On Thursday, December 5, in Chicago, Illinois, former president Barack Obama gave the third in an annual series of lectures he has delivered since 2022 at his foundation’s Democracy Forum, which gathers experts, leaders, and young people to explore ways to safeguard democracy through community action.
Taken together, these lectures are a historical and philosophical exploration of the weaknesses of twenty-first century democracy as well as a road map of directions, some new and some old, for democracy’s defense. In 2022, Obama explored ways to counteract the flood of disinformation swamping a shared reality for decision making; in 2023 he discussed ways to address the extraordinary concentration of wealth that has undermined support for democracy globally.
On Thursday, Obama explored the concept of “pluralism,” a word he defined as meaning simply that “in a democracy, we all have to find a way to live alongside individuals and groups who are different than us.”
But rather than advocating what he called “holding hands and singing ‘Kumbaya’” as we all tolerate each other, Obama described modern pluralism as active work to form coalitions over shared issues. His argument echoed the concepts James Madison, a key framer of the Constitution, explained in Federalist #10 when he was trying to convince inhabitants of a big, diverse country that they should endorse the newly written document.
In 1787, many inhabitants of the fledgling nation objected to the idea of the strong national government proposed under the new constitution. They worried that such a government could fall under the control of a majority that would exercise its power to crush the rights of the minority. Madison agreed that such a calamity was likely in a small country, but argued that the very size and diversity of the people in the proposed United States would guard against such tyranny as people formed coalitions over one issue or another, then dissolved them and formed others. Such constantly shifting coalitions would serve the good of all Americans without forging a permanent powerful majority.
Obama called the Constitution “a rulebook for practicing pluralism.” The Bill of Rights gives us a series of rights that allow us to try to convince others to form coalitions to elect representatives who will “negotiate and compromise and hopefully advance our interests.”
Majority rule determines who wins, but the separation of powers and an independent judiciary are supposed to guarantee that the winners “don’t overreach to try to permanently entrench themselves or violate minority rights,” he said. The losers accept the outcome so long as they know they’ll have a chance to win the next time.
Obama noted that this system worked smoothly after World War II, largely because a booming economy meant rising standards of living that eased friction between different groups: management and labor, industry and agriculture. At the same time, the Cold War helped Americans come together against an external threat, and a limited range of popular culture reinforced a shared perspective on the world—everyone watched the sitcom Gilligan’s Island.
Most of all, though, Obama noted, American pluralism worked well because it largely excluded women and racial, gender, and religious minorities. He pointed out that as late as 2005, when he went to the Senate, he was the only African American there and only the third since Reconstruction. There were two Latinos and fourteen women.
In the 1960s, he noted drily, “things got more complicated.” “[H]istorically marginalized groups—Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Native Americans; women and gays and lesbians; and disabled Americans—demanded a seat at the table. Not only did they insist on a fair share of government-directed resources, but they brought with them new issues, born of their unique experiences that could not just be resolved by just giving them a bigger slice of the pie. So racial minorities insisted that the government intervene more deeply in the private sector and civil society to root out long-standing, systemic discrimination.”
Women wanted control over their own bodies, and gays and lesbians demanded equality before the law, challenging religious and social norms. “[P]olitics,” Obama said, “wasn’t just a fight about tax rates or roads anymore. It was about more fundamental issues that went to the core of our being and how we expected society to structure itself. Issues of identity and status and gender. Issues of family, values, and faith…. [A] lot of people…began to feel that their way of life, the American way of life, was under attack” just as increasing economic inequality made them think that other people were benefiting at their expense.
Increasingly, that economic inequality cloistered people in their own bubbles as unions, churches, and civic institutions decayed. “[W]ith the Cold War over, with generations scarred by Vietnam and Iraq and a media landscape that would shatter into a million disparate voices,” he said, Americans lost the sense of “a common national story or a common national purpose.” Media companies have played to extremes, and “[e]very election becomes an act of mortal combat.”
With that sense, there is “an increasing willingness on the part of politicians and their followers to violate democratic norms, to do anything they can to get their way, to use the power of the state to target critics and journalists and political rivals, and to even resort to violence in order to gain and hold on to power.”
For all that he was speaking in 2024, Obama could have been describing the realization of the fears of those opposed to the Constitution in 1787.
But he did not agree that those anti-Federalists had won the debate. Instead, he adapted Madison’s theory of pluralism to the modern era. Obama stood firm on the idea that the way to reclaim democracy is to build coalitions around taking action on issues that matter to the American people without regard to personal identities or political affiliations. Pluralism, Obama said, “is about recognizing that in a democracy, power comes from forging alliances, and building coalitions, and making room in those coalitions not only for the woke but also for the waking.”
And that, in many ways, identified the elephant—or rather the donkey—in the room. In the 2024 election, the Democratic Party under Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota governor Tim Walz very deliberately moved away from so-called identity politics: the idea that a person builds their political orientation around their pre-existing social identity. During the campaign, Harris rarely referred to the fact that if elected, she would be the first woman, as well as the first woman of color, to hold the presidency: when attendees at the Democratic National Convention wore white in honor of the suffragists, Harris wore black.
Instead, Harris and Walz embraced investing in the middle class and supporting small businesses. But that shift to the center did not translate into a presidential victory in 2024, and those on the political left, as well as progressive Democrats, are not convinced it was a good move.
Since the rise of Donald Trump, the MAGA party has been the one championing identity politics, rejecting American pluralism in favor of centering whiteness, a certain kind of individualist masculinity, Christianity, and misogyny. Making common cause with Republicans, even non-MAGA Republicans, in the face of such politics seems to the left and progressive Democrats self-defeating.
Obama disagrees. “[I]t’s understandable that people who have been oppressed or marginalized want to tell their stories and give voice fully to their experiences—to not have to hold back and censor themselves, especially because so many of them have been silenced in the past,” he said, “But too often, focusing on our differences leads to this notion of fixed victims and fixed villains.”
He stood firm against compromising core principles but said: “In order to build lasting majorities that support justice—not just for feeling good, not just for getting along, to deliver the goods—we have to be open to framing our issues, our causes, what we believe in in terms of ‘we’ and not just ‘us’ and ‘them.’”
And he emphasized that such cooperation works best when it’s about action, rather than just words, because action requires that people invest themselves in a common project. “It won't eradicate people's prejudices, but it will remind people that they don't have to agree on everything to at least agree on some things. And that there are some things we cannot do alone.” “It’s about agency and relationships.”
Then Obama addressed the political crisis of this moment, the one the anti-Federalists feared: “What happens when the other side has repeatedly and abundantly made clear they’re not interested in playing by the rules?” When that happens, he said, “pluralism does not call for us” to accept it. “[W]e have to stand firm and speak out and organize and mobilize as forcefully as we can.” Even then, though, “it’s important to look for allies in unlikely places,” he said, noting that “people on the other side…may share our beliefs in sticking to the rules, observing norms,” and that supporting them might help them “to exert influence on people they’ve got relationships with within the other party.”
The power of pluralism, he said, is that it can make people recognize their common experiences and common values. That, he said, is how we break the cycle of cynicism in our politics.
Obama’s argument has already drawn criticism. At MSNBC, Ben Burgis condemned Obama’s “centrist liberalism” as inadequate to address the real problems of inequality and warned that his political approach is outdated.
But it is striking how much Obama’s embrace of pluralism echoes that of James Madison, who had in his lifetime witnessed a group of wildly diverse colonists talk, write letters, argue, and organize to forge themselves into a movement that could throw off the age-old system of monarchy in favor of creating something altogether new.
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Late last night, the White House said in a statement that “President Biden and his team are closely monitoring the extraordinary events in Syria and staying in constant touch with regional partners.”
Early this morning, the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad fell to armed opposition.
According to Jill Lawless of the Associated Press, the forces that toppled Assad are led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, a coalition of Islamic groups formerly associated with al-Qaeda’s branch in Syria and currently designated a terrorist group by the U.S. and the United Nations, although its leaders have tried to distance themselves from al-Qaeda.
President Bashar al-Assad succeeded his father to the Syrian presidency in July 2000, establishing a totalitarian dictatorship. In 2011, Assad cracked down on protesters who were part of the Arab Spring, sparking a civil war of a number of factions fighting Assad’s troops, which by 2015 relied on support from Russia and Iran.
That war has turned half of Syria’s prewar population of 23 million (a little more than the population of Florida) into refugees and killed more than half a million people. With Russian and Iranian support, Assad managed to regain control of most of the country, with rebels pushed back to the north and northwest.
A stalemate that had lasted for years ended abruptly on November 27.
Iran and Hezbollah have been badly weakened by the ongoing fight of Israel against Iran-backed Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. On November 27, Israel and Lebanon signed a ceasefire agreement that made it clear that Hezbollah had been tied down in Lebanon and that its ability to fight had been severely compromised. At the same time, Russia has been badly weakened by almost three years of war against Ukraine, and the Russian ruble fell sharply again in late November after additional U.S. sanctions targeted Russia’s third-largest bank, creating more economic hardship in Russia and undercutting Putin’s insistence that he is winning against the West.
When opposition forces began an offensive on November 27, they took more than 15 villages in Aleppo province that day. Journalist Lawless recounted a quick history of the next 11 days, recording how the insurgents swept through the country with little resistance, taking Syria’s largest city, Aleppo, on the 29th. The Syrian military launched a counterattack on December 1, but the insurgents continued to gain ground, and by December 7 they had captured Syria’s third-largest city, Homs. They announced they were in the “final stage” of their offensive.
Today, December 8, Assad fled with his family to Moscow, where Russian president Vladimir Putin has offered him asylum. As Nick Paton Walsh of CNN put it, “Without the physical crutches of Russia’s air force and Iran’s proxy muscle Hezbollah, [Assad] toppled when finally pushed.”
In Damascus, crowds are praying and celebrating, and opposition forces have liberated the prisoners held in the notorious Saydnaya military prison. More than 100,000 detainees are unaccounted for, and their families are hoping to find them, or at least to find answers.
Meanwhile, after Assad’s regime fell, the U.S. Air Force struck more than 75 ISIS-related targets in Syria. “ISIS has been trying to reconstitute in this broad area known as the Badiya desert,” a White House senior official told reporters. “We have worked to make sure they cannot do that. So when they try to camp there, when they try to train… we take them out.”
National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan explained at the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California, that the U.S. will work to prevent the resurgence of ISIS. It will also make sure “that our friends in the region, Israel, Jordan, Iraq, others who border Syria, or who would potentially face spillover effects from Syria, are strong and secure.” Finally, he said, the U.S. wants to make sure “that this does not lead to a humanitarian catastrophe.”
Speaking to the nation this afternoon, President Joe Biden announced: "At long last, the Assad regime has fallen. This regime brutalized and tortured and killed literally hundreds of thousands of innocent Syrians." He called the fall of Assad’s regime a “fundamental act of justice” and “a moment of historic opportunity for the long-suffering people of Syria to build a better future for their proud country.”
But it is also “a moment of risk and uncertainty,” the president said. He noted that the U.S. is “mindful” of the security of Americans in Syria, including freelance journalist Austin Tice, who was kidnapped in 2012 and imprisoned by Assad’s regime. “[W]e believe he is alive,” Biden told reporters. “We think we can get him back, but we have no direct evidence of that yet.”
Biden noted that Syria’s main backers, Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia, could not defend “this abhorrent regime in Syria” because they “are far weaker today than when I took office.” He continued: “This is a direct result of the blows that Ukraine [and] Israel” have landed on them “with the unflagging support of the United States.”
In contrast to Biden's comments, President-elect Donald Trump’s social media accounts took Russia’s side in the Syrian events. Noting that the insurgents looked as if they would throw Assad out, Trump’s account said that “Russia, because they are so tied up in Ukraine, and with the loss there of over 600,000 soldiers, seems incapable of stopping this literal march through Syria, a country they have protected for years.” The account blamed former president Barack Obama for the crisis of 2011 and said that Russia had stepped in then to stop the chaos. The Trump account suggested that Assad’s defeat might be “the best thing that can happen to” Russia, because “[t]here was never much of a benefit in Syria for Russia, other than to make Obama look really stupid.”
“In any event,” the account continued, “Syria is a mess, but is not our friend, & THE UNITED STATES SHOULD HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH IT. THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT. LET IT PLAY OUT. DO NOT GET INVOLVED!”
In contrast to Trump’s focus on Russia, journalist Anne Applebaum, a scholar of autocracy, took a much broader view of the meaning of Assad’s fall. In dictatorships, she wrote in The Atlantic, “cold, deliberate, well-planned cruelty” like Assad’s “is meant to inspire hopelessness. Ludicrous lies and cynical propaganda campaigns are meant to create apathy and nihilism.” Random arrests create destabilizing waves of refugees that leave those who remain in despair.
Authoritarian regimes seek “to rob people of any ability to plan for a different future, to convince people that their dictatorships are eternal. ‘Our leader forever’” she points out, was the slogan of the Assad dynasty. But soldiers and police officers have relatives who suffer under the regime, and their loyalty is not assured, as Assad has now learned.
The future of Syria is entirely unclear, Applebaum writes, but there is no doubt that “the end of the Assad regime creates something new, and not only in Syria. There is nothing worse than hopelessness, nothing more soul-destroying than pessimism, grief, and despair. The fall of a Russian- and Iranian-backed regime offers, suddenly, the possibility of change. The future might be different. And that possibility will inspire hope all around the world.”
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
0
brianlux
Moving through All Kinds of Terrain. Posts: 42,274
" And that possibility will inspire hope all around the world."
Much needed right here in the good of U.S. of A.
"Pretty cookies, heart squares all around, yeah!" -Eddie Vedder, "Smile"
" And that possibility will inspire hope all around the world."
Much needed right here in the good of U.S. of A.
Yet the incoming administration is full of dictatorship sympathizers including the head 🤡 who loves Putin and has been carrying his jock strap for decades!
jesus greets me looks just like me ....
0
brianlux
Moving through All Kinds of Terrain. Posts: 42,274
" And that possibility will inspire hope all around the world."
Much needed right here in the good of U.S. of A.
Yet the incoming administration is full of dictatorship sympathizers including the head 🤡 who loves Putin and has been carrying his jock strap for decades!
It's unsettling, for sure. Let's hope there are enough Republicans who still believe in some semblance of democracy to keep the Felon from carrying out all his baseless threats.
"Pretty cookies, heart squares all around, yeah!" -Eddie Vedder, "Smile"
The sudden collapse of the Assad regime in Syria yesterday took oxygen away from the airing of President-elect Trump’s interview with Kristen Welker of NBC's Meet the Press. The interview told us little that we didn’t already know, but it did reinforce what we can expect in the new administration.
As Tom Nichols pointed out after the interview, when Donald Trump ran for the presidency this year, he “wasn’t running to do anything. He was running to stay out of jail. The rest he doesn’t care about.”
Nichols was reacting to the exchange that began when Welker asked the president-elect: “Do you have an actual plan at this point for health care?” Trump answered: “Yes. We have concepts of a plan that would be better.” “Still just concepts? Do you have a fully developed plan?” Welker asked.
The answer, nine years after Trump first said he would repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with something cheaper and better, is still no. He went on to add, “I am the one that saved Obamacare,” although he spent his first term trying to weaken it.
Trump also reiterated his plans for revenge against those he perceives to be his enemies. He told Welker that when he is president, the Department of Justice should pursue and jail the members of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, more commonly known as the January 6th Committee. He singled out committee leaders Representative Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY).
But it was in his insistence on one specific lie that Trump was most revealing. He told Welker that there were “13,099 murderers released into our country over the last three years. They’re walking down the streets. They’re walking next to you and your family, and they’re very dangerous.”
This statement sets Trump up to be a strongman who will save America from great danger, but it is a lie that has been repeatedly debunked. It originated in a September 2024 letter from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to Representative Tony Gonzales (R-TX) listing 13,099 people convicted of homicide as being “non-detained.”
As Alex Nowrasteh of the libertarian Cato blog explains, “non-detained” does not mean free to roam the streets; it simply means that those in prison for homicide are not currently detained by ICE. Once they have served their sentences, they go back onto ICE’s docket to be deported unless their countries of origin don’t have repatriation agreements with the U.S., a condition that affects a very small number of people. Releases of criminal migrants into the U.S. dropped during the Biden administration from the numbers released during Trump’s term. In addition, as Nowrasteh points out, the 13,099 figure covers at least 40 years.
Welker tried to correct Trump: “The thirteen thousand figure I think goes back around 40 years,” she said. “No, it doesn’t,” Trump insisted. “It’s within the three-year period. It’s during the Biden term.”
Trump was intent on making Welker and the television audience accept an egregious lie, despite the fact it has been thoroughly debunked. His insistence echoed his determination in January 2017 to make the American people accept his lie that his inauguration crowd was bigger than that of his predecessor, Barack Obama, although we could see with our own eyes that he was lying. He was demanding we reject our own experience and instead let him define how we see the country.
Trump built on a history of narrative shaping that ran through the Republican Party. In 2004 a senior advisor to President George W. Bush famously told journalist Ron Suskind that people like Suskind lived in “the reality-based community,” believing that people could find solutions to problems based on their real-world observations. But such a worldview was obsolete, the aide said. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore.… We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality…. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
America’s right wing has been able to shape reality in large part because of the 1996 advent of the Fox News Channel (FNC), the brainchild of Australian-born media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Shows on the FNC used clear, simple messaging with colorful graphics that told a story of an America overwhelmingly made up of white, rural folks who hated taxes and an intrusive government, and would do fine if they could just get the socialist Democrats to leave them alone. To spread the new channel, Murdoch initially offered ten dollars per subscriber to each cable company that carried it.
That right-wing echo chamber has expanded until it is now so strong that nearly 70% of Republicans falsely believe Trump was the rightful winner of the 2020 presidential election, despite the fact that the FNC had to pay more than $787 million to Dominion Voting Systems for defamation after it lied to viewers about that election.
Trump has built on that Republican narrative to create a fantasy world that is badly out of step with reality. It is not easy to see how he will reconcile his vision with real-world events.
He and his supporters might try simply to tell voters that they have done what they promised, and hope that story sells.
When Trump threatened to put a 25% tariff on goods from Mexico until Mexico stopped undocumented migrants from crossing the border, Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum told Trump that "encounters at the Mexico–United States border have decreased by 75 percent between December 2023 and November 2024.” Trump then simply told reporters that Sheinbaum had “agreed to stop Migration through Mexico, and into the United States, effectively closing our Southern Border,” and his supporters trumpeted on social media that Trump had closed the border with one phone call.
But convincing people of an alternative reality might be harder with issues closer to home.
Trump has vowed to place a tariff wall around the U.S., for example, at the same time he has promised to bring down the price of consumer goods. “Economists of all stripes say that ultimately, consumers pay the price of tariffs,” Welker told him on Sunday. “I don’t believe that,” Trump answered. He might not believe it, but producers do: car manufacturers as well as major shopping chains have warned that tariffs will force them to raise prices.
On other issues, Trump will have a vocal and established opposition. After his threat to go after the members of the January 6th committee, former representative Liz Cheney said in a statement: “There is no conceivably appropriate factual or constitutional basis for what Donald Trump is suggesting.“
“Here is the truth: Donald Trump attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election and seize power. He mobilized an angry mob and sent them to the United States Capitol, where they attacked police officers, invaded the building, and halted the official counting of electoral votes. Trump watched on television as police officers were brutally beaten and the Capitol was assaulted, refusing for hours to tell the mob to leave. This was the worst breach of our Constitution by any president in our nation’s history.”
Cheney called for the release of the evidence and grand jury material special counsel Jack Smith assembled “so all Americans can see Donald Trump for who he genuinely is and fully understand his role in this terrible period in our nation’s history.”
Nobel laureates generally try to stay out of politics, but today more than 75 of them in medicine, chemistry, economics, and physics wrote a letter to senators urging them not to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick for secretary of Health and Human Services. They object to Kennedy’s stand against the scientists and agencies he would oversee. They noted that he has no credentials or relevant experience and that he has opposed life-saving vaccines, promoted conspiracy theories, and attacked the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health.
Putting him in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services, they write, “would put the public’s health in jeopardy and undermine America’s global leadership in the health sciences, in both the public and commercial sectors.”
There is also the chance that the Fox media empire will not effectively push a right-wing narrative much longer. The Murdoch family is in a struggle over control of that empire after the eventual death of the 93-year-old Rupert. He and his eldest son, Lachlan, want to lock the company into its current political slant, but at least two of the three of Murdoch’s other children who are set to inherit the company do not share their father and brother’s politics.
Rupert has been trying to change the terms of the family trust to cement Lachlan’s control of the empire, but today a commissioner in Nevada ruled against him. Edward Helmore of The Guardian noted that the decision likely means that even if the children do not take the media empire in a different direction, divided leadership will weaken the right-wing message.
Almost 30 years after the Fox News Channel began to shape American politics with a fictional narrative, a different Fox media empire would almost certainly disrupt the right-wing bubble. A lawyer for Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch said they will appeal the decision.
Finally, Pennsylvania law enforcement officials today arrested a “strong person of interest” in the shooting of United Healthcare chief executive officer Brian Thompson. Tonight a court document shows 26-year-old Luigi Mangione has been charged with murder.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Today is Human Rights Day, celebrated internationally in honor of the day seventy-six years ago, December 10, 1948, when the United Nations General Assembly announced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).
In 1948 the world was still reeling from the death and destruction of World War II, including the horrors of the Holocaust. The Soviet Union was blockading Berlin, Italy and France were convulsed with communist-backed labor agitation, Greece was in the middle of a civil war, Arabs opposed the new state of Israel, communists and nationalists battled in China, and segregationists in the U.S. were forming their own political party to stop the government from protecting civil rights for Black Americans. In the midst of these dangerous trends, the member countries of the United Nations came together to adopt a landmark document: a common standard of fundamental rights for all human beings.
The United Nations itself was only three years old. Representatives of the 47 countries that made up the Allies in World War II, along with the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, and newly liberated Denmark and Argentina, had formed the United Nations as a key part of an international order based on rules on which nations agreed, rather than the idea that might makes right, which had twice in just over twenty years brought wars that involved the globe.
Part of the mission of the U.N. was “to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small.” In early 1946 the United Nations Economic and Social Council organized a nine-person commission on human rights to construct the mission of a permanent Human Rights Commission. Unlike other U.N. commissions, though, the selection of its members would be based not on their national affiliations but on their personal merit.
