I think they have pretty much baked this in already. If policy, as such, is important to you, you probably realized a long time ago that Il Douche is an idiot. Pointing out that water is still wet doesn’t drive eyeballs or clicks. I wish the press was more invested in doing their jobs than in click-baiting, but they are not, and this is the world we are in. A blow-out, true blue wave would not make them money, so they are going to do their best to make it close. All in the name on “neutrality,” of course.
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August 28, 2024 (Wednesday)
Former president Trump appears to have slid further since last night’s news about a new grand jury’s superseding indictment of him on charges of trying to overthrow the 2020 presidential election. Over the course of about four hours this morning, Trump posted 50 times on his social media platform, mostly reposting material that was associated with QAnon, violent, authoritarian, or conspiratorial.
He suggested he is “100% INNOCENT,” and that the indictment is a “Witch Hunt.” He called for trials and jail for special counsel Jack Smith, former president Barack Obama, and the members of Congress who investigated the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. And he reposted a sexual insult about the political careers of both Vice President Kamala Harris and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Meanwhile, Trump’s campaign has today escalated the fight about Trump’s photo op Monday at Arlington National Cemetery, where campaign staff took photos and videos in Section 60, the burial ground of recent veterans, apparently over the strong objections of cemetery officials. Then the campaign released photos and a video from the visit attacking Harris.
Arlington National Cemetery was established on the former property of General Robert E. Lee in 1864, after the Lee family did not pay their property taxes. At the time, Lee was leading Confederate forces against the United States government, and those buried in the cemetery in its early years were those killed in the Civil War. The cemetery is one of two in the United States that is under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Army, and it is widely considered hallowed ground.
A statement from the Arlington National Cemetery reiterated: “Federal law prohibits political campaign or election-related activities within Army National Military Cemeteries, to include photographers, content creators or any other persons attending for purposes, or in direct support of a partisan political candidate’s campaign. Arlington National Cemetery reinforced and widely shared this law and its prohibitions with all participants. We can confirm there was an incident, and a report was filed.”
Republican vice presidential candidate Ohio Senator J.D. Vance first said there was a “little disagreement” at the cemetery, but in Erie, Pennsylvania, today he tried to turn the incident into an attack on Harris. “She wants to yell at Donald Trump because he showed up?” Vance said. “She can go to hell.” Harris has not, in fact, commented on the controversy.
VoteVets, a progressive organization that works to elect veterans to office, called the Arlington episode “sickening.”
In an interview with television personality Dr. Phil that aired last night, Trump suggested that Democrats in California each got seven ballots and that he would win in the state if Jesus Christ counted the votes. As Philip Bump of the Washington Post pointed out today, Trump has always said he could not lose elections unless there was fraud; last night he suggested repeatedly that God wants him to win the 2024 election.
When asked his opinion of Vice President Harris, Trump once again called her “a Marxist,” a reference that would normally be used to refer to someone who agrees with the basic principles outlined by nineteenth-century philosopher Karl Marx in his theory of how society works. In Marx’s era, people in the U.S. and Europe were grappling with what industrialization would mean for the relationship between individual workers, employers, resources, and society. Marx believed that there was a growing conflict between workers and capitalists that would eventually lead to a revolution in which workers would take over the means of production—factories, farms, and so on—and end economic inequality.
Harris has shown no signs of embracing this philosophy, and on August 15, when Trump talked at reporters for more than an hour at his Bedminster property in front of a table with coffee and breakfast cereal at what was supposed to be a press conference on the economy, he said of his campaign strategy: “All we have to do is define our opponent as being a communist or a socialist or somebody that’s going to destroy our country.”
Trump uses “Marxist,” “communist,” and “socialist” interchangeably, and when he and his allies accuse Democrats of being one of those things, they are not talking about an economic system in which the people, represented by the government, take control of the means of production. They are using a peculiarly American adaptation of the term “socialist.”
True socialism has never been popular in America. The best it has ever done in a national election was in 1912, when labor organizer Eugene V. Debs, running for president as a Socialist, won 6% of the vote, coming in behind Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and William Howard Taft.
What Republicans mean by “socialism” in America is a product of the years immediately after the Civil War, when African American men first got the right to vote. Eager to join the economic system from which they had previously been excluded, these men voted for leaders who promised to rebuild the South, provide schools and hospitals (as well as prosthetics for veterans, a vital need in the post-war U.S.), and develop the economy with railroads to provide an equal opportunity for all men to rise to prosperity.
Former Confederates loathed the idea of Black men voting almost as much as they hated the idea of equal rights. They insisted that the public programs poorer voters wanted were simply a redistribution of wealth from prosperous white men to undeserving Black Americans who wanted a handout, although white people would also benefit from such programs. Improvements could be paid for only with tax levies, and white men were the only ones with property in the Reconstruction South. Thus, public investments in roads and schools and hospitals would redistribute wealth from propertied men to poor people, from white men to Black people. It was, opponents said, “socialism.” Poor Black voters were instituting, one popular magazine wrote, “Socialism in South Carolina” and should be kept from the polls.
This idea that it was dangerous for working people to participate in government caught on in the North as immigrants moved into growing cities to work in the developing factories. Like their counterparts in the South, they voted for roads and schools, and wealthy men insisted these programs meant a redistribution of wealth through tax dollars. They got more concerned still when a majority of Americans began to call for regulation to keep businessmen from gouging consumers, polluting the environment, and poisoning the food supply (the reason you needed to worry about strangers and candy in that era was that candy was often painted with lead paint).
Any attempt to regulate business would impinge on a man’s liberty, wealthy men argued, and it would cost tax dollars to hire inspectors. Thus, they said, it was a redistribution of wealth. Long before the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia brought the fears of a workers’ government to life, Americans argued that their economy was under siege by socialists. Their conviction did indeed lead to a redistribution of wealth, but as regular Americans were kept from voting, the wealth went dramatically upward, not down.
The powerful formula linking racism to the idea of an active government and arguing that a government that promotes infrastructure, provides a basic social safety net, and regulates business is socialism has shaped American history since Reconstruction. In the modern era the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision of 1954 enabled wealthy men to convince voters that their tax dollars were being taken from them to promote the interests of Black Americans. President Ronald Reagan made that formula central to the Republican Party, and it has lived there ever since, as Republicans call any policy designed to help ordinary Americans “socialism.”
Vice President Harris recently said she would continue the work of the Biden administration and crack down on the price-fixing, price gouging, and corporate mergers that drove high grocery prices in the wake of the pandemic. Such plans have been on the table for a while: Senator Bob Casey (D-PA) noted last year that from July 2020 through July 2022, inflation rose by 14% and corporate profits rose by 75%. He backed a measure introduced by Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA)—who came up with the idea of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—that would set standards to prevent large corporations from price gouging during an “exceptional market shock” like a power grid failure, a public health emergency, a natural disaster, and so on. Harris’s proposal was met with pushback from opponents saying that such a law would do more harm than good and that post-pandemic high inflation was driven by the market.
Yesterday, during testimony for an antitrust case, an email from the senior director for pricing at the grocery giant Kroger, Andy Groff, to other Kroger executives seemed to prove that those calling out price gouging were at least in part right. In it, Groff wrote: "On milk and eggs, retail inflation has been significantly higher than cost inflation.”
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August 29, 2024 (Thursday)
And now the U.S. Army has weighed in on the scandal surrounding Trump’s visit to Arlington National Cemetery for a campaign photo op, after which his team shared a campaign video it had filmed. The Army said that the cemetery hosts almost 3,000 public wreath-laying ceremonies a year without incident and that Trump and his staff “were made aware of federal laws, Army regulations and [Department of Defense] policies, which clearly prohibit political activities on cemetery grounds.”
It went on to say that a cemetery employee “who attempted to ensure adherence to these rules was abruptly pushed aside…. This incident was unfortunate, and it is also unfortunate that the… employee and her professionalism has been unfairly attacked. [Arlington National Cemetery] is a national shrine to the honored dead of the Armed Forces, and its dedicated staff will continue to ensure public ceremonies are conducted with the dignity and respect the nation’s fallen deserve.”
“I don’t think I can adequately explain what a massive deal it is for the Army to make a statement like this,” political writer and veteran Allison Gill of Mueller, She Wrote, noted. “The Pentagon avoids statements like this at all costs. But a draft dodging traitor decided to lie about our armed forces staff, so they went to paper.”
