Heather Cox Richardson

wrath
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July 24, 2023 (Monday)

Today, Israel’s parliament passed a law that increases the power of the country’s right wing, headed by prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel does not have a written constitution, and the prime minister’s ruling coalition is in control of both the executive and the legislative branches of government. The only check on them was the courts, which could overturn extreme laws that did not pass a “reasonableness standard,” which means they were not made according to a basic standard of fair and just policymaking.

The new law aims to take away that judicial power, and it passed by a vote of 64–0 after opponents walked out in protest. Netanyahu’s coalition has indicated it intends to continue to weaken the institutions that can check it. “This is just the beginning,” said National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.

For 13 of the last 14 years, Netanyahu, who is under indictment for bribery, fraud, and breach of trust, has been Israel’s prime minister. Israeli democracy has weakened under him, in part because, as Zach Beauchamp of Vox explains, his support for Israeli settlement of the West Bank has fed an aggressive right-wing nationalist movement.

Netanyahu was turned out of the position briefly by a fragile coalition in 2021 but returned to power in December 2022 at the head of a coalition made up of ultranationalist and ultrareligious parties. That coalition commands just 64 out of 120 seats, a bare majority, in the Knesset, Israel’s unicameral legislature, which passes laws and runs the government.

As soon as the coalition formed, it announced its intention of reforming the judiciary to weaken it significantly. It also backed taking over the West Bank and limiting the rights of Palestinians, LGBTQ individuals, and secular Israelis. In early July the government launched a massive attack on the refugee camp in the city of Jenin in the occupied West Bank that killed at least 8 Palestinians and wounded 50 others, saying the camp contained a militant command center.

Secular and center-left Jewish Israelis flooded the streets to protest as soon as the coalition announced its attack on the judiciary, and they have continued to protest for 29 weeks. Last Saturday, military leaders wrote to Netanyahu, blaming him personally for the damage done to the military and to Israel’s national security, and demanding that he stop. “We, veterans of Israel’s wars,… are raising a blaring red stop sign for you and your government.” Thousands of Israeli military reservists warned they would not report for duty if the judicial overhaul plan passed, dramatically weakening the country’s national security.

If the far-right coalition destroys the independence of the judiciary, it will have kneecapped the courts that could convict Netanyahu. It could also rig future elections by, for example, barring Arab parties from participating, thus cementing its hold on power.

The United States was the first nation to recognize Israel 75 years ago and has been a staunch supporter ever since, to the tune of nearly $4 billion a year. But the country’s rightward lurch is testing the strength of that bond.

Netanyahu has politicized the two countries’ bonds, openly siding with Trump and Trump Republicans, who continue to offer him their support. President Joe Biden has staunchly supported Israel for 50 years but recently has warned Netanyahu personally against pushing court reform, and last week he took the extraordinary step of inviting New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman to the Oval Office to make his message clear. Biden told Friedman that Israel’s lawmakers should not make fundamental changes to the country’s government without a popular consensus. The White House called today’s vote “unfortunate.”

Nonetheless, the administration has repeatedly emphasized that the U.S.-Israel relationship is “ironclad,” although White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre reiterated that “the core of that relationship is…on democratic values, the shared democratic values and interests." In the Daily Beast today, David Rothkopf argued that Israel has abandoned those democratic values and thus has ended “America’s special relationship with Israel.” That damage “cannot be easily undone,” he writes. “A relationship built on shared values cannot be easily restored once it is clear those values are no longer shared.”

Two former U.S. ambassadors to Israel, Dan Kurtzer and Martin Indyk, have called for the U.S. to cut military aid to that country, saying it is time to develop a new approach to the relationship. At the New York Times, columnist Nicholas Kristof points out that Israel is a wealthy country and that U.S. aid is essentially “a backdoor subsidy to American military contractors.”

In order to stay in power and avoid his legal trouble, Netanyahu must cater to his country’s hard right, no matter the cost to the nation. In the Washington Post today, columnist Max Boot noted that Netanyahu is undermining Israeli democracy, risking Israel’s relationship with the U.S., and threatening to spark a violent uprising among West Bank Palestinians.

In the U.S. today, after Texas governor Greg Abbott responded to the Justice Department’s letter warning him his buoys and razor wire in the Rio Grande were illegal by telling the government he would see it in court, the Department of Justice filed a civil complaint against the state of Texas on the same grounds it cited in the letter: the deployment of barriers breaks the Rivers and Harbors Act. It also threatens to damage U.S. foreign policy by breaking international treaties with Mexico, and foreign policy is exclusively the responsibility of the federal government.