President Harry S. Truman had appointed Eleanor Roosevelt, widow of former president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and much beloved defender of human rights in the United States, as a delegate to the United Nations. In turn, U.N. Secretary-General Trygve Lie from Norway put her on the commission to develop a plan for the formal human rights commission. That first commission asked Roosevelt to take the chair.
“[T]he free peoples” and “all of the people liberated from slavery, put in you their confidence and their hope, so that everywhere the authority of these rights, respect of which is the essential condition of the dignity of the person, be respected,” a U.N. official told the commission at its first meeting on April 29, 1946.
The U.N. official noted that the commission must figure out how to define the violation of human rights not only internationally but also within a nation, and must suggest how to protect “the rights of man all over the world.” If a procedure for identifying and addressing violations “had existed a few years ago,” he said, “the human community would have been able to stop those who started the war at the moment when they were still weak and the world catastrophe would have been avoided.”
Drafted over the next two years, the final document began with a preamble explaining that a UDHR was necessary because “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,” and because “disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind.” Because “the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,” the preamble said, “human rights should be protected by the rule of law.”
The thirty articles that followed established that “[a]ll human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights…without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status” and regardless “of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs.”
Those rights included freedom from slavery, torture, degrading punishment, arbitrary arrest, exile, and “arbitrary interference with…privacy, family, home or correspondence, [and] attacks upon…honour and reputation.”
They included the right to equality before the law and to a fair trial, the right to travel both within a country and outside of it, the right to marry and to establish a family, and the right to own property.
They included the “right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion,” “freedom of opinion and expression,” peaceful assembly, the right to participate in government either “directly or through freely chosen representatives,” the right of equal access to public service. After all, the UDHR noted, the authority of government rests on the will of the people, “expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage.”
They included the right to choose how and where to work, the right to equal pay for equal work, the right to unionize, and the right to fair pay that ensures “an existence worthy of human dignity.”
They included “the right to a standard of living adequate for…health and well-being…, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond [one’s] control.”
They included the right to free education that develops students fully and strengthens “respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms.” Education “shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.”
They included the right to participate in art and science.
They included the right to live in the sort of society in which the rights and freedoms outlined in the UDHR could be realized. And, the document concluded, “Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.”
Although eight countries abstained from the UDHR—South Africa, Saudi Arabia, and six countries from the Soviet bloc—no country voted against it, making the vote unanimous. The declaration was not a treaty and was not legally binding; it was a declaration of principles.
Since then, though, the UDHR has become the foundation of international human rights law. More than eighty international treaties and declarations, along with regional human rights conventions, domestic human rights bills, and constitutional provisions, make up a legally binding system to protect human rights. All of the members of the United Nations have ratified at least one of the major international human rights treaties, and four out of five have ratified four or more.
Indeed, today is the fortieth anniversary of the U.N.’s adoption of the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, more commonly known as the United Nations Convention Against Torture (UNCAT), which follows the structure of the UDHR.
The UDHR remains aspirational, but it is a vital part of the rules-based order that restrains leaders from human rights abuses, giving victims a language and a set of principles to condemn mistreatment. Before 1948 that language and those principles were unimaginable.
In a proclamation today, the White House recommitted to “upholding the equal and inalienable rights of all people.” It noted that in the U.S., the Biden administration established “the White House Gender Policy Council to advance the rights and opportunities of women and girls across domestic and foreign policy [and] rejoined the United Nations Human Rights Council to highlight and address pressing human rights concerns.” It has “worked to protect the rights of LGBTQI+ people” and to expand “accessibility for people with disabilities.” Crucially, the administration has also worked to stop the misuse of commercial spyware, which has enabled human rights abuses around the world as authoritarian governments surveil their populations, and to fight back against transnational repression targeting human rights defenders.
At the State Department, Under Secretary of State Uzra Zeya, Assistant Secretary of State Dafna Rand, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken honored eight individuals with the Human Rights Defender Award. The recipients came from Kuwait, Bolivia, the Kyrgyz Republic, Burma, Eswatini, Ghana, Colombia, and Azerbaijan and defend migrant workers, LGBTQ+ individuals, women, democracy.
Their stories underlined both that the fight for human rights is universal and that it requires courage. One recipient’s award was delivered in absentia because he is imprisoned. Another award was posthumous—the recipient was murdered last year.
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Yesterday, President Joe Biden spoke at the Brookings Institution, where he gave a major speech on the American economy. He contrasted his approach with the supply-side economics of the forty years before he took office, an approach the incoming administration of Donald Trump has said he would reinstate. Biden urged Trump and his team not to destroy the seeds of growth planted over the past four years. And he laid out the extraordinary successes of his administration as a benchmark going forward.
The president noted that Trump is inheriting a strong economy. Biden shifted the U.S. economy from 40 years of supply-side economics that had transferred about $50 trillion from the bottom 90% to the top 1% and hollowed out the middle class.
By investing in the American people, the Biden team expanded the economy from “the middle out and the bottom up,” as Biden says, and created an economy that he rightfully called “the envy of the world.” Biden listed the numbers: more than 16 million new jobs, the most in any four-year presidential term in U.S. history; low unemployment; a record 20 million applications for the establishment of new businesses; the stock market hitting record highs.
Biden called out that in the two years since Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act, the private sector has jumped on the public investments to invest more than a trillion dollars in clean energy and advanced manufacturing.
Disruptions from the pandemic—especially the snarling of supply chains—and Russian president Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine created a global spike in inflation; the administration brought those rates back to around the Fed’s target of 2%.
Biden pointed out that “[l]ike most…[great] economic developments, this one is neither red nor blue, and America’s progress is everyone’s progress.”
But voters’ election of Donald Trump last month threatens Biden’s reworking of the economy. Trump and his team embrace the supply-side economics Biden abandoned. They argue that the way to nurture the economy is to free up money at the top of the economy through deregulation and tax cuts. Investors will then establish new industries and jobs more efficiently than they could if the government intervened. Those new businesses, the theory goes, will raise wages for all Americans and everyone will thrive.
Trump and MAGA Republicans have made it clear they intend to restore supply-side economics.
The first priority of the incoming Republican majority is to extend the 2017 Trump tax cuts, many of which are due to expire in 2025. Those tax cuts added almost $2 trillion to budget deficits, but there is little evidence that they produced the economic growth their supporters promised. At the same time, the income tax cuts delivered an average tax cut of $252,300 to households in the top 0.1%, $61,090 to households in the top 1%, but just $457 to the bottom 60% of American households. The corporate tax cuts were even more skewed to the wealthy.
In the Washington Post yesterday, Catherine Rampell noted that Republicans’ claim that extending those cuts isn’t extraordinarily expensive means “getting rid of math.”
At a time when Republicans like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who are leading the new “Department of Government Efficiency,” are clamoring for cuts of $2 trillion from the budget, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that extending the tax cuts will add more than $4 trillion to the federal budget over the next ten years. Republicans who will chair the House and Senate finance committees, Representative Jason Smith (R-MO) and Senator Mike Crapo (R-ID), say that extending the cuts shouldn’t count as adding to the deficit because they would simply be extending the status quo.
Trump has also indicated he plans to turn the country over to billionaires, both by putting them into government and by letting them act as they wish. Last night, on social media, President-elect Trump posted: “Any person or company investing ONE BILLION DOLLARS, OR MORE, in the United States of America, will receive fully expedited approvals and permits, including, but in no way limited to, all Environmental approvals. GET READY TO ROCK!!!”
Biden called out the contrast between these two economic visions, saying that the key question for the American people is “do we continue to grow the economy from the middle out and the bottom up, investing in all of America and Americans, supporting unions and working families as we have the past four years? Or do we…backslide to an economy that’s benefited those at the top, while working people and the middle class struggle…for a fair share of growth and [for an] economic theory that encouraged industries and…livelihoods to be shipped overseas?”
Biden explained that for decades Republicans had slashed taxes for the very wealthy and the biggest corporations while cutting public investment in infrastructure, education, and research and development. Jobs and factories moved overseas where labor was cheaper. To offset the costs of tax cuts, Biden said, ‘advocates of trickle-down economics ripped the social safety net by trying to privatize Social Security and Medicare, trying to deny access to affordable health care and prescription drugs.” He added, “Lifting the fortunes of the very wealthy often meant taking the rights of workers away to unionize and bargain collectively.”
This approach to the economy “meant rewarding short-termism in pursuit of short-term profits [and] extraordinary high executive pay, instead of making long-term investments…. As a consequence, our…infrastructure fell…behind. A flood of cheap imports hollowed out our factory towns.”
“Economic opportunity and innovation became more concentrated in [a] few major cities, while the heartland and communities were left behind. Scientific discoveries and inventions developed in America were commercialized in countries like China, bolstering their manufacturing investment and jobs instead of [our] economy. Even before the pandemic, this economic agenda was clearly failing. Working- and middle-class families were being hurt.”
“[W]hen the pandemic hit,” Biden said, “we found out how vulnerable America was.” Supply chains failed, and prices soared.
Biden told the audience that he “came into office with a different vision for America…: grow the economy from the middle out and the bottom up; invest in America and American products. And when that happens, everybody does…well…no matter where they lived, whether they went to college or not.”
“I was determined to restore U.S. leadership in industries of the future,” he said. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, CHIPS and Science Act, and Inflation Reduction Act “mark the most significant investment in America since the New Deal,” with new factories bringing good jobs that are rejuvenating towns that had been left behind in the past decades. Biden said he required that the government buy American goods as the country invested in “modernizing our roads; our bridges; our ports; our airports; our clean water system; affordable, high-speed Internet systems; and so much more.”
Eighty percent of working-age Americans have jobs, and the average after-tax income is up almost $4,000 since before the pandemic, significantly outpacing inflation.
Biden and his team worked to restore competition in the economy—just today, the huge grocery chain Albertsons gave up on its merger with another huge grocery chain, Kroger, after Biden’s Federal Trade Commission sued to block the merger because it would raise prices and lower workers’ wages by eliminating competition—and their negotiations with big pharma have dramatically cut the costs of prescription drugs for seniors. The administration cut junk fees, capping the cost of overdraft fees, for example, from an average of $35 a month to $5.
Biden quoted Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Stephen Henriques in Time magazine a month ago, saying: “President-elect Trump is receiving the strongest economy in modern history, which is the envy of the world.”
In his speech, Biden noted that it would be “politically costly and economically unsound” to disrupt the decisions and investments the nation has made over the past four years, and he urged Trump to leave them in place. “Will the next president stop a new electric battery factory in Liberty, North Carolina, that will create thousands of jobs?” he asked. “[W]ill we deny seniors living in red states $35-a-month insulin?”
In their article, Sonnenfeld and Henriques noted: “President Trump will likely claim he waved a magic wand on January 20 and the economic clouds cleared,” and they urged people: “Don’t Give Trump Credit for the Success of the Biden Economy.”
Biden gave yesterday’s speech in part to put down benchmarks against which we should measure Trump’s economic policies. “During my presidency, we created [16] million new jobs in America” and saw “the lowest average unemployment rate of…any administration in 50 years.” Economic growth has been a strong 3% on average, and inflation is near 2 percent, he said.
“[T]hese are simple, well-established economic benchmarks used to measure the strength of any economy, the success or failure of any president’s four years in office. They’re not political, rhetorical opinions. They’re just facts,” Biden said, “simple facts. As President Reagan called them, ‘stubborn facts.’”
Biden is willing to bet that if the American people pay attention to those facts, they will recognize that his approach to the economy, rather than supply-side economics, works best for everyone.
Today the NASDAQ Composite index, which focuses on tech stocks, broke 20,000 for the first time.
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Ten days ago, on December 2, President Joe Biden arrived in Angola, the first U.S. president to visit central Africa since President Barack Obama traveled there in 2015. In the United States, the story got lost under the president’s pardon of his son Hunter Biden, but it is the far more important one, since events in the 54 countries on the continent of Africa are key to the global future.
The Biden administration has made it a point to strengthen relations between the U.S. and Africa. It recognizes the importance of a continent whose 1.5 billion people are expected to climb to 2.5 billion in the next 25 years, as Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post pointed out last Thursday. The median age of Africa’s inhabitants is 19, and by 2050 it is expected that one out of every four humans on Earth will be African.
The administration has worked to ease African distrust of the U.S. stemming from its history of enslavement, its tendency to back right-wing forces during the post–World War II and Cold War period when African nations threw off colonial rule, and the disdain with which Trump treated African countries during his administration.
The Biden administration hosted the U.S.-Africa leaders' summit in December 2022, backed the admission of the African Union to the Group of 20, and pledged more than $6.5 billion to the continent to aid security, support democratic institutions, and advance civil rights and the rule of law.
During Biden’s term, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield, First Lady Jill Biden, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have all visited the continent. In March 2023, Vice President Kamala Harris visited Ghana, Tanzania, and Zambia.
In Angola last week, Biden said that the U.S. is “all-in on Africa.”
He was in Angola to highlight the Lobito Corridor, a development project centered around a rail line linking the port of Lobito, Angola, on Africa’s Atlantic coast, with the city of Kolwezi, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), in Africa’s interior mining region. Biden traveled to Angola for a summit on the Lobito project as well as other infrastructure investment in the region, joining leaders from Angola, DRC, Tanzania, and Zambia on their own continent to demonstrate his conviction that the African people themselves must determine their own future.
The White House, other democratic countries, regional development banks, and international investors have put more than $6 billion behind the Lobito Corridor. They are hoping to ease the transport of critical minerals from interior countries like Zambia and DRC to Lobito. It currently takes a truck about 45 days to make the journey from the interior to Durban, South Africa; the railway would cut the trip out of the interior to about 45 hours.
The railway will strengthen global supply chains for those minerals while also benefiting local people, local governments, and the local region in Angola, Zambia, and DRC. The project includes investments in clean energy, agriculture, trade between countries, and clearing the mines from Angola’s decades-long civil war along the route, all of which will create good jobs for local workers.
“It’s a game-changer. Imagine how transformative this will be for technology, clean energy, for farming, for food security as a whole. It’s faster, it’s cleaner, it’s cheaper and most importantly, I think, it’s just plain common sense,” Biden said at the summit.
The Lobito Corridor is the flagship project of a new investment program from the Group of Seven (G7) called the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGII). The G7 is a forum of advanced economies that share values of liberal democracy, and the PGII is the answer to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which has invested billions in infrastructure in developing African countries but brings with it the risk of debt traps for the governments that borrow from it. PGII is designed to connect democratic countries, the private sector, and development banks to create “sustainable and transparent investment in quality infrastructure.”
On December 5, Eugene Robinson noted in the Washington Post that Republicans are blasting Biden’s announcement last Tuesday of $1 billion in additional humanitarian aid to 31 African countries to address famine and displacement. Biden said that this help was “the right thing for the wealthiest nation in the world to do,” and Robinson noted that it is also smart. “Ultimately, it will be Nigerians, South Africans, Ethiopians, Angolans and the people of other African nations who decide the continent’s future,” he wrote. “They will remember who was there beside them all along. And who was not.”
Russia has also been working to gain influence in Africa with an eye to extracting the continent's valuable minerals. It turned to the continent after Putin’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine began to isolate Russia from other nations and their resources. The Russian Wagner Group of mercenary fighters has been a key player in Africa since then, often called in by authoritarian leaders to suppress political opposition in exchange for access to mines or other valuable resources. Russia has become the biggest supplier of arms to the continent.
The fall of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad threatens Russia’s ability to continue to operate in Africa. As Mike Eckel of Radio Free Europe explained on Monday, Russia launches most of its African operations from the Hmeimim air base and the Tartus naval base on the Mediterranean coast of Syria. Their loss would hamstring those operations. Russian officials are trying to negotiate with the insurgents who overturned Assad’s regime in order to secure those bases as well as Russia’s other footholds in the country. They have gone from calling the insurgents “terrorists” to referring to them as “armed opposition,” and Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters that Putin has no plans for a public meeting with Assad.
The Syrian ambassador in Moscow told Russian media: “The escape of the head of this system in such a miserable and humiliating manner…confirms the correctness of change and brings hope for a new dawn.” Former Russian and Soviet diplomat Nikolai Sokov told Pjotr Sauer of The Guardian: “Moscow prefers to deal with those who have power and control, [and] discards those who lose them.” But, as the Institute for the Study of War noted, Russia’s inability to preserve Assad’s regime will make the African autocrats see it as an unreliable partner, an impression the Kremlin’s rapid about-face will do little to relieve.
On Monday, a senior administration official emphasized the same idea of self-determination that Biden’s administration applied to development in African countries. He told reporters that Assad’s collapse “is a day for Syrians, about Syrians. It’s not about the United States or anyone else. It’s about the people of Syria who now have a chance to build a new country, free of the oppression and corruption of the Assad family and decades of misrule. We owe them support as they do so, and we are prepared to provide it. But the future of Syria, like the fall of Assad today, will be written by Syrians for Syrians.”
That system, the official suggested, caused Assad’s fall. “[I]t is impossible not to place this week’s events in the context of the decisions the President has made to fully back Israel against Iran and its proxy terrorist groups, including Hezbollah, and Ukraine against Russia,” the official said. After bipartisan support for that position, the official added, “Hamas is on its back; its leaders are dead. Iran is on its back. Hezbollah is on its back. Russia is on its back. It’s just abandoned its only ally in the Middle East. Now, the Assad regime, Russia and Iran’s main ally in the Middle East, has just collapsed. None of this would have been possible absent the direct support for Ukraine and [Israel] in their own defense provided by the United States of America.”
The official recounted the importance of sanctions against the Assad regime and noted that the U.S. has maintained a military presence in Syria to counter the Islamic extremists of ISIS, targeting 75 ISIS targets immediately after Assad’s fall to ensure that ISIS does not regroup in the chaos of the moment.
The official noted that the administration still believes there is a path to a ceasefire and the release of hostages in Gaza, especially in the wake of Assad’s fall and the “dramatically changed balance of power in the region”—“a path…to a Middle East that is far more stable, far more aligned with our interests, and far more aligned with the interests of the people of the Middle East who want to live in peace, without wars, and in prosperity in a region that is more integrated and prosperous and peaceful.”
Today, Secretary of State Blinken traveled to Jordan and Türkiye, where he met with King Abdullah II and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to promote an “inclusive, Syrian-led” government transition in Syria.
Journalist Mike Eckel noted that “[t]he fall of the Assad regime this past weekend was a tectonic event, reverberating across the entire Middle East and further.” Considering the ties of Russia to Syria, and the role Syrian bases have played in Russian influence in Africa, those reverberations will, in some form, echo across the African continent.
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Time magazine’s interview with President-elect Donald Trump, published yesterday, revealed a man who was so desperate to be reelected to the presidency that he constructed a performance that he believed would woo voters, but who has no apparent plans for actual governance.
Trump deliberately patterned the Republican National Convention where he accepted the party’s nomination for president on a professional wrestling event, even featuring a number of professional wrestlers. It appears now that the campaign itself was, similarly, a performance—possibly, as Tom Nichols of The Atlantic suggested, simply to avoid the threat of conviction in one of the many federal or state cases pending against him. In the Time interview, Trump called his campaign “72 Days of Fury.”
During the campaign, Trump repeatedly promised he would “slash” the prices that soared during the post-pandemic economic recovery, although in fact they have been largely stable for the past two years. He hammered on the idea that he would erase transgendered Americans from public life—the Republicans invested $215 million in ads that pushed that theme, making it a key cultural battle. He and his surrogates attacked immigrants, lying that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, for example, were eating local pets and that Aurora, Colorado, a suburb of Denver, had been taken over by Venezuelan gangs, and falsely claiming that the Biden administration had opened the southern border.
The Time interview suggests that, now that he has won back power, Trump has lost interest in the promises of the campaign.
Notably, when a Time journalist asked Trump if his presidency would be a failure if he doesn’t bring the price of groceries down, he answered: “I don't think so. Look, they got them up. I'd like to bring them down. It's hard to bring things down once they're up. You know, it's very hard. But I think that they will.” He then pivoted to a different subject, and that was all he had to say about the price of groceries.
When the journalist asked Trump about the current attempt of Republican lawmakers to force transgender women to use men’s bathrooms, Trump indicated he didn’t really want to talk about it, noting that “it's a very small number of people we're talking about, and it's ripped apart our country.” Caitlyn Jenner, who is herself transgender, is a frequent guest at Mar-a-Lago and has indicated she uses the women’s bathroom there.
Asked whether he would reverse Biden’s protections for transgender children under the Title Nine section of the Education Amendments of 1972, prohibiting sex-based discrimination in schools, Trump clearly hadn’t given the issue much thought. Although it was this expansion that fed Trump’s rhetorical fury over what Republicans claimed was boys participating in girls’ sports, he answered simply:” I'm going to look at it very closely. We're looking at it right now. We're gonna look at it. We're gonna look at everything. Look, the country is torn apart. We're gonna look at everything.”
Trump’s response to the interviewer about immigration can’t really be parsed because it remains based in a completely false version of the actual conditions, including that the Biden administration has admitted more than 13,000 murderers to the U.S.—which has been repeatedly debunked—and that other countries are emptying “people from mental institutions” into the U.S., an apparent misunderstanding of the word “asylum” in immigration. Under both U.S. and international law, a person fleeing violence or persecution has the right to apply for protection, or asylum, in another country.
If Trump has now abandoned the performance he used to win the election, Trump’s planned appointments to office reveal that the actual pillars of his presidency will be personal revenge, the destruction of American institutions, and the use of political office for gain, also known as graft.
Trump appears to have tapped henchmen for revenge against those who tried to hold him accountable to the law. On Tuesday, Department of Justice inspector general Michael Horowitz reported that during Trump’s first term, his Justice Department secretly seized records from 2 members of Congress and 43 congressional staffers as well as phone and text records from journalists.
That use of the Department of Justice against those he considers his enemies seems to have been behind his attempt to make loyalist former Florida representative Matt Gaetz the United States attorney general. Mired in a sex-trafficking scandal, Gaetz had to step aside. Trump then tapped former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi, whose support for him extended not only to pushing the Big Lie that he won the 2020 election but also, apparently, to dropping Florida’s case against the fraudulent Trump University in exchange for a $25,000 donation to one of Bondi’s political action committees. The conservative Washington Examiner has urged U.S. senators to “closely scrutinize” Bondi in confirmation hearings.
The Justice Department oversees the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and Trump’s handling of the director of the FBI also appears to be aimed at his enemies. In 1976, Congress established that an FBI director would serve a single ten-year term, with the idea that such a director would not be tied to a single president. In 2017, Trump fired the Republican FBI director picked by President Barack Obama, James Comey, after Comey refused to drop the investigation into the ties between Trump’s campaign and Russian operatives. In Comey’s place, he settled on Christopher Wray.