The deputy Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh said the Department of Defense is “aware of the statement that the Army issued, and we support what the Army said.” Hours later, Trump campaign manager Chris LaCivita reposted the offending video on X and, tagging the official account for Army Secretary Christine Wormuth, said he was “hoping to trigger the hacks” in her office.
In Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall reported that the Trump campaign’s plan was to lay a wreath at Arlington National Cemetery to honor the 13 members of the U.S. military killed in the suicide bombing during the evacuation of Kabul, Afghanistan, in August 2021. They intended to film the event and then attack Vice President Kamala Harris and President Joe Biden for not “showing up” for the event, which they intended to portray as an “established memorial.”
Another major story from yesterday is that the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) has finalized two rules that will work to stop corruption and money laundering in U.S. residential real estate and in private investment.
This is a big deal. As scholar of kleptocracies Casey Michel put it: “This is a massive, massive deal in the world of counter-kleptocracy—the U.S. is finally ending the gargantuan anti–money laundering loopholes for real estate, private equity, hedge funds, and more. Can’t overstate how important this is. What a feat.”
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991, the oligarchs who rose to power in the former Soviet republics looked to park their illicit money in western democracies, where the rule of law would protect their investments. Once invested in the United States, they favored the Republicans, who focused on the protection of wealth rather than social services. For their part, Republican politicians focused on spreading capitalism rather than democracy, arguing that the two went hand in hand.
The financial deregulation that made the U.S. a good bet for oligarchs to launder money got a boost when, shortly after the September 11, 2001, attacks, Congress passed the USA PATRIOT Act to address the threat of terrorism. The law took on money laundering and the illicit funding of terrorism, requiring financial institutions to inspect large sums of money passing through them. But the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) exempted many real estate deals from the new regulations.
The United States became one of the money-laundering capitals of the world, with hundreds of billions of dollars laundered in the U.S. every year.
In 2011 the international movement of illicit money led then–FBI director Robert Mueller to tell the Citizens Crime Commission of New York City that globalization and technology had changed the nature of organized crime. International enterprises, he said, “are running multi-national, multi-billion dollar schemes from start to finish…. They may be former members of nation-state governments, security services, or the military…. These criminal enterprises are making billions of dollars from human trafficking, health care fraud, computer intrusions, and copyright infringement. They are cornering the market on natural gas, oil, and precious metals, and selling to the highest bidder…. These groups may infiltrate our businesses. They may provide logistical support to hostile foreign powers. They may try to manipulate those at the highest levels of government. Indeed, these so-called ‘iron triangles’ of organized criminals, corrupt government officials, and business leaders pose a significant national security threat.”
Congress addressed this threat in 2021 by including the Corporate Transparency Act in the National Defense Authorization Act. It undercut shell companies and money laundering by requiring the owners of any company that is not otherwise overseen by the federal government (by filing taxes, for example, or through close regulation) to file with FinCEN a report identifying (by name, birth date, address, and an identifying number) each person associated with the company who either owns 25% or more of it or exercised substantial control over it. The measure also increased penalties for money laundering and streamlined cooperation between banks and foreign law enforcement authorities. That act went into effect on January 1, 2024.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration made fighting corruption a centerpiece of its attempt to shore up democracy both at home and abroad. In June 2021, President Biden declared the fight against corruption a core U.S. national security interest. “Corruption threatens United States national security, economic equity, global anti-poverty and development efforts, and democracy itself,” he wrote. “But by effectively preventing and countering corruption and demonstrating the advantages of transparent and accountable governance, we can secure a critical advantage for the United States and other democracies.”
In March 2023 the Treasury told Congress that “[m]oney laundering perpetrated by the Government of the Russian Federation (GOR), Russian [state-owned enterprises], Russian organized crime, and Russian elites poses a significant threat to the national security of the United States and the integrity of the international financial system,” and it outlined the ways in which it had been trying to combat that corruption.
Now FinCEN has firmed up rules to add anti-money-laundering safeguards to private real estate and private investment. They will require certain industry professionals to report information to FinCEN about cash transfers of residential real estate to a legal entity or trust, transactions that “present a high illicit finance risk,” FinCEN wrote. “The rule will increase transparency, limit the ability of illicit actors to anonymously launder illicit proceeds through the American housing market, and bolster law enforcement investigative efforts.” The real estate rule will go into effect on December 1, 2025.
The rule about investment advisors will make the obligation to report suspicious financial activity apply to certain financial advisors. This rule will go into effect on January 1, 2026.
“The Treasury Department has been hard at work to disrupt attempts to use the United States to hide and launder ill-gotten gains,” Secretary of the Treasury Janet L. Yellen explained. “That includes by addressing our biggest regulatory deficiencies, including through these two new rules that close critical loopholes in the U.S. financial system that bad actors use to facilitate serious crimes like corruption, narcotrafficking, and fraud. These steps will make it harder for criminals to exploit our strong residential real estate and investment adviser sectors.”
“I applaud FinCEN’s commonsense efforts to prevent corrupt actors from using the American residential real estate and private investment sectors as safe havens for hiding dirty money,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) said in a statement. “For too long, vulnerabilities in the system have attracted kleptocrats, cartels, and criminals looking to stow away their ill-gotten gains. I hope FinCEN will apply similar safeguards to commercial real estate, as well as due diligence requirements to investment advisors. These are all welcome steps toward keeping our country and financial system safe and secure for the American people—not those who wish to abuse it.”
The Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (also known as the Helsinki Commission) brought the history of modern money laundering full circle. It said: “We welcome the Treasury Department’s decision to close off crucial pathways for Russian money laundering and sanctions evasion through real estate and private equity.”
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August 30, 2024 (Friday)
Trump and the MAGA movement garnered power through performances that projected dominance and cowed media and opponents into silence. Rather than disqualifying him from the highest office in the United States, Trump’s mocking of a disabled reporter, bragging about assaulting women, and calling immigrants rapists and criminals seemed to demonstrate his dominance and strengthen him with his base. In July the Republican National Convention celebrated that performance with a deliberate appropriation of the themes of professional wrestling, including a display by an actual professional wrestler.
Their plan for winning the 2024 election seems to have been to put forward more of the same.
But the national mood appears to be changing. President Joe Biden’s decision to decline the Democratic nomination for president opened the way for the Democrats to launch a new, younger, more vibrant vision for the country.
Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, have promised to continue, and even to expand slightly, the programs that under the Biden-Harris administration have started the process of rebuilding the country’s infrastructure, bringing back manufacturing, and investing in industries to combat climate change. As the country did before 1981, they are promising to continue to focus on supporting a strong middle class rather than those at the top of the economy.
Harris and Walz are building on this economic base to recenter the United States government on the idea of community. They have deliberately rejected the identity politics that Trump used so effectively to assert his dominance and have instead emphasized that they see the country not as a community defined by winners and losers, but as one in which everyone has value and should have the same opportunities for success.
Last night, CNN’s Dana Bash asked Harris, whose mother immigrated to the U.S. from India and whose father immigrated from Jamaica, to respond to Trump’s suggestion that she “happened to turn Black” for political advantage, “questioning a core part of your identity.” Harris responded: “Same old, tired playbook. Next question, please,” and she laughed. “That’s it?” Bash asked. “That’s it,” Harris answered.
Harris’s refusal to accept the MAGA terms of engagement, along with the exuberant support for Harris and Walz, has Trump, Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, and MAGA Republicans reeling. That, in turn, has made them seem vulnerable, and that vulnerability is now opening up room for pundits from a range of outlets to challenge them. They seem to be losing the ability to control the public conversation by asserting dominance.
This change has been evident this week in the response to Trump’s visit to Arlington National Cemetery with the family of a soldier who died in the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan three years ago for campaign videos and photos attacking Harris, despite the fact that federal law prohibits campaign activities in the cemetery, in what is widely considered hallowed ground. The moment almost passed unnoticed, as it likely would have in the past, but Esquire’s Charles Pierce asked in his blog: “How The Hell Was Trump Allowed To Use Arlington National Cemetery As A Campaign Prop?”
Led by NPR, different outlets begin to dig into the story, and Trump, Vance, Trump’s spokesperson, and Trump’s campaign manager Chris LaCivita all tried to brush off their lawlessness with their usual rhetoric. Trump tried to change the subject to say he was being unfairly attacked for supporting a military family. Vance tried to suggest that Harris should have attended the private ceremony and that for criticizing it she should “go to hell,” although she hadn’t commented on it. The spokesperson suggested that the female cemetery official who tried to stop them was experiencing a “mental health episode,” and LaCivita, a leading figure in the Swift Boat veterans’ attacks on John Kerry in 2004, reposted an offending video to “trigger” Army officials, he said.