Today the Department of Justice also agreed to permit U.S. attorney David Weiss to testify before the House Judiciary Committee…but with a twist. Weiss is the Trump-appointed official in charge of investigating President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden. In response to Weiss’s decision to charge Biden with two misdemeanor tax offenses and permit a pretrial diversion agreement with regard to a firearms charge, Trump Republicans have spread widely the accusations of two Internal Revenue Service investigators that Attorney General Merrick Garland tied Weiss’s hands. (As far as I can tell, these witnesses are not official whistleblowers, a designation that would mean the inspector general has agreed their accusations have merit.)

Weiss has publicly denied that accusation twice, but committee chair Jim Jordan (R-OH), Ways and Means Committee chair Jason Smith (R-MO), and Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-KY) have demanded that Weiss, as well as more than a dozen other officials, testify before their committees.

But while the committee chairs have asked for closed-door testimony, the Justice Department today said it will make Weiss available for a public hearing, writing: “The Department believes it is strongly in the public interest for the American people and for Congress to hear directly from U.S. Attorney Weiss on these assertions and questions about his authority at a public hearing.” The Justice Department has proposed a number of dates for that hearing immediately after the House comes back from its August recess.

Russia continues to bomb the Ukrainian port city of Odesa, targeting agricultural infrastructure. Putin seems to have decided that if he can’t have Odesa, neither can anyone else. On Friday, Russia destroyed 100 tons of peas and 20 tons of barley in Odesa. Russia’s attacks on Ukrainian grain facilities just as the wheat harvest begins have spiked global grain prices and threatened food exports to Africa, which Russia has suggested it could take over itself. Russia’s attacks on Ukraine have badly damaged the country’s agricultural capacity, a blow to global food supplies. Today, Klaus Iohannis, the president of Romania, said he “strongly condemn[s]” Russian attacks on grain transit after Russians hit the port of Reni on the Romanian border.

Russia’s attacks on the city have also badly damaged famous cultural sites, earning condemnation in “the strongest terms” from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Such attacks on Ukraine’s infrastructure and cultural treasures are another attempt to swing the war in Russia’s direction.

And on Friday, Russian officials announced they are raising the maximum age that men can be conscripted into military service from 27 to 30 years old.

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Ironically so is Saudi Arabia, Qatar and UAE. Cats and dogs make US defense contractors very very rich. Yeah, so when you hear all that BS about Israeli support from pandering US politicians it’s really coming from defense lobbyists.

But we know this.

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July 25, 2023 (Tuesday)

President Biden’s determination to “build the economy from the middle out and the bottom up,” appears to be paying off. Last Friday the global financial services company Morgan Stanley credited Biden’s policies with driving a boom in large-scale infrastructure and manufacturing, a boom large enough that Morgan Stanley revised its gross domestic product growth projections upward to 1.9%, a projection almost four times higher than its original projection.

Analysts doubled their projections for the fourth quarter, and raised forecasts for next year, as well. “The economy in the first half of the year is growing much stronger than we had anticipated,” Morgan Stanley’s chief U.S. economist Ellen Zentner wrote.

Part of their reasoning comes from a surge in manufacturing construction across the country thanks to the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which invests in roads, bridges, and other “hard” infrastructure projects; the Inflation Reduction Act, which invests in addressing climate change; and the CHIPS and Science Act, which invests in science and semiconductor chip manufacturing. During the 2010s, manufacturing construction generally held at about $50–80 billion a year. Now it is at $189 billion, with private investment following the government investment.

In half of the U.S. states, job creation is strong and unemployment is at or near 50-year lows, while lowering inflation rates has helped U.S. consumer confidence to rise to its highest level in two years (an important marker because consumer spending makes up about 70% of U.S. economic activity).

Today, the Teamsters union announced it has reached an agreement with United Parcel Service to avoid a major strike of as many as 340,000 workers. The tentative five-year agreement increases wages, including those for part-time employees, which was a sticking point in negotiations. Teamsters members still need to approve this deal, but Biden applauded the two sides for reaching an agreement by negotiating in good faith.

The agreement, Biden said, is “a testament to the power of employers and employees coming together to work out their differences at the bargaining table in a manner that helps businesses succeed while helping workers secure pay and benefits they can raise a family on and retire with dignity and respect.”

At the Economic Innovation Group, a bipartisan organization devoted to building a more dynamic U.S. economy, Daniel Newman reported yesterday that “[i]ndividuals filed nearly 2.7 million applications to start a business between January and June of this year, a 5 percent increase over 2022 and a staggering 52 percent increase over the same period in 2019.” He noted that “[t]he durability and growth of the startup surge is quite striking” and that nearly every major industry sector is participating in it.

