Of course she is… of course… and NBC will just… accept that as genuine. God, I hate this timeline.
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At one point, I thought bringing back the Fairness Doctrine would help, since repealing that led to the rise in conservative talk radio, but I’m not sure it would do anything now other than forcing everyone to both-sides everything. What we really need to do is somehow divorce news coverage from the profit model. Back when the Fairness Doctrine still existed, most people still got their news from one of three or four broadcast channels, and none of them were running news 24/7, so they all operated their news divisions at a loss. CBS wasn’t trying to make money with their news programs, so they left people like Edward R. Murrow free to be actual journalists. Bringing back the Fairness Doctrine now won’t restore things to the way they were then. And I don’t know how to fix this.
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Yeah, that…
And that!
Me neither, but I do know there is solution, even if it’s not easy to see or implement. I doubt it’s just one thing that needs doing, honestly, but larger set of reforms that need to happen.
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Indeed. Educating the young ones so they can better separate wheat from lies seems like a huge part of it. Which is of course a big reason why reactionaries want to ban accurate history and decimate the humanities.
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Hmmm Ronna, were those problems something to do with the color of the skin that the Biden voters had?
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The bit where it was established that Fox can tell outright lies because everyone should just know it’s entertainment can’t be helping…
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Make news organizations NGOs? Stations can still carry news but they have to contract it to a non-profit provider.
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March 25, 2024 (Monday)
This morning The Boeing Company announced that the chief of Boeing’s commercial airplane division, Stan Deal, is leaving immediately. Chief executive officer Dave Calhoun is stepping down at the end of the year. Chair of the board Larry Kellner will not stand for reelection.
On January 5 a door plug blew off a Boeing 737 Max jetliner operated by Alaska Airlines while it was in flight. The United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) immediately grounded about 170 similar Boeing planes operated by U.S. airlines or in U.S. territory until they could be inspected. “The FAA’s first priority is keeping the flying public safe,” it said, and added: “The safety of the flying public, not speed, will determine the timeline for returning the Boeing 737-9 MAX to service.”
Last year an FAA investigation “observed a disconnect between Boeing’s senior management and other members of the organization on safety culture,” with employees worrying about retaliation for reporting safety issues. After the door plug blew off, an FAA audit of different aspects of the production process released two weeks ago found that Boeing failed 33 of 89 product audits. On March 9, Spencer S. Hsu, Ian Duncan, and Lori Aratani of the Washington Post reported that the Justice Department had opened a criminal investigation into the door plug failure.
Today, Boeing announced a change in leadership.
Also today, Acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su reminded readers of Teen Vogue, on the anniversary of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire that killed 147 garment workers in New York City after their employer had locked the exits, of how that tragedy prompted the federal government to create “programs that generations of Americans have relied on for economic security and dignity, including a nationwide minimum wage, health and safety regulations, restrictions on child labor, and more.”
Each generation “has a duty to take the baton of progress from those who came before us,” Su said. She noted that industries whose workforces are mostly women or immigrants have historically often broken the law, exposing workers to dangerous conditions and withholding pay.
This problem persists in the present, and she reported that the Department of Labor is working to address it. For example, after three injuries at a plant outside Chicago, including the December 2022 death of a 29-year-old sanitation worker, the U.S. Department of Labor fined the company $2.8 million. And, earlier this year, the department recovered more than $1 million for 165 workers whose employer had cheated them of overtime pay, the largest settlement ever for California garment workers.
The U.S. Department of Energy today announced it has selected 33 projects from more than 20 states that will be awarded up to $6 billion to jump-start the elimination of carbon dioxide emissions from industries that are hard to adapt to green technologies. The projects will match federal monies to invest more than $20 billion toward commercial-scale decarbonization solutions for cement and concrete, chemicals and refining, metals including iron and steel, pulp and paper mills, and so on. The projects are funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act, and will create tens of thousands of jobs. The Department of Energy estimates that the funded projects will cut carbon emissions by an average of 77%.
All of these news items today—airplane safety, worker protection, and technologies to address climate change—reflect a government designed to protect the American people. The nonpartisan civil servants staffing the agencies responsible for that protection are the ones that MAGA Republicans call the Deep State and Trump has vowed to replace with his own loyalists.
For his part, as he faced cases in two different New York courts, Trump’s focus today was on the rule of law. He does not appear to be a fan of it.