But Wray oversaw the FBI’s investigations into the pro-Trump January 6 rioters and the raid on Mar-a-Lago after Trump lied about retaining top secret documents. Trump was also angry that Wray told a congressional committee that he had seen no sign of cognitive decline in President Joe Biden.
Trump made it clear he intended to get rid of Wray and replace him with extreme loyalist Kash Patel. Wray’s term expires in 2027, but on Wednesday he announced he would step down at the end of Biden’s term, as Trump wants him to. Trump cheered the announcement, saying the FBI had “illegally raided” his home—in fact, a judge signed off on a search warrant—and added: “We want our FBI back.”
Kash Patel has vowed to dismantle the FBI, as well as to go after media that he considers disloyal to Trump. He has written a trilogy of children’s books about Trump, titled “The Plot Against the King.”
Trump’s appointments also feed his anti-establishment supporters who want to destroy institutions, especially his tapping of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to become the secretary of Health and Human Services. A leader in the anti-vax movement, Kennedy has attacked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Today, Christina Jewett and Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times reported that the lawyer who is helping Kennedy pick the health officials he will bring into office, Aaron Siri, has tried to stop the distribution of 13 vaccines. In addition, in 2022 he petitioned the FDA to revoke its approval of the polio vaccine. If approved, Kennedy will oversee the FDA.
The third pillar of Trump’s presidency appears to be graft for himself, his cronies, and his family. Dana Mattioli and Rebecca Ballhaus of the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is planning to donate $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund in an effort to shore up his ties to the incoming president.
Mark Zuckerberg of Meta handed over $1 million as well, as did both the chief executive officer of OpenAI and AI search startup Perplexity. Trump has refused to sign the paperwork that would require him to disclose the donors to the inauguration fund.
Today, Jonathan V. Last of The Bulwark called the fund “a slush fund, pure and simple.” There is no required accounting for how the money is spent, making it, as Last says, “a way for rich people to funnel money to the incoming president that he can then use however he sees fit, completely unfettered and under cover of darkness. The inauguration fund is no different than feudal lords approaching the new king with gifts of rubies, or mobsters showering a new mayor with envelopes of cash.”
There are other ways for people to buy influence in the new administration. As Judd Legum pointed out on December 2 in Popular Information, crypto currency entrepreneur Justin Sun, a Chinese national, bought $30 million in crypto tokens from Trump’s new crypto venture, an essentially worthless investment that nonetheless freed up about $18 million for Trump himself.
In March 2023 the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Sun with fraud and market manipulation. Sun posted on social media that his company “is committed to making America great again.”
Trump appears willing to reward cronies with positions that could be lucrative as well, tapping billionaire Tom Barrack, for example, to become his administration’s ambassador to Türkiye. Barrack chaired Trump’s 2016 inauguration fund and was accused—and acquitted—of secret lobbying for the United Arab Emirates in exchange for investments of tens of millions of dollars in an office building and one of his investment funds.
Trump is also putting family members into official positions, tapping his son Don Jr.’s former fiancee Kimberly Guilfoyle to become the U.S. ambassador to Greece shortly after news broke that Don Jr. is seeing someone else. Trump is pushing Florida governor Ron DeSantis to name his daughter-in-law Lara Trump to the Senate seat that will be vacated by Marco Rubio’s elevation to secretary of state, and he has tapped his daughter Tiffany’s father-in-law, Massad Boulos, to become his Middle East advisor.
Various newspapers have reported that Boulos’s reputation as a billionaire mogul at the head of Boulos Enterprises is undeserved: in fact, he is a small-time truck salesman who has nothing to do with Boulos Enterprises but permitted the confusion, he says, because he doesn’t comment on his business.
And then there is Eric Trump, who announced yesterday that the Trump Organization has made a deal with Dubai-based real estate developer Dar Global to build a Trump Tower in the Saudi capital of Riyadh. When asked about potential conflicts of interest, Eric Trump said: “I have no interaction with Washington, D.C. I want no interaction with Washington, D.C.”
So far, there has been little outcry over Eric Trump’s announcement, despite years of stories focusing on Republicans’ claims that Hunter Biden and President Biden had each taken $5 million from the Ukrainian energy company on whose board Hunter Biden sat. Yesterday the key witness behind that accusation, Alexander Smirnov, pleaded guilty of lying to the FBI and hiding the more than $2 million he received after that testimony.
Early this month, President Biden pardoned Hunter, saying that he had been charged “only because he is my son,” and that “there’s no reason to believe it will stop here.” On December 5, Representative Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) told the Fox News Channel that House Republicans would continue to investigate Hunter Biden despite the pardon.
If there is one major continuity between Trump’s campaign and plans for his administration, it is that his focus on shock and performance, rather than the detailed work of governing, still plays well to the media.
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0
brianlux
Moving through All Kinds of Terrain. Posts: 42,274
I love Heather even though sometimes her letter makes me want to jump off the nearest tall building.
(But don't get you hopes up, MAGA folk, I'm facetious ).
"Pretty cookies, heart squares all around, yeah!" -Eddie Vedder, "Smile"
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Tomorrow, December 16, is the fiftieth anniversary of the Safe Drinking Water Act, signed into law on December 16, 1974, by President Gerald R. Ford, a Republican. The measure required the Environmental Protection Agency to set maximum contaminant levels for drinking water and required states to comply with them. It protected the underground sources of drinking water and called for emergency measures to protect public health if a dangerous contaminant either was in or was likely to enter a public water system.
To conduct research on clean drinking water and provide grants for states to clean up their systems, Congress authorized appropriations of $15 million in 1975, $25 million in 1976, and $35 million in 1977.
The Safe Drinking Water Act was one of the many laws passed in the 1970s after the environmental movement, sparked after Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring explored the effect of toxic chemicals on living organisms, had made Americans aware of the dangers of pollution in the environment. That awareness had turned to anger by 1969, when in January a massive oil spill off Santa Barbara, California, poured between 80,000 and 100,000 barrels of oil into the Pacific, fouling 35 miles of California beaches and killing seabirds, dolphins, sea lions, and elephant seals. Then, in June, the chemical contaminants that had been dumped into Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River caught fire.
The nation had dipped its toes into water regulation during the Progressive Era at the beginning of the twentieth century, after germ theory became widely understood in the 1880s. Cleaning up cities first meant installing sewer systems, then meant trying to stop diseases from spreading through water systems. In 1912, Congress passed the U.S. Public Health Service Act, which established a national agency for protecting public health and called for getting rid of waterborne illnesses—including the life-threatening illness typhoid—by treating water with chlorine.
It was a start, but a new focus on science and technology after World War II pointed toward updating the system. The U.S. Public Health Service investigated the nation’s water supply in the 1960s and discovered more than 46,000 cases of waterborne illness. In the 1970s it found that about 90% of the drinking water systems it surveyed exceeded acceptable levels of microbes.
In February 1970, Republican President Richard M. Nixon sent to Congress a special message “on environmental quality.” “[W]e…have too casually and too long abused our natural environment,” he wrote. “The time has come when we can wait no longer to repair the damage already done, and to establish new criteria to guide us in the future.” He called for “fundamentally new philosophies of land, air and water use, for stricter regulation, for expanded government action, for greater citizen involvement, and for new programs to ensure that government, industry and individuals all are called on to do their share of the job and to pay their share of the cost.”
Later that year, Congress passed a measure establishing the Environmental Protection Agency, and Nixon signed it into law.
Widespread calls to protect drinking water ran up against lobbyists for oil companies and members of Congress from oil districts. They complained that the science of what substances were dangerous was uncertain and that how they would be measured and regulated was unclear. They complained that the EPA was inefficient and expensive and was staffed with inexperienced officials.
Then, in 1972, an EPA study discovered that waters downstream from 60 industries discharging waste from Baton Rouge to the Mississippi River’s mouth in New Orleans had high concentrations of 66 chemicals and toxic metals. Chemical companies had sprung up after World War II along the 85 miles between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, potentially polluting the water, while the lower end of the Mississippi River collected all the runoff from the river itself.
Two years later, an analysis of drinking water and cancer death rates among white men in that same area of Louisiana suggested that carcinogens in the water might be linked to high cancer rates. Louisiana representative Lindy Boggs, a Democrat, told Congress that “it is really vitally important to our region that we have controls enforced on the toxic organic compounds that come into the river from the industrial and municipal discharges, from runoffs from from agricultural regions, from accidents on the river, and from chemical spills on the river.”
Concerns about the area of Louisiana that later came to be known as “Cancer Alley” were uppermost, but there were chemical companies across the country, and Congress set out to safeguard the lives of Americans from toxins released by corporations into the nation’s water supply. The Safe Drinking Water Act, the first law designed to create a comprehensive standard for the nation’s drinking water, was Congress’s answer.
The new law dramatically improved the quality of drinking water in the U.S., making it some of the safest in the world. Over the years, the EPA has expanded the list of contaminants it regulates, limiting both new man-made chemicals and new pathogens.
But the system is under strain: not only have scientific advances discovered that some contaminants are dangerous at much lower concentrations than scientists previously thought, but also a lack of funding for the EPA means that oversight can be lax. Even when it’s not, a lack of funding for towns and cities means they can’t always afford to upgrade their systems.
By 2015, almost 77 million Americans lived in regions whose water systems did not meet the safety standards of the Safe Drinking Water Act. In addition, more than 2 million Americans did not have running water, and many more rely on wells or small systems not covered by the Safe Drinking Water Act.
The Biden administration began to address the problem with an investment of about $22 billion to upgrade the nation’s water systems. The money removed lead pipes, upgraded wastewater and sewage systems, and addressed the removal of so-called forever chemicals and proposed a new standard for acceptable measures of them.
What this will mean in the future is unclear. President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to increase production of oil and gas—although it is currently at an all-time high—and such projects are often slowed by environmental regulations. On Tuesday, December 10, he posted on social media, “Any person or company investing ONE BILLION DOLLARS, OR MORE, in the United States of America, will receive fully expedited approvals and permits, including, but in no way limited to, all Environmental approvals. GET READY TO ROCK!!!”
“[B]y ignoring environmental costs we have given an economic advantage to the careless polluter over his more conscientious rival,” Trump’s Republican predecessor Nixon told the nation in 1970. “While adopting laws prohibiting injury to person or property, we have freely allowed injury to our shared surroundings.” When he signed the Safe Drinking Water Act in 1974, President Ford added simply: “Nothing is more essential to the life of every single American than clean air, pure food, and safe drinking water.”
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Today, President Joe Biden designated a new national monument in honor of Frances Perkins, secretary of labor under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The first female Cabinet secretary, Perkins served for twelve years. She took the job only after getting FDR to sign on to her goals: unemployment insurance, health insurance, old-age insurance, a 40-hour work week, a minimum wage, and abolition of child labor. She later recalled: “I remember he looked so startled, and he said, ‘Well, do you think it can be done?’”
She promised to find out.
Once in office, Perkins was a driving force behind the administration’s massive investment in public works projects to get people back to work. She urged the government to spend $3.3 billion on schools, roads, housing, and post offices. Those projects employed more than a million people in 1934.
In 1935, FDR signed into law the Social Security Act that she designed and negotiated, providing ordinary Americans with unemployment insurance; aid to homeless, dependent, and neglected children; funds to promote maternal and child welfare; and public health services.
In 1938, Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established a minimum wage and maximum hours. It banned child labor.
The one area where Perkins fell short of her goals was in establishing public healthcare. It was not until 2010 that President Barack Obama signed into law the Affordable Care Act.
Perkins’s work to build FDR’s New Deal sparked the modern American state.
Before Perkins, the primary function of the federal government was to manage the economic relationships between labor, capital, and resources. Property rights, after all, had been the basis on which North American colonists had found the justification to rebel against the British crown, and that focus on the relationships inherent in property ownership had continued to dominate the government American lawmakers built.
But Perkins recognized that the central purpose of government was not to protect property; it was to protect the communities of people who lived in the nation. She recognized that children, the elderly, women, and disabled Americans, all of whom contributed to society whether or not that contribution was recognized with a paycheck, were as valuable to the survival of a community as male workers and the wealthy men who employed them.
“The people are what matter to government,” she said, “and a government should aim to give all the people under its jurisdiction the best possible life.”
A majority of Americans of both parties liked the new system, but the reworking of the government shocked those who had previously dominated the country. As soon as the Social Security Act passed, opponents set out to destroy it along with the rest of the new system. A coalition of Republican businessmen who hated both business regulation and the taxes that paid for social programs, racists who opposed the idea of equal rights for racial and ethnic minorities, and religious traditionalists—especially Southern Baptists—who opposed the recognition of women’s equal rights, joined together to fight against the New Deal.
Their undermining of Perkins’s vision got little traction when they were attacking business regulation and taxes to support social services. Voters liked those things. But it began to attract supporters after 1954, when the Supreme Court handed down the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, decision requiring the desegregation of public schools. That decision enabled those opposed to the New Deal to harness racism to their cause, warning American voters that a government that protected everyone would mean a government that used tax dollars paid by white Americans to benefit Black Americans.
Religious traditionalists’ role in undermining the New Deal grew in the 1970s. The new system dramatically expanded women’s rights, and when President Richard Nixon’s people worried he would lose reelection in 1972, they quite deliberately used the issue of abortion to claim that “women’s liberation” was destroying the family structure that religious traditionalists believed mirrored God’s relationship to his human flock.
By 1979, religious traditionalists had rejected the modern move toward women’s rights and made common cause with Republicans eager to derail the New Deal. In 1980 the support of those traditionalists put Republican president Ronald Reagan into the White House. Their influence grew in the 1990s as white evangelicals became the base of the Republican Party. By 2016 they had brought into the Republican Party a determination to reinstate a male-dominated, patriarchal world that resurrected the government Frances Perkins’s vision had replaced.
That impulse has grown until now, in 2024, attacks on women have become central to the destruction of the kind of government Frances Perkins helped to establish during the New Deal. Religious extremists in the Republican Party have in some states reduced or prevented women’s access to healthcare and are talking about taking away women’s right to vote, and the party itself has downgraded the role of women in society. When House Republicans released a list of their committee leaders for the next Congress last Thursday, there were no women on it. For the first time in 20 years, no House committees will be chaired by women.
“Very fitting in the MAGA Era—No Women Need Apply,” former Republican representative from Virginia Barbara Comstock posted on X.
In his term in office, President Biden has worked to reclaim Frances Perkins’s vision of a government that works for all Americans. When he took office, he promised to have a Cabinet that “looks like America,” and he created the most diverse Cabinet in American history. And he has emphasized women’s equality. In March 2024 he signed an executive order noting that, since women’s roles in American history have often been overlooked, it is imperative that we recognize the women and girls who have shaped the nation.
The creation today of the Frances Perkins National Monument tied together Perkins’s expansion of the government and the centrality of women to the American story. The event took place in the Frances Perkins Building, the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Labor in Washington, D.C., where acting secretary of labor Julie Su noted that Biden has been “the most pro-worker, pro-union president in history,” protecting pensions, defending unions, creating good jobs, and unapologetically wielding the power of the presidency on behalf of working people.
Su inducted the president into the Labor Department’s Hall of Honor, and Biden responded with the observation that “the American people are beginning to figure out all we’re doing is what’s basically decent and fair—just basically decent and fair.”
Then Biden spoke about Perkins and her work. He described how his administration has defended, protected, and expanded her vision. He reiterated that women have always been vital to the United States and insisted that they must be acknowledged both in our current society and in the way we remember our history.
As part of the day’s events, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland announced the establishment of five new National Historic Landmarks recognizing women’s history: the Charleston Cigar Factory in Charleston, South Carolina, where in 1945–1946, Black women led a strike that prompted the organization of southern workers; the Furies Collective, the Washington, D.C., home of a lesbian, feminist publishing group in the early 1970s; the Washington, D.C., Slowe-Burrill House, home of Black lesbian educators Lucy Diggs Slowe and Mary Burrill in the early twentieth century; Azurest South in Petersburg, Virginia, the home and studio of early twentieth century Black architect Amaza Lee Meredith; and the Peter Hurd and Henriette Wyeth House and Studios in San Patricio, New Mexico, where the two painted in the twentieth century.
In establishing the 57-acre family farm of Frances Perkins on the Damariscotta River in Newcastle, Maine, as a National Monument today, Biden acknowledged both the importance of Perkins’s New Deal vision of a government that benefits everyone and the centrality of women’s equality to that vision.
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Yesterday, Trump gave his first press conference since the election. It was exactly what Trump’s public performances always are: attention-grabbing threats alongside lies and very little apparent understanding of actual issues. His mix of outrageous and threatening is central to his politics, though: it keeps him central to the media, even though, as Josh Marshall pointed out in Talking Points Memo on December 13, he often claims a right to do something he knows very little about and has no power to accomplish. The uncertainty he creates is key to his power, Marshall notes. It keeps everyone off balance and focused on him in anticipation of trouble to come.
At the same time, it seems increasingly clear that the wealthy leaders who backed Trump’s reelection are not terribly concerned about his threats: they seem to see him as a figurehead rather than a policy leader. They are counting on him to deliver more tax cuts and deregulation but apparently are dismissing his campaign vows to raise tariffs and deport immigrants as mere rhetoric.
As the promised tax cuts are already under discussion, interested parties are turning to deregulation. Susanne Rust and Ian James of the Los Angeles Times reported on Sunday that on December 5, more than a hundred industrial trade groups signed a 21-page letter to Trump complaining that “regulations are strangling our economy.” They urged him to gut Biden-era regulations and instead to “partner” with manufacturers to create “workable regulations that achieve important policy goals without imposing overly burdensome and impractical requirements on our sector.”
They single out reductions in air quality, water quality, chemical, vehicle, and power plant environmental regulations as important for their industries. They also call for ending the “regulatory overreach” of the Biden administration on labor rules, saying those rules “threaten the employer-employee relationship and harm manufacturers’ global competitiveness.” They want an end to “right-to-repair” laws, a loosening of the rules for how and when companies need to report cyber incidents, and the replacement of mandated consumer product safety rules with “voluntary standards.”
They also call for cuts to the Biden administration’s antitrust efforts and for looser corporate finance regulations. On December 12, Gina Heeb reported in the Wall Street Journal that Trump’s advisors are exploring ways “to dramatically shrink, consolidate or even eliminate the top bank watchdogs in Washington,” including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).
As Catherine Rampell explained in the Washington Post today, Congress created the FDIC in 1933 to protect bank deposits so that a bank’s customers can trust that mismanaged banks won’t lose their money. The FDIC also oversees those banks so that they are less likely to get into trouble in the first place. Congress created the system after people rushing to get their money out before a collapse actually created the very collapse that they feared, with one bank failure creating another in a domino effect that dug the economy even further into the crisis it was in after the Great Crash.
But the insurance money for those banks comes from fees assessed on the banks themselves, so abolishing the FDIC would save the banks money.
When he learned that Trump’s advisors are eyeing cuts to the FDIC, Princeton history professor Kevin Kruse commented: “When I lecture about New Deal banking reforms, I note that some of the key measures—like Glass Steagall—were repealed by the right with disastrous results like the 2008 financial meltdown, but ha ha, no one will ever be stupid enough to kill FDIC and bring back the old bank runs.”
Ben Guggenheim of Politico was the first to report that twenty-nine Republican members of Congress are also quick off the blocks in getting into the act of promoting private industry, calling for the incoming president to end the program of the Internal Revenue Service that lets people file their taxes directly without using a private tax preparer. Other developed countries use a similar public system, but in the U.S., private tax preparers staunchly opposed the public system. When more than 140,000 people used the IRS pilot program this year, they saved an estimated $6.5 million. Republicans called for its end, warning it is “a threat to taxpayers’ freedom from government overreach.”
But for all their faith that Trump will deregulate the economy, economic leaders seem to think his other promises were just rhetoric.
Brian Schwartz of the Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that business executives have been lobbying Trump to change his declared plans on tariffs. The president-elect has vowed to place tariffs of 25% on products from Canada and Mexico, and of an additional 10% on products from China. He claims to believe that other countries will pay these tariffs, but in fact U.S. consumers will pay them. That, plus the fact that other countries will almost certainly respond with their own tariffs against U.S. products, makes economists warn that Trump’s plans will hurt the economy with both inflation and trade wars.
Schwartz reported that some companies and some Republicans are hoping that Trump’s tariff threats are simply a bargaining tactic.
Trump supporters say something similar about his vow to deport 11 to 20 million undocumented immigrants, hoping he won’t actually go after long-term, hardworking undocumented people. On December 10, Jack Dolan reported in the Los Angeles Times that the resort town of Mammoth Lakes, California, depends on migrant labor, and on December 15, Eli Saslow and Erin Schaff of the New York Times reported the story of an undocumented worker brought to the U.S. as an infant, who is now trying to figure out his future after his beloved father-in-law voted for Trump. Two days ago, CNN reported on Trump-supporting dairy farmers in South Dakota who depend on undocumented workers, insisting that Trump will not round up undocumented immigrants, no matter what he says.
One person who is not discounting Trump’s threats is Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). McConnell will give up his leadership position in January and has told his colleagues he feels “liberated.”
McConnell appears to be taking a stand against Trump’s expected appointee for secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Kennedy speaks often against vaccines, and after the New York Times reported that the lawyer working with Kennedy to vet potential HHS staff petitioned federal regulators to take the polio vaccine off the market, McConnell—a polio survivor—warned: “Efforts to undermine public confidence in proven cures are not just uninformed—they’re dangerous. Anyone seeking the Senate’s consent to serve in the incoming administration would do well to steer clear of even the appearance of association with such efforts.”
McConnell has also been vocal about his opposition to Trump’s isolationism. He is a champion of sending military support to Ukraine and, after he steps down from the leadership, will chair the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, the subcommittee that controls military spending. “America’s national security interests face the gravest array of threats since the Second World War,” McConnell says. “At this critical moment, a new Senate Republican majority has a responsibility to secure the future of U.S. leadership and primacy.”
McConnell will also chair the Rules Committee, which gives him a chance to stop MAGA senators from trying to abandon the power of the Senate and permit Trump to get his way. McConnell has said that “[d]efending the Senate as an institution and protecting the right to political speech in our elections remain among my longest-standing priorities.”
That last sentence identifies the current struggle in the Republican Party. McConnell is showing his willingness to prevent Trump and MAGA Republicans from bulldozing their way through the Senate in order to undermine the departments of Justice, Defense, and Health and Human Services, among others. But when he talks about “protecting the right to political speech in our elections,” he is talking about protecting the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision that permits corporations and wealthy individuals to flood our elections, and thus our political system, with money.
