biden says, as the music changes and the video shows images of Americans coming together, laughing and working together. “We the people will not be silenced,” Biden says.

“Let’s finish this job; I know we can,” the video ends. “Because this is the United States of America. And there’s nothing, simply nothing, we cannot do if we do it together.”

“Let’s finish the job,” says writing across the screen.

It is a revealing moment. If Biden announced a presidential run in 2019 to recall the United States to its principles, he is running in 2023 on an extraordinary record of legislation and the idea that he has restored competence to Washington. And unlike Republicans eager for their party’s nomination, he appears to revel in highlighting the people around him rather than hogging the spotlight, while he touts the work the government has done for ordinary Americans.

Politico’s Eli Stokols observed that some major media outlets treated the president’s announcement as a less important story than a new revelation that yet another right-wing Supreme Court justice, Neil Gorsuch, didn’t disclose that he sold real estate to a wealthy man with business before the Supreme Court, or information coming out about the ongoing lawsuits against the former president. Stokols suggested the Biden campaign was quite happy to let the Republicans tear themselves apart in public while the president stays in the background, permitting Americans to forget the federal government is there—as they were able to in the past—because it is operating competently and without drama.

As if to honor that theme, Biden announced that Julie Chávez Rodríguez will serve as his campaign manager. The former director of the White House office of intergovernmental affairs, focused on working with state, local, and tribal officials, she has been described by a colleague as “a get-sh*t-done staffer.” Rodríguez is the granddaughter of union activist César Chávez.

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who had left open the possibility that he would run as a progressive candidate, promptly threw his weight behind Biden and announced that he would support the incumbent president, suggesting the Democrats are unified behind Biden’s reelection.

The Republican National Committee responded to Biden’s announcement with an entirely computer generated video warning of what the world would look like if Biden were to be reelected: a dystopian future full of international and domestic crises (including an economic crash, which promptly led Twitter users to speculate that House speaker Kevin McCarthy’s threat to force a crisis over the debt ceiling was part of a larger plot to destroy Biden’s booming economy before the election). In keeping with the party’s construction of false narratives, the “news reports” in the ad are fake; the images are computer generated.

MSNBC’s Steve Benen notes that the ad “accidentally makes an important point.” Unable to find anything horrific about Biden’s actual record, “the RNC found it necessary to peddle literally fake, made-up images referring to events that have not occurred.”

Bloomberg columnist Matt Yglesias tweeted: I feel like if you have to use fake [images] of hypothetical future bad things that might happen if the incumbent president stays in office, that itself tells you something.”