March 25 was the deadline for Trump to produce a bond to cover the $454 million he owes to the people of the state of New York for fraud. But before New York attorney general Letitia James could begin to seize his assets this morning, a New York appeals court threw him a lifeline, cutting the size of the required bond to $175 million and giving him 10 more days to post it. The order also paused the enforcement of many of the penalties Judge Arthur Engoron had imposed. So, for the time being, Trump and his sons can continue to do business in New York, although their businesses remain under the supervision of an independent monitor.
The court’s order does not change Engoron’s judgment in the case. It simply puts the execution of that judgment on hold as Trump appeals it, which he must do on time.
In a different courtroom today, Judge Juan Merchan rejected further delaying tactics by Trump’s lawyers and set April 15 as the date for jury selection in the criminal case of election interference. This is the case in which Trump is charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records to hide payments to people with damaging information about him before the 2016 election. This scheme gave Trump “an illegal edge in a razor-thin race,” as legal reporter Adam Klasfeld of Just Security put it.
Trump has said he will appeal.
Last week, Brian Beutler of Off Message noted that “Trump is scarcely running a presidential campaign…. [H]is efforts are overwhelmingly fixed on evading justice or mooting judgments he’s already lost by any means necessary. He’d ideally like to prevail in these efforts before the election, but the task will become much easier if he’s able to win or steal the presidency despite the legal peril.”
Trump appeared angry today at a press conference after Judge Merchan set a date for the start of the election interference case. He blamed President Joe Biden for his legal troubles, although the case is in New York. He insisted that holding him accountable for his behavior is itself “election interference.”
In a statement, the Biden camp replied: “Donald Trump is weak and desperate—both as a man and a candidate for President…. His campaign can’t raise money, he is uninterested in campaigning outside his country club, and every time he opens his mouth, he pushes moderate and suburban voters away with his dangerous agenda.
“America deserves better than a feeble, confused, and tired Donald Trump.”
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Dark Brandon is just getting warmed up. Finally. I would love to see them absolutely take it to the orange asshole and leave him a gibbering idiot. Ah, well, a guy can dream. Still, nice to see a “no quarter asked, none given” style finally, as though they have at last acknowledged to stakes here.
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March 26, 2024 (Tuesday)
At about 1:30 this morning, local time, the Dali, a 985-foot (300 m) container ship operating under a Singapore flag, struck the steel Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, Maryland, that spans the lower Patapsco River and outer Baltimore Harbor. The bridge immediately collapsed.
Eight maintenance workers were on the bridge repairing potholes when the ship hit. Two were rescued from the water, but the other six remain missing. Search and rescue operations were complicated by twisted metal and debris from the collapsed bridge. This evening, the Coast Guard called off its search. Tomorrow morning, divers will begin recovery efforts.
It is possible there were motorists on the bridge, too, but fewer than there might otherwise have been. Crew members issued a “Mayday” call—an internationally recognized word meaning distress—that Maryland police heard. At 1:27, police radio recorded an officer saying a ship had lost control of its steering as it approached the bridge, and to stop traffic and evacuate the area. There were cars submerged in the water, but they may have belonged to the construction workers.
The loss of the bridge will tangle traffic and disrupt supply chains. Named for the Maryland lawyer who in 1814 wrote the poem that became the national anthem, the Francis Scott Key bridge carries I-695, the Baltimore Beltway, and is used by about 30,000 people a day.
The Port of Baltimore is one of the nation’s largest shipping hubs, especially for both imports and exports of cars and light trucks. About 850,000 vehicles go through that port every year. So does more than 20% of the nation’s coal exports. In 2023 the port moved a record-breaking $80 billion worth of foreign cargo. Now the shipping lane is closed and must be cleared of debris.
“There is no question this will be a major and protracted impact on supply chains,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said from Baltimore today.
Perhaps learning from the 2023 East Palestine, Ohio, train derailment, when the government response was fast but quiet and thus opened a window for right-wing complaints they weren’t doing enough, the administration was out front today. Buttigieg rushed to the scene from a trip out West, and Maryland governor Wes Moore told reporters Buttigieg had called him at 3:30 am, just two hours after the crash.
By around 6:00 am, the National Transportation Safety Board already had a team of 24 people on the scene to launch an investigation into the cause of the collision.
Speaking today, President Joe Biden said: “I’ve directed my team to move heaven and earth to reopen the port and rebuild the bridge as soon as…humanly possible. And we’re going to work hand in hand…to support Maryland, whatever they ask for. And we’re going to work with our partners in Congress to make sure the state gets the support it needs. It’s my intention that federal government will pay for the entire cost of reconstructing that bridge, and I expect…the Congress to support my effort.”