It hasn’t flown. Today, MSNBC’s Dasha Burns asked Trump directly: “Should your campaign have put out those videos and photos?” Trump answered: “Well, we have a lot of people. You know, we have people, TikTok people, you know we’re leading the Internet. That was the other thing. We’re so far above her on the Internet….” Burns interrupted and followed up: “But on that hallowed ground, should they have put out the images…?” Trump said: “Well I don’t know what the rules and regulations are, I don’t know who did it, and, I, it could have been them. It could have been the parents. It could have been somebody….”
Burns interrupted again: “It was your campaign’s TikTok that put out the video.” Trump answered: “I really don’t know anything about it. All I do is I stood there and I said, ‘If you’d like to have a picture, we can have a picture.’ If somebody did it; this was a setup by the people in the administration that, 'Oh, Trump is coming to Arlington, that looks so bad for us.’”
In the days since Biden stepped out of contention, Trump has been flailing—often complaining that it is “unfair” that Biden isn’t his opponent any longer—but his behavior has rocketed downhill since the new grand jury delivered a new indictment revising the four charges against him for trying to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and install himself in power. Karen Tumulty wrote in the Washington Post today that Trump is “spiraling,” noting that in the space of 24 hours he posted about Harris engaging in a sex act, promoted QAnon slogans, and called for prison for his political opponents.
Tumulty notes that Trump’s team has been trying to get him to focus on the issues voters care about, but that after he “listlessly delivers some lines from the teleprompter,” he “gets bored and begins recycling the rants from his rallies.” Harris has stayed silent about his behavior, Tumulty says a campaign staffer told her, because “Why would we step in this man’s way?” The Harris campaign wants microphones left on throughout the planned September 10 debate, expecting that Trump will not be able to contain the rants that used to serve his interests but now turn voters off.
To Vance is left the job of trying to clean up after Trump, but he’s not a skilled politician. Asked by John Berman about Trump’s social media attacks, Vance suggested that Trump was bringing “fun” and “jokes” to politics to “lift people up.” But observers on social media noted that claiming that attacks are “jokes” is a key part of asserting dominance.
Vance himself went after Harris by saying that he had an early version of Harris’s CNN interview and then posting an old meme of a young Miss Teen USA who appeared to panic when answering a question and produced a nonsensical answer. When Berman told him that the young woman contemplated self-harm after becoming a national joke and asked if he would like to apologize for bringing up that old video, Vance declined to apologize, suggested we should “laugh at ourselves,” and repeated that we should “try to have some fun in politics.”
Vance got into deeper trouble, though, when asked to explain Trump’s statement when he told Dasha Burns that he opposes Florida’s six-week abortion ban. This November, Floridians will have to vote yes or no on a constitutional amendment that would put abortion rights similar to those of Roe v. Wade into the state constitution.
Trump’s opposition to that amendment reflects the political reality that abortion bans are unpopular even in Republican-dominated states, but the MAGA base is fervently antiabortion. “That ‘thump thump’ you just heard is the entire pro-life movement going under the bus,” one wrote.
A campaign spokesperson promptly tried to walk the statement back by saying that Trump “has not yet said how he will vote on the ballot initiative in Florida,” which Vance reiterated on CNN. When Berman pressed him on it, though, Vance appeared to lose the ability to hear the question, suggesting the feed was bad.
This afternoon, Trump announced he will side with the antiabortion activists and vote against the amendment to the Florida constitution that would restore the rights that were in Roe v. Wade. Harris and Walz, meanwhile, have announced a national bus tour to highlight reproductive freedom. It will start in Palm Beach, Florida, where the Trump Organization’s Mar-a-Lago property is located.
Today, lawyers for Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, the election workers Trump ally Rudy Giuliani defamed by accusing them of fraud in the 2020 election, asked a federal court to enforce the judgment that awarded them $146 million. They have asked for a court order requiring Giuliani to turn over his properties in New York and Florida, his luxury car, and his personal valuables including three New York Yankees World Series rings. Giuliani’s spokesperson accused the women of bullying Giuliani.
The Lincoln Project, which believes that needling Trump is the best way to rattle him, today released a video that portrays Trump as a predatory animal who is old, past his prime, and abandoned by his pack. Rather than engaging in his final hunt, he has found himself the prey. The voice-over intones: “The circle of life eventually closes on all things.”
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i see he’s chosen the “i’m incompetent” approach, with a dash of “i’m not in charge of anything”
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Saw a post about this event on social media this morning, and they are really emphasizing the “old, tired” part:
Leading up to the debate, I guess we’ll see which outlets will begin to cover 45 in the same way they did Biden.
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August 31, 2024 (Saturday)
Buddy took this picture on his way to work one morning while I was in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention.
So much of life is in the contrasts.
And after a very busy week, I’m going to go to bed early night. I’ll see you tomorrow.
[Photo by Buddy Poland.]
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September 1, 2024 (Sunday)
Almost one hundred and forty-two years ago, on September 5, 1882, workers in New York City celebrated the first Labor Day holiday with a parade. The parade almost didn’t happen: there was no band, and no one wanted to start marching without music. Once the Jewelers Union of Newark Two showed up with musicians, the rest of the marchers, eventually numbering between 10,000 and 20,000 men and women, fell in behind them to parade through lower Manhattan. At noon, when they reached the end of the route, the march broke up and the participants listened to speeches, drank beer, and had picnics. Other workers joined them.
Their goal was to emphasize the importance of workers in the industrializing economy and to warn politicians that they could not be ignored.
Less than 20 years before, northern men had fought a war to defend a society based on free labor and had, they thought, put in place a government that would support the ability of all hardworking men to rise to prosperity. But for all that the war had seemed to be about defending men against the rise of an oligarchy that intended to reduce all men to a life of either enslavement or wage labor, the war and its aftermath had pushed workers’ rights backward.
The drain of men to the battlefields and the western mines during the war resulted in a shortage of workers that kept unemployment low and wages high. Even when they weren’t, the intense nationalism of the war years tended to silence the voices of labor organizers. “It having been resolved to enlist with Uncle Sam for the war,” one organization declared when the war broke out, “this union stands adjourned until either the Union is safe, or we are whipped.”
Another factor working against the establishment of labor unions during the war was the tendency of employers to claim that striking workers were deliberately undercutting the war effort. They turned to the government to protect production, and in industries like Pennsylvania’s anthracite coal fields, government leaders sent soldiers to break budding unions and defend war production.
During the war, government contracting favored those companies that could produce big orders of the mule shoes, rifles, rain slickers, coffee, and all the other products that kept the troops supplied. The owners of the growing factories grew wealthy on government contracts, even as conditions in the busy factories deteriorated. While wages were high during the war, they were often paid in greenbacks, which were backed only by the government’s promise to pay.
While farmers and some entrepreneurs thrived during the war, urban workers and miners had reason to believe that employers had taken advantage of the war to make money off them. After the war, they began to strike for better wages and safer conditions. In August 1866, 60,000 people met as the National Labor Union in Baltimore, Maryland, where they called for an eight-hour workday. Most of those workers calling for organization simply wanted a chance to rise to comfort, but the resolutions developed by the group’s leaders after the convention declared that workers must join unions to reform the abuses of the industrial system.
To many of those who thought the war would create a country where hard work would mean success, the resolutions seemed to fly in the face of that harmony, echoing the southern enslavers by dividing the world into people of wealth and workers, and asking for government intervention, this time on the side of workers. Republicans began to redefine their older, broad concept of workers to mean urban unskilled or semi-skilled wage laborers specifically.
Then in 1867, a misstep by Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio made the party step back from workers. Wade had been a cattle drover and worked on the Erie Canal before studying law and entering politics, and he was a leader among those who saw class activism as the next step in the party’s commitment to free labor. His fiery oratory lifted him to prominence, and in March 1867 the Senate chose him its president pro tempore, in effect making him the nation’s acting vice president in those days before there was a process for replacing a vice president who had stepped into the presidency.
Wade joined a number of senators on a trip to the West, and in Lawrence, Kansas, newspapers reported—possibly incorrectly—that Wade predicted a fight in America between labor and capital. “Property is not equally divided,” the reporter claimed Wade said, “and a more equal distribution of capital must be worked out.” Congress, which Wade now led, had done much for ex-slaves and must now address “the terrible distinction between the man that labors and him that does not.”