It is those corporations and wealthy individuals who are now lining up for tax cuts and deregulation, but who don’t want the tariffs or mass deportations or isolationism Trump’s “America First” MAGA base wants.
Trump and his team have been talking about their election win as a “mandate” and a “landslide,” but it was actually a razor thin victory with more voters choosing someone other than Trump than voting for him. He will need the support of establishment Republicans in the Senate to put his MAGA policies in place.
At yesterday's press conference, he appeared to be nodding to McConnell when he promised: “You’re not going to lose the polio vaccine. That’s not going to happen.” McConnell’s fierce use of power in the past suggests that the Senate’s giving up its constitutional power to bend to Trump’s will isn’t likely to happen, either.
[Buddy and I happened to be walking past the FDIC building in Washington, D.C., tonight, and it was too perfect a coincidence to pass up.]
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Yesterday, Representative Barry Loudermilk (R-GA) released an “Interim Report on the Failures and Politicization of the January 6th Select Committee.” As the title suggests, the report seeks to rewrite what happened on January 6, 2021, when rioters encouraged by former president Donald Trump attacked the U.S. Capitol. Loudermilk chairs a subcommittee on oversight that sits within the Committee on House Administration. The larger committee—House Administration—oversees the daily operations of the House of Representatives, including the Capitol Police. Under that charge, former House speaker Kevin McCarthy permitted MAGA Republicans to investigate security failures at the Capitol on January 6.
Loudermilk was himself involved in the story of that day after video turned up of him giving a tour of the Capitol on January 5 despite its being closed because of Covid. During his tour, participants took photos of things that are not usually of interest to visitors: stairwells, for example. Since then, he has been eager to turn the tables against those investigating the events of January 6.
Loudermilk turned the committee’s investigation of security failures into an attack on the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, more commonly known as the January 6th Committee. Yesterday’s report singled out former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY), who has taken a strong stand against Trump’s fitness for office after his behavior that day, as the primary villain of the select committee. In his press release concerning the interim report, Loudermilk said that Cheney “should be investigated for potential criminal witness tampering,” and the report itself claimed that “numerous federal laws were likely broken by Liz Cheney” and that the FBI should investigate that alleged criminality.
The report seeks to exonerate Trump and those who participated in the events of January 6 while demonizing those who are standing against him, rewriting the reality of what happened on January 6 with a version that portrays Trump as a persecuted victim.
Trump’s team picked up the story and turned it even darker. At 2:11 this morning, Trump’s social media account posted: “Liz Cheney could be in a lot of trouble based on the evidence obtained by the subcommittee, which states that ‘numerous federal laws were likely broken by Liz Cheney, and these violations should be investigated by the FBI.’ Thank you to Congressman Barry Loudermilk on a job well done.”
To this, conservative writer David Frum responded: “After his successful consolidation of power, the Leader prepares show trials for those who resisted his failed first [violent attempt to overthrow the government].”
Liz Cheney also responded. “January 6th showed Donald Trump for who [he] really is—a cruel and vindictive man who allowed violent attacks to continue against our Capitol and law enforcement officers while he watched television and refused for hours to instruct his supporters to stand down and leave.” She pointed out that the January 6th committee’s report was based on evidence that came primarily from Republican witnesses, “including many of the most senior officials from Trump’s own White House, campaign and Administration,” and that the Department of Justice reached the similar conclusions after its own investigation.
Loudermilk’s report “intentionally disregards the truth and the Select Committee’s tremendous weight of evidence, and instead fabricates lies and defamatory allegations in an attempt to cover up what Donald Trump did,” Cheney wrote. “Their allegations do not reflect a review of the actual evidence, and are a malicious and cowardly assault on the truth. No reputable lawyer, legislator or judge would take this seriously.”
CNN aired clips today of Republican lawmakers blaming Trump for the events of January 6.
Last night, Trump also filed a civil lawsuit against pollster J. Ann Selzer, her polling company, the Des Moines Register, and its parent company Gannett over Selzer’s November 2 poll showing Harris in the lead for the election. Calling it “brazen election interference,” the suit alleges that the poll violated the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act. Robert Corn-Revere, chief counsel for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, told Brian Stelter, Katelyn Polantz, Hadas Gold, and Paula Reid of CNN: “This absurd lawsuit is a direct assault on the First Amendment. Newspapers and polling firms are not engaged in ‘deceptive practices’ just because they publish stories and poll results President-elect Donald Trump doesn’t like. Getting a poll wrong is not election interference or fraud.”
Conservative former representative Joe Walsh (R-IL) wrote: “Trump is suing a pollster and calling for an investigation of [Liz Cheney]. Don’t you dare tell me he’s not an authoritarian. And don’t you dare look the other way. Donald Trump is un-American. The resistance to him from Americans must be steadfast & fierce.”
This afternoon, Trump’s authoritarian aspirations smashed against reality.
The determination of the MAGA extremists in the House to put poison pills in appropriations measures over the past year meant that the Republicans have been unable to pass the necessary appropriations bills for 2024 (not a typo), forcing the government to operate with continuing resolutions. On September 25, Congress passed a continuing resolution that would fund the government through December 20, this Friday. Without funding, the government will begin to shut down…right before the holidays.
At the same time, a farm bill, which Congress usually passes every five years and which outlines the country’s agriculture and food policies including supplemental nutrition (formerly known as food stamps), expired in 2023 and has been continued through temporary extensions.
Last night, news broke that congressional leaders had struck a bipartisan deal to keep the government from shutting down. The proposed 1,500-page measure extended the farm bill for a year and provided about $100 billion in disaster relief as well as about $10 billion in assistance for farmers. It also raised congressional salaries and kicked the government funding deadline through March 14. It seemed like a last-minute reprieve from a holiday government shutdown.
But MAGA Republicans immediately opposed the measure. “It’s a total dumpster fire. I think it’s garbage,” said Representative Eric Burlison (R-MO). They are talking publicly about ditching Johnson and voting for someone else for House speaker.
Trump’s sidekick Elon Musk also opposed the bill. Chad Pergram of the Fox News Channel reported that House speaker Mike Johnson explained on the Fox News Channel that he is on a text chain with Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, both of whom are unelected appointees to Trump’s proposed "Department of Government Efficiency" charged with cutting the U.S. budget.
Johnson said he explained to Musk that the measure would need Democratic votes to pass, and then they could bring Trump in roaring back with the America First agenda. Apparently, Musk was unconvinced: shortly after noon, he posted, “Any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in 2 years!” Later, he added: “No bills should be passed Congress [sic] until Jan 20, when [Trump] takes office.”
This blueprint would shut down the United States government for a month, but Musk—who, again, does not answer to any constituents—seems untroubled. ″‘Shutting down’ the government (which doesn’t actually shut down critical functions btw) is infinitely better than passing a horrible bill,” he tweeted.
Pergram reported that Musk’s threats sent Republicans scrambling, and Musk tweeted: “Your elected representatives have heard you and now the terrible bill is dead. The voice of the people has triumphed! VOX POPULI VOX DEI.”
But Trump and Vice President–elect J.D. Vance seem to recognize that shutting down the government before the holidays is likely to be unpopular. They issued their own statement against the measure, calling instead for “a streamlined bill that doesn’t give Chuck Schumer and the Democrats everything they want.”
Then Trump and Vance went on to bring up something not currently on the table: the debt ceiling. The debt ceiling is a holdover from World War I, when Congress stopped trying to micromanage the Treasury and instead simply gave it a ceiling for borrowing money. In the last decades, Congress has appropriated more money than the country brings in, thus banging up against the debt ceiling. If it is not raised, the United States will default on its debt, and so Congress routinely raises the ceiling…as long as a Republican president is in office. If a Democrat is in office, Republicans fight bitterly against what they say is profligate spending.
The debt ceiling is not currently an issue, but Trump and Vance made it central to their statement, perhaps hoping people would confuse the appropriations bill with the debt ceiling. ”Increasing the debt ceiling is not great but we’d rather do it on Biden’s watch. If Democrats won’t cooperate on the debt ceiling now”—again, it is the Republicans who threaten to force the country into default—“what makes anyone think they would do it in June during our administration. Let’s have this debate now.”
Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) explained: “Remember what this is all about: Trump wants Democrats to agree to raise the debt ceiling so he can pass his massive corporate and billionaire tax cut without a problem. Shorter version: tax cut for billionaires or the government shuts down for Christmas.”
President and Dr. Biden are in Delaware today, honoring the memory of Biden’s first wife, Neilia, and his one-year-old daughter Naomi, who were killed in a car accident 52 years ago today, but White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre issued a statement saying:
“Republicans need to stop playing politics with this bipartisan agreement or they will hurt hardworking Americans and create instability across the country. President-elect Trump and Vice President–elect Vance ordered Republicans to shut down the government and they are threatening to do just that—while undermining communities recovering from disasters, farmers and ranchers, and community health centers. Triggering a damaging government shutdown would hurt families who are gathering to meet with their loved ones and endanger the basic services Americans from veterans to Social Security recipients rely on. A deal is a deal. Republicans should keep their word.”
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo pointed out the relationship between Trump’s authoritarianism and today’s chaos on Capitol Hill. Trump elevated Musk to the center of power, Marshall observes, and now is following in his wake. Musk, Marshall writes, “is erratic, volatile, impulsive, mercurial,” and he “introduces a huge source of unpredictability and chaos into the presidency that for once Trump doesn’t control.”
Ron Filipkowski of MeidasNews captured the day’s jockeying among Trump and Musk and warring Republican factions over whether elected officials should fund the United States government. He posted: “The owner of a car company is controlling the House of Representatives from a social media app.”
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“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”
These were the first lines in a pamphlet that appeared in Philadelphia on December 19, 1776, at a time when the fortunes of the American patriots seemed at an all-time low. Just five months before, the members of the Second Continental Congress had adopted the Declaration of Independence, explaining to the world that “the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, Assembled…do…solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved.”
The nation’s founders went on to explain why it was necessary for them “to dissolve the political bands” which had connected them to the British crown.
They explained that their vision of human government was different from that of Great Britain. In contrast to the tradition of hereditary monarchy under which the American colonies had been organized, the representatives of the united states on the North American continent believed in a government organized according to the principles of natural law.
Such a government rested on the “self-evident” concept “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Governments were created to protect those rights and, rather than deserving loyalty because of tradition, religion, or heritage, they were legitimate only if those they governed consented to them. And the American colonists no longer consented to be governed by the British monarchy.
This new vision of human government was an exciting thing to declare in the heat of a Philadelphia summer after a year of skirmishing between the colonial army and British regulars, but by December 1776, enthusiasm for this daring new experiment was ebbing. Shortly after colonials had cheered news of independence in July as local leaders read copies of the Continental Congress’s declaration in meetinghouses and taverns in cities and small towns throughout the colonies, the British moved on General George Washington and the troops in New York City.
By September the British had forced Washington and his soldiers to retreat from the city, and after a series of punishing skirmishes across Manhattan Island, by November the Redcoats had pushed the Americans into New Jersey. They chased the colonials all the way across the Delaware River into Pennsylvania.
By mid-December, things looked bleak for the Continental Army and the revolutionary government it backed. The 5,000 soldiers with Washington who were still able to fight were demoralized from their repeated losses and retreats, and since the Continental Congress had kept enlistments short so as not to risk a standing army, many of the men would be free to leave the army at the end of the year, further weakening it.
As the British troops had taken over New York City and the Continental soldiers had retreated, many of the newly minted Americans outside the army were also having doubts about the whole enterprise of creating a new, independent nation based on the idea that all men were created equal. Then things got worse: as the American soldiers crossed into Pennsylvania, the Continental Congress abandoned Philadelphia on December 12 out of fear of a British invasion, regrouping in Baltimore (which they complained was dirty and expensive).
“These are the times that try men’s souls.”
The author of The American Crisis was Thomas Paine, whose January 1776 pamphlet Common Sense had solidified the colonists’ irritation at the king’s ministers into a rejection of monarchy itself, a rejection not just of King George III, but of all kings. In early 1776, Paine had told the fledgling Americans, many of whom still prayed for a return to the comfortable neglect they had enjoyed from the British government before 1763, that the colonies must form their own independent government.
Now he urged them to see the experiment through. He explained that he had been with the troops as they retreated across New Jersey and, describing the march for his readers, told them “that both officers and men, though greatly harassed and fatigued, frequently without rest, covering, or provision, the inevitable consequences of a long retreat, bore it with a manly and martial spirit. All their wishes centred in one, which was, that the country would turn out and help them to drive the enemy back.”
For that was the crux of it. Paine had no doubt that patriots would create a new nation, eventually, because the cause of human self-determination was just. But how long it took to establish that new nation would depend on how much effort people put into success. “I call not upon a few, but upon all: not on this state or that state, but on every state: up and help us; lay your shoulders to the wheel; better have too much force than too little, when so great an object is at stake,” Paine wrote. “Let it be told to the future world, that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet and to repulse it.”
In mid-December, British commander General William Howe had sent most of his soldiers back to New York to spend the winter, leaving garrisons across the river in New Jersey to guard against Washington advancing.
On Christmas night, having heard that the garrison at Trenton was made up of Hessian auxiliaries who were exhausted and unprepared for an attack, Washington and 2,400 soldiers crossed back over the icy Delaware River in a winter storm. They marched nine miles to attack the garrison, the underdressed soldiers suffering from the cold and freezing rain. Reaching Trenton, they surprised the outnumbered Hessians, who fought briefly in the streets before surrendering.
The victory at Trenton restored the colonials’ confidence in their cause. Soldiers reenlisted, and in early January they surprised the British at Princeton, New Jersey, driving them back. The British abandoned their posts in central New Jersey, and by March the Continental Congress moved back to Philadelphia. Historians credit the Battles of Trenton and Princeton with saving the Revolutionary cause.
There is no hard proof that Washington had officers read The American Crisis to his troops when it came out six days before the march to Trenton, as some writers have said, but there is little doubt they heard it one way or another. So, too, did those wavering loyalists.
“Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered,” Paine wrote in that fraught moment, “yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.”
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This evening the House of Representatives passed a measure to fund the government for three months. The measure will fund the government at current levels halfway through March. It also appropriates $100 billion in disaster aid for regions hit by the storms and fires of the summer and fall, as well as $10 billion for farmers.
Getting to this agreement has exposed the power vacuum in the Republican Party and thus a crisis in the government of the United States.
This fight over funding has been brewing since Republicans took over the House of Representatives in January 2023. From their first weeks in office, when they launched the longest fight over a House speaker since 1860, the Republicans were bitterly divided. MAGA Republicans want to slash government so deeply that it will no longer be able to regulate business, provide a basic safety net, promote infrastructure, or protect civil rights. Establishment Republicans also want to cut the government, but they recognize that with Democrats in charge of the Senate and a Democratic president, they cannot get everything they want.
As Jacob Bogage of the Washington Post recounted, when the nation hit the debt ceiling in spring 2023, Republicans used it to demand that the Democrats cut the budget back to 2022 levels. Democrats objected that they had raised the debt ceiling without conditions three times under Trump and that Republicans had agreed to the budget to which the new Republicans were demanding cuts.
The debt ceiling is a holdover from World War I, when Congress stopped micromanaging the instruments the Treasury used to borrow money and instead simply set a debt limit. That procedure began to be a political weapon after the tax cuts first during President George W. Bush’s term and then under President Donald Trump reduced government revenues to 16.5% of the nation’s gross domestic product while spending has risen to nearly 23%. This gap means the country must borrow money to meet its budget appropriations, eventually hitting the ceiling.
The Treasury has never defaulted on the U.S. debt. A default would mean the government could not meet its obligations, and would, as Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned in 2023, “cause irreparable harm to the U.S. economy, the livelihoods of all Americans, and global financial stability.”
As journalist Borage recalled, when then–House speaker Kevin McCarthy agreed to raise the debt ceiling in June 2023 in exchange for the Fiscal Responsibility Act that kept the 2024 and 2025 budgets at 2022 levels, House extremists turned on him. In September those extremists, led by then-representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) threw McCarthy out of the speaker’s chair—the only time in American history that a party has thrown out its own speaker. Weeks later, the Republicans finally voted to make Mike Johnson (R-LA) speaker, but Johnson had to rely on Democratic votes to fund the government for fiscal year 2024.
For 2025, Johnson and the Republicans said they wanted more cuts than the Fiscal Responsibility Act set out, and even still, the extremists filled the appropriations bills with culture-wars poison pills. Johnson couldn’t get any measures through the House, and instead kept the government operating with Democratic votes for continuing resolutions that funded the government first through September 30, and then through today, December 20.
At the same time, a farm bill, which Congress usually passes every five years and which outlines the country’s agriculture and food policies including supplemental nutrition (formerly known as food stamps), expired in 2023 and has also been continued through temporary extensions.
On Tuesday, December 17, Johnson announced that Republican and Democratic congressional leaders had hashed out another bipartisan continuing resolution that kept spending at current levels through March 14 while also providing about $100 billion in disaster relief and about $10 billion in assistance for farmers. It also raised congressional salaries and kicked the government funding deadline through March 14. With bipartisan backing, it seemed like a last-minute reprieve from a holiday government shutdown.
Extremist Republicans immediately opposed the measure, but this was not a surprise. There were likely enough Democratic votes to pass it without them.
What WAS a surprise was that on Wednesday, billionaire Elon Musk, who holds billions in federal contracts, frightened Republican lawmakers into killing the continuing resolution by appearing to threaten to fund primary challengers against those who voted for the resolution. “Any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in 2 years!” he tweeted. Later, he added: “No bills should be passed Congress [sic] until Jan 20, when [Trump] takes office.”
Musk’s opposition appeared to shock President-elect Donald Trump into speaking up against the bill about thirteen hours after Musk’s first stand, when he and Vice President–elect J.D. Vance also came out against the measure. But, perhaps not wanting to seem to be following in Musk’s wake, Trump then added a new and unexpected demand. He insisted that any continuing resolution raise or get rid of the debt ceiling throughout his term, although the debt ceiling isn’t currently an issue. Trump threatened to primary any Republican who voted for a measure that did not suspend the debt ceiling.
Trump’s demand highlighted that his top priority is not the budget deficit he promised during the campaign to cut by 33%, but rather freeing himself up to spend whatever he wishes: after all, he added about a quarter of the current national debt during his first term. He intends to extend his 2017 tax cuts after they expire in 2025, although the Congressional Budget Office estimates that those cuts will add $4.6 trillion to the deficit over the next ten years. He has also called for the deportation of 11 million to 20 million undocumented immigrants and possibly others, at a cost estimate of $88 billion to $315 billion a year.
House Republicans killed the bipartisan bill and, yesterday afternoon, introduced a new bill, rewritten along the lines Musk and Trump had demanded. They had not shown it to Democrats. It cut out a number of programs, including $190 million designated for pediatric cancer research, but it included the $110 billion in disaster aid and aid to farmers. It also raised the debt ceiling for the next two years, during which Republicans will control Congress.
"All Republicans, and even the Democrats, should do what is best for our Country and vote 'YES' for this Bill, TONIGHT!" Trump wrote.
But extremist Republicans said no straight out of the box, and Democrats, who had not been consulted on the bill, wanted no part of it. Republicans immediately tried to blame the Democrats for the looming government shutdown. Ignoring that Musk had manufactured the entire crisis and that members of his own party refused to support the measure, Trump posted, “This is a Biden problem to solve, but if Republicans can help solve it, they will.”
Then, as Johnson went back to the drawing board, Musk posted on X his support for Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) neo-Nazi party. This raised back to prominence Trump’s having spent November 5, Election Day, at Mar-a-Lago with members of AfD, who said they are hoping to be close with the incoming Trump administration.
Today, social media exploded with the realization that an unelected billionaire from South Africa who apparently supports fascism was able to intimidate Republican legislators into doing his bidding. In this last week, Trump has threatened former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) with prosecution for her work as a member of Congress and has sued the Des Moines Register for publishing a poll that was unfavorable to him before the November election. Those actions are classic authoritarian moves to consolidate power, but to those not paying close attention they were perhaps less striking than the reality that Musk appears to have taken over for Trump as the incoming president.
As CNN’s Erin Burnett pointed out “the world’s richest man, right now, holding the country hostage,” Democrats worked to call attention to this crisis. Representative Richard Neal (D-MA) said: “We reached an agreement…and a tweet changed all of it? Can you imagine what the next two years are going to be like if every time the Congress works its will and then there's a tweet…from an individual who has no official portfolio who threatens members on the Republican side with a primary, and they succumb?”
The chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Patty Murray (D-WA), said she would stay in Washington, D.C., through Christmas “because we’re not going to let Elon Musk run the government. Put simply, we should not let an unelected billionaire rip away research for pediatric cancer so he can get a tax cut or tear down policies that help America outcompete China because it could hurt his bottom line. We had a bipartisan deal—we should stick to it…. The American people do not want chaos or a costly government shutdown all because an unelected billionaire wants to call the shots.”
Republicans, too, seemed dismayed at Musk’s power. Representative Rich McCormick (R-GA) told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins: “Last time I checked, Elon Musk doesn’t have a vote in Congress. Now, he has influence and he’ll put pressure on us to do whatever he thinks the right thing is for him, but I have 760,000 people that voted for me to do the right thing for them. And that’s what matters to me.”
Tonight the House passed a measure much like the one Musk and Trump had undermined, funding the government and providing the big-ticket disaster and farm relief but not raising or getting rid of the debt ceiling. According to Jennifer Scholtes of Politico, Republican leadership tried to get party members on board by promising to raise the debt ceiling by $1.5 trillion early in 2025 while also cutting $2.5 trillion in “mandatory” spending, which covers Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and SNAP nutrition assistance.
The vote in the House was 366 to 34, with one abstention. The measure passed thanks to Democratic votes, with 196 Democrats voting yes in addition to the 170 Republicans who voted yes (because of the circumstances of its passage, the measure needed two thirds of the House to vote yes). No Democrats voted against the measure, while 34 Republicans abandoned their speaker to vote no. As Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News wrote: “Dem[ocrat]s saved Republicans here.” Democrats also kept the government functioning to help ordinary Americans.
The fiasco of the past few days is a political blow to Trump. Musk overshadowed him, and when Trump demanded that Republicans free him from the debt ceiling, they ignored him. Meanwhile, extremist Republicans are calling for Johnson’s removal, but it is unclear who could earn the votes to take his place. And, since the continuing resolution extends only until mid-March, and the first two months of Trump’s term will undoubtedly be consumed with the Senate confirmation hearings for his appointees—some of whom are highly questionable—it looks like this chaos will continue into 2025.