Former member of President Obama’s 2012 campaign Jason Karsh noted Biden’s speech and said on social media: “[B]ecause Biden got infrastructure spending done for the first time in over a generation, and because [Pennsylvania] was able to rebuild that bridge that collapsed in record time, Dem[ocrat]s have the credibility to say things like this. Competence in government matters.”
It remains far too soon for any solid understanding of what caused the deadly crash.
Despite the impossibility of solid information in the hours immediately after the collision—or perhaps because of it—verified accounts on X (formerly Twitter) began spreading conspiracy theories. They posted that the accident was linked to terrorism, Jewish people, or diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs. “Did anti-white business practices cause this disaster?” one posted. Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones wrote that the collision was “deliberate” and that “WW3 has already started.”
Technology reporter Taylor Lorenz, who studies social media patterns, explained in the Washington Post that many of these accounts are “engagement farming.” This is the practice of posting extremist comments to generate attention, which can then be monetized by, for example, getting a cut of advertising that appears near those comments. Comments with heavy engagement can receive thousands of dollars.
For a long time now, America’s political right has riled people up with wild political rhetoric to get them to buy stuff. Just today, Trump began to hawk Bibles for $59.99, plus shipping and handling, with a video message saying “Religion and Christianity are the biggest things missing from this country, and I truly believe we need to bring them back…. That’s why our country’s going haywire—we’ve lost religion in our country.”
That system appeared to be in play as Trump supporters apparently flocked to today’s public offering of the Trump Media & Technology Group, the company behind the Truth Social app, sending the stock upward 16%. That surge would value the company at more than $7 billion, although in the first nine months of last year it had only about $3 million in sales and lost nearly $50 million. Julian Klymochko, founder and CEO of Accelerate Financial Technologies, told NPR’s Rafael Nam that the $7 billion valuation “is completely detached from any sort of fundamentals.”
Buying stock in the company is “more of a political movement or just a speculative meme stock [a stock driven by social media] that’s completely detached or unrelated to the underlying business fundamentals of Truth Social,” Klymochko said.
As well as convincing supporters to buy products, extremist rhetoric can push them toward violence. Yesterday, John Keller, the head of a Department of Justice task force set up to protect election workers, told reporters Trump’s lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen has put the U.S. in a “new era” in which election workers are “scapegoated, targeted, and attacked.”
Today, on his social media network, Trump attacked individuals related to his upcoming election interference case. He lashed out at one of the prosecutors on Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s staff who previously worked for the Justice Department; Judge Juan Merchan, the judge in his upcoming criminal case for election interference; and the judge’s daughter. Of the judge and his daughter, Trump told his angry followers: “These COUNTRY DESTROYING SCOUNDRELS & THUGS HAVE NO CASE AGAINST ME. WITCH HUNT!”
Legal analyst Joyce White Vance of Civil Discourse called out Trump’s “rank effort at intimidating the judge by threatening his family,” which she said “merits a gag order but also serious pushback from [Republican] leadership—which we know won’t come.”
Republican leadership indeed stayed quiet, but the judge noted Trump’s pattern of using “threatening, inflammatory, [and] denigrating” statements against individuals in his legal cases and placed a gag order on him. Merchan noted that in the past, Trump’s statements had intimidated the individual targeted and required them to hire protection.
Trump can still talk about Merchan or Bragg, but he cannot comment on any attorney, court staff member, or family member of prosecutors or lawyers. He can’t make statements about any potential or actual juror.
Other news today suggests that Americans outside the MAGA bubble are turning against the poisonous politics that appeals to fear and hatred so its perpetrators can gain money or power.
The outrage over NBC’s hiring of former Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel was so strong that today the chair of NBC News, Cesar Conde, emailed staff to tell them he had “decided that Ronna McDaniel will not be an NBC News contributor.” McDaniel had trafficked in lies to support Trump and had worked with him to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
When the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine today, observers thought the justices seemed inclined to back away from the decision of extremist antiabortion judge Matthew Kacsmaryk taking the abortion drug mifepristone off the market. Antiabortion activists have long sought to ban abortion nationwide, but a strong majority of Americans support reproductive rights and have made their wishes known at the ballot box.
Voters’ frustration with the extremists who have captured the Republican Party appeared to be behind the results in today’s special election for a seat in the Alabama legislature. There, voters in a swing district elected a Democrat, who ran on protecting abortion access, to replace a Republican. In 2022 that Democrat, Marilyn Lands, won about 45% of the vote. Today she won almost 65% of it.