Republican newspapers were apoplectic. The New York Times claimed that Wade was a demagogue. Every hard worker could succeed in America, it wrote. “Laborers here can make themselves sharers in the property of the country,—can become capitalists themselves,—just as nine in ten of all the capitalists in the country have done so before them,—by industry, frugality, and intelligent enterprise.” Trying to get rich by force of law would undermine society.
Congress established an eight-hour day for federal employees in June 1868, but in that year’s election, voters turned Wade, and with others like him, out of office. In 1869, Republican president Ulysses S. Grant issued a proclamation saying that the eight-hour workday of “laborers, workmen, and mechanics” would not mean cuts in wages.
Then, in spring 1871, in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, workers took over the city of Paris and established the Paris Commune. The transatlantic cable had gone into operation in 1866, and American newspapers had featured stories of the European war. Now, hungry for dramatic stories, they plastered details of the Commune on their front pages, describing it as a propertied American’s worst nightmare. They highlighted the murder of priests, the burning of the Tuileries Palace, and the bombing of buildings by crazed women who lobbed burning bottles of newfangled petroleum through cellar windows.
The Communards were a “wild, reckless, irresponsible, murderous mobocracy” who planned to confiscate all property and transfer all money, factories, and land to associations of workmen, American newspapers wrote. In their telling, the Paris Commune brought to life the chaotic world the elite enslavers foresaw when they said it was imperative to keep workers from politics.
Scribner’s Monthly warned in italics: “the interference of ignorant labor with politics is dangerous to society.” Famous reformer Charles Loring Brace looked at the rising numbers of industrial workers and the conditions of city life, and warned Americans, “In the judgment of one who has been familiar with our ‘dangerous classes’ for twenty years, there are just the same explosive social elements beneath the surface of New York as of Paris.”
At the same time, it was also clear that wealthy industrialists were gaining more and more control over both state and local governments. In 1872 the Credit Mobilier scandal broke. This was a complicated affair, and what had actually happened was almost certainly misrepresented, but it seemed to show congressmen taking bribes from railroad barons, and Americans were ready to believe that they were doing so. Then, in July 1877, after the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad cut wages 20 percent and strikers shut down most of the nation’s railroads, President Rutherford B. Hayes sent U.S. soldiers to the cities immobilized by the strikes. It seemed industrialists had the Army at their beck and call.
By 1882, factories and the fortunes they created had swung the government so far toward men of capital that it seemed there was more room for workingmen to demand their rights. By the 1880s, even the staunchly Republican Chicago Tribune complained about the links between business and government: “Behind every one of half of the portly and well-dressed members of the Senate can be seen the outlines of some corporation interested in getting or preventing legislation,” it wrote. The Senate, Harper’s Weekly noted, was “a club of rich men.”
The workers marching in New York City in the first Labor Day celebration in 1882 carried banners saying: “Labor Built This Republic and Labor Shall Rule it,” “Labor Creates All Wealth,” “No Land Monopoly,” “No Money Monopoly,” “Labor Pays All Taxes,” “The Laborer Must Receive and Enjoy the Full Fruit of His Labor,” ‘Eight Hours for a Legal Day’s Work,” and “The True Remedy is Organization and the Ballot.”
Two years later, workers helped to elect Democrat Grover Cleveland to the White House. A number of Republicans crossed over to support the reformer, afraid that, as he said, “The gulf between employers and the employed is constantly widening, and classes are rapidly forming, one comprising the very rich and powerful, while in another are found the toiling poor…. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.”
In 1888, Cleveland won the popular vote by about 100,000 votes, but his Republican opponent, Benjamin Harrison, won in the Electoral College. Harrison promised that his would be “A BUSINESS MAN’S ADMINISTRATION” and said that “before the close of the present Administration business men will be thoroughly well content with it….”
Businessmen mostly were, but the rest of the country wasn’t. In November 1892 a Democratic landslide put Cleveland back in office, along with the first Democratic Congress since before the Civil War. As soon as the results of the election became apparent, the Republicans declared that the economy would collapse. Harrison’s administration had been “beyond question the best business administration the country has ever seen,” one businessmen’s club insisted, so losing it could only be a calamity. “The Republicans will be passive spectators,” the Chicago Tribune noted. “It will not be their funeral.” People would be thrown out of work, but “[p]erhaps the working classes of the country need such a lesson….”
As investors rushed to take their money out of the U.S. stock market, the economy collapsed a few days before Cleveland took office in early March 1893. Trying to stabilize the economy by enacting the proposals capitalists wanted, Cleveland and the Democratic Congress had to abandon many of the pro-worker policies they had promised, and the Supreme Court struck down the rest (including the income tax).
They could, however, support Labor Day and its indication of workers’ political power. On June 28, 1894, Cleveland signed Congress’s bill making Labor Day a legal holiday. Each year, the first Monday in September would honor the country’s workers.
In Chicago the chair of the House Labor Committee, Lawrence McGann (D-IL), told the crowd gathered for the first official observance: “Let us each Labor day, hold a congress and formulate propositions for the amelioration of the people. Send them to your Representatives with your earnest, intelligent indorsement [sic], and the laws will be changed.”
Happy Labor Day.
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September 2, 2024 (Monday)
In an interview with right-wing host Mark Levin on the Fox News Channel last night, Trump complained about the new grand jury indictment of him for trying to steal the 2020 presidential election. “Whoever heard you get indicted for interfering with a presidential election where you have every right to do it,” he asked.
In fact, no one has a right to interfere with a presidential election. Several federal laws prohibit such interference. Legal analyst Joyce White Vance added: “This is the banality of evil right here—Trump asserting he can override the will of the voters to claim victory in an election he lost. And, he will do it again. We must vote against him in overwhelming numbers.”
Former president Trump is approaching the election of 2024 the way southern white supremacists approached elections from 1876 to 1964. He has made it very clear he is not trying to win the votes of a majority of Americans. He and his loyalists are trying to intimidate his opponents to keep them from voting while egging on his supporters to commit violence. They are bringing the tactics of the reactionary southern Democrats after the Civil War forward to the present day in an attempt to impose the same sort of minority rule on the nation as a whole.
Trump has made it clear he is not trying to win the popular vote. When his primary challenger Nikki Haley dropped out of the race in March, Trump’s team made no effort to win over her voters; it was President Joe Biden’s reelection team that reached out to them.
A few days later, when Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump and his loyalist Michael Whatley took over the Republican National Committee, they killed the plans of former RNC chair Ronna McDaniel to open 40 satellite campaign offices across ten battleground states. As The Dispatch noted, that meant very little ground game: doors knocked on, phone calls made, or volunteers organized. The new leadership of the RNC also fired 40 out of 60 employees whose job was field organizing.
Trump was clear what he was doing: rather than worrying about attracting voters, he intended to play out the game of the Big Lie that he had won the 2020 presidential election.
Since the 2020 election, at least 28 states have passed laws making it harder to vote in 2024. Whatley was a chief proponent of the Big Lie that justified those laws, and Trump put him in place, saying he wanted the RNC to prioritize “election integrity” efforts. The campaign has focused on lawsuits to make it harder to vote and to put their own loyalists into positions where they might be able to affect the certification of the 2024 vote. As Peter Nicholas reported at NBC News yesterday, Republicans have filed dozens of lawsuits that seemed designed not only to game the system, but also to convince supporters that the election is rigged against Trump.
That lie was the argument Florida governor Ron DeSantis made to justify creating an election police unit in 2022 to stop what he claimed was illegal voting, although voter fraud is vanishingly rare. The unit conducted raids—mostly in the early morning—primarily against Black Americans shortly before the 2022 election. Most of the cases were later dropped or those charged agreed to a plea deal without jail time.
The raids did, though, depress voting. In its 2023 annual report, the Office of Election Crime and Security wrote: “Enforcing Florida election law has the primary effect of punishing violators, but enforcement also and equally as important acts as a deterrent for those who may consider voting illegally or committing other election related crimes.”
Now MAGA Republicans have joined Trump in arguing that Democrats are trying to get noncitizen immigrants to vote for their candidates, although a federal law in place since 1996 makes it clear that it is illegal for noncitizens to vote in elections for president or members of Congress. It does not appear to matter to Republicans that there is no evidence that noncitizens try to vote. As House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said in May: “We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections, but it’s not been something that is easily provable.”
Texas attorney general Ken Paxton also created an “Election Integrity Unit” in the wake of the 2020 election, and on August 21, 2024, after Fox News Channel personality Maria Bartiromo repeated a baseless rumor about noncitizens registering to vote, Paxton launched what he called an undercover investigation that, just days later, launched raids against Latino activists. “It is evident through his pattern of lawsuits, raids, searches, and seizures that he is trying to keep Latinos from voting,” Latino leaders say.