The Senate passed the measure as expected just after midnight. Nonetheless, it appears that that chaos, and the extraordinary problem of an unelected billionaire who hails from South Africa calling the shots in the Republican Congress, will loom over the new year.
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On Thursday, December 5, in Chicago, Illinois, former president Barack Obama gave the third in an annual series of lectures he has delivered since 2022 at his foundation’s Democracy Forum, which gathers experts, leaders, and young people to explore ways to safeguard democracy through community action.
Taken together, these lectures are a historical and philosophical exploration of the weaknesses of twenty-first century democracy as well as a road map of directions, some new and some old, for democracy’s defense. In 2022, Obama explored ways to counteract the flood of disinformation swamping a shared reality for decision making; in 2023 he discussed ways to address the extraordinary concentration of wealth that has undermined support for democracy globally.
On Thursday, Obama explored the concept of “pluralism,” a word he defined as meaning simply that “in a democracy, we all have to find a way to live alongside individuals and groups who are different than us.”
But rather than advocating what he called “holding hands and singing ‘Kumbaya’” as we all tolerate each other, Obama described modern pluralism as active work to form coalitions over shared issues. His argument echoed the concepts James Madison, a key framer of the Constitution, explained in Federalist #10 when he was trying to convince inhabitants of a big, diverse country that they should endorse the newly written document.
In 1787, many inhabitants of the fledgling nation objected to the idea of the strong national government proposed under the new constitution. They worried that such a government could fall under the control of a majority that would exercise its power to crush the rights of the minority. Madison agreed that such a calamity was likely in a small country, but argued that the very size and diversity of the people in the proposed United States would guard against such tyranny as people formed coalitions over one issue or another, then dissolved them and formed others. Such constantly shifting coalitions would serve the good of all Americans without forging a permanent powerful majority.
Obama called the Constitution “a rulebook for practicing pluralism.” The Bill of Rights gives us a series of rights that allow us to try to convince others to form coalitions to elect representatives who will “negotiate and compromise and hopefully advance our interests.”
Majority rule determines who wins, but the separation of powers and an independent judiciary are supposed to guarantee that the winners “don’t overreach to try to permanently entrench themselves or violate minority rights,” he said. The losers accept the outcome so long as they know they’ll have a chance to win the next time.
Obama noted that this system worked smoothly after World War II, largely because a booming economy meant rising standards of living that eased friction between different groups: management and labor, industry and agriculture. At the same time, the Cold War helped Americans come together against an external threat, and a limited range of popular culture reinforced a shared perspective on the world—everyone watched the sitcom Gilligan’s Island.
Most of all, though, Obama noted, American pluralism worked well because it largely excluded women and racial, gender, and religious minorities. He pointed out that as late as 2005, when he went to the Senate, he was the only African American there and only the third since Reconstruction. There were two Latinos and fourteen women.
In the 1960s, he noted drily, “things got more complicated.” “[H]istorically marginalized groups—Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Native Americans; women and gays and lesbians; and disabled Americans—demanded a seat at the table. Not only did they insist on a fair share of government-directed resources, but they brought with them new issues, born of their unique experiences that could not just be resolved by just giving them a bigger slice of the pie. So racial minorities insisted that the government intervene more deeply in the private sector and civil society to root out long-standing, systemic discrimination.”
Women wanted control over their own bodies, and gays and lesbians demanded equality before the law, challenging religious and social norms. “[P]olitics,” Obama said, “wasn’t just a fight about tax rates or roads anymore. It was about more fundamental issues that went to the core of our being and how we expected society to structure itself. Issues of identity and status and gender. Issues of family, values, and faith…. [A] lot of people…began to feel that their way of life, the American way of life, was under attack” just as increasing economic inequality made them think that other people were benefiting at their expense.
Increasingly, that economic inequality cloistered people in their own bubbles as unions, churches, and civic institutions decayed. “[W]ith the Cold War over, with generations scarred by Vietnam and Iraq and a media landscape that would shatter into a million disparate voices,” he said, Americans lost the sense of “a common national story or a common national purpose.” Media companies have played to extremes, and “[e]very election becomes an act of mortal combat.”
With that sense, there is “an increasing willingness on the part of politicians and their followers to violate democratic norms, to do anything they can to get their way, to use the power of the state to target critics and journalists and political rivals, and to even resort to violence in order to gain and hold on to power.”
For all that he was speaking in 2024, Obama could have been describing the realization of the fears of those opposed to the Constitution in 1787.
But he did not agree that those anti-Federalists had won the debate. Instead, he adapted Madison’s theory of pluralism to the modern era. Obama stood firm on the idea that the way to reclaim democracy is to build coalitions around taking action on issues that matter to the American people without regard to personal identities or political affiliations. Pluralism, Obama said, “is about recognizing that in a democracy, power comes from forging alliances, and building coalitions, and making room in those coalitions not only for the woke but also for the waking.”
And that, in many ways, identified the elephant—or rather the donkey—in the room. In the 2024 election, the Democratic Party under Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota governor Tim Walz very deliberately moved away from so-called identity politics: the idea that a person builds their political orientation around their pre-existing social identity. During the campaign, Harris rarely referred to the fact that if elected, she would be the first woman, as well as the first woman of color, to hold the presidency: when attendees at the Democratic National Convention wore white in honor of the suffragists, Harris wore black.
Instead, Harris and Walz embraced investing in the middle class and supporting small businesses. But that shift to the center did not translate into a presidential victory in 2024, and those on the political left, as well as progressive Democrats, are not convinced it was a good move.
Since the rise of Donald Trump, the MAGA party has been the one championing identity politics, rejecting American pluralism in favor of centering whiteness, a certain kind of individualist masculinity, Christianity, and misogyny. Making common cause with Republicans, even non-MAGA Republicans, in the face of such politics seems to the left and progressive Democrats self-defeating.
Obama disagrees. “[I]t’s understandable that people who have been oppressed or marginalized want to tell their stories and give voice fully to their experiences—to not have to hold back and censor themselves, especially because so many of them have been silenced in the past,” he said, “But too often, focusing on our differences leads to this notion of fixed victims and fixed villains.”
He stood firm against compromising core principles but said: “In order to build lasting majorities that support justice—not just for feeling good, not just for getting along, to deliver the goods—we have to be open to framing our issues, our causes, what we believe in in terms of ‘we’ and not just ‘us’ and ‘them.’”
And he emphasized that such cooperation works best when it’s about action, rather than just words, because action requires that people invest themselves in a common project. “It won't eradicate people's prejudices, but it will remind people that they don't have to agree on everything to at least agree on some things. And that there are some things we cannot do alone.” “It’s about agency and relationships.”
Then Obama addressed the political crisis of this moment, the one the anti-Federalists feared: “What happens when the other side has repeatedly and abundantly made clear they’re not interested in playing by the rules?” When that happens, he said, “pluralism does not call for us” to accept it. “[W]e have to stand firm and speak out and organize and mobilize as forcefully as we can.” Even then, though, “it’s important to look for allies in unlikely places,” he said, noting that “people on the other side…may share our beliefs in sticking to the rules, observing norms,” and that supporting them might help them “to exert influence on people they’ve got relationships with within the other party.”
The power of pluralism, he said, is that it can make people recognize their common experiences and common values. That, he said, is how we break the cycle of cynicism in our politics.
Obama’s argument has already drawn criticism. At MSNBC, Ben Burgis condemned Obama’s “centrist liberalism” as inadequate to address the real problems of inequality and warned that his political approach is outdated.
But it is striking how much Obama’s embrace of pluralism echoes that of James Madison, who had in his lifetime witnessed a group of wildly diverse colonists talk, write letters, argue, and organize to forge themselves into a movement that could throw off the age-old system of monarchy in favor of creating something altogether new.
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Late last night, the White House said in a statement that “President Biden and his team are closely monitoring the extraordinary events in Syria and staying in constant touch with regional partners.”
Early this morning, the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad fell to armed opposition.
According to Jill Lawless of the Associated Press, the forces that toppled Assad are led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, a coalition of Islamic groups formerly associated with al-Qaeda’s branch in Syria and currently designated a terrorist group by the U.S. and the United Nations, although its leaders have tried to distance themselves from al-Qaeda.
President Bashar al-Assad succeeded his father to the Syrian presidency in July 2000, establishing a totalitarian dictatorship. In 2011, Assad cracked down on protesters who were part of the Arab Spring, sparking a civil war of a number of factions fighting Assad’s troops, which by 2015 relied on support from Russia and Iran.
That war has turned half of Syria’s prewar population of 23 million (a little more than the population of Florida) into refugees and killed more than half a million people. With Russian and Iranian support, Assad managed to regain control of most of the country, with rebels pushed back to the north and northwest.
A stalemate that had lasted for years ended abruptly on November 27.
Iran and Hezbollah have been badly weakened by the ongoing fight of Israel against Iran-backed Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. On November 27, Israel and Lebanon signed a ceasefire agreement that made it clear that Hezbollah had been tied down in Lebanon and that its ability to fight had been severely compromised. At the same time, Russia has been badly weakened by almost three years of war against Ukraine, and the Russian ruble fell sharply again in late November after additional U.S. sanctions targeted Russia’s third-largest bank, creating more economic hardship in Russia and undercutting Putin’s insistence that he is winning against the West.
When opposition forces began an offensive on November 27, they took more than 15 villages in Aleppo province that day. Journalist Lawless recounted a quick history of the next 11 days, recording how the insurgents swept through the country with little resistance, taking Syria’s largest city, Aleppo, on the 29th. The Syrian military launched a counterattack on December 1, but the insurgents continued to gain ground, and by December 7 they had captured Syria’s third-largest city, Homs. They announced they were in the “final stage” of their offensive.
Today, December 8, Assad fled with his family to Moscow, where Russian president Vladimir Putin has offered him asylum. As Nick Paton Walsh of CNN put it, “Without the physical crutches of Russia’s air force and Iran’s proxy muscle Hezbollah, [Assad] toppled when finally pushed.”
In Damascus, crowds are praying and celebrating, and opposition forces have liberated the prisoners held in the notorious Saydnaya military prison. More than 100,000 detainees are unaccounted for, and their families are hoping to find them, or at least to find answers.
Meanwhile, after Assad’s regime fell, the U.S. Air Force struck more than 75 ISIS-related targets in Syria. “ISIS has been trying to reconstitute in this broad area known as the Badiya desert,” a White House senior official told reporters. “We have worked to make sure they cannot do that. So when they try to camp there, when they try to train… we take them out.”
National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan explained at the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California, that the U.S. will work to prevent the resurgence of ISIS. It will also make sure “that our friends in the region, Israel, Jordan, Iraq, others who border Syria, or who would potentially face spillover effects from Syria, are strong and secure.” Finally, he said, the U.S. wants to make sure “that this does not lead to a humanitarian catastrophe.”
Speaking to the nation this afternoon, President Joe Biden announced: "At long last, the Assad regime has fallen. This regime brutalized and tortured and killed literally hundreds of thousands of innocent Syrians." He called the fall of Assad’s regime a “fundamental act of justice” and “a moment of historic opportunity for the long-suffering people of Syria to build a better future for their proud country.”
But it is also “a moment of risk and uncertainty,” the president said. He noted that the U.S. is “mindful” of the security of Americans in Syria, including freelance journalist Austin Tice, who was kidnapped in 2012 and imprisoned by Assad’s regime. “[W]e believe he is alive,” Biden told reporters. “We think we can get him back, but we have no direct evidence of that yet.”
Biden noted that Syria’s main backers, Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia, could not defend “this abhorrent regime in Syria” because they “are far weaker today than when I took office.” He continued: “This is a direct result of the blows that Ukraine [and] Israel” have landed on them “with the unflagging support of the United States.”
In contrast to Biden's comments, President-elect Donald Trump’s social media accounts took Russia’s side in the Syrian events. Noting that the insurgents looked as if they would throw Assad out, Trump’s account said that “Russia, because they are so tied up in Ukraine, and with the loss there of over 600,000 soldiers, seems incapable of stopping this literal march through Syria, a country they have protected for years.” The account blamed former president Barack Obama for the crisis of 2011 and said that Russia had stepped in then to stop the chaos. The Trump account suggested that Assad’s defeat might be “the best thing that can happen to” Russia, because “[t]here was never much of a benefit in Syria for Russia, other than to make Obama look really stupid.”
“In any event,” the account continued, “Syria is a mess, but is not our friend, & THE UNITED STATES SHOULD HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH IT. THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT. LET IT PLAY OUT. DO NOT GET INVOLVED!”
In contrast to Trump’s focus on Russia, journalist Anne Applebaum, a scholar of autocracy, took a much broader view of the meaning of Assad’s fall. In dictatorships, she wrote in The Atlantic, “cold, deliberate, well-planned cruelty” like Assad’s “is meant to inspire hopelessness. Ludicrous lies and cynical propaganda campaigns are meant to create apathy and nihilism.” Random arrests create destabilizing waves of refugees that leave those who remain in despair.
Authoritarian regimes seek “to rob people of any ability to plan for a different future, to convince people that their dictatorships are eternal. ‘Our leader forever’” she points out, was the slogan of the Assad dynasty. But soldiers and police officers have relatives who suffer under the regime, and their loyalty is not assured, as Assad has now learned.
The future of Syria is entirely unclear, Applebaum writes, but there is no doubt that “the end of the Assad regime creates something new, and not only in Syria. There is nothing worse than hopelessness, nothing more soul-destroying than pessimism, grief, and despair. The fall of a Russian- and Iranian-backed regime offers, suddenly, the possibility of change. The future might be different. And that possibility will inspire hope all around the world.”
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-Eddie Vedder, "Smile"
It's unsettling, for sure. Let's hope there are enough Republicans who still believe in some semblance of democracy to keep the Felon from carrying out all his baseless threats.
-Eddie Vedder, "Smile"
The sudden collapse of the Assad regime in Syria yesterday took oxygen away from the airing of President-elect Trump’s interview with Kristen Welker of NBC's Meet the Press. The interview told us little that we didn’t already know, but it did reinforce what we can expect in the new administration.
As Tom Nichols pointed out after the interview, when Donald Trump ran for the presidency this year, he “wasn’t running to do anything. He was running to stay out of jail. The rest he doesn’t care about.”
Nichols was reacting to the exchange that began when Welker asked the president-elect: “Do you have an actual plan at this point for health care?” Trump answered: “Yes. We have concepts of a plan that would be better.” “Still just concepts? Do you have a fully developed plan?” Welker asked.
The answer, nine years after Trump first said he would repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with something cheaper and better, is still no. He went on to add, “I am the one that saved Obamacare,” although he spent his first term trying to weaken it.
Trump also reiterated his plans for revenge against those he perceives to be his enemies. He told Welker that when he is president, the Department of Justice should pursue and jail the members of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, more commonly known as the January 6th Committee. He singled out committee leaders Representative Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY).
But it was in his insistence on one specific lie that Trump was most revealing. He told Welker that there were “13,099 murderers released into our country over the last three years. They’re walking down the streets. They’re walking next to you and your family, and they’re very dangerous.”
This statement sets Trump up to be a strongman who will save America from great danger, but it is a lie that has been repeatedly debunked. It originated in a September 2024 letter from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to Representative Tony Gonzales (R-TX) listing 13,099 people convicted of homicide as being “non-detained.”
As Alex Nowrasteh of the libertarian Cato blog explains, “non-detained” does not mean free to roam the streets; it simply means that those in prison for homicide are not currently detained by ICE. Once they have served their sentences, they go back onto ICE’s docket to be deported unless their countries of origin don’t have repatriation agreements with the U.S., a condition that affects a very small number of people. Releases of criminal migrants into the U.S. dropped during the Biden administration from the numbers released during Trump’s term. In addition, as Nowrasteh points out, the 13,099 figure covers at least 40 years.
Welker tried to correct Trump: “The thirteen thousand figure I think goes back around 40 years,” she said. “No, it doesn’t,” Trump insisted. “It’s within the three-year period. It’s during the Biden term.”
Trump was intent on making Welker and the television audience accept an egregious lie, despite the fact it has been thoroughly debunked. His insistence echoed his determination in January 2017 to make the American people accept his lie that his inauguration crowd was bigger than that of his predecessor, Barack Obama, although we could see with our own eyes that he was lying. He was demanding we reject our own experience and instead let him define how we see the country.
Trump built on a history of narrative shaping that ran through the Republican Party. In 2004 a senior advisor to President George W. Bush famously told journalist Ron Suskind that people like Suskind lived in “the reality-based community,” believing that people could find solutions to problems based on their real-world observations. But such a worldview was obsolete, the aide said. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore.… We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality…. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
America’s right wing has been able to shape reality in large part because of the 1996 advent of the Fox News Channel (FNC), the brainchild of Australian-born media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Shows on the FNC used clear, simple messaging with colorful graphics that told a story of an America overwhelmingly made up of white, rural folks who hated taxes and an intrusive government, and would do fine if they could just get the socialist Democrats to leave them alone. To spread the new channel, Murdoch initially offered ten dollars per subscriber to each cable company that carried it.
That right-wing echo chamber has expanded until it is now so strong that nearly 70% of Republicans falsely believe Trump was the rightful winner of the 2020 presidential election, despite the fact that the FNC had to pay more than $787 million to Dominion Voting Systems for defamation after it lied to viewers about that election.
Trump has built on that Republican narrative to create a fantasy world that is badly out of step with reality. It is not easy to see how he will reconcile his vision with real-world events.
He and his supporters might try simply to tell voters that they have done what they promised, and hope that story sells.
When Trump threatened to put a 25% tariff on goods from Mexico until Mexico stopped undocumented migrants from crossing the border, Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum told Trump that "encounters at the Mexico–United States border have decreased by 75 percent between December 2023 and November 2024.” Trump then simply told reporters that Sheinbaum had “agreed to stop Migration through Mexico, and into the United States, effectively closing our Southern Border,” and his supporters trumpeted on social media that Trump had closed the border with one phone call.
But convincing people of an alternative reality might be harder with issues closer to home.
Trump has vowed to place a tariff wall around the U.S., for example, at the same time he has promised to bring down the price of consumer goods. “Economists of all stripes say that ultimately, consumers pay the price of tariffs,” Welker told him on Sunday. “I don’t believe that,” Trump answered. He might not believe it, but producers do: car manufacturers as well as major shopping chains have warned that tariffs will force them to raise prices.
On other issues, Trump will have a vocal and established opposition. After his threat to go after the members of the January 6th committee, former representative Liz Cheney said in a statement: “There is no conceivably appropriate factual or constitutional basis for what Donald Trump is suggesting.“
“Here is the truth: Donald Trump attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election and seize power. He mobilized an angry mob and sent them to the United States Capitol, where they attacked police officers, invaded the building, and halted the official counting of electoral votes. Trump watched on television as police officers were brutally beaten and the Capitol was assaulted, refusing for hours to tell the mob to leave. This was the worst breach of our Constitution by any president in our nation’s history.”
Cheney called for the release of the evidence and grand jury material special counsel Jack Smith assembled “so all Americans can see Donald Trump for who he genuinely is and fully understand his role in this terrible period in our nation’s history.”
Nobel laureates generally try to stay out of politics, but today more than 75 of them in medicine, chemistry, economics, and physics wrote a letter to senators urging them not to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick for secretary of Health and Human Services. They object to Kennedy’s stand against the scientists and agencies he would oversee. They noted that he has no credentials or relevant experience and that he has opposed life-saving vaccines, promoted conspiracy theories, and attacked the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health.
Putting him in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services, they write, “would put the public’s health in jeopardy and undermine America’s global leadership in the health sciences, in both the public and commercial sectors.”
There is also the chance that the Fox media empire will not effectively push a right-wing narrative much longer. The Murdoch family is in a struggle over control of that empire after the eventual death of the 93-year-old Rupert. He and his eldest son, Lachlan, want to lock the company into its current political slant, but at least two of the three of Murdoch’s other children who are set to inherit the company do not share their father and brother’s politics.
Rupert has been trying to change the terms of the family trust to cement Lachlan’s control of the empire, but today a commissioner in Nevada ruled against him. Edward Helmore of The Guardian noted that the decision likely means that even if the children do not take the media empire in a different direction, divided leadership will weaken the right-wing message.
Almost 30 years after the Fox News Channel began to shape American politics with a fictional narrative, a different Fox media empire would almost certainly disrupt the right-wing bubble. A lawyer for Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch said they will appeal the decision.
Finally, Pennsylvania law enforcement officials today arrested a “strong person of interest” in the shooting of United Healthcare chief executive officer Brian Thompson. Tonight a court document shows 26-year-old Luigi Mangione has been charged with murder.
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Today is Human Rights Day, celebrated internationally in honor of the day seventy-six years ago, December 10, 1948, when the United Nations General Assembly announced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).
In 1948 the world was still reeling from the death and destruction of World War II, including the horrors of the Holocaust. The Soviet Union was blockading Berlin, Italy and France were convulsed with communist-backed labor agitation, Greece was in the middle of a civil war, Arabs opposed the new state of Israel, communists and nationalists battled in China, and segregationists in the U.S. were forming their own political party to stop the government from protecting civil rights for Black Americans. In the midst of these dangerous trends, the member countries of the United Nations came together to adopt a landmark document: a common standard of fundamental rights for all human beings.
The United Nations itself was only three years old. Representatives of the 47 countries that made up the Allies in World War II, along with the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, and newly liberated Denmark and Argentina, had formed the United Nations as a key part of an international order based on rules on which nations agreed, rather than the idea that might makes right, which had twice in just over twenty years brought wars that involved the globe.
Part of the mission of the U.N. was “to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small.” In early 1946 the United Nations Economic and Social Council organized a nine-person commission on human rights to construct the mission of a permanent Human Rights Commission. Unlike other U.N. commissions, though, the selection of its members would be based not on their national affiliations but on their personal merit.
President Harry S. Truman had appointed Eleanor Roosevelt, widow of former president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and much beloved defender of human rights in the United States, as a delegate to the United Nations. In turn, U.N. Secretary-General Trygve Lie from Norway put her on the commission to develop a plan for the formal human rights commission. That first commission asked Roosevelt to take the chair.
“[T]he free peoples” and “all of the people liberated from slavery, put in you their confidence and their hope, so that everywhere the authority of these rights, respect of which is the essential condition of the dignity of the person, be respected,” a U.N. official told the commission at its first meeting on April 29, 1946.