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March 27, 2024 (Wednesday)
The news that NBC News reconsidered its invitation to former Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel to become a paid contributor has buried the recent news about some of the other participants in Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Yesterday a judge in Minnesota ruled in favor of a warehouse owner who sought to evict MyPillow after it failed to pay more than $200,000 in rent. MyPillow chief executive officer Mike Lindell has complained that his company has been “decimated” by his support for Trump. His insistence—without evidence—that the 2020 presidential election was stolen has entangled him in expensive defamation lawsuits filed by voting machine companies Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic.
Lindell cannot pay his lawyers and claims to have “lost hundreds of millions of dollars,” but insists he is being persecuted “because you want me to shut up about [the] security of our elections.”
Also yesterday, Trump loyalist Kari Lake, who has pushed the idea that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, ran for Arizona governor in 2022, and is now running for the U.S. Senate, admitted she defamed Maricopa County recorder Stephen Richer and that she acted with actual malice when she claimed he “sabotaged” the 2022 election. The request to admit to defamation came on the day that discovery, the process of sharing information about a case with each side, was to begin, suggesting that she preferred to admit wrongdoing rather than let anyone see what might be in her emails, texts, and recordings.
Arizona journalist Howard Fischer reported in the Arizona Daily Star that in a video statement, Lake said her admission did not mean she agreed she did anything wrong, although that is expressly stipulated in the court papers. She said she conceded because Richer’s lawsuit was keeping her off the campaign trail. “It’s called lawfare: weaponizing the legal system to punish, impoverish and destroy political opponents,’’ Lake said. “We’ve all seen how they’re doing it to President Trump. And here in Arizona, they’re doing the exact same thing to me.’’
One of Lake’s senior advisors said: “Kari Lake maintains she has always been truthful.”
Also yesterday, a three-member panel of the D.C. Bar’s Board of Professional Responsibility began a disciplinary hearing for former Department of Justice environmental lawyer Jeffrey Clark, who was so key to Trump’s plan to get state legislatures to overturn the results of the 2020 election that Trump tried to make him attorney general.
Clark joins Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who led the media blitz to argue—falsely—that the election had been stolen. Giuliani’s New York and Washington, D.C., law licenses were suspended in June 2021 after a court found that he made “demonstrably false and misleading statements to courts, lawmakers, and the public at large.” He is now facing disbarment.
Earlier this month, he said on his podcast that he expected to be disbarred because “[t]he Bar Association is going to crucify me no matter what. I will be disbarred in New York. I will be disbarred in Washington. It will have nothing to do with anything I did wrong.”
Today, after a long trial, attorney discipline judge Yvette Roland recommended that John Eastman, the lawyer who came up with the justification for using fake electors to overturn the 2020 presidential election, be disbarred. Eastman will immediately lose his license to practice law. The California Supreme Court will decide whether to disbar Eastman.
Eastman’s lawyer said it was unfair to take Eastman’s law license because he needs to make money to fight the criminal charges against him in Georgia, where he has been indicted for his part in the effort to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election there. For his part, Eastman maintains he did nothing wrong.
In her recommendation, Judge Roland compared Eastman’s case to that of Donald Segretti, the lawyer whose efforts to guarantee President Richard Nixon’s 1972 reelection included, as Roland’s recommendation noted, distributing letters that made false accusations against Nixon’s rivals (including a forged letter attributing a slur against French-Canadians to Maine senator and candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination Edmund Muskie). At the time, the court noted that Segretti was only 30, thought he was acting for Nixon, and did not act in his capacity as a lawyer. The court also emphasized that Segretti “recognized the wrongfulness of his acts, expressed regret, and cooperated with the investigating agencies.”
In contrast, Roland wrote, “[t]he scale and egregiousness of Eastman’s unethical actions far surpasses” Segretti’s misconduct. Segretti acted outside his role as an attorney, while “Eastman’s wrongdoing was committed directly in the course and scope of his representation of President Trump and the Trump campaign.” Roland also noted that while Segretti expressed remorse and recognized his wrongdoing, Eastman has shown “an apparent inability to accept responsibility. This lack of remorse and accountability presents a significant risk that Eastman may engage in further unethical conduct, compounding the threat to the public.”
One by one, those who worked with Trump to overturn the election are being held to account by our legal system. But still, they refuse to admit any wrongdoing.
In that, they are following Trump.