This pattern echoes the Reconstruction Era intimidation of Black voters and their white Republican allies, and it does so with the same justification: the idea that business regulation, social welfare, infrastructure, and civil rights policies are “socialism.” Those policies had nothing to do with the actual principles of socialism, which call for the government to control the means of production. This “socialism” echoed the argument of southern white supremacists who used it to attack Black voting in 1871 after the Fifteenth Amendment, ratified the year before, made it unconstitutional to stop someone from voting on the basis of race.
As newly enfranchised formerly enslaved men who owned little property—because enslavers took what they produced—and white Republicans voted for lawmakers who would rebuild the South, white supremacist Democrats maintained that the roads, schools, and hospitals a healthy society needed could be paid for only with tax dollars. Since white men owned most of the property, such improvements were, they said, a redistribution of wealth.
In the nineteenth century, that argument led first to voter suppression and then to the argument that anyone who did not vote to keep the white supremacists in power was a danger to society. Good Americans must keep such dangerous people out of any proximity to power. In that light, outright violence to maintain the rule of the minority was a demonstration of civic virtue.
True to form, Trump and his supporters have made it clear they consider their ascendancy imperative to recover America from the carnage into which they allege President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have led it. And, if their opponents are truly as dangerous as they insist, those opponents must be capable of any of the actions MAGA Republicans falsely attribute to them.
Trump and his campaign advisor Corey Lewandowski have recently asserted the lie that Democrats kill newborn babies, for example, and Trump told the right-wing Moms for Liberty organization on Friday that schools are operating on children to transition them to a different sex. In a direct link to the ideas of the late nineteenth century that white supremacists used to justify taking power, Trump routinely calls Vice President Harris a communist.
Trump’s lies have become cartoonish as his attachment to reality has slipped, but behind them is a demonizing of his opponents that echoes the past argument that certain people must be kept from power and, possibly, purged from society.
Many of those arrested for attacking the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, told the court they believed they were defending American democracy from those who were destroying the country and had stolen the election. Trump has championed those arrested for trying to install him into the presidency, saying they are “patriots” who have been “treated unfairly” and “have shown incredible courage and sacrifice,” and has promised that if reelected, he will pardon the nearly 1,000 people found guilty of crimes related to that event.
A gala to celebrate and raise money for those attackers—the J6 Awards Gala—was scheduled to be held at Trump’s Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club this Thursday but has just been called off until after the election.
The celebration of violence is now deeply embedded in the MAGA movement with leaders like North Carolina lieutenant governor Mark Robinson, the Republican nominee for governor, who recently attacked an assortment of enemies and assured his audience: “Some folks need killing!” As Josh Kovensky of Talking Points Memo wrote on August 27, this violent tendency has become for MAGA Republicans a fantasy about deploying the military against American citizens.
Yesterday, on the same day that Trump declared he had the right to interfere in a presidential election to put himself in power, the pro-Trump owner of X, Elon Musk, reposted to his nearly 200 million followers a statement suggesting that women and men who can’t physically defend themselves are inferior to “alpha men” and are not good participants in government because they lack the ability to think critically. “This is why a Republic of high status males is best for decision making,” the original post said. “Democratic, but a democracy only for those who are free to think.”
Over the statement, Musk posted: “Interesting observation.”
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What a contrast that overview of Republicans overtly fascist strategies is to this piece at the NYT. Republicans are not so bad, you see. What’s important to realize is that Both Sides (trademark) spread and believe in lies and conspiracy theories!
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/03/technology/left-wing-misinformation-conspiracy-theories.html
Misinformation has always occurred during election seasons. What’s different about Tromp and his minions, as HCR’s letter shows, is that they’re doing it purposefully, with specific, time-tested methods and messages, not to mention a weapoized judicial system, in a deliberate effort to steal an election. Funny how the NYT doesn’t seem to find that at least a bit alarming.
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September 3, 2024 (Tuesday)
Last night the Boston Globe published a leaked email from a top volunteer with the Trump campaign, former Massachusetts Republican Party vice chair Tom Mountain, telling volunteers that the Trump campaign “no longer thinks New Hampshire is winnable” and is “pulling back” from that important swing state. He urged volunteers to turn their attention instead to Pennsylvania. After the story dropped, the Trump campaign cut ties with Mountain.
Stephen Collinson of CNN and Isaac Arnsdorf, Josh Dawsey, and Marianne LeVine of the Washington Post reported today that Trump’s team has given up on trying to get Trump to talk about the economy and other issues voters care about. The former president has decided to spend the rest of the campaign attacking Vice President Harris to destroy her popularity and drive voters away from her, rather than trying to attract them to himself. The Washington Post reporters noted that likely voters view Trump unfavorably and his team has concluded that while he can’t improve his own standing, he can damage hers.
Collinson dubbed Trump’s plans a “feral political offensive.”
It is not clear that this will work. As Collinson notes, Harris has refused to get dragged into the gutter with Trump, and Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark, who studies focus groups, notes that voters appear to want to put the nastiness of the past several years behind them. Still, the media-tracking company AdImpact reported that between August 23 and August 29, 57% of the total television spending for political ads was on Republican attacks on Harris.
Trump also continues to demand that Republicans support his attempt to suppress voting. Having failed to pass any of the necessary appropriations bills before going on August recess, Congress will be in a rush when it comes back into session next week. It needs to fund the government before the end of the fiscal year on September 30 in order to prevent a partial shutdown. Last Thursday, Trump told right-wing podcast host Monica Crowley that he would “shut down the government in a heartbeat” unless the government funding package includes the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act—which would give credence to the idea that noncitizens are voting in national elections despite the fact it is already illegal—and a bill restricting legal immigration.
Zeeshan Aleem of MSNBC today took public notice of Trump’s “deteriorating ability to clearly communicate.” His speeches “seem to be growing more discursive and difficult to comprehend by the day,” Aleem wrote. “Those speeches are making it hard, if not impossible, for people listening to them to understand what he wants to do with his power in office, and they’re reportedly turning off voters.” A reporter for The Guardian pointed out that attendees at Trump’s rallies are leaving as he rambles for nearly two hours, and complaining that he is “babbling.”
For his part, Trump says his wandering speech is deliberate. He calls it “the weave.” I’ll talk about, like, nine different things, and they all come back brilliantly together, and it’s like, and friends of mine that are, like, English professors, they say, ‘It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.’”
Aleem notes that this less-focused, less-capable Trump would be exceptionally dangerous in office a second time. And yet, he was dangerous enough the first time. Today Adam Klasfeld and Ryan Goodman of Just Security released a study showing at least twelve times that Trump used the power of the presidency to retaliate against his political enemies. They note that there is no evidence that President Joe Biden or anyone else at the Biden White House ever took similar actions.
John McCain’s son Jimmy today announced that he has switched his voter registration from Republican to Democrat and will work to elect Vice President Harris and Minnesota governor Tim Walz in 2024. The younger McCain enlisted in the Marine Corps at 17 and is now an intelligence officer in the 158th Infantry Regiment of the Arizona Army National Guard. He said he is speaking out because Trump’s conduct at Arlington National Cemetery was a “violation.”
Last Friday, just before the long weekend, Trump announced that he would vote against a Florida ballot measure that would essentially enshrine in the Florida state constitution the abortion rights formerly protected by the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. When Trump had bowed to popular support for abortion rights and expressed uneasiness at the state’s current six-week ban—a cutoff reached before most women know they’re pregnant—antiabortion activists launched fierce attacks on him. So, on Friday, Trump switched his position and announced he would vote against restoring access to abortion in Florida.
That announcement has given wings to the Democrats’ messaging about Republicans’ determination to end abortion rights. It did not help the Republicans that more videos have been unearthed in which Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance said that “a childless elite” is ruling the country. He went on to excoriate this elite for what he claimed was their pride that they didn’t have children and that they had abortions, and said “they look down on people who invest their time and their future in their children. And that is a dangerous place to live as a country.” Even a right-wing Newsmax interviewer suggested that he was “painting this group with perhaps a broad brush?”