Historically, Newman notes, “there is a tight correlation between the number of applications and true business formation.” “The sustained boost to entrepreneurship observed across much of the country since 2020 should produce a sense of optimism for a healthier, more dynamic economy in the coming years.”

Biden has always emphasized the importance of a healthy economy that gives workers breathing room and the ability to live with dignity.

But the administration’s reworking of the nation has not stopped there. Vice President Kamala Harris has stood firm on visibly honoring the nation’s commitment to equality before the law, and Biden has followed suit. Together, they have recalled the multicultural vision of the years from World War II to 1980, when the nation celebrated the power of its diversity.

On July 16, Harris spoke in Chicago at the retirement of the Reverend Jesse Jackson from the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, a civil rights organization he founded in 1971. Celebrating Jackson’s storied career, from his years as a protege of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., to creating Rainbow/PUSH, to running for president and critiquing the policies of the Republican Party, Harris noted that Jackson’s work rested on “the belief that the diversity of our nation is not a weakness or an afterthought, but instead, our greatest strength.”

“In his life’s work,” she said, Jackson “has reinforced that no matter who we are or where we come from, we have so much more in common than what separates us.” Jackson “has [brought] and continues to bring together people of all backgrounds: Black Americans, Asian Americans, Latino Americans, farmers, LGBTQ+ Americans, Native Americans, women, labor union members, people with disabilities, our young leaders, and people around the world.”

He created “[a] coalition to push the values of democracy and liberty and equality and justice not from the top down, but from the bottom up and the outside in…. He has built coalitions that expanded who has a voice and a seat at the table. And in so doing, he has expanded our democracy—the democracy of our nation.”

But, Harris warned, extremists are threatening that expansion of democracy, seeking “to divide us as a nation,… to attack the importance of diversity and equity and inclusion.” “[I]n these dark moments,” she said, “history shines a light on our path.” “[O]ur ability to stand together is our strength. Our ability to unify as many peoples is our strength. And the heroes of this moment will be those who bring us together in coalition; those who know that one’s strength is not measured based on who you beat down, but who you lift up.”

Vice President Harris today opened an event to mark Biden’s designation of a national monument in honor of Emmett Till and his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, in a searing reminder of what those determined to make the United States a country defined by white supremacy can do. “We gather to remember an act of astonishing violence and hate and to honor the courage of those who called upon…our nation to look with open eyes at that horror and to act,” Harris said.

In August 1955, fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, a Black boy from Chicago, was visiting relatives in a small Mississippi town. After the wife of a white man named Roy Bryant accused the boy of flirting with her, Bryant and his half-brother, J. W. Milam, kidnapped Till, brutally beat him, mutilated him, shot him in the back of the head, and dumped his body in the Tallahatchie River. The county sheriff directed that the body be buried quickly, but his mother insisted that her son’s body be returned to Chicago.

There, she insisted on an open-casket funeral. “Let the world see what I have seen,” she said.

Till’s murder became a symbol of what would happen if men were not called to account for their actions and a rallying cry to make sure such a society of white supremacists could not survive.

In March 2022, President Biden signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, making lynching a federal hate crime. And he warned that “those who seek to ban books, bury history,” would not succeed. “[W]hile darkness and denialism can hide much,” he said, “they erase nothing.” And, he added, “only with truth comes healing, justice, repair, and another step forward toward forming a more perfect union.”

Today, on what would have been Emmett Till’s eighty-second birthday, Biden established the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument. It covers three historic sites in Mississippi and Chicago: the site in Graball Landing, Mississippi, where Till’s body is believed to have been pulled from the Tallahatchie River; the Chicago church where mourners held Till’s funeral; and the courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi, where an all-white jury acquitted Bryant and Milam.

“We can’t just choose to learn what we want to know” about our history, Biden said. “We have to learn what we should know. We should know about our country. We should know everything: the good, the bad, the truth of who we are as a nation. That’s what great nations do, and we are a great nation.”

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Can someone explain to me why lynching wasn’t a federal hate crime before? Honest question, I have no idea. I am truly surprised. I just looked up the definition of lynching to check if I got something wrong, as a non-native speaker. But extra-judicially killing a person, how can that not be a federal crime?

What am I missing? Was there some legal intricacy which makes it just prosecutable on a non-federal level?

In other words:
how high wtf GIF

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White supremacy. The answer is almost always white supremacy.

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I agree, but could you elaborate how this procedurally worked?

I mean, isn’t murder a federal crime?