The U.N. official noted that the commission must figure out how to define the violation of human rights not only internationally but also within a nation, and must suggest how to protect “the rights of man all over the world.” If a procedure for identifying and addressing violations “had existed a few years ago,” he said, “the human community would have been able to stop those who started the war at the moment when they were still weak and the world catastrophe would have been avoided.”
Drafted over the next two years, the final document began with a preamble explaining that a UDHR was necessary because “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,” and because “disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind.” Because “the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,” the preamble said, “human rights should be protected by the rule of law.”
The thirty articles that followed established that “[a]ll human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights…without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status” and regardless “of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs.”
Those rights included freedom from slavery, torture, degrading punishment, arbitrary arrest, exile, and “arbitrary interference with…privacy, family, home or correspondence, [and] attacks upon…honour and reputation.”
They included the right to equality before the law and to a fair trial, the right to travel both within a country and outside of it, the right to marry and to establish a family, and the right to own property.
They included the “right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion,” “freedom of opinion and expression,” peaceful assembly, the right to participate in government either “directly or through freely chosen representatives,” the right of equal access to public service. After all, the UDHR noted, the authority of government rests on the will of the people, “expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage.”
They included the right to choose how and where to work, the right to equal pay for equal work, the right to unionize, and the right to fair pay that ensures “an existence worthy of human dignity.”
They included “the right to a standard of living adequate for…health and well-being…, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond [one’s] control.”
They included the right to free education that develops students fully and strengthens “respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms.” Education “shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.”
They included the right to participate in art and science.
They included the right to live in the sort of society in which the rights and freedoms outlined in the UDHR could be realized. And, the document concluded, “Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.”
Although eight countries abstained from the UDHR—South Africa, Saudi Arabia, and six countries from the Soviet bloc—no country voted against it, making the vote unanimous. The declaration was not a treaty and was not legally binding; it was a declaration of principles.
Since then, though, the UDHR has become the foundation of international human rights law. More than eighty international treaties and declarations, along with regional human rights conventions, domestic human rights bills, and constitutional provisions, make up a legally binding system to protect human rights. All of the members of the United Nations have ratified at least one of the major international human rights treaties, and four out of five have ratified four or more.
Indeed, today is the fortieth anniversary of the U.N.’s adoption of the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, more commonly known as the United Nations Convention Against Torture (UNCAT), which follows the structure of the UDHR.
The UDHR remains aspirational, but it is a vital part of the rules-based order that restrains leaders from human rights abuses, giving victims a language and a set of principles to condemn mistreatment. Before 1948 that language and those principles were unimaginable.
In a proclamation today, the White House recommitted to “upholding the equal and inalienable rights of all people.” It noted that in the U.S., the Biden administration established “the White House Gender Policy Council to advance the rights and opportunities of women and girls across domestic and foreign policy [and] rejoined the United Nations Human Rights Council to highlight and address pressing human rights concerns.” It has “worked to protect the rights of LGBTQI+ people” and to expand “accessibility for people with disabilities.” Crucially, the administration has also worked to stop the misuse of commercial spyware, which has enabled human rights abuses around the world as authoritarian governments surveil their populations, and to fight back against transnational repression targeting human rights defenders.
At the State Department, Under Secretary of State Uzra Zeya, Assistant Secretary of State Dafna Rand, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken honored eight individuals with the Human Rights Defender Award. The recipients came from Kuwait, Bolivia, the Kyrgyz Republic, Burma, Eswatini, Ghana, Colombia, and Azerbaijan and defend migrant workers, LGBTQ+ individuals, women, democracy.
Their stories underlined both that the fight for human rights is universal and that it requires courage. One recipient’s award was delivered in absentia because he is imprisoned. Another award was posthumous—the recipient was murdered last year.
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Yesterday, President Joe Biden spoke at the Brookings Institution, where he gave a major speech on the American economy. He contrasted his approach with the supply-side economics of the forty years before he took office, an approach the incoming administration of Donald Trump has said he would reinstate. Biden urged Trump and his team not to destroy the seeds of growth planted over the past four years. And he laid out the extraordinary successes of his administration as a benchmark going forward.
The president noted that Trump is inheriting a strong economy. Biden shifted the U.S. economy from 40 years of supply-side economics that had transferred about $50 trillion from the bottom 90% to the top 1% and hollowed out the middle class.
By investing in the American people, the Biden team expanded the economy from “the middle out and the bottom up,” as Biden says, and created an economy that he rightfully called “the envy of the world.” Biden listed the numbers: more than 16 million new jobs, the most in any four-year presidential term in U.S. history; low unemployment; a record 20 million applications for the establishment of new businesses; the stock market hitting record highs.
Biden called out that in the two years since Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act, the private sector has jumped on the public investments to invest more than a trillion dollars in clean energy and advanced manufacturing.
Disruptions from the pandemic—especially the snarling of supply chains—and Russian president Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine created a global spike in inflation; the administration brought those rates back to around the Fed’s target of 2%.
Biden pointed out that “[l]ike most…[great] economic developments, this one is neither red nor blue, and America’s progress is everyone’s progress.”
But voters’ election of Donald Trump last month threatens Biden’s reworking of the economy. Trump and his team embrace the supply-side economics Biden abandoned. They argue that the way to nurture the economy is to free up money at the top of the economy through deregulation and tax cuts. Investors will then establish new industries and jobs more efficiently than they could if the government intervened. Those new businesses, the theory goes, will raise wages for all Americans and everyone will thrive.
Trump and MAGA Republicans have made it clear they intend to restore supply-side economics.
The first priority of the incoming Republican majority is to extend the 2017 Trump tax cuts, many of which are due to expire in 2025. Those tax cuts added almost $2 trillion to budget deficits, but there is little evidence that they produced the economic growth their supporters promised. At the same time, the income tax cuts delivered an average tax cut of $252,300 to households in the top 0.1%, $61,090 to households in the top 1%, but just $457 to the bottom 60% of American households. The corporate tax cuts were even more skewed to the wealthy.
In the Washington Post yesterday, Catherine Rampell noted that Republicans’ claim that extending those cuts isn’t extraordinarily expensive means “getting rid of math.”
At a time when Republicans like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who are leading the new “Department of Government Efficiency,” are clamoring for cuts of $2 trillion from the budget, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that extending the tax cuts will add more than $4 trillion to the federal budget over the next ten years. Republicans who will chair the House and Senate finance committees, Representative Jason Smith (R-MO) and Senator Mike Crapo (R-ID), say that extending the cuts shouldn’t count as adding to the deficit because they would simply be extending the status quo.
Trump has also indicated he plans to turn the country over to billionaires, both by putting them into government and by letting them act as they wish. Last night, on social media, President-elect Trump posted: “Any person or company investing ONE BILLION DOLLARS, OR MORE, in the United States of America, will receive fully expedited approvals and permits, including, but in no way limited to, all Environmental approvals. GET READY TO ROCK!!!”
Biden called out the contrast between these two economic visions, saying that the key question for the American people is “do we continue to grow the economy from the middle out and the bottom up, investing in all of America and Americans, supporting unions and working families as we have the past four years? Or do we…backslide to an economy that’s benefited those at the top, while working people and the middle class struggle…for a fair share of growth and [for an] economic theory that encouraged industries and…livelihoods to be shipped overseas?”
Biden explained that for decades Republicans had slashed taxes for the very wealthy and the biggest corporations while cutting public investment in infrastructure, education, and research and development. Jobs and factories moved overseas where labor was cheaper. To offset the costs of tax cuts, Biden said, ‘advocates of trickle-down economics ripped the social safety net by trying to privatize Social Security and Medicare, trying to deny access to affordable health care and prescription drugs.” He added, “Lifting the fortunes of the very wealthy often meant taking the rights of workers away to unionize and bargain collectively.”
This approach to the economy “meant rewarding short-termism in pursuit of short-term profits [and] extraordinary high executive pay, instead of making long-term investments…. As a consequence, our…infrastructure fell…behind. A flood of cheap imports hollowed out our factory towns.”
“Economic opportunity and innovation became more concentrated in [a] few major cities, while the heartland and communities were left behind. Scientific discoveries and inventions developed in America were commercialized in countries like China, bolstering their manufacturing investment and jobs instead of [our] economy. Even before the pandemic, this economic agenda was clearly failing. Working- and middle-class families were being hurt.”
“[W]hen the pandemic hit,” Biden said, “we found out how vulnerable America was.” Supply chains failed, and prices soared.
Biden told the audience that he “came into office with a different vision for America…: grow the economy from the middle out and the bottom up; invest in America and American products. And when that happens, everybody does…well…no matter where they lived, whether they went to college or not.”
“I was determined to restore U.S. leadership in industries of the future,” he said. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, CHIPS and Science Act, and Inflation Reduction Act “mark the most significant investment in America since the New Deal,” with new factories bringing good jobs that are rejuvenating towns that had been left behind in the past decades. Biden said he required that the government buy American goods as the country invested in “modernizing our roads; our bridges; our ports; our airports; our clean water system; affordable, high-speed Internet systems; and so much more.”
Eighty percent of working-age Americans have jobs, and the average after-tax income is up almost $4,000 since before the pandemic, significantly outpacing inflation.
Biden and his team worked to restore competition in the economy—just today, the huge grocery chain Albertsons gave up on its merger with another huge grocery chain, Kroger, after Biden’s Federal Trade Commission sued to block the merger because it would raise prices and lower workers’ wages by eliminating competition—and their negotiations with big pharma have dramatically cut the costs of prescription drugs for seniors. The administration cut junk fees, capping the cost of overdraft fees, for example, from an average of $35 a month to $5.
Biden quoted Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Stephen Henriques in Time magazine a month ago, saying: “President-elect Trump is receiving the strongest economy in modern history, which is the envy of the world.”
In his speech, Biden noted that it would be “politically costly and economically unsound” to disrupt the decisions and investments the nation has made over the past four years, and he urged Trump to leave them in place. “Will the next president stop a new electric battery factory in Liberty, North Carolina, that will create thousands of jobs?” he asked. “[W]ill we deny seniors living in red states $35-a-month insulin?”
In their article, Sonnenfeld and Henriques noted: “President Trump will likely claim he waved a magic wand on January 20 and the economic clouds cleared,” and they urged people: “Don’t Give Trump Credit for the Success of the Biden Economy.”
Biden gave yesterday’s speech in part to put down benchmarks against which we should measure Trump’s economic policies. “During my presidency, we created [16] million new jobs in America” and saw “the lowest average unemployment rate of…any administration in 50 years.” Economic growth has been a strong 3% on average, and inflation is near 2 percent, he said.
“[T]hese are simple, well-established economic benchmarks used to measure the strength of any economy, the success or failure of any president’s four years in office. They’re not political, rhetorical opinions. They’re just facts,” Biden said, “simple facts. As President Reagan called them, ‘stubborn facts.’”
Biden is willing to bet that if the American people pay attention to those facts, they will recognize that his approach to the economy, rather than supply-side economics, works best for everyone.
Today the NASDAQ Composite index, which focuses on tech stocks, broke 20,000 for the first time.
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Ten days ago, on December 2, President Joe Biden arrived in Angola, the first U.S. president to visit central Africa since President Barack Obama traveled there in 2015. In the United States, the story got lost under the president’s pardon of his son Hunter Biden, but it is the far more important one, since events in the 54 countries on the continent of Africa are key to the global future.
The Biden administration has made it a point to strengthen relations between the U.S. and Africa. It recognizes the importance of a continent whose 1.5 billion people are expected to climb to 2.5 billion in the next 25 years, as Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post pointed out last Thursday. The median age of Africa’s inhabitants is 19, and by 2050 it is expected that one out of every four humans on Earth will be African.
The administration has worked to ease African distrust of the U.S. stemming from its history of enslavement, its tendency to back right-wing forces during the post–World War II and Cold War period when African nations threw off colonial rule, and the disdain with which Trump treated African countries during his administration.
The Biden administration hosted the U.S.-Africa leaders' summit in December 2022, backed the admission of the African Union to the Group of 20, and pledged more than $6.5 billion to the continent to aid security, support democratic institutions, and advance civil rights and the rule of law.
During Biden’s term, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield, First Lady Jill Biden, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have all visited the continent. In March 2023, Vice President Kamala Harris visited Ghana, Tanzania, and Zambia.
In Angola last week, Biden said that the U.S. is “all-in on Africa.”
He was in Angola to highlight the Lobito Corridor, a development project centered around a rail line linking the port of Lobito, Angola, on Africa’s Atlantic coast, with the city of Kolwezi, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), in Africa’s interior mining region. Biden traveled to Angola for a summit on the Lobito project as well as other infrastructure investment in the region, joining leaders from Angola, DRC, Tanzania, and Zambia on their own continent to demonstrate his conviction that the African people themselves must determine their own future.
The White House, other democratic countries, regional development banks, and international investors have put more than $6 billion behind the Lobito Corridor. They are hoping to ease the transport of critical minerals from interior countries like Zambia and DRC to Lobito. It currently takes a truck about 45 days to make the journey from the interior to Durban, South Africa; the railway would cut the trip out of the interior to about 45 hours.
The railway will strengthen global supply chains for those minerals while also benefiting local people, local governments, and the local region in Angola, Zambia, and DRC. The project includes investments in clean energy, agriculture, trade between countries, and clearing the mines from Angola’s decades-long civil war along the route, all of which will create good jobs for local workers.
“It’s a game-changer. Imagine how transformative this will be for technology, clean energy, for farming, for food security as a whole. It’s faster, it’s cleaner, it’s cheaper and most importantly, I think, it’s just plain common sense,” Biden said at the summit.
The Lobito Corridor is the flagship project of a new investment program from the Group of Seven (G7) called the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGII). The G7 is a forum of advanced economies that share values of liberal democracy, and the PGII is the answer to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which has invested billions in infrastructure in developing African countries but brings with it the risk of debt traps for the governments that borrow from it. PGII is designed to connect democratic countries, the private sector, and development banks to create “sustainable and transparent investment in quality infrastructure.”
On December 5, Eugene Robinson noted in the Washington Post that Republicans are blasting Biden’s announcement last Tuesday of $1 billion in additional humanitarian aid to 31 African countries to address famine and displacement. Biden said that this help was “the right thing for the wealthiest nation in the world to do,” and Robinson noted that it is also smart. “Ultimately, it will be Nigerians, South Africans, Ethiopians, Angolans and the people of other African nations who decide the continent’s future,” he wrote. “They will remember who was there beside them all along. And who was not.”
Russia has also been working to gain influence in Africa with an eye to extracting the continent's valuable minerals. It turned to the continent after Putin’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine began to isolate Russia from other nations and their resources. The Russian Wagner Group of mercenary fighters has been a key player in Africa since then, often called in by authoritarian leaders to suppress political opposition in exchange for access to mines or other valuable resources. Russia has become the biggest supplier of arms to the continent.
The fall of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad threatens Russia’s ability to continue to operate in Africa. As Mike Eckel of Radio Free Europe explained on Monday, Russia launches most of its African operations from the Hmeimim air base and the Tartus naval base on the Mediterranean coast of Syria. Their loss would hamstring those operations. Russian officials are trying to negotiate with the insurgents who overturned Assad’s regime in order to secure those bases as well as Russia’s other footholds in the country. They have gone from calling the insurgents “terrorists” to referring to them as “armed opposition,” and Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters that Putin has no plans for a public meeting with Assad.
The Syrian ambassador in Moscow told Russian media: “The escape of the head of this system in such a miserable and humiliating manner…confirms the correctness of change and brings hope for a new dawn.” Former Russian and Soviet diplomat Nikolai Sokov told Pjotr Sauer of The Guardian: “Moscow prefers to deal with those who have power and control, [and] discards those who lose them.” But, as the Institute for the Study of War noted, Russia’s inability to preserve Assad’s regime will make the African autocrats see it as an unreliable partner, an impression the Kremlin’s rapid about-face will do little to relieve.
On Monday, a senior administration official emphasized the same idea of self-determination that Biden’s administration applied to development in African countries. He told reporters that Assad’s collapse “is a day for Syrians, about Syrians. It’s not about the United States or anyone else. It’s about the people of Syria who now have a chance to build a new country, free of the oppression and corruption of the Assad family and decades of misrule. We owe them support as they do so, and we are prepared to provide it. But the future of Syria, like the fall of Assad today, will be written by Syrians for Syrians.”
That system, the official suggested, caused Assad’s fall. “[I]t is impossible not to place this week’s events in the context of the decisions the President has made to fully back Israel against Iran and its proxy terrorist groups, including Hezbollah, and Ukraine against Russia,” the official said. After bipartisan support for that position, the official added, “Hamas is on its back; its leaders are dead. Iran is on its back. Hezbollah is on its back. Russia is on its back. It’s just abandoned its only ally in the Middle East. Now, the Assad regime, Russia and Iran’s main ally in the Middle East, has just collapsed. None of this would have been possible absent the direct support for Ukraine and [Israel] in their own defense provided by the United States of America.”
The official recounted the importance of sanctions against the Assad regime and noted that the U.S. has maintained a military presence in Syria to counter the Islamic extremists of ISIS, targeting 75 ISIS targets immediately after Assad’s fall to ensure that ISIS does not regroup in the chaos of the moment.
The official noted that the administration still believes there is a path to a ceasefire and the release of hostages in Gaza, especially in the wake of Assad’s fall and the “dramatically changed balance of power in the region”—“a path…to a Middle East that is far more stable, far more aligned with our interests, and far more aligned with the interests of the people of the Middle East who want to live in peace, without wars, and in prosperity in a region that is more integrated and prosperous and peaceful.”
Today, Secretary of State Blinken traveled to Jordan and Türkiye, where he met with King Abdullah II and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to promote an “inclusive, Syrian-led” government transition in Syria.
Journalist Mike Eckel noted that “[t]he fall of the Assad regime this past weekend was a tectonic event, reverberating across the entire Middle East and further.” Considering the ties of Russia to Syria, and the role Syrian bases have played in Russian influence in Africa, those reverberations will, in some form, echo across the African continent.
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Time magazine’s interview with President-elect Donald Trump, published yesterday, revealed a man who was so desperate to be reelected to the presidency that he constructed a performance that he believed would woo voters, but who has no apparent plans for actual governance.
Trump deliberately patterned the Republican National Convention where he accepted the party’s nomination for president on a professional wrestling event, even featuring a number of professional wrestlers. It appears now that the campaign itself was, similarly, a performance—possibly, as Tom Nichols of The Atlantic suggested, simply to avoid the threat of conviction in one of the many federal or state cases pending against him. In the Time interview, Trump called his campaign “72 Days of Fury.”
During the campaign, Trump repeatedly promised he would “slash” the prices that soared during the post-pandemic economic recovery, although in fact they have been largely stable for the past two years. He hammered on the idea that he would erase transgendered Americans from public life—the Republicans invested $215 million in ads that pushed that theme, making it a key cultural battle. He and his surrogates attacked immigrants, lying that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, for example, were eating local pets and that Aurora, Colorado, a suburb of Denver, had been taken over by Venezuelan gangs, and falsely claiming that the Biden administration had opened the southern border.
The Time interview suggests that, now that he has won back power, Trump has lost interest in the promises of the campaign.
Notably, when a Time journalist asked Trump if his presidency would be a failure if he doesn’t bring the price of groceries down, he answered: “I don't think so. Look, they got them up. I'd like to bring them down. It's hard to bring things down once they're up. You know, it's very hard. But I think that they will.” He then pivoted to a different subject, and that was all he had to say about the price of groceries.
When the journalist asked Trump about the current attempt of Republican lawmakers to force transgender women to use men’s bathrooms, Trump indicated he didn’t really want to talk about it, noting that “it's a very small number of people we're talking about, and it's ripped apart our country.” Caitlyn Jenner, who is herself transgender, is a frequent guest at Mar-a-Lago and has indicated she uses the women’s bathroom there.
Asked whether he would reverse Biden’s protections for transgender children under the Title Nine section of the Education Amendments of 1972, prohibiting sex-based discrimination in schools, Trump clearly hadn’t given the issue much thought. Although it was this expansion that fed Trump’s rhetorical fury over what Republicans claimed was boys participating in girls’ sports, he answered simply:” I'm going to look at it very closely. We're looking at it right now. We're gonna look at it. We're gonna look at everything. Look, the country is torn apart. We're gonna look at everything.”
Trump’s response to the interviewer about immigration can’t really be parsed because it remains based in a completely false version of the actual conditions, including that the Biden administration has admitted more than 13,000 murderers to the U.S.—which has been repeatedly debunked—and that other countries are emptying “people from mental institutions” into the U.S., an apparent misunderstanding of the word “asylum” in immigration. Under both U.S. and international law, a person fleeing violence or persecution has the right to apply for protection, or asylum, in another country.
If Trump has now abandoned the performance he used to win the election, Trump’s planned appointments to office reveal that the actual pillars of his presidency will be personal revenge, the destruction of American institutions, and the use of political office for gain, also known as graft.
Trump appears to have tapped henchmen for revenge against those who tried to hold him accountable to the law. On Tuesday, Department of Justice inspector general Michael Horowitz reported that during Trump’s first term, his Justice Department secretly seized records from 2 members of Congress and 43 congressional staffers as well as phone and text records from journalists.
That use of the Department of Justice against those he considers his enemies seems to have been behind his attempt to make loyalist former Florida representative Matt Gaetz the United States attorney general. Mired in a sex-trafficking scandal, Gaetz had to step aside. Trump then tapped former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi, whose support for him extended not only to pushing the Big Lie that he won the 2020 election but also, apparently, to dropping Florida’s case against the fraudulent Trump University in exchange for a $25,000 donation to one of Bondi’s political action committees. The conservative Washington Examiner has urged U.S. senators to “closely scrutinize” Bondi in confirmation hearings.
The Justice Department oversees the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and Trump’s handling of the director of the FBI also appears to be aimed at his enemies. In 1976, Congress established that an FBI director would serve a single ten-year term, with the idea that such a director would not be tied to a single president. In 2017, Trump fired the Republican FBI director picked by President Barack Obama, James Comey, after Comey refused to drop the investigation into the ties between Trump’s campaign and Russian operatives. In Comey’s place, he settled on Christopher Wray.
But Wray oversaw the FBI’s investigations into the pro-Trump January 6 rioters and the raid on Mar-a-Lago after Trump lied about retaining top secret documents. Trump was also angry that Wray told a congressional committee that he had seen no sign of cognitive decline in President Joe Biden.