Despite Judge Juan Merchan’s gag order, Trump continued today to attack both Merchan and his daughter. On his social media site, Trump posted that Merchan was trying to deprive him of his “First Amendment right to speak out against the Weaponization of Law Enforcement, including the fact that Crooked Joe Biden, Merrick Garland, and their Hacks and Thugs are tracking and following me all across the Country, obsessively trying to persecute me, while everyone knows I have done nothing wrong!” Trump posted in great detail about the judge’s daughter, accusing her of making money by “working to ‘Get Trump,’” based on images shared by an old social media account of hers that had been hacked.
It was President Nixon who perfected the refusal to admit wrongdoing in the face of overwhelming evidence. Even after tapes recorded in the Oval Office revealed that he had plotted with an aide to block investigations of the break-in at the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Hotel by invoking national security and Republican Party leaders told him he needed to resign, he refused to admit wrongdoing. Instead, he told the American people he was stepping down because he no longer had enough support in Congress to advance the national interest. He blamed his fall on the press, saying its “leaks and accusations and innuendo” were designed to destroy him.
Gerald R. Ford, the president who replaced Nixon, inadvertently put a rubber stamp on Nixon’s refusal to accept responsibility. Believing it was better for the country to move past the divisions of the Watergate era, Ford issued a preemptive pardon for any crimes the former president might have committed against the United States while in office. Ford maintained that the acceptance of a pardon was an admission of guilt.
But Ford’s pardon meant Nixon never faced legal accountability for his actions. That escape allowed him to argue that a president is above the law. In a 1977 interview with British journalist David Frost, Nixon told Frost that “when the president does it…that means that it is not illegal,” by definition.
As Nixon did, Trump has watched those who participated in his schemes pay dearly for their support, but he appears angry and confused at the idea that he himself could be held legally accountable for his behavior.
But without accountability, as Judge Roland noted, there is no incentive to stop dangerous behavior. Josh Dawsey reported last night in the Washington Post that since Trump has taken over the Republican National Committee and purged it of former employees, those interviewing for jobs are being asked if they believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Other questions, Dawsey reported, include “what applicants believe should be done on ‘election integrity’ in 2024.”
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Making Attorneys Get un-Attorneyed
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People need to understand how reluctant bar associations are to disbar attorneys. It is literally the weapon of last resort. In 2018, the most recent year I found data for, there were 1.3 million practicing attorneys in the United States. That year, a bit under 3,000 faced some sort of public discipline. That’s well under 1% of all attorneys. Even fewer, around 600, were disbarred that year. Bar associations are comprised of lawyers. They never want to take away a fellow attorney’s ability to practice law. They do everything they can before they resort to that. To suggest that disbarring in multiple jurisdictions could only be the result of politics and the weaponization of the legal system is so ludicrous that it doesn’t warrant any serious discussion. I would argue that more lawyers should be disbarred every year. There are a lot of bad attorneys out there. They go completely unpunished most of the time. When they are punished, it’s usually a slap on the wrist. So when a recommendation to disbar an attorney is made, you can bet that attorney either did something really, really bad, or they have a pattern of misconduct that lesser punishments have failed to correct.
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Yeah, true… of course, I doubt most non-lawyers realize that about disbarment. And of course the MAGA folks are already primed to believe that “the deep state” is out to get them and their movement…
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John Oliver recently did a story about state medical boards and how reluctant they are to discipline doctors. It’s the same with lawyers only worse, because typically lives aren’t at stake, so there’s not nearly as much public pressure for bar associations to discipline attorneys. It’s literally a fox guarding the henhouse situation. So when some of the foxes actually protect the hens, you know it’s bad.
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March 28, 2024 (Thursday)
Yesterday the National Economic Council called a meeting of the Supply Chain Disruptions Task Force, which the Biden-Harris administration launched in 2021, to discuss the impact of the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge and the partial closure of the Port of Baltimore on regional and national supply chains. The task force draws members from the White House and the departments of Transportation, Commerce, Agriculture, Defense, Labor, Health and Human Services, Energy, and Homeland Security. It is focused on coordinating efforts to divert ships to other ports and to minimize impacts to employers and workers, making sure, for example, that dock workers stay on payrolls.
Today, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg convened a meeting of port, labor, and industry partners—ocean carriers, truckers, local business owners, unions, railroads, and so on—to mitigate disruption from the bridge collapse. Representatives came from 40 organizations including American Roll-on Roll-off Carrier; the Georgia Ports Authority; the International Longshoremen’s Association, the International Organization of Masters, Mates and Pilots; John Deere; Maersk; Mercedes-Benz North America Operations; Seabulk Tankers; Under Armour; and the World Shipping Council.