Really, honestly, I am at a loss. My grasp of your legal system is rudimentary. As a continental European, I think in categories of written law, and a hierarchical application of the written law. In Germany, “Bundesrecht bricht Landesrecht”, e.g., is a concept many if not most people know about. I understood it at some point in school, even, when someone tried to argue that the death penalty wasn’t abolished in Germany, as the Hassian Landesverfassung still mentioned it.

The concept that lynching isn’t a federal crime is so Alien to me, I don’t know If I can understand it if you guys explain it.

Try me?

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It seems to me that the legal principles are sic semper fecimus (“this is how we’ve always done it”), alia praecepta nobis (“it’s different when we do it”), and fabricati diem, punc (“whatcha gonna do about it? Come on if you think you’re hard enough. Yeah, didn’t think so.”)

Maybe I’m misunderstanding as well.

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July 26, 2023 (Wednesday)

Yesterday a team of international researchers confirmed that human-caused climate change is driving the life-threatening heat waves in the U.S. and Europe. The U.S. has broken more than 2,000 high temperature records in the past month, and it looks like July will be the hottest month on Earth since scientists have kept records.

Another study published yesterday warns that the Atlantic currents that transport warm water from the tropics north are in danger of collapsing as early as 2025 and as late as 2095, with a central estimate of 2050. As Arctic ice melts, the cold water that sinks and pulls the current northward is warming, slowing the mechanism that moves the currents. The collapse of that system would disrupt rain patterns in India, South America, and West Africa, endangering the food supplies for billions of people. It would also raise sea levels on the North American east coast and create storms and colder temperatures in Europe.

On Sunday and Monday, the ocean water off the tip of Florida reached temperatures over 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.8 Celsius), the same temperature as an average hot tub. According to the Coral Restoration Foundation, a nonprofit organization in Florida’s Key Largo that works to protect coral reefs, the hot water has created “a severe and urgent crisis,” with mortality up to 100%. The Mediterranean Sea also hit a record high this week, reaching 83.1 degrees Fahrenheit (28.4 Celsius).

An op-ed by David Wallace-Wells in the New York Times today noted that more land burned in Quebec in June than in the previous 20 years combined; across Canada, more than 25 million acres burned. And most of Canada’s fire season is still ahead.

Professor Ian Lowe of Australia’s Griffith University told The Guardian that he recalled reading the 1985 report that identified the link between greenhouse gasses and climate change, and worked to draw public attention to it. “Now all the projected changes are happening,” he said. “I reflect on how much needless environmental damage and human suffering will result from the work of those politicians, business leaders and public figures who have prevented concerted action. History will judge them very harshly.”

Former vice president Mike Pence, who is running for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, today unveiled his economic proposal. It calls for eliminating the Environmental Protection Agency and the Biden administration’s incentives designed to address climate change.

In that, he is in line with Republican lawmakers. Earlier this month, Mike Magner in Roll Call noted that at least four of the bills released so far by the House Appropriations Committee for 2024 include cutting funding to address climate change that Congress appropriated in the Inflation Reduction Act. Project 2025, which has provided the blueprint for a Trump presidency, says “the Biden Administration’s climate fanaticism will need a whole-of-government unwinding,” and calls for more use of fossil fuels.

A new report from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and Columbia University says that court cases related to climate change have more than doubled in five years. Thirty-four of the 2,180 lawsuits have been brought forward on behalf of children, teens, and young adults.

And therein lies a huge problem for today’s Republican Party. A recent poll of young voters shows they care deeply about gun violence, economic inequality, LGBTQ+ rights, and climate change. All of those issues are only becoming more prominent.

And speaking of young people and the problems Republicans are having with that generation, I have only one other observation tonight, as I am spending this week reading the audiobook for the new book and am truly exhausted. It appears that the administration is pushing back on the attempts of states like Florida to whitewash our history by providing historical recaps in its press releases.

Today is the 75th anniversary of the desegregation of the armed forces by President Harry S. Truman in 1948, and the White House statement celebrating that anniversary did more than acknowledge it and praise today’s multicultural military. It recounted the history of Black service members from the American Revolution to the present.

It covered the Black regiments that fought in the Civil War to preserve the United States and defend their own freedom; the highly decorated Harlem Hellfighters of World War I who fought in France as part of the French army because American commanders would not have them alongside white units; the Tuskegee Airmen who flew 15,000 missions in World War II but returned home to discrimination and oppression.

It then went on to call out the women and men of color who have served in the U.S. military, including the Indigenous Code Talkers, who turned native languages into an unbroken code during World War II while their people were losing their lands; the famous 442nd Regimental Combat Team of Japanese Americans who fought in Europe even as their families were incarcerated in camps in the United States; the 65th Infantry Regiment of Puerto Rican soldiers in the Korean War, known as the Borinqueneers, who were court martialed as a group when their commander was replaced by a non-Hispanic officer.