Trump made it clear he intended to get rid of Wray and replace him with extreme loyalist Kash Patel. Wray’s term expires in 2027, but on Wednesday he announced he would step down at the end of Biden’s term, as Trump wants him to. Trump cheered the announcement, saying the FBI had “illegally raided” his home—in fact, a judge signed off on a search warrant—and added: “We want our FBI back.”
Kash Patel has vowed to dismantle the FBI, as well as to go after media that he considers disloyal to Trump. He has written a trilogy of children’s books about Trump, titled “The Plot Against the King.”
Trump’s appointments also feed his anti-establishment supporters who want to destroy institutions, especially his tapping of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to become the secretary of Health and Human Services. A leader in the anti-vax movement, Kennedy has attacked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Today, Christina Jewett and Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times reported that the lawyer who is helping Kennedy pick the health officials he will bring into office, Aaron Siri, has tried to stop the distribution of 13 vaccines. In addition, in 2022 he petitioned the FDA to revoke its approval of the polio vaccine. If approved, Kennedy will oversee the FDA.
The third pillar of Trump’s presidency appears to be graft for himself, his cronies, and his family. Dana Mattioli and Rebecca Ballhaus of the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is planning to donate $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund in an effort to shore up his ties to the incoming president.
Mark Zuckerberg of Meta handed over $1 million as well, as did both the chief executive officer of OpenAI and AI search startup Perplexity. Trump has refused to sign the paperwork that would require him to disclose the donors to the inauguration fund.
Today, Jonathan V. Last of The Bulwark called the fund “a slush fund, pure and simple.” There is no required accounting for how the money is spent, making it, as Last says, “a way for rich people to funnel money to the incoming president that he can then use however he sees fit, completely unfettered and under cover of darkness. The inauguration fund is no different than feudal lords approaching the new king with gifts of rubies, or mobsters showering a new mayor with envelopes of cash.”
There are other ways for people to buy influence in the new administration. As Judd Legum pointed out on December 2 in Popular Information, crypto currency entrepreneur Justin Sun, a Chinese national, bought $30 million in crypto tokens from Trump’s new crypto venture, an essentially worthless investment that nonetheless freed up about $18 million for Trump himself.
In March 2023 the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Sun with fraud and market manipulation. Sun posted on social media that his company “is committed to making America great again.”
Trump appears willing to reward cronies with positions that could be lucrative as well, tapping billionaire Tom Barrack, for example, to become his administration’s ambassador to Türkiye. Barrack chaired Trump’s 2016 inauguration fund and was accused—and acquitted—of secret lobbying for the United Arab Emirates in exchange for investments of tens of millions of dollars in an office building and one of his investment funds.
Trump is also putting family members into official positions, tapping his son Don Jr.’s former fiancee Kimberly Guilfoyle to become the U.S. ambassador to Greece shortly after news broke that Don Jr. is seeing someone else. Trump is pushing Florida governor Ron DeSantis to name his daughter-in-law Lara Trump to the Senate seat that will be vacated by Marco Rubio’s elevation to secretary of state, and he has tapped his daughter Tiffany’s father-in-law, Massad Boulos, to become his Middle East advisor.
Various newspapers have reported that Boulos’s reputation as a billionaire mogul at the head of Boulos Enterprises is undeserved: in fact, he is a small-time truck salesman who has nothing to do with Boulos Enterprises but permitted the confusion, he says, because he doesn’t comment on his business.
And then there is Eric Trump, who announced yesterday that the Trump Organization has made a deal with Dubai-based real estate developer Dar Global to build a Trump Tower in the Saudi capital of Riyadh. When asked about potential conflicts of interest, Eric Trump said: “I have no interaction with Washington, D.C. I want no interaction with Washington, D.C.”
So far, there has been little outcry over Eric Trump’s announcement, despite years of stories focusing on Republicans’ claims that Hunter Biden and President Biden had each taken $5 million from the Ukrainian energy company on whose board Hunter Biden sat. Yesterday the key witness behind that accusation, Alexander Smirnov, pleaded guilty of lying to the FBI and hiding the more than $2 million he received after that testimony.
Early this month, President Biden pardoned Hunter, saying that he had been charged “only because he is my son,” and that “there’s no reason to believe it will stop here.” On December 5, Representative Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) told the Fox News Channel that House Republicans would continue to investigate Hunter Biden despite the pardon.
If there is one major continuity between Trump’s campaign and plans for his administration, it is that his focus on shock and performance, rather than the detailed work of governing, still plays well to the media.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
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-Eddie Vedder, "Smile"
Spent the day with family and friends, and am going to finish a lovely day with an early bedtime.
This photo of the harbor comes from a neighbor. There's nothing quite like the sky in the winter, and Allen captured one of our spectacular sunrises.
[Photo by Allen Guignard.]
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Tomorrow, December 16, is the fiftieth anniversary of the Safe Drinking Water Act, signed into law on December 16, 1974, by President Gerald R. Ford, a Republican. The measure required the Environmental Protection Agency to set maximum contaminant levels for drinking water and required states to comply with them. It protected the underground sources of drinking water and called for emergency measures to protect public health if a dangerous contaminant either was in or was likely to enter a public water system.
To conduct research on clean drinking water and provide grants for states to clean up their systems, Congress authorized appropriations of $15 million in 1975, $25 million in 1976, and $35 million in 1977.
The Safe Drinking Water Act was one of the many laws passed in the 1970s after the environmental movement, sparked after Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring explored the effect of toxic chemicals on living organisms, had made Americans aware of the dangers of pollution in the environment. That awareness had turned to anger by 1969, when in January a massive oil spill off Santa Barbara, California, poured between 80,000 and 100,000 barrels of oil into the Pacific, fouling 35 miles of California beaches and killing seabirds, dolphins, sea lions, and elephant seals. Then, in June, the chemical contaminants that had been dumped into Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River caught fire.
The nation had dipped its toes into water regulation during the Progressive Era at the beginning of the twentieth century, after germ theory became widely understood in the 1880s. Cleaning up cities first meant installing sewer systems, then meant trying to stop diseases from spreading through water systems. In 1912, Congress passed the U.S. Public Health Service Act, which established a national agency for protecting public health and called for getting rid of waterborne illnesses—including the life-threatening illness typhoid—by treating water with chlorine.
It was a start, but a new focus on science and technology after World War II pointed toward updating the system. The U.S. Public Health Service investigated the nation’s water supply in the 1960s and discovered more than 46,000 cases of waterborne illness. In the 1970s it found that about 90% of the drinking water systems it surveyed exceeded acceptable levels of microbes.
In February 1970, Republican President Richard M. Nixon sent to Congress a special message “on environmental quality.” “[W]e…have too casually and too long abused our natural environment,” he wrote. “The time has come when we can wait no longer to repair the damage already done, and to establish new criteria to guide us in the future.” He called for “fundamentally new philosophies of land, air and water use, for stricter regulation, for expanded government action, for greater citizen involvement, and for new programs to ensure that government, industry and individuals all are called on to do their share of the job and to pay their share of the cost.”
Later that year, Congress passed a measure establishing the Environmental Protection Agency, and Nixon signed it into law.
Widespread calls to protect drinking water ran up against lobbyists for oil companies and members of Congress from oil districts. They complained that the science of what substances were dangerous was uncertain and that how they would be measured and regulated was unclear. They complained that the EPA was inefficient and expensive and was staffed with inexperienced officials.
Then, in 1972, an EPA study discovered that waters downstream from 60 industries discharging waste from Baton Rouge to the Mississippi River’s mouth in New Orleans had high concentrations of 66 chemicals and toxic metals. Chemical companies had sprung up after World War II along the 85 miles between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, potentially polluting the water, while the lower end of the Mississippi River collected all the runoff from the river itself.
Two years later, an analysis of drinking water and cancer death rates among white men in that same area of Louisiana suggested that carcinogens in the water might be linked to high cancer rates. Louisiana representative Lindy Boggs, a Democrat, told Congress that “it is really vitally important to our region that we have controls enforced on the toxic organic compounds that come into the river from the industrial and municipal discharges, from runoffs from from agricultural regions, from accidents on the river, and from chemical spills on the river.”
Concerns about the area of Louisiana that later came to be known as “Cancer Alley” were uppermost, but there were chemical companies across the country, and Congress set out to safeguard the lives of Americans from toxins released by corporations into the nation’s water supply. The Safe Drinking Water Act, the first law designed to create a comprehensive standard for the nation’s drinking water, was Congress’s answer.
The new law dramatically improved the quality of drinking water in the U.S., making it some of the safest in the world. Over the years, the EPA has expanded the list of contaminants it regulates, limiting both new man-made chemicals and new pathogens.
But the system is under strain: not only have scientific advances discovered that some contaminants are dangerous at much lower concentrations than scientists previously thought, but also a lack of funding for the EPA means that oversight can be lax. Even when it’s not, a lack of funding for towns and cities means they can’t always afford to upgrade their systems.
By 2015, almost 77 million Americans lived in regions whose water systems did not meet the safety standards of the Safe Drinking Water Act. In addition, more than 2 million Americans did not have running water, and many more rely on wells or small systems not covered by the Safe Drinking Water Act.
The Biden administration began to address the problem with an investment of about $22 billion to upgrade the nation’s water systems. The money removed lead pipes, upgraded wastewater and sewage systems, and addressed the removal of so-called forever chemicals and proposed a new standard for acceptable measures of them.
What this will mean in the future is unclear. President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to increase production of oil and gas—although it is currently at an all-time high—and such projects are often slowed by environmental regulations. On Tuesday, December 10, he posted on social media, “Any person or company investing ONE BILLION DOLLARS, OR MORE, in the United States of America, will receive fully expedited approvals and permits, including, but in no way limited to, all Environmental approvals. GET READY TO ROCK!!!”
“[B]y ignoring environmental costs we have given an economic advantage to the careless polluter over his more conscientious rival,” Trump’s Republican predecessor Nixon told the nation in 1970. “While adopting laws prohibiting injury to person or property, we have freely allowed injury to our shared surroundings.” When he signed the Safe Drinking Water Act in 1974, President Ford added simply: “Nothing is more essential to the life of every single American than clean air, pure food, and safe drinking water.”
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
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Today, President Joe Biden designated a new national monument in honor of Frances Perkins, secretary of labor under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The first female Cabinet secretary, Perkins served for twelve years. She took the job only after getting FDR to sign on to her goals: unemployment insurance, health insurance, old-age insurance, a 40-hour work week, a minimum wage, and abolition of child labor. She later recalled: “I remember he looked so startled, and he said, ‘Well, do you think it can be done?’”
She promised to find out.
Once in office, Perkins was a driving force behind the administration’s massive investment in public works projects to get people back to work. She urged the government to spend $3.3 billion on schools, roads, housing, and post offices. Those projects employed more than a million people in 1934.
In 1935, FDR signed into law the Social Security Act that she designed and negotiated, providing ordinary Americans with unemployment insurance; aid to homeless, dependent, and neglected children; funds to promote maternal and child welfare; and public health services.
In 1938, Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established a minimum wage and maximum hours. It banned child labor.
The one area where Perkins fell short of her goals was in establishing public healthcare. It was not until 2010 that President Barack Obama signed into law the Affordable Care Act.
Perkins’s work to build FDR’s New Deal sparked the modern American state.
Before Perkins, the primary function of the federal government was to manage the economic relationships between labor, capital, and resources. Property rights, after all, had been the basis on which North American colonists had found the justification to rebel against the British crown, and that focus on the relationships inherent in property ownership had continued to dominate the government American lawmakers built.
But Perkins recognized that the central purpose of government was not to protect property; it was to protect the communities of people who lived in the nation. She recognized that children, the elderly, women, and disabled Americans, all of whom contributed to society whether or not that contribution was recognized with a paycheck, were as valuable to the survival of a community as male workers and the wealthy men who employed them.
“The people are what matter to government,” she said, “and a government should aim to give all the people under its jurisdiction the best possible life.”
A majority of Americans of both parties liked the new system, but the reworking of the government shocked those who had previously dominated the country. As soon as the Social Security Act passed, opponents set out to destroy it along with the rest of the new system. A coalition of Republican businessmen who hated both business regulation and the taxes that paid for social programs, racists who opposed the idea of equal rights for racial and ethnic minorities, and religious traditionalists—especially Southern Baptists—who opposed the recognition of women’s equal rights, joined together to fight against the New Deal.
Their undermining of Perkins’s vision got little traction when they were attacking business regulation and taxes to support social services. Voters liked those things. But it began to attract supporters after 1954, when the Supreme Court handed down the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, decision requiring the desegregation of public schools. That decision enabled those opposed to the New Deal to harness racism to their cause, warning American voters that a government that protected everyone would mean a government that used tax dollars paid by white Americans to benefit Black Americans.
Religious traditionalists’ role in undermining the New Deal grew in the 1970s. The new system dramatically expanded women’s rights, and when President Richard Nixon’s people worried he would lose reelection in 1972, they quite deliberately used the issue of abortion to claim that “women’s liberation” was destroying the family structure that religious traditionalists believed mirrored God’s relationship to his human flock.
By 1979, religious traditionalists had rejected the modern move toward women’s rights and made common cause with Republicans eager to derail the New Deal. In 1980 the support of those traditionalists put Republican president Ronald Reagan into the White House. Their influence grew in the 1990s as white evangelicals became the base of the Republican Party. By 2016 they had brought into the Republican Party a determination to reinstate a male-dominated, patriarchal world that resurrected the government Frances Perkins’s vision had replaced.
That impulse has grown until now, in 2024, attacks on women have become central to the destruction of the kind of government Frances Perkins helped to establish during the New Deal. Religious extremists in the Republican Party have in some states reduced or prevented women’s access to healthcare and are talking about taking away women’s right to vote, and the party itself has downgraded the role of women in society. When House Republicans released a list of their committee leaders for the next Congress last Thursday, there were no women on it. For the first time in 20 years, no House committees will be chaired by women.
“Very fitting in the MAGA Era—No Women Need Apply,” former Republican representative from Virginia Barbara Comstock posted on X.
In his term in office, President Biden has worked to reclaim Frances Perkins’s vision of a government that works for all Americans. When he took office, he promised to have a Cabinet that “looks like America,” and he created the most diverse Cabinet in American history. And he has emphasized women’s equality. In March 2024 he signed an executive order noting that, since women’s roles in American history have often been overlooked, it is imperative that we recognize the women and girls who have shaped the nation.
The creation today of the Frances Perkins National Monument tied together Perkins’s expansion of the government and the centrality of women to the American story. The event took place in the Frances Perkins Building, the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Labor in Washington, D.C., where acting secretary of labor Julie Su noted that Biden has been “the most pro-worker, pro-union president in history,” protecting pensions, defending unions, creating good jobs, and unapologetically wielding the power of the presidency on behalf of working people.
Su inducted the president into the Labor Department’s Hall of Honor, and Biden responded with the observation that “the American people are beginning to figure out all we’re doing is what’s basically decent and fair—just basically decent and fair.”
Then Biden spoke about Perkins and her work. He described how his administration has defended, protected, and expanded her vision. He reiterated that women have always been vital to the United States and insisted that they must be acknowledged both in our current society and in the way we remember our history.
As part of the day’s events, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland announced the establishment of five new National Historic Landmarks recognizing women’s history: the Charleston Cigar Factory in Charleston, South Carolina, where in 1945–1946, Black women led a strike that prompted the organization of southern workers; the Furies Collective, the Washington, D.C., home of a lesbian, feminist publishing group in the early 1970s; the Washington, D.C., Slowe-Burrill House, home of Black lesbian educators Lucy Diggs Slowe and Mary Burrill in the early twentieth century; Azurest South in Petersburg, Virginia, the home and studio of early twentieth century Black architect Amaza Lee Meredith; and the Peter Hurd and Henriette Wyeth House and Studios in San Patricio, New Mexico, where the two painted in the twentieth century.
In establishing the 57-acre family farm of Frances Perkins on the Damariscotta River in Newcastle, Maine, as a National Monument today, Biden acknowledged both the importance of Perkins’s New Deal vision of a government that benefits everyone and the centrality of women’s equality to that vision.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
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another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Yesterday, Trump gave his first press conference since the election. It was exactly what Trump’s public performances always are: attention-grabbing threats alongside lies and very little apparent understanding of actual issues. His mix of outrageous and threatening is central to his politics, though: it keeps him central to the media, even though, as Josh Marshall pointed out in Talking Points Memo on December 13, he often claims a right to do something he knows very little about and has no power to accomplish. The uncertainty he creates is key to his power, Marshall notes. It keeps everyone off balance and focused on him in anticipation of trouble to come.
At the same time, it seems increasingly clear that the wealthy leaders who backed Trump’s reelection are not terribly concerned about his threats: they seem to see him as a figurehead rather than a policy leader. They are counting on him to deliver more tax cuts and deregulation but apparently are dismissing his campaign vows to raise tariffs and deport immigrants as mere rhetoric.
As the promised tax cuts are already under discussion, interested parties are turning to deregulation. Susanne Rust and Ian James of the Los Angeles Times reported on Sunday that on December 5, more than a hundred industrial trade groups signed a 21-page letter to Trump complaining that “regulations are strangling our economy.” They urged him to gut Biden-era regulations and instead to “partner” with manufacturers to create “workable regulations that achieve important policy goals without imposing overly burdensome and impractical requirements on our sector.”
They single out reductions in air quality, water quality, chemical, vehicle, and power plant environmental regulations as important for their industries. They also call for ending the “regulatory overreach” of the Biden administration on labor rules, saying those rules “threaten the employer-employee relationship and harm manufacturers’ global competitiveness.” They want an end to “right-to-repair” laws, a loosening of the rules for how and when companies need to report cyber incidents, and the replacement of mandated consumer product safety rules with “voluntary standards.”
They also call for cuts to the Biden administration’s antitrust efforts and for looser corporate finance regulations. On December 12, Gina Heeb reported in the Wall Street Journal that Trump’s advisors are exploring ways “to dramatically shrink, consolidate or even eliminate the top bank watchdogs in Washington,” including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).
As Catherine Rampell explained in the Washington Post today, Congress created the FDIC in 1933 to protect bank deposits so that a bank’s customers can trust that mismanaged banks won’t lose their money. The FDIC also oversees those banks so that they are less likely to get into trouble in the first place. Congress created the system after people rushing to get their money out before a collapse actually created the very collapse that they feared, with one bank failure creating another in a domino effect that dug the economy even further into the crisis it was in after the Great Crash.
But the insurance money for those banks comes from fees assessed on the banks themselves, so abolishing the FDIC would save the banks money.
When he learned that Trump’s advisors are eyeing cuts to the FDIC, Princeton history professor Kevin Kruse commented: “When I lecture about New Deal banking reforms, I note that some of the key measures—like Glass Steagall—were repealed by the right with disastrous results like the 2008 financial meltdown, but ha ha, no one will ever be stupid enough to kill FDIC and bring back the old bank runs.”
Ben Guggenheim of Politico was the first to report that twenty-nine Republican members of Congress are also quick off the blocks in getting into the act of promoting private industry, calling for the incoming president to end the program of the Internal Revenue Service that lets people file their taxes directly without using a private tax preparer. Other developed countries use a similar public system, but in the U.S., private tax preparers staunchly opposed the public system. When more than 140,000 people used the IRS pilot program this year, they saved an estimated $6.5 million. Republicans called for its end, warning it is “a threat to taxpayers’ freedom from government overreach.”
But for all their faith that Trump will deregulate the economy, economic leaders seem to think his other promises were just rhetoric.
Brian Schwartz of the Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that business executives have been lobbying Trump to change his declared plans on tariffs. The president-elect has vowed to place tariffs of 25% on products from Canada and Mexico, and of an additional 10% on products from China. He claims to believe that other countries will pay these tariffs, but in fact U.S. consumers will pay them. That, plus the fact that other countries will almost certainly respond with their own tariffs against U.S. products, makes economists warn that Trump’s plans will hurt the economy with both inflation and trade wars.
Schwartz reported that some companies and some Republicans are hoping that Trump’s tariff threats are simply a bargaining tactic.
Trump supporters say something similar about his vow to deport 11 to 20 million undocumented immigrants, hoping he won’t actually go after long-term, hardworking undocumented people. On December 10, Jack Dolan reported in the Los Angeles Times that the resort town of Mammoth Lakes, California, depends on migrant labor, and on December 15, Eli Saslow and Erin Schaff of the New York Times reported the story of an undocumented worker brought to the U.S. as an infant, who is now trying to figure out his future after his beloved father-in-law voted for Trump. Two days ago, CNN reported on Trump-supporting dairy farmers in South Dakota who depend on undocumented workers, insisting that Trump will not round up undocumented immigrants, no matter what he says.
One person who is not discounting Trump’s threats is Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). McConnell will give up his leadership position in January and has told his colleagues he feels “liberated.”
McConnell appears to be taking a stand against Trump’s expected appointee for secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Kennedy speaks often against vaccines, and after the New York Times reported that the lawyer working with Kennedy to vet potential HHS staff petitioned federal regulators to take the polio vaccine off the market, McConnell—a polio survivor—warned: “Efforts to undermine public confidence in proven cures are not just uninformed—they’re dangerous. Anyone seeking the Senate’s consent to serve in the incoming administration would do well to steer clear of even the appearance of association with such efforts.”
McConnell has also been vocal about his opposition to Trump’s isolationism. He is a champion of sending military support to Ukraine and, after he steps down from the leadership, will chair the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, the subcommittee that controls military spending. “America’s national security interests face the gravest array of threats since the Second World War,” McConnell says. “At this critical moment, a new Senate Republican majority has a responsibility to secure the future of U.S. leadership and primacy.”
McConnell will also chair the Rules Committee, which gives him a chance to stop MAGA senators from trying to abandon the power of the Senate and permit Trump to get his way. McConnell has said that “[d]efending the Senate as an institution and protecting the right to political speech in our elections remain among my longest-standing priorities.”
That last sentence identifies the current struggle in the Republican Party. McConnell is showing his willingness to prevent Trump and MAGA Republicans from bulldozing their way through the Senate in order to undermine the departments of Justice, Defense, and Health and Human Services, among others. But when he talks about “protecting the right to political speech in our elections,” he is talking about protecting the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision that permits corporations and wealthy individuals to flood our elections, and thus our political system, with money.
It is those corporations and wealthy individuals who are now lining up for tax cuts and deregulation, but who don’t want the tariffs or mass deportations or isolationism Trump’s “America First” MAGA base wants.