Today the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration announced it would make $60 million available immediately to be used as a down payment toward initial costs. Already, though, some Republicans are balking at the idea of using new federal money to rebuild the bridge, saying that lawmakers should simply take the money that has been appropriated for things like electric vehicles, or wait until insurance money comes in from the shipping companies.
In 2007, when a bridge across the Mississippi River in Minneapolis suddenly collapsed, Congress passed funding to rebuild it in days and then-president George W. Bush signed the measure into law within a week of the accident.
In the past days, we have learned that the six maintenance workers killed when the bridge collapsed were all immigrants, natives of Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Around 39% of the workforce in the construction industry around Baltimore and Washington, D.C., about 130,000 people, are immigrants, Scott Dance and María Luisa Paúl reported in the Washington Post yesterday.
Some of the men were undocumented, and all of them were family men who sent money back to their home countries, as well. From Honduras, the nephew of one of the men killed told the Associated Press, “The kind of work he did is what people born in the U.S. won’t do. People like him travel there with a dream. They don’t want to break anything or take anything.”
In the Philadelphia Inquirer today, journalist Will Bunch castigated the right-wing lawmakers and pundits who have whipped up native-born Americans over immigration, calling immigrants sex traffickers and fentanyl dealers, and even “animals.” Bunch illustrated that the reality of what was happening on the Francis Scott Key Bridge when it collapsed creates an opportunity to reframe the immigration debate in the United States.
Last month, Catherine Rampell of the Washington Post noted that immigration is a key reason that the United States experienced greater economic growth than any other nation in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. The surge of immigration that began in 2022 brought to the U.S. working-age people who, Director Phill Swagel of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office wrote, are expected to make the U.S. gross domestic product about $7 trillion larger over the ten years from 2023 to 2034 than it would have been otherwise. Those workers will account for about $1 trillion dollars in revenues.
Curiously, while Republican leaders today are working to outdo each other in their harsh opposition to immigration, it was actually the leaders of the original Republican Party who recognized the power of immigrants to build the country and articulated an economic justification for increased immigration during the nation’s first major anti-immigrant period.
The United States had always been a nation of immigrants, but in the 1840s the failure of the potato crop in Ireland sent at least half a million Irish immigrants to the United States. As they moved into urban ports on the East Coast, especially in Massachusetts and New York, native-born Americans turned against them as competitors for jobs.
The 1850s saw a similar anti-immigrant fury in the new state of California. After the discovery of gold there in 1848, native-born Americans—the so-called Forty Niners—moved to the West Coast. They had no intention of sharing the riches they expected to find. The Indigenous people who lived there had no right to the land under which gold lay, native-born men thought; nor did the Mexicans whose government had sold the land to the U.S. in 1848; nor did the Chileans, who came with mining skills that made them powerful competitors. Above all, native-born Americans resented the Chinese miners who came to work in order to send money home to a land devastated by the first Opium War.
Democrats and the new anti-immigrant American Party (more popularly known as the “Know Nothings” because members claimed to know nothing about the party) turned against the new immigrants, seeing them as competition that would drive down wages. In the 1850s, Know Nothing officials in Massachusetts persecuted Catholics and deported Irish immigrants they believed were paupers. In California the state legislature placed a monthly tax on Mexican and Chinese miners, made unemployment a crime, took from Chinese men the right to testify in court, and finally tried to stop Chinese immigration altogether by taxing shipmasters $50 for each Chinese immigrant they brought.
When the Republicans organized in the 1850s, they saw society differently than the Democrats and the Know Nothings. They argued that society was not made up of a struggle over a limited economic pie, but rather that hardworking individuals would create more than they could consume, thus producing capital that would make the economy grow. The more people a nation had, the stronger it would be.
In 1860 the new party took a stand against the new laws that discriminated against immigrants. Immigrants’ rights should not be “abridged or impaired,” the delegates to its convention declared, adding that they were “in favor of giving a full and efficient protection to the rights of all classes of citizens, whether native or naturalized, both at home and abroad.”
Republicans’ support for immigration only increased during the Civil War. In contrast to the southern enslavers, they wanted to fill the land with people who supported freedom. As one poorly educated man wrote to his senator, “Protect Emegration and that will protect the Territories to Freedom.”