Taken with yesterday’s quite comprehensive history of the 1955 murder of 14-year-old Black child Emmett Till, it seems as if the White House has found a simple way to push back on the whitewashed history taught in places like Florida: making the country’s real history easily available.

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First, I’m sick so please forgive me if this doesn’t make too much sense.
It has to do with a strange way that US law has two different tiers. The lower tier is state law and that is where most murders are prosecuted. The upper tier is federal law, only some murders can be prosecuted under federal law. usually the ones that involve a murder that happened at the same time as breaking another federal law or a specific type of murder that is placed under federal jurisdiction.
Generally speaking, a murder that happens in a state with no part of it crossing state boundaries is a state level murder. The feds can’t touch it. But the feds can prosecute for civil rights violations, That is how the feds prosecuted the officers for George Floyd’s murder. It wasn’t the murder itself. It is the violation of George Floyd’s civil rights that resulted in his murder. The violation of civil rights was the hook that allowed federal prosecutors to charge those officers.
This new law is important because it moves lynching, which is a type of murder, specifically under federal jurisdiction. Before this law, a lynching that happened only within state borders but didn’t involve interstate issues or a violation of another federal law could only be prosecuted on the state level.
As we’ve seen, that’s a big problem. Too many states won’t prosecute white people who have killed BIPOC people.
I haven’t looked at the law itself yet and I’m not a really in shape right now to figure this out, but the few articles that I read make it sound like this is not just the stereotypical lynching that is going to be illegal under federal law. That it’s any kind of mob violence based on race. I haven’t read the law yet though so I’m not sure
Here’s a link to a decent explainer on federal murder

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No, because we have overlapping jurisdiction (local, county, state, federal). And because of white supremacy, from the 1890s to about the 1950s, the Department of Justice would rarely step in to investigate any such crimes, unless pressed to do so, and there were no federal anti-lynching laws on the books. In generally, if it’s a crime at the local level, then there has to be some overriding reason/specific laws for the feds to step in to take over the case… they have to have standing of some kind. In cases like racially motivated murders, even if there was, it was often ignored (white supremacy). During the civil rights era, there was far more pressure, from the public and from various presidents to intervene in such cases, usually on the grounds of civil rights violations, so you saw an uptick in these kinds of investigations, but even then, they were few and far between given the level of violence aimed at the Black community.

Because of how our federal system works, anything not under federal jurisdiction is under state/local jurisdiction. They just aren’t supposed to challenge federal laws.

I agree and it’s sickening that it took so long to get one, but that’s how our system works - local control is preferred by the constitution as much as possible - with a set of federal laws that are meant to be supreme. There had been various efforts to get an anti-lynching laws since the 19teens at least. Ida B. Wells led one of the first efforts to get a federal law passed, and that failed (white supremacy), same after Emmett Till’s death (failed again), and finally Biden signed one into law.

But WHY that happens is due to white supremacy.

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Thank you for the explanation. I still do not grasp the concept of “local control is preferred by the constitution” in that case. How can local control not be overridden by two of the inalienable rights - life, and liberty? Also, lynching is by definition without due process, as guaranteed by the fifth amendment. How can thus be lynching not be a crime against, directly, the constitution, to be prosecuted as a federal crime?

I feel like being obtuse.

Maybe it’s just because I have the impression that states could, without lynching being a federal crime, simply change their law and make lynching legal. Which, coming from a legal system based on the french declaration of human rights (which, ironically, derive from the US-American bill of rights…) and the Code Napoleon, to name just two bits, sounds like incomprehensible madness.

White supremacy we had - and have - in continental Europe as well. But the idea that lynching would be not a federal crime? Mind: blown.

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That is covered by the supremacy clause, which says that outside anything specifically stated in the constitution/federal law is the domain of state/local governments.

But in this case, despite this clear violation of people’s civil rights, it was considered a “local” matter to be handled by local officials. Because of white supremacy. The federal government was often complicit in aiding the racial order… sometimes explicitly, other times, less so.

They could not do that, even without a federal statue. How it worked was it was either ignored, or if there was a case, white supremacy was enforced via jury nullification. The lynchers of Emmett Till killed him, were put on trial, and then they were acquitted by an all white jury.

We’re fully aware of how unjust and illegal all this was constitutionally. The law is only as good as the people enforcing it, though.

So, again - white supremacy is the issue here.

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I don’t know what to say.

I hate it.

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This is via the washington post and I haven’t looked into the author at all but it’s hard to summarize so I’ll paste it. Procedurally I think Mindy made the best summary that could be made, it’s just that we were a nation formed by and during the transatlantic slave trade so a lot of our laws and legal precedents are really really really racist.