On October 1, in Louisiana, a law will go into effect that reclassified the drug misoprostol as a controlled dangerous substance. Misoprostol can be used for abortion. It is also used for routine reproductive care and during medical emergencies to treat postpartum hemorrhage. It is on the World Health Organization’s list of essential medications, a list containing those medications that are the most effective and safe to meet a health care system’s most important needs. After antiabortion activists targeted the drug, Louisiana governor Jeff Landry signed a law reclassifying it as a controlled dangerous substance. The reclassification means that the drug will no longer be easily available on obstetric hemorrhage carts.
“Take it off the carts?” one doctor said to Lorena O’Neil of the Louisiana Illuminator. “That’s death. That’s a matter of life or death.”
The Harris campaign said: “Let’s be clear: Donald Trump is the reason Louisiana women who are suffering from miscarriages or bleeding out after birth can no longer receive the critical care they would have received before Trump overturned Roe. Because of Trump, doctors are scrambling to find solutions to save their patients and are left at the whims of politicians who think they know better. Trump is proud of what he’s done. He brags about it. And if he wins, he will threaten to bring the crisis he created for Louisiana women to all 50 states.”
Vice President Harris’s campaign started its “Fighting for Reproductive Freedom” bus tour today in Palm Beach, Florida, where it drove past the Trump Organization’s Mar-a-Lago club. The bus will make at least 50 stops across the country.
Pollster Tom Bonier today continued his examination of new registrants to vote. This time his focus was North Carolina. The pattern he has found across the country continues: “surges in registration are being driven by women.” In North Carolina, he writes, the number of registrants was almost 50% higher during the week of July 21 than in the same week in 2020, and the gender gap was +12 women, compared to +6 women in 2020. The new registrants were +6 Democratic, and 43% were younger than 30.
The Harris-Walz campaign today joined the Democratic National Committee in announcing a transfer of nearly $25 million to support Democratic candidates in down-ballot state and federal races. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee will get $10 million each in hopes of supporting a Democratic majority in each chamber of Congress in the new administration.
The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, the organization devoted to winning state legislatures, will receive $2.5 million. The Democratic Governors Association and the Democratic Attorneys General Association will get $1 million each.
Finally, today, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction to stop the Trump campaign from playing the song he likes to dance to at his rallies: “Hold On, I’m Coming.” The estate of Isaac Hayes Jr., the artist who co-wrote the song, filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Trump, his campaign, and a number of his allies, noting that they have never obtained a public performance license for the song although they have used it at least 133 times.
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September 4, 2024 (Wednesday)
Long tonight, folks, but it’s been quite a day. And even still, I did not mention the day’s horrific shooting at a Georgia school.
Today, Vice President Kamala Harris announced a series of proposals to help entrepreneurs create small businesses. Like President Joe Biden, she and her running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, argue that small businesses and entrepreneurs are the “engines of our economy.” In a statement today, they noted that “small businesses employ half of all private-sector workers in America—creating 70 percent of net new jobs since 2019—and do trillions of dollars of business every year.”
The Biden administration has boasted of the record number of new businesses created since Biden and Harris took office. There have been 19 million new business applications in that time. Harris said she and Walz are setting a goal of 25 million new business applications in their first term. Their plan, they say, is to “kickstart…more young, small, and innovative firms.”
To make this happen, they propose raising the deduction for startup expenses from its current level of $5,000 to $50,000, noting that the average amount a new business spends to get set up in its first year of operation is $40,000. They also propose funding a network of new and existing “federal, state, local, and private incubators and small business innovation hubs” that will make it easier for small business and local suppliers to get technical assistance, funding, customers, and so on.
They also promised to make low-interest and no-interest loans available for small businesses, to protect and expand the support of the Affordable Care Act for small business owners, and to guarantee that one third of federal contract money will go to small businesses. They promise to make it easier for small businesses to file taxes, reduce excessive occupational licensing requirements, and urge state and local governments to cut the red tape of burdensome regulations by streamlining them across jurisdictions.
Harris and Walz said they are committed to making the investments that will build the economy while also paying for them and reducing the deficit. “They also know,” their statement said, that “we need to support America as a locus of innovators, entrepreneurs, and workers coming together to create a better future.
Harris calls this a New Way Forward, but it is curiously close to the old Republican reforms of the Progressive Era, when entrepreneurs joined forces with workers and farmers to demand access to capital and a fair economic playing field after decades in which a few wealthy industrialists stacked the system in their own favor. When we look at that era, as well as the New Deal reforms of the 1930s, we tend to emphasize reforms designed to benefit workers and farmers, but members of those groups always allied with entrepreneurs shut out of the system by wealthy industrialists. The demand for securities and exchange law in the 1930s, for example, did not come from western farmers, but from entrepreneurs who knew they could not break into the system if established businesses made up the rules amongst themselves.
Harris recalled that Republican reform impulse when she said we must make the tax system fairer. She called for rolling back Trump’s tax cuts and implementing common-sense tax reforms for corporations and the richest Americans. She calls for setting a minimum income tax for billionaires, the corporate tax rate to 28% (it was 35% before the Trump tax cuts), and quadrupling the tax on the stock buybacks that overwhelmingly benefit the wealthiest Americans.
She emphasized that no one earning less than $400,000 a year will pay more in taxes under her plans, and called for a tax rate of 28% on long-term capital gains for those who earn more than a million dollars a year. This is up from the current 20% rate, but less than the 39.6% rate Biden proposed in his 2025 budget.
A Fox News Channel host applauded some of Harris’s ideas, saying, “When a political candidate comes up with what I think is a good idea, I have to call it a good idea. And a fifty thousand dollar…tax credit for startups or small businesses, coupled with less red tape, I’ve got to say, that is a good idea, regardless of her other tax ideas.”
This was a nice endorsement of Harris’s policies, coming as it did after yesterday’s assessment by economists for the Goldman Sachs Group saying that the nation’s economic growth would take a hit if Trump wins, but will grow under a Harris presidency if she also has the support of a Democratic House and Senate.
In her statement about economic policy, Harris called out Trump for supporting “himself and the biggest corporations” and noted that sixteen Nobel laureates have said that Trump’s policies would ignite inflation and trigger a recession by mid-2025. That recession, economists project, would cost more than 3 million jobs, explode the deficit, and raise costs. Harris pointed out that Project 2025 would cut funding for the Small Business Administration and make it harder for small businesses to get access to money.
For his part, Trump has doubled down on the idea that the United States is a failing nation. For the past week he has been telling a story about a residential building in Colorado taken over by a gang from Venezuela. But it appears the story is entirely made up. Similarly, Trump on Friday said at a right-wing Moms for Liberty event that public schools in America kidnap children and operate on them to change their sex. This is bonkers, but it is bonkers in a way that deliberately demonizes Trump’s opponents.
Trump’s vision of the United States is one of darkness and carnage. As Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz said today, “It is a deliberate effort by some people to make them believe that our political system is broken. To make them believe that things are pessimistic. My God, every time I hear Donald Trump give a speech, it’s like the next screenplay for Mad Max or something. They are rooting against America.”
That bleak version of the United States, it turns out, echoes the talking points Russian handlers gave to their operatives working in the U.S. in an effort “to steer the U.S. public opinion in the right direction.” The Russians directed their U.S. employees to emphasize the following “campaign topics”: “Encroaching universal poverty. Record inflation. Halting of economic growth. Unaffordable prices for food and essential goods”; “Risk of job loss for white Americans”; “Privileges for people of color, perverts, and disabled”; “Constant lies of the [Democratic] administration about the real situation in the country”; “Threat of crime coming from people of color and immigrants”; “Overspending on foreign policy and at the interests of white US citizens”; “Constant lies to the voters by [Democrats] in power.”
The target audience of the campaign was “[Republican] voters,” [Trump] supporters, “Supporters of traditional family values,” and “White Americans, representing the lower-middle and middle class.” The focus was in particular on “[r]esidents of "swing states whose voting results impact the outcomes of the elections more than other states.
This information came out today when the Departments of Justice, State, and the Treasury announced sanctions against 10 individuals and 2 entities, and criminal charges against two employees of RT, a Russian state-controlled media outlet, who allegedly funded a company in the U.S. to hire right-wing social media influencers to push Russian propaganda before the 2024 election.
While the indictment does not name the Tennessee-based company the Russians funded, it appears to be Tenet Media, a company registered by Liam Donovan and Lauren Tam, who is associated with The Blaze and Turning Point USA, as well as RT. The two appear to be married. The indictment alleges that the company’s two founders knew they were working for the Russians, but suggests the six commentators—Lauren Southern, Tim Pool, Tayler Hansen, Matt Christiansen, Dave Rubin, and Benny Johnson, all staunch Trump supporters—did not know where their massive paychecks originated. After the story broke, five of the commentators denied any knowledge of the source of the company’s funding; some insisted their words were entirely their own.