Republicans also wanted to bring as many workers to the country as possible to increase economic development. The war created a huge demand for agricultural products to feed the troops. At the same time, a terrible drought in Europe meant there was money to be made exporting grain. But the war was draining men to the battlefields of Stones River and Gettysburg and to the growing U.S. Navy, leaving farmers with fewer and fewer hands to work the land.
By 1864, Republicans were so strongly in favor of immigration that Congress passed “an Act to Encourage Immigration.” The law permitted immigrants to borrow against future homesteads to fund their voyage to the U.S., appropriated money to provide for impoverished immigrants upon their arrival, and, to undercut Democrats’ accusations that they were simply trying to find men to throw into the grinding war, guaranteed that no immigrant could be drafted until he announced his intention of becoming a citizen.
Support for immigration has waxed and waned repeatedly since then, but as recently as 1989, Republican president Ronald Reagan said: “We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people—our strength—from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation…. Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier. This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”
The workers who died in the bridge collapse on Tuesday “were not ‘poisoning the blood of our country,’” Will Bunch wrote, quoting Trump; “they were replenishing it…. They may have been born all over the continent, but when these men plunged into our waters on Tuesday, they died as Americans.”
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Please, more of this!! We need to make this a nationwide phenomenon.
(The sentiment, not the dying part)
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March 29, 2024 (Friday)
On Wednesday the nonprofit, nonpartisan Institute for the Study of War published a long essay explaining that Russia’s only strategy for success in Ukraine is to win the disinformation war in which it is engaged. While the piece by Nataliya Bugayova and Frederick W. Kagan, with Katryna Stepanenko, focused on Russia’s war against Ukraine, the point it makes about Russia’s information operation against Western countries applies more widely.
The authors note that the countries allied behind Ukraine dwarf Russia, with relative gross domestic products of $63 trillion and $1.9 trillion, respectively, while those countries allied with Russia are not mobilizing to help Russian president Vladimir Putin. Russia cannot defeat Ukraine or the West, they write, if the West mobilizes its resources.
This means that the strategy that matters most for the Kremlin is not the military strategy, but rather the spread of disinformation that causes the West to back away and allow Russia to win. That disinformation operation echoes the Russian practice of getting a population to believe in a false reality so that voters will cast their ballots for the party of oligarchs. In this case, in addition to seeding the idea that Ukraine cannot win and that the Russian invasion was justified, the Kremlin is exploiting divisions already roiling U.S. politics.
It is, for example, playing on the American opposition to sending our troops to fight “forever” wars, a dislike ingrained in the population since the Vietnam War. But the U.S. is not fighting in Ukraine. Ukrainians are asking only for money and matériel, and their war is not a proxy war—they are fighting for their own reasons—although their victory could well prevent U.S. engagement elsewhere in the future. The Kremlin is also playing on the idea that aid to Ukraine is too expensive as the U.S. faces large budget deficits, but the U.S. contribution to Ukraine’s war effort in 2023 was less than 0.5% of the defense budget.
Russian propaganda is also changing key Western concepts of war, suggesting, for example, that Ukrainian surrender will bring peace when, in fact, the end of fighting will simply take away Ukrainians’ ability to protect themselves against Russian violence. The authors note that Russia is using Americans’ regard for peace, life, American interests, freedom of debate, and responsible foreign relations against the U.S.
The authors’ argument parallels that of political observers in the U.S. and elsewhere: Russian actors have amplified the power of a relatively small, aggressive country by leveraging disinformation.
The European Union will hold parliamentary elections in June, and on Wednesday the Czech government sanctioned a news site called Voice of Europe, saying it was part of a pro-Russian propaganda operation. It also sanctioned the man running the site, Artyom Marchevsky, as well as Putin ally Viktor Medvedchuk, a Ukrainian oligarch, saying Medvedchuk was running a “Russian influence operation” through Voice of Europe.
The far right has been rising in Europe, and Nicholas Vinocur, Pieter Haeck, and Eddy Wax of Politico noted that “Voice of Europe’s YouTube page throws up a parade of EU lawmakers, many of them belonging to far-right, Euroskeptic parties, who line up to bash the Green Deal, predict the Union’s imminent collapse, or attack Ukraine.”
Belgian security services were in on the investigation, and on Thursday, Belgian prime minister Alexander De Croo added that Russian operatives had paid European Union lawmakers to parrot Russian propaganda. Intelligence sources told Czech media that Voice of Europe paid politicians from Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, and Poland to influence the upcoming E.U. elections. Germany’s Der Spiegel newspaper said the money was paid in cash or cryptocurrency.