The first anti-lynching legislation was introduced in 1900 by Rep. George Henry White (R-N.C.), then the only Black representative. The bill never made it out of committee, and over the years and then decades, there were 200 unsuccessful attempts to criminalize lynching. In 1922, the House passed an anti-lynching measure, but a bloc of Southern segregationists in the Senate mounted a filibuster that effectively killed off the bill. Similar anti-lynching bills were introduced, only to meet the same fate. In 2005, the Senate passed a resolution expressing remorse for failing to pass anti-lynching legislation but still couldn’t muster the votes to amend federal law. The Senate came close in 2020 to passing an anti-lynching bill that had bipartsian support in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, but at the 11th hour, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) blocked it. Mr. Paul signed on to the new legislation, saying his concerns about it being too expansive — allowing prosecutions when only minor injuries were involved — were resolved.

So, basically ever since the civil war the white supremacists have just… won… over and over again, and I don’t know that there’s more to look for there in terms of explanation.

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It’s part and parcel of the modern state, I’m afraid. You can certainly find the same patterns in almost any other modern representative democracies, to varying degrees. This is what you get when you build a sense of national belonging on concepts that just are problematic (like the concept of race or shared identity around faith/ethnicity). It can be used as a force for exclusion in various ways. We can see ti both here and in Europe with regards to the migrant crisis happening in both places right now. I’d argue it’s the biggest flaw in the whole “rule of law” regime. It depends on human being to implement it fairly, but if they have a different set of ideas other than equality and full inclusion for everyone within a particular place, and they get control, then you’re kind of fucked.

I don’t know how the change that reality. I know we can probably figure out a way to improve things, but it’s not easy.

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July 27, 2023 (Thursday)

More good news today for Bidenomics, as the gross domestic product report for the second quarter showed annualized growth of 2.4%, higher than projected, and inflation rose at a slower pace of 2.6%, down from last quarter and well below projections. Economic analyst Steven Rattner noted that as of the second quarter, “the US economy is over 6% larger than it was before COVID (after adjusting for inflation). At this point in the recovery from the Great Recession, 2011, the economy was just 0.7% larger than it had been in 2007.”

Both consumer spending and business investment, which is up 7.7% in real annualized terms, drove this growth. Business spending makes up a much smaller share of gross domestic product, but it drives future jobs and growth, and much of this growth is in manufacturing facilities. In keeping with that trend, the nation’s largest solar panel manufacturer, First Solar, announced today that it will build a fifth factory in the U.S. as alternative energy technology takes off. This commitment brings to more than $2.8 billion the amount First Solar has invested in the U.S. to ramp up production.

While so-called Bidenomics is designed to rebuild the middle class, the administration is also trying to reestablish fair ground rules for corporate behavior. Yesterday, the Departments of Justice, Commerce, and Treasury invited American businesses to come forward voluntarily if they think they might have violated U.S. sanctions, export controls, or other national security laws by sharing sensitive technology or helping sanctioned individuals launder money. Coming forward “can provide significant mitigation of civil or criminal liability,” the note says.

It highlighted the anti–money laundering and sanctions whistleblower program in the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN.

While many of us were watching the federal courthouse in Washington, D.C., to see if an indictment was forthcoming against former president Trump for his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election, a different set of charges appeared tonight. Special counsel Jack Smith brought additional charges against Trump in connection with his retention of classified documents.

The new indictment alleges that Trump plotted to delete video from security cameras near the storage room where he had stored boxes containing classified documents, and did so after the Department of Justice subpoenaed that footage. That effort to delete the video involved a third co-conspirator, Carlos De Oliveira, who has been added to the case.

De Oliveira is a former valet at the Trump Organization’s Mar-a-Lago property who became property manager there in January 2022. Allegedly, he told another Trump employee that “the boss” wanted the server deleted and that the conversation should stay between the two of them.

In the Washington Post, legal columnist Ruth Marcus wrote, “The alleged conduct—yes, even after all these years of watching Trump flagrantly flout norms—is nothing short of jaw-dropping: Trump allegedly conspired with others to destroy evidence.” If the allegations hold up, “the former president is a common criminal—and an uncommonly stupid one.”

This superseding indictment reiterates the material from the original indictment, and as I reread it, it still blows my mind that Trump allegedly compromised national security documents from the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense, the National Security Agency, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (surveillance imagery), the National Reconnaissance Office (surveillance and maps), the Department of Energy (nuclear weapons), and the Department of State and Bureau of Intelligence and Research (diplomatic intelligence).