One of the videos the company pushed at the request of the Russians was what appears to have been right-wing host Tucker Carlson’s visit to a grocery store in Russia where he praised the low prices (which even the company’s founders thought “just feels like overt shilling”).
Separately, the Department of Justice seized 32 internet domains that “the Russian government and Russian sponsored actors” have used to influence the 2024 election. In a malign influence campaign called “Doppelganger,” these domains produced fake articles that appeared to be from major U.S. news sites, to which influencers and fake social media profiles on Facebook, X, Truth Social, and YouTube then drove traffic.
Russian operatives called in bold type for Russia “to put a maximum effort to ensure that the [Republican] point of view (first and foremost, the opinion of [Trump] supporters) wins over the US public opinion. This includes provisions on peace in Ukraine in exchange for territories, the need to focus on the problems of the US economy, returning troops home from all over the world, etc.”
One of the documents produced in the affidavit justifying the seizure of the internet domains called for trying to stir up a conflict between the U.S. and Mexico in order to distract from the fact that the U.S. economy is “very healthy” under Biden.
Tonight, in an interview with Fox News Channel host Sean Hannity, Trump appeared to think he is running against Joe Biden. An internal email leaked to the press from the Trump campaign showed managers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles warning staff not to communicate with the press and suggested anyone doing so would be fired.
Today, Steph Curry of California’s Golden State Warriors basketball team and former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for president. “Endorsing Kamala Harris is important for me and my family,” Curry said. “Knowing Kamala and having been around her, I understand she’s qualified for this job."
“There was never a doubt that the courageous Liz Cheney would endorse Vice President Harris,” conservative judge J. Michael Luttig wrote, “because Liz Cheney stands for America. She is the very embodiment of country over party and country over self. And she fears no one—least of all the former president.”
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It’s like some of these people are testing the waters to see if it’s safe to abandon Trump now. It’s like they really, really want to, but they’re still scared it will end their careers.
I will say, I can’t think of a single Presidential election in my life when so many current and former elected officials of one party have endorsed the candidate of the other party. I have no idea if it will impact the election, but it feels pretty unprecedented. I mean, a lot of Democratic voters obviously voted for Reagan at the height of his popularity, but I don’t recall Democratic politicians and officials openly endorsing him. I’m not sure anything like this has happened since maybe the early 18th century? Unless maybe a lot of Republicans endorsed FDR in 1936 or 1940? I don’t know. This seems like it should be getting more press as a really big deal.
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an uncle who went to mit, and friends who are english professors. english! professors!
who’s elite now, buddy?
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I have lightly been following the DOJ story and wow.
Imagine being so fucking stupid and toxic to your own people that the only folks who would pay to promote you actively want to destroy the culture you exist within.
There’s one in particular named individual in the charges that had a stunning response basically claiming to be a victim but then reiterating that they made all of that on purpose themselves because they believe it… like he’s being charged with fucking libel or something. It hasn’t clicked that the only reason to support HIM is because he harms US citizens. Maybe never will but I hope his ego fractures and he never recovers, personally.
No the victims of this bullshit are spread all over the country.
Cancel culture was just us defending ourselves from the cancer of these narcissistic douchebros who dominate the world because they worship the idea of enslaving whatever they can and killing the rest but can’t reconcile that with how low their irl kd ratio is.
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September 5, 2024 (Thursday)
The U.S. government continues to tighten the screws against Russian malign activity. This morning the Department of Justice announced an indictment charging Dimitri Simes for violating U.S. sanctions against Russia. Simes allegedly worked for a sanctioned Russian television station and laundered the money from his work. Simes advised Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
A second indictment charged Simes’s wife, Anastasia, with sanctions violations and money laundering through the purchase of fine art.
The Justice Department also issued a grand jury’s superseding indictment against six Russian computer hackers. Five were officers in Russia’s military intelligence agency; one is a civilian. The six are charged with hacking into and leaking information from, as well as destroying, Ukrainian computer systems. The hackers also attacked systems in European countries that support Ukraine and in the U.S.
The State Department has offered a $10 million reward for information on the defendants’ locations or their malicious cyberactivity.
The fallout from yesterday’s revelation that six powerful right-wing media figures were on the Russian payroll continues. One of the right-wing commenters referred to in yesterday’s indictment, Tim Pool, has pushed the idea that the U.S. is in a civil war, interviewed Trump on his podcast in May, and has been fervently against American aid to Ukraine. Today, he posted: “Upon reflection I now understand that Ukraine is our Greatest ally[.] As the breadbasket of Europe and a peace loving people we cannot allow the Fascist Russians to continue their crimes against humanity[.] We must redouble our efforts and provide and additional $200b at once[.]”
By this evening, though, he was making a joke of the news that his paycheck had come from Russia.
Notably, Trump posted on his social media site a rant that tied his own 2016 campaign to yesterday’s indictments, although the indictment itself did not do so. He accused “Comrade Kamala Harris and her Department of Justice” of “resurrecting the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, and trying to say that Russia is trying to help me, which is absolutely FALSE.”
Vice President Harris is not in charge of the Department of Justice.
By tying yesterday’s indictments to his campaign’s involvement with Russian operatives in 2016, Trump might have been trying to suggest the story was old news, but it does highlight the parallels between Russia and right-wing operatives trying to get him reelected. Along with his colleague Donie O’Sullivan, Jake Tapper put it like this on CNN: “Today, the U.S. government is trying to peel back more layers of what officials say are massive and complex efforts underway to influence your vote in the upcoming election. One part of these alleged plots: replacing your average 2016 Russian social media bots with actual conservative Americans, right-wing influencers with a combined millions of followers, influencers promoted by Elon Musk, some visited by Republican politicians such as former president Trump.”
Then Trump fell back on the old trope that his opponents are communists, posting on his social media platform: “We are fighting true COMMUNISM in this Country. We have to save our Elections, our System of Justice, our Constitution, and our FREEDOM, but that can only be done after we win BIG on November 5th, and proceed to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.”
Economists for Goldman Sachs Group Inc. say that a Trump win in November would hurt the U.S. economy, while a Harris win—if she also gets Democratic control of the House and the Senate—would make it grow.
Trump’s 2024 campaign is not at all about reality; it’s about a worldview. When asked at an event at the New York Economic Club “what specific piece of legislation will you advance” to make child care affordable, the 78-year-old Trump answered:
“Well I would do that. And we’re sitting down. You know I was somebody. We had Senator Marco Rubio, and my daughter Ivanka was so impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that because—look, child care is child care. It’s—couldn’t, you know, it’s something you have to have it—in this country you have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to—but they’ll get used to it very quickly—and it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country. Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s going to take care. We’re going to have—I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time, coupled with the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country, because I have to stay with child care. I want to stay with child care, but those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth, but growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just told you about. We’re going to be taking in trillions of dollars, and as much as child care is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in. We’re going to make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people, and then we’ll worry about the rest of the world. Let’s help other people, but we’re going to take care of our country first. This is about America first. It’s about Make America Great Again, we have to do it because right now we’re a failing nation, so we’ll take care of it.”
There is no specific legislation here, or even a grasp of the specific nature of the problem of paying for child care. What there is, apparently, is an argument that high tariffs will solve all of the nation’s problems. In the New York event, Trump called again for slashing taxes on the wealthy and insisted that new, high tariffs of 20% on all imports, and as much as 60% on Chinese imports, will end federal deficits and bring trillions of dollars into the country, although he is wrong about how tariffs work.
Trump insists that tariffs are taxes on foreign countries, but they are not. They are essentially taxes on imported products, and they are paid by consumers. Trump’s running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, recently tried to claim that economists disagree about whether consumers bear the cost of tariffs, but as Michael Hiltzik explained in the Los Angeles Times yesterday, economists agree on this.
When he was in office, Trump launched a trade war in 2018 by putting tariffs of up to 25% on $50 billion worth of Chinese products. The next year he added another set of 10% tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese imports, and the next year he did it again, this time on an additional $112 billion of Chinese products. The nonpartisan Tax Foundation calculates that this amounted to an $80 billion tax a year on American consumers, costing the average household about $300 a year and costing the U.S. about 142,000 jobs.
There are reasons to use tariffs. They can be used to protect a new industry from cheaper foreign products until the new industry can compete, or to stop foreign countries from flooding a country with cheap products that destroy a domestic industry. When he took office, Biden kept those of Trump’s tariffs that protected certain industries.