Czech prime minister Petr Fiala wrote on social media: “We have uncovered a pro-Russian network that was developing an operation to spread Russian influence and undermine security across Europe.” “This shows how great the risk of foreign influence is,” Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte told journalists. “It’s a threat to our democracy, to our free elections, to our freedom of speech, to everything.”
There are reasons to think the same disinformation process is underway in the United States. Not only do MAGA Republicans, including House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), parrot Russian talking points about Ukraine, but Russian disinformation has also been a key part of the House Republicans’ attempt to impeach President Joe Biden.
Republicans spent months touting Alexander Smirnov’s allegation that Biden had accepted foreign bribes, with Representative James Comer (R-KY) and Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) calling his evidence “verifiable” and “valuable.” In February the Department of Justice indicted Smirnov for creating a false record, days before revealing that he was in close contact with “Russian intelligence agencies” and was “actively peddling new lies that could impact U.S. elections.”
On March 19, former Rudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnas testified about the investigation into Biden’s alleged corruption before the House Oversight Committee at the request of the Democrats. Parnas was part of the attempt to create dirt on Biden before the 2020 election, and he explained how the process worked.
“The only information ever pushed about the Bidens and Ukraine has come from Russia and Russian agents,” Parnas said, and was part of “a much larger plan for Russia to crush Ukraine by infiltrating the United States.” Politicians and right-wing media figures, including then-representative Devin Nunes (R-CA), Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), The Hill reporter John Solomon, Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity, and other FNC hosts, knew the narrative was false, Parnas said, even as they echoed it. He suggested that they were permitting “Russia to use our government for malicious purposes, and to reward selfish people with ill-gotten gains.”
The attempt to create a false reality—whether by foreign operatives or homegrown ones—seems increasingly obvious in perceptions of the 2024 election. There has been much chatter, for example, about polls showing Trump ahead of Biden. But the 2022 polls were badly skewed rightward by partisan actors, and Democrat Marilyn Lands’s overwhelming victory over her Republican opponent in an Alabama House election this week suggests those errors have not yet been fully addressed.
Real measures of political enthusiasm appear to favor Biden and the Democrats. On Wednesday, Molly Cook Escobar, Albert Sun, and Shane Goldmacher of the New York Times reported that since leaving office, Trump has spent more than $100 million on legal fees alone. He is badly in need of money, and his reordering of the funding priorities of the Republican National Committee to put himself first means that the party is badly in need of money, too.
Donors’ awareness that their cash will go to Trump before funding other Republican candidates might well slow fundraising. Certainly, small-donor contributions to Trump have dropped off significantly: Brian Schwartz of CNBC reported last week that “[i]n 2023, Trump’s reelection campaign raised 62.5% less money from small-dollar donors than it did in 2019, the year before the last presidential election.”
Billionaires Liz and Dick Uihlein have recently said they will back Trump, and Alexandra Ulmer of Reuters reported on Tuesday that other billionaires had pooled the money to back Trump’s then–$454 million appeal bond before an appeals court reduced it. But Ulmer also noted that there might be a limit to such gifts, as they “could draw scrutiny from election regulators or federal prosecutors if the benefactors were to give Trump amounts exceeding campaign contribution limits. While the payment would not be a direct donation to Trump’s campaign, federal laws broadly define political contributions as ‘anything of value’ provided to a campaign.”
Meanwhile, the fundraising of Biden and the Democrats is breaking records. Last night, in New York City, former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama joined Biden onstage with television personality Stephen Colbert, along with event host Mindy Kaling and musical guests Queen Latifah, Lizzo, and Ben Platt. The 5,000-person event raised an eye-popping amount—more than $25 million—and the campaign noted that, unlike donations to Trump, every dollar raised would go to the campaign.
In his remarks, Biden said that the grassroots nature of the Democrats’ support showed in the number of people who have contributed so far to his campaign: 1.5 million in all, including 550,000 “brand-new contributors in the last couple of weeks.” Ninety-seven percent of the donations have been less than $200.
Tonight, Adrienne Watson, the spokesperson for the National Security Council, the president’s primary forum for national security and foreign policy, pointed to Russia’s devastating recent attacks on Ukraine’s energy grid and called again for Speaker Johnson to bring up the bipartisan national security supplemental bill providing aid to Ukraine that the Senate passed in February. She warned: “Ukraine’s need is urgent, and we cannot afford any further delays.”
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