It sounds like he was a one-man wrecking ball, aimed at our national security.

The Justice Department has asked again for a protective order to protect the classified information at the heart of this case. In their request, they explained that, among other things, Trump wanted to be able to discuss that classified information with his lawyers outside a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF, a room protected against electronic surveillance and data leakage.

Former deputy assistant director of the FBI’s counterintelligence division Peter Strzok noted that there is “[n]o better demonstration of Trump’s abject lack of understanding of—and disregard for—classified info and national security. He is asking the Court to waive the requirements for classified info that EVERY OTHER SINGLE CLEARANCE HOLDER IN THE UNITED STATES must follow.”

The Senate today passed the $886 billion annual defense bill by a strong bipartisan margin of 86 to 11 after refusing to load it up with all the partisan measures Republican extremists added to the House bill. Now negotiators from the House and the Senate will try to hash out a compromise measure, but the bills are so far apart it is not clear they will be able to create a bipartisan compromise. The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) has passed on a bipartisan basis for more than 60 years.

The extremists in the House Republican conference continue to revolt against House speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) deal with the administration to raise the debt ceiling. They insist the future cuts to which McCarthy agreed are not steep enough, and demand more. This has sparked fighting among House Republicans; Emine Yücel of Talking Points Memo suggests that McCarthy’s new willingness to consider impeaching President Biden might be an attempt to cut a deal with the extremists.

As the Senate is controlled by Democrats, the fight among the House Republicans threatens a much larger fight between the chambers because Democratic senators will not accept the demands of the extremist Republican representatives.

The House left for its August recess today without passing 11 of the 12 appropriations bills necessary to fund the government after September, setting up the conditions for a government shutdown this fall if they cannot pass the bills and negotiate with the Senate in the short time frame they’ve left. Far-right Republicans don’t much care, apparently. Representative Bob Good (R-VA) told reporters this week, “We should not fear a government shutdown… Most of what we do up here is bad anyway.”

Representative Katherine Clark (D-MA), the second ranking Democrat in the House, disagreed. “The Republican conference is saying they are sending us home for six weeks without funding the government? That we have one bill…out of 12 completed because extremists are holding your conference hostage, and that’s not the full story: the extremists are holding the American people hostage. We will have twelve days…when we return to fund the government, to live up to the job the American people sent us here to do. This is a reckless march to a MAGA shutdown, and for what? In pursuit of a national abortion ban? Is that what we are doing here?

“The American people see through this. They know who is fighting for them, fighting for solutions…. Your time is coming. The American people are watching. They are going to demand accountability. We should be staying here, completing these appropriations bills, stripping out the toxic, divisive, bigoted riders that have been put on these bills and get[ting] back to work for freedom and for our economy and the American family.”

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3223

yeah, buddy, we know. your whole party is terrible. if you stopped attacking your fellow citizens, you’d have plenty of time to do some good in the world… but you’d have to want to do good, wouldn’t you.

american soldiers GIF

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3224

I think the problem is the difference in what doing good in the world means to different people. I’m sure, to him, good in the world means letting corporations and theocratic Christians run everything, eliminating the LGBQT+ community, and enforcing a segregated, class-bound society…

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yeah, and i think highlights the gop victim mentality that his party is in control, but they still can’t manage to even what they consider good…

that clip is going to make a good campaign ad someday

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July 28, 2023 (Friday)

On Wednesday, soldiers of the presidential guard overthrew Niger’s democratically elected president, Mohamed Bazoum, and replaced him with a military general, Abdourahmane Tchiani. Niger gained independence from France in 1960, and after a series of upheavals, the country established its current democracy in 2011. Bazoum was the first elected leader since then to succeed another in a peaceful democratic transfer of power. Niger is a key player in the struggle to establish democracy in Africa, and Bazoum’s overthrow is part of that larger story.

Niger is a landlocked country about twice the size of Texas in the center of the Sahel region in Africa, a dry grassland region that crosses the continent from the Atlantic to the Red Sea. The Sahel sits below the Sahara and above the tropical Sudanian savanna. That region is being hit terribly hard by climate change, as temperatures are rising there faster than anywhere else in the world, making the desert push into the grasslands. The United Nations estimates Niger loses almost 250,000 acres of arable land each year.

That region has also been plagued by violent Islamic groups, and strongmen promising to restore order have launched successful coups in the countries of Mali and Burkina Faso, which are Niger’s neighbors. (When Vice President Kamala Harris went to Ghana in March, her visit was partly to shore up democracy in that country, which is on the edge of the Sahel region and under pressure from militants in Sahel countries.)