Trump and his team have been talking about their election win as a “mandate” and a “landslide,” but it was actually a razor thin victory with more voters choosing someone other than Trump than voting for him. He will need the support of establishment Republicans in the Senate to put his MAGA policies in place.
At yesterday's press conference, he appeared to be nodding to McConnell when he promised: “You’re not going to lose the polio vaccine. That’s not going to happen.” McConnell’s fierce use of power in the past suggests that the Senate’s giving up its constitutional power to bend to Trump’s will isn’t likely to happen, either.
[Buddy and I happened to be walking past the FDIC building in Washington, D.C., tonight, and it was too perfect a coincidence to pass up.]
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you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
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Yesterday, Representative Barry Loudermilk (R-GA) released an “Interim Report on the Failures and Politicization of the January 6th Select Committee.” As the title suggests, the report seeks to rewrite what happened on January 6, 2021, when rioters encouraged by former president Donald Trump attacked the U.S. Capitol. Loudermilk chairs a subcommittee on oversight that sits within the Committee on House Administration. The larger committee—House Administration—oversees the daily operations of the House of Representatives, including the Capitol Police. Under that charge, former House speaker Kevin McCarthy permitted MAGA Republicans to investigate security failures at the Capitol on January 6.
Loudermilk was himself involved in the story of that day after video turned up of him giving a tour of the Capitol on January 5 despite its being closed because of Covid. During his tour, participants took photos of things that are not usually of interest to visitors: stairwells, for example. Since then, he has been eager to turn the tables against those investigating the events of January 6.
Loudermilk turned the committee’s investigation of security failures into an attack on the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, more commonly known as the January 6th Committee. Yesterday’s report singled out former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY), who has taken a strong stand against Trump’s fitness for office after his behavior that day, as the primary villain of the select committee. In his press release concerning the interim report, Loudermilk said that Cheney “should be investigated for potential criminal witness tampering,” and the report itself claimed that “numerous federal laws were likely broken by Liz Cheney” and that the FBI should investigate that alleged criminality.
The report seeks to exonerate Trump and those who participated in the events of January 6 while demonizing those who are standing against him, rewriting the reality of what happened on January 6 with a version that portrays Trump as a persecuted victim.
Trump’s team picked up the story and turned it even darker. At 2:11 this morning, Trump’s social media account posted: “Liz Cheney could be in a lot of trouble based on the evidence obtained by the subcommittee, which states that ‘numerous federal laws were likely broken by Liz Cheney, and these violations should be investigated by the FBI.’ Thank you to Congressman Barry Loudermilk on a job well done.”
To this, conservative writer David Frum responded: “After his successful consolidation of power, the Leader prepares show trials for those who resisted his failed first [violent attempt to overthrow the government].”
Liz Cheney also responded. “January 6th showed Donald Trump for who [he] really is—a cruel and vindictive man who allowed violent attacks to continue against our Capitol and law enforcement officers while he watched television and refused for hours to instruct his supporters to stand down and leave.” She pointed out that the January 6th committee’s report was based on evidence that came primarily from Republican witnesses, “including many of the most senior officials from Trump’s own White House, campaign and Administration,” and that the Department of Justice reached the similar conclusions after its own investigation.
Loudermilk’s report “intentionally disregards the truth and the Select Committee’s tremendous weight of evidence, and instead fabricates lies and defamatory allegations in an attempt to cover up what Donald Trump did,” Cheney wrote. “Their allegations do not reflect a review of the actual evidence, and are a malicious and cowardly assault on the truth. No reputable lawyer, legislator or judge would take this seriously.”
CNN aired clips today of Republican lawmakers blaming Trump for the events of January 6.
Last night, Trump also filed a civil lawsuit against pollster J. Ann Selzer, her polling company, the Des Moines Register, and its parent company Gannett over Selzer’s November 2 poll showing Harris in the lead for the election. Calling it “brazen election interference,” the suit alleges that the poll violated the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act. Robert Corn-Revere, chief counsel for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, told Brian Stelter, Katelyn Polantz, Hadas Gold, and Paula Reid of CNN: “This absurd lawsuit is a direct assault on the First Amendment. Newspapers and polling firms are not engaged in ‘deceptive practices’ just because they publish stories and poll results President-elect Donald Trump doesn’t like. Getting a poll wrong is not election interference or fraud.”
Conservative former representative Joe Walsh (R-IL) wrote: “Trump is suing a pollster and calling for an investigation of [Liz Cheney]. Don’t you dare tell me he’s not an authoritarian. And don’t you dare look the other way. Donald Trump is un-American. The resistance to him from Americans must be steadfast & fierce.”
This afternoon, Trump’s authoritarian aspirations smashed against reality.
The determination of the MAGA extremists in the House to put poison pills in appropriations measures over the past year meant that the Republicans have been unable to pass the necessary appropriations bills for 2024 (not a typo), forcing the government to operate with continuing resolutions. On September 25, Congress passed a continuing resolution that would fund the government through December 20, this Friday. Without funding, the government will begin to shut down…right before the holidays.
At the same time, a farm bill, which Congress usually passes every five years and which outlines the country’s agriculture and food policies including supplemental nutrition (formerly known as food stamps), expired in 2023 and has been continued through temporary extensions.
Last night, news broke that congressional leaders had struck a bipartisan deal to keep the government from shutting down. The proposed 1,500-page measure extended the farm bill for a year and provided about $100 billion in disaster relief as well as about $10 billion in assistance for farmers. It also raised congressional salaries and kicked the government funding deadline through March 14. It seemed like a last-minute reprieve from a holiday government shutdown.
But MAGA Republicans immediately opposed the measure. “It’s a total dumpster fire. I think it’s garbage,” said Representative Eric Burlison (R-MO). They are talking publicly about ditching Johnson and voting for someone else for House speaker.
Trump’s sidekick Elon Musk also opposed the bill. Chad Pergram of the Fox News Channel reported that House speaker Mike Johnson explained on the Fox News Channel that he is on a text chain with Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, both of whom are unelected appointees to Trump’s proposed "Department of Government Efficiency" charged with cutting the U.S. budget.
Johnson said he explained to Musk that the measure would need Democratic votes to pass, and then they could bring Trump in roaring back with the America First agenda. Apparently, Musk was unconvinced: shortly after noon, he posted, “Any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in 2 years!” Later, he added: “No bills should be passed Congress [sic] until Jan 20, when [Trump] takes office.”
This blueprint would shut down the United States government for a month, but Musk—who, again, does not answer to any constituents—seems untroubled. ″‘Shutting down’ the government (which doesn’t actually shut down critical functions btw) is infinitely better than passing a horrible bill,” he tweeted.
Pergram reported that Musk’s threats sent Republicans scrambling, and Musk tweeted: “Your elected representatives have heard you and now the terrible bill is dead. The voice of the people has triumphed! VOX POPULI VOX DEI.”
But Trump and Vice President–elect J.D. Vance seem to recognize that shutting down the government before the holidays is likely to be unpopular. They issued their own statement against the measure, calling instead for “a streamlined bill that doesn’t give Chuck Schumer and the Democrats everything they want.”
Then Trump and Vance went on to bring up something not currently on the table: the debt ceiling. The debt ceiling is a holdover from World War I, when Congress stopped trying to micromanage the Treasury and instead simply gave it a ceiling for borrowing money. In the last decades, Congress has appropriated more money than the country brings in, thus banging up against the debt ceiling. If it is not raised, the United States will default on its debt, and so Congress routinely raises the ceiling…as long as a Republican president is in office. If a Democrat is in office, Republicans fight bitterly against what they say is profligate spending.
The debt ceiling is not currently an issue, but Trump and Vance made it central to their statement, perhaps hoping people would confuse the appropriations bill with the debt ceiling. ”Increasing the debt ceiling is not great but we’d rather do it on Biden’s watch. If Democrats won’t cooperate on the debt ceiling now”—again, it is the Republicans who threaten to force the country into default—“what makes anyone think they would do it in June during our administration. Let’s have this debate now.”
Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) explained: “Remember what this is all about: Trump wants Democrats to agree to raise the debt ceiling so he can pass his massive corporate and billionaire tax cut without a problem. Shorter version: tax cut for billionaires or the government shuts down for Christmas.”
President and Dr. Biden are in Delaware today, honoring the memory of Biden’s first wife, Neilia, and his one-year-old daughter Naomi, who were killed in a car accident 52 years ago today, but White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre issued a statement saying:
“Republicans need to stop playing politics with this bipartisan agreement or they will hurt hardworking Americans and create instability across the country. President-elect Trump and Vice President–elect Vance ordered Republicans to shut down the government and they are threatening to do just that—while undermining communities recovering from disasters, farmers and ranchers, and community health centers. Triggering a damaging government shutdown would hurt families who are gathering to meet with their loved ones and endanger the basic services Americans from veterans to Social Security recipients rely on. A deal is a deal. Republicans should keep their word.”
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo pointed out the relationship between Trump’s authoritarianism and today’s chaos on Capitol Hill. Trump elevated Musk to the center of power, Marshall observes, and now is following in his wake. Musk, Marshall writes, “is erratic, volatile, impulsive, mercurial,” and he “introduces a huge source of unpredictability and chaos into the presidency that for once Trump doesn’t control.”
Ron Filipkowski of MeidasNews captured the day’s jockeying among Trump and Musk and warring Republican factions over whether elected officials should fund the United States government. He posted: “The owner of a car company is controlling the House of Representatives from a social media app.”
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“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”
These were the first lines in a pamphlet that appeared in Philadelphia on December 19, 1776, at a time when the fortunes of the American patriots seemed at an all-time low. Just five months before, the members of the Second Continental Congress had adopted the Declaration of Independence, explaining to the world that “the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, Assembled…do…solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved.”
The nation’s founders went on to explain why it was necessary for them “to dissolve the political bands” which had connected them to the British crown.
They explained that their vision of human government was different from that of Great Britain. In contrast to the tradition of hereditary monarchy under which the American colonies had been organized, the representatives of the united states on the North American continent believed in a government organized according to the principles of natural law.
Such a government rested on the “self-evident” concept “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Governments were created to protect those rights and, rather than deserving loyalty because of tradition, religion, or heritage, they were legitimate only if those they governed consented to them. And the American colonists no longer consented to be governed by the British monarchy.
This new vision of human government was an exciting thing to declare in the heat of a Philadelphia summer after a year of skirmishing between the colonial army and British regulars, but by December 1776, enthusiasm for this daring new experiment was ebbing. Shortly after colonials had cheered news of independence in July as local leaders read copies of the Continental Congress’s declaration in meetinghouses and taverns in cities and small towns throughout the colonies, the British moved on General George Washington and the troops in New York City.
By September the British had forced Washington and his soldiers to retreat from the city, and after a series of punishing skirmishes across Manhattan Island, by November the Redcoats had pushed the Americans into New Jersey. They chased the colonials all the way across the Delaware River into Pennsylvania.
By mid-December, things looked bleak for the Continental Army and the revolutionary government it backed. The 5,000 soldiers with Washington who were still able to fight were demoralized from their repeated losses and retreats, and since the Continental Congress had kept enlistments short so as not to risk a standing army, many of the men would be free to leave the army at the end of the year, further weakening it.
As the British troops had taken over New York City and the Continental soldiers had retreated, many of the newly minted Americans outside the army were also having doubts about the whole enterprise of creating a new, independent nation based on the idea that all men were created equal. Then things got worse: as the American soldiers crossed into Pennsylvania, the Continental Congress abandoned Philadelphia on December 12 out of fear of a British invasion, regrouping in Baltimore (which they complained was dirty and expensive).
“These are the times that try men’s souls.”
The author of The American Crisis was Thomas Paine, whose January 1776 pamphlet Common Sense had solidified the colonists’ irritation at the king’s ministers into a rejection of monarchy itself, a rejection not just of King George III, but of all kings. In early 1776, Paine had told the fledgling Americans, many of whom still prayed for a return to the comfortable neglect they had enjoyed from the British government before 1763, that the colonies must form their own independent government.
Now he urged them to see the experiment through. He explained that he had been with the troops as they retreated across New Jersey and, describing the march for his readers, told them “that both officers and men, though greatly harassed and fatigued, frequently without rest, covering, or provision, the inevitable consequences of a long retreat, bore it with a manly and martial spirit. All their wishes centred in one, which was, that the country would turn out and help them to drive the enemy back.”
For that was the crux of it. Paine had no doubt that patriots would create a new nation, eventually, because the cause of human self-determination was just. But how long it took to establish that new nation would depend on how much effort people put into success. “I call not upon a few, but upon all: not on this state or that state, but on every state: up and help us; lay your shoulders to the wheel; better have too much force than too little, when so great an object is at stake,” Paine wrote. “Let it be told to the future world, that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet and to repulse it.”
In mid-December, British commander General William Howe had sent most of his soldiers back to New York to spend the winter, leaving garrisons across the river in New Jersey to guard against Washington advancing.
On Christmas night, having heard that the garrison at Trenton was made up of Hessian auxiliaries who were exhausted and unprepared for an attack, Washington and 2,400 soldiers crossed back over the icy Delaware River in a winter storm. They marched nine miles to attack the garrison, the underdressed soldiers suffering from the cold and freezing rain. Reaching Trenton, they surprised the outnumbered Hessians, who fought briefly in the streets before surrendering.
The victory at Trenton restored the colonials’ confidence in their cause. Soldiers reenlisted, and in early January they surprised the British at Princeton, New Jersey, driving them back. The British abandoned their posts in central New Jersey, and by March the Continental Congress moved back to Philadelphia. Historians credit the Battles of Trenton and Princeton with saving the Revolutionary cause.
There is no hard proof that Washington had officers read The American Crisis to his troops when it came out six days before the march to Trenton, as some writers have said, but there is little doubt they heard it one way or another. So, too, did those wavering loyalists.
“Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered,” Paine wrote in that fraught moment, “yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.”
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This evening the House of Representatives passed a measure to fund the government for three months. The measure will fund the government at current levels halfway through March. It also appropriates $100 billion in disaster aid for regions hit by the storms and fires of the summer and fall, as well as $10 billion for farmers.
Getting to this agreement has exposed the power vacuum in the Republican Party and thus a crisis in the government of the United States.
This fight over funding has been brewing since Republicans took over the House of Representatives in January 2023. From their first weeks in office, when they launched the longest fight over a House speaker since 1860, the Republicans were bitterly divided. MAGA Republicans want to slash government so deeply that it will no longer be able to regulate business, provide a basic safety net, promote infrastructure, or protect civil rights. Establishment Republicans also want to cut the government, but they recognize that with Democrats in charge of the Senate and a Democratic president, they cannot get everything they want.
As Jacob Bogage of the Washington Post recounted, when the nation hit the debt ceiling in spring 2023, Republicans used it to demand that the Democrats cut the budget back to 2022 levels. Democrats objected that they had raised the debt ceiling without conditions three times under Trump and that Republicans had agreed to the budget to which the new Republicans were demanding cuts.
The debt ceiling is a holdover from World War I, when Congress stopped micromanaging the instruments the Treasury used to borrow money and instead simply set a debt limit. That procedure began to be a political weapon after the tax cuts first during President George W. Bush’s term and then under President Donald Trump reduced government revenues to 16.5% of the nation’s gross domestic product while spending has risen to nearly 23%. This gap means the country must borrow money to meet its budget appropriations, eventually hitting the ceiling.
The Treasury has never defaulted on the U.S. debt. A default would mean the government could not meet its obligations, and would, as Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned in 2023, “cause irreparable harm to the U.S. economy, the livelihoods of all Americans, and global financial stability.”
As journalist Borage recalled, when then–House speaker Kevin McCarthy agreed to raise the debt ceiling in June 2023 in exchange for the Fiscal Responsibility Act that kept the 2024 and 2025 budgets at 2022 levels, House extremists turned on him. In September those extremists, led by then-representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) threw McCarthy out of the speaker’s chair—the only time in American history that a party has thrown out its own speaker. Weeks later, the Republicans finally voted to make Mike Johnson (R-LA) speaker, but Johnson had to rely on Democratic votes to fund the government for fiscal year 2024.
For 2025, Johnson and the Republicans said they wanted more cuts than the Fiscal Responsibility Act set out, and even still, the extremists filled the appropriations bills with culture-wars poison pills. Johnson couldn’t get any measures through the House, and instead kept the government operating with Democratic votes for continuing resolutions that funded the government first through September 30, and then through today, December 20.
At the same time, a farm bill, which Congress usually passes every five years and which outlines the country’s agriculture and food policies including supplemental nutrition (formerly known as food stamps), expired in 2023 and has also been continued through temporary extensions.
On Tuesday, December 17, Johnson announced that Republican and Democratic congressional leaders had hashed out another bipartisan continuing resolution that kept spending at current levels through March 14 while also providing about $100 billion in disaster relief and about $10 billion in assistance for farmers. It also raised congressional salaries and kicked the government funding deadline through March 14. With bipartisan backing, it seemed like a last-minute reprieve from a holiday government shutdown.
Extremist Republicans immediately opposed the measure, but this was not a surprise. There were likely enough Democratic votes to pass it without them.
What WAS a surprise was that on Wednesday, billionaire Elon Musk, who holds billions in federal contracts, frightened Republican lawmakers into killing the continuing resolution by appearing to threaten to fund primary challengers against those who voted for the resolution. “Any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in 2 years!” he tweeted. Later, he added: “No bills should be passed Congress [sic] until Jan 20, when [Trump] takes office.”
Musk’s opposition appeared to shock President-elect Donald Trump into speaking up against the bill about thirteen hours after Musk’s first stand, when he and Vice President–elect J.D. Vance also came out against the measure. But, perhaps not wanting to seem to be following in Musk’s wake, Trump then added a new and unexpected demand. He insisted that any continuing resolution raise or get rid of the debt ceiling throughout his term, although the debt ceiling isn’t currently an issue. Trump threatened to primary any Republican who voted for a measure that did not suspend the debt ceiling.
Trump’s demand highlighted that his top priority is not the budget deficit he promised during the campaign to cut by 33%, but rather freeing himself up to spend whatever he wishes: after all, he added about a quarter of the current national debt during his first term. He intends to extend his 2017 tax cuts after they expire in 2025, although the Congressional Budget Office estimates that those cuts will add $4.6 trillion to the deficit over the next ten years. He has also called for the deportation of 11 million to 20 million undocumented immigrants and possibly others, at a cost estimate of $88 billion to $315 billion a year.
House Republicans killed the bipartisan bill and, yesterday afternoon, introduced a new bill, rewritten along the lines Musk and Trump had demanded. They had not shown it to Democrats. It cut out a number of programs, including $190 million designated for pediatric cancer research, but it included the $110 billion in disaster aid and aid to farmers. It also raised the debt ceiling for the next two years, during which Republicans will control Congress.
"All Republicans, and even the Democrats, should do what is best for our Country and vote 'YES' for this Bill, TONIGHT!" Trump wrote.
But extremist Republicans said no straight out of the box, and Democrats, who had not been consulted on the bill, wanted no part of it. Republicans immediately tried to blame the Democrats for the looming government shutdown. Ignoring that Musk had manufactured the entire crisis and that members of his own party refused to support the measure, Trump posted, “This is a Biden problem to solve, but if Republicans can help solve it, they will.”
Then, as Johnson went back to the drawing board, Musk posted on X his support for Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) neo-Nazi party. This raised back to prominence Trump’s having spent November 5, Election Day, at Mar-a-Lago with members of AfD, who said they are hoping to be close with the incoming Trump administration.
Today, social media exploded with the realization that an unelected billionaire from South Africa who apparently supports fascism was able to intimidate Republican legislators into doing his bidding. In this last week, Trump has threatened former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) with prosecution for her work as a member of Congress and has sued the Des Moines Register for publishing a poll that was unfavorable to him before the November election. Those actions are classic authoritarian moves to consolidate power, but to those not paying close attention they were perhaps less striking than the reality that Musk appears to have taken over for Trump as the incoming president.
As CNN’s Erin Burnett pointed out “the world’s richest man, right now, holding the country hostage,” Democrats worked to call attention to this crisis. Representative Richard Neal (D-MA) said: “We reached an agreement…and a tweet changed all of it? Can you imagine what the next two years are going to be like if every time the Congress works its will and then there's a tweet…from an individual who has no official portfolio who threatens members on the Republican side with a primary, and they succumb?”
The chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Patty Murray (D-WA), said she would stay in Washington, D.C., through Christmas “because we’re not going to let Elon Musk run the government. Put simply, we should not let an unelected billionaire rip away research for pediatric cancer so he can get a tax cut or tear down policies that help America outcompete China because it could hurt his bottom line. We had a bipartisan deal—we should stick to it…. The American people do not want chaos or a costly government shutdown all because an unelected billionaire wants to call the shots.”
Republicans, too, seemed dismayed at Musk’s power. Representative Rich McCormick (R-GA) told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins: “Last time I checked, Elon Musk doesn’t have a vote in Congress. Now, he has influence and he’ll put pressure on us to do whatever he thinks the right thing is for him, but I have 760,000 people that voted for me to do the right thing for them. And that’s what matters to me.”
Tonight the House passed a measure much like the one Musk and Trump had undermined, funding the government and providing the big-ticket disaster and farm relief but not raising or getting rid of the debt ceiling. According to Jennifer Scholtes of Politico, Republican leadership tried to get party members on board by promising to raise the debt ceiling by $1.5 trillion early in 2025 while also cutting $2.5 trillion in “mandatory” spending, which covers Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and SNAP nutrition assistance.
The vote in the House was 366 to 34, with one abstention. The measure passed thanks to Democratic votes, with 196 Democrats voting yes in addition to the 170 Republicans who voted yes (because of the circumstances of its passage, the measure needed two thirds of the House to vote yes). No Democrats voted against the measure, while 34 Republicans abandoned their speaker to vote no. As Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News wrote: “Dem[ocrat]s saved Republicans here.” Democrats also kept the government functioning to help ordinary Americans.
The fiasco of the past few days is a political blow to Trump. Musk overshadowed him, and when Trump demanded that Republicans free him from the debt ceiling, they ignored him. Meanwhile, extremist Republicans are calling for Johnson’s removal, but it is unclear who could earn the votes to take his place. And, since the continuing resolution extends only until mid-March, and the first two months of Trump’s term will undoubtedly be consumed with the Senate confirmation hearings for his appointees—some of whom are highly questionable—it looks like this chaos will continue into 2025.
The Senate passed the measure as expected just after midnight. Nonetheless, it appears that that chaos, and the extraordinary problem of an unelected billionaire who hails from South Africa calling the shots in the Republican Congress, will loom over the new year.
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