Trump’s insistence that tariffs will solve everything is not about economics, it’s about pushing a worldview from the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, one embodied by the 1890 McKinley Tariff. “If you look at McKinley,” Trump told right-wing media host Mark Levin on Sunday, “he was a great president. He made the country rich.” In fact, McKinley (R-OH) pushed through the tariff named for him while he was in the House of Representatives from his position as a spokesperson for wealthy industrialists. They insisted that high tariffs were imperative to the survival of the country, that such tariffs were good for workers because they protected wages, and that anyone who disagreed was a socialist. But in an era without business regulation, industrialists actually kept wages low and used the tariffs to protect high prices that they passed on to consumers.
In the late 1880s, the American people demanded a lower tariff, but when Republicans in Congress went to “revise” it, they made it higher. In May 1890, in a chaotic congressional session with members shouting amendments, yelling objections, and talking over each other, Republicans passed the McKinley Tariff without any Democratic votes. They cheered and clapped at their victory. “You may rejoice now,” a Democrat yelled across the aisle, “but next November you’ll mourn.”
Democrats were right. In the November 1890 midterm elections, angry voters repudiated the Republican Party. They gave the Democrats a two-to-one majority in the House—McKinley himself lost his seat. Republicans managed to keep the Senate by four seats, but three of those seats were held by senators who had voted against the McKinley Tariff, and the fourth turned out to have been stolen.
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September 6, 2024 (Friday)
One of the things that came to light on Wednesday, in the paperwork the Justice Department unveiled to explain its seizure of 32 internet domains being used by Russian agents in foreign malign influence campaigns, was that the six right-wing U.S. influencers mentioned in the indictments of the Russian operatives are only the tip of the iceberg.
Since at least 2022, three Russian companies working with the Kremlin have been trying to change foreign politics in a campaign they called “Doppelganger,” covertly spreading Russian government propaganda. “[F]irst and foremost,” notes from a meeting with Russian officials about targeting Germany read, “we need to discredit the USA, Great Britain, and NATO.” Through fake social media profiles, their operatives posed as Americans or other non-Russians, seeding public conversations with Russian propaganda.
In August 2023 they launched the “Good Old USA Project” to target swing-state residents, online gamers, American Jews, and “US citizens of Hispanic descent” to reelect Donald Trump. "They are afraid of losing the American way of life and the ‘American dream,’” one of the propagandists wrote. “It is these sentiments that should be exploited in the course of an information campaign in/for the United States.” Using targeted ads on Facebook, they could see how their material was landing and use bots and trollies to push their narrative in comment sections.
“In order for this work to be effective, you need to use a minimum of fake news and a maximum of realistic information,” the propagandists told their staff. “At the same time, you should continuously repeat that this is what is really happening, but the official media will never tell you about it or show it to you.”
According to the documents, one of the three companies, Social Design Agency (SDA), monitors and collects information about media organizations and social media influencers. It collected a list of 1,900 “anti-influencers,” whose accounts posted material SDA workers thought operated against Russian interests. About 26% of those accounts were based in the U.S.
SDA also identified as pro-Russian influencers more than 2,800 people in 81 countries operating on various social media platforms like X, Facebook, and Telegram. Those influencers included “television and radio hosts, politicians, bloggers, journalists, businessmen, professors, think-tank analysts, veterans, professors, and comedians.” About 21% of those influencers were in the U.S.
YouTube took down the Tenet Media Channels associated with the Justice Department’s indictments, and last night, Tenet Media abruptly shut down. In The Bulwark, Jonathan V. Last noted that the Tenet influencers maintain they were dupes, although they must have been aware that their paychecks were crazy high for the numbers of viewers they had. He asks if, knowing now that their gains are ill-gotten, they are going to give them to charity.
Earlier this week, former Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson hosted Holocaust denier Darryl Cooper on his X show, where Cooper not only suggested that the death of more than six million Jews was an accidental result of poor planning, but also argued that British prime minister Winston Churchill, who stood firm against the expansion of fascist Germany in World War II, was the true villain of the war.
Cooper’s argument puts him squarely on the side of Russian president Vladimir Putin and Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who insist that democracy undermines society. During the recent summer Olympics, Cooper posted on social media an image of Hitler in Paris alongside another of drag queens representing Greek gods at the Olympic opening ceremonies, an image some on the right thought made fun of the Last Supper of Jesus and his disciples. “This may be putting it too crudely for some,” Cooper wrote, “but the picture [of Hitler in Paris] was infinitely preferable in virtually every way than the one on the right.”
The idea that Churchill, not Hitler, is the villain of World War II means denying the fact of the Holocaust and defending the Nazis. It lands Carlson and Cooper in the same camp as those autocrats journalist Anne Applebaum notes are “making common cause with MAGA Republicans to discredit liberalism and freedom around the world.” Elon Musk promoted the interview, saying it was “very interesting,” and “worth watching,” before the backlash made him delete his post. The video has been viewed nearly 30 million times.
Carlson told Lauren Irwin of The Hill that the Biden administration is made up of “warmonger freaks” who have “used the Churchill myth to bring our country closer to nuclear war than at any moment in history.” Carlson is on a 16-day speaking tour, on which he will interview Trump allies, including Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance and Donald Trump Jr.
Trump today continued his effort to undermine the democratic American legal system in a “news conference” of more than 45 minutes, in which he took no questions. Although Judge Juan Merchan, who oversaw the election interference case in which a jury found Trump guilty on 34 counts, decided today to delay sentencing until November 26 to avoid any appearance that the court was trying to affect the 2024 election, Trump nonetheless launched an attack on the U.S. legal system and suggested the lawsuits against him were election interference.
He spoke after he and his legal team were in court today to try to overturn a jury’s conclusion that he had sexually assaulted writer E. Jean Carroll, a decision that brought his judgments in the two cases she brought to around $90 million. He began with an attack on what he said was a new “Russia, Russia, Russia” hoax, and promised he had not “spoken to anybody from Russia in years.”
Aaron Rupar of Public Notice recorded what amounted to close to an hour of attacks on the American Justice Department and the laws of the country, and also on American women (he not only attacked Carroll, he brought up others of the roughly two dozen women who have accused him of sexual assault). He attempted to retry the Carroll case in the media, refuting the evidence the jury considered and suggesting that the photo of him and Carroll together was generated by AI, although it was published in 2019.
Attacking women was an interesting decision in light of the fact that he will need the votes of suburban women if he is to make up the ground he has lost to Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris and vice presidential nominee Tim Walz.
For her part, former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) appears to see this moment for what it is. Although a staunch Republican herself, she is urging conservative women to admit they’ve had enough. Referring to both Trump and Vance in a conversation sponsored by the Texas Tribune, she said: “This is my diplomatic way of saying it: They’re misogynistic pigs.” She assured listeners, quite accurately, that Trump “is not a conservative.” “Women around this country…we’ve had enough.” “These are not people that we can entrust with power again.”
Her father, former vice president Dick Cheney, agreed that Trump “can never be trusted with power again” and announced today that he will be voting for Harris. “As citizens, we each have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our Constitution. That is why I will be casting my vote for Vice President Kamala Harris,” he said. Eighty-eight business leaders also endorsed Harris today, including James Murdoch, an heir to the Murdoch family media empire. Citing Harris’s “policies that support the rule of law, stability, and a sound business environment,” they said in a public letter, “the best way to support the continued strength, security, and reliability of our democracy and economy” is by electing Harris president.
Meanwhile, at his event with Sean Hannity of the Fox News Channel yesterday, Trump embraced the key element of Project 2025 that calls for a dictatorial leader to take over the U.S. That document maintains that “personnel is policy” and that the way to achieve all that the Christian nationalists want is to fire the nonpartisan civil servants currently in place and put their own people into office. Trump has tried hard to distance himself from Project 2025, but last night he said the way to run the government is to “get the right people. You put the right person and the right group of people at the heads of these massive agencies, you’re going to have tremendous success, and I know now the people, and I know them better than anybody would know them.”
One of those people appears to be X owner Elon Musk, whom Trump has promised to put at the head of an “efficiency” commission to audit the U.S. government.
In 1858, Abraham Lincoln, then a candidate for the Senate, warned that the arguments against democracy and in favor of a few people dominating the rest were always the same. In his era, it was enslavers saying some people were better than others. But, he said, those were the same arguments “that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world…. Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent.”
In our era, Indiana Jones said it best in The Last Crusade: “Nazis. I hate these guys.”
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