While Niger’s people are some of the poorest in the world, the country’s resources are immensely valuable. Niger has oil and, more strikingly, produces 7% of all the uranium in the world. It also has the fastest population growth in the world, with more than half the population under 15. Noting that young people are vulnerable to radicalization, the U.S. last year said that “helping Niger to become an increasingly capable partner against regional threats is a critical goal.”

Nigerien forces have worked alongside France and the U.S. to combat Islamic terrorism in the region, and both France and the U.S. have troops stationed in Niger: France has about 1,500, and the U.S. has about 1,100. In 2022 the U.S. State Department described Niger as “strategically important as a linchpin for stability in the Sahel as well as a reliable counterterrorism partner against ISIS,…Boko Haram,…[and] other regional violent extremist organizations.”

In March, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Niger, where he announced a $150 million humanitarian aid package to the Sahel region, bringing the year’s total aid from the U.S. to $233 million. “Niger is a young democracy in a challenging part of the world,” Blinken told reporters. “But it remains true to the values we share. Niger has been quick to defend the democratic values under threat in neighboring countries.”

During that visit, Niger’s foreign minister said that Niger would uphold democratic values to combat extremists. “We need to show that democracy is the only way to defeat terrorism,” he said.

Russia’s mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Wagner Group troops have also been active in the region, working on the side of those overthrowing the governments in Mali and Burkina Faso by mercilessly crushing their opponents. In exchange, they extract highly valuable resources.

While it is not clear that the Wagner Group was involved in the government overthrow in Niger—the French newspaper Le Monde says there are no obvious signs of Russian involvement—some of the militants have been waving Russian flags, and Prigozhin yesterday took credit for the coup.

“This shows the effectiveness of Wagner,” Prigozhin said on social media. “A thousand Wagner fighters are able to restore order and destroy terrorists, preventing them from harming the civilian population of states.” This boast could well just be Prigozhin trying to rebuild his brand after his march on Moscow, but both Mali and Burkina Faso have turned toward Moscow after the coups there, and there is reason to think the same could happen in Niger.

Certainly, as their war in Ukraine goes poorly, it seems as if Russian leaders are throwing more of their weight into Africa. Putin has recently torn up the agreement that enabled Ukraine to export 35 million tons of grain in the past year, at least half of it to the developing world. He has added new mines to the Black Sea and has begun to bomb Ukraine’s grain-exporting ports, including the major port of Odesa, destroying 60,000 tons of grain stored there for export.

At a Russia-Africa summit held in St.Petersburg over the past two days between Russia and the leaders of 17 African countries, Russian president Vladimir Putin promised that Russia would export free grain to African countries to make up the difference. But Gyude Moore, senior policy fellow at the Centre for Global Development, told an Al Jazeera reporter that the amount he has offered is “too small in terms of the need.”

It is also notable that African attendance at this summit is much smaller than at the first Russia-Africa summit in 2019, when 43 African leaders attended, suggesting that the continent as a whole is not tilting toward Russia.

In New Zealand yesterday, where he said the “door is open” for New Zealand and other nations to join AUKUS, the new security pact between the U.S., the U.K. and Australia, Blinken noted that Russia is responsible for cutting off food to Africa and pointed out that the U.S. donates about half of the budget of the World Food Program while Russia contributes about .02%.

“So that gives you some idea of who’s the solution and who’s the problem,” he said. He suggested that Russia’s attack on grain headed for Africa “sends a very clear message, and I think it’s a message that is falling on very, very critical and concerned ears in Africa and throughout the developing world. My expectation would be that Russia will hear this clearly from our African partners when they meet.” “[T]hey know exactly who’s to blame for this current situation.”

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres condemned “in the strongest terms” the attempt to seize power by force and called for those involved “to exercise restraint and to ensure the protection of constitutional order.” “We strongly condemn any effort to detain or subvert the functioning of Niger’s democratically elected government, led by President Bazoum,” White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said. A spokesperson for the White House National Security Council added: “An unconstitutional seizure of power puts at grave risk our continued security cooperation with the government of Niger.”

Ulf Laessing, head of the Sahel program at Germany’s Konrad Adenauer Foundation, told the Associated Press that the mutiny was a “nightmare scenario for Western powers who had betted on Bazoum and Niger as new security anchor for the Sahel.”

Still, Laessing added, “It remains to be seen whether this is the last word. Parts of the army are probably still loyal to Bazoum. They benefited much from equipment and training as part of foreign military assistance.” People in the streets protested the takeover, with one telling a reporter: “We are here to show the people that we are not happy about this movement going on, just to show these military people that they can’t just take the power like this…. We are a democratic country, we support democracy and we don’t need this kind of movement.”

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