Letter From An American by Heather Cox Richardson

mickeyrat

  October 28, 2023 (Saturday)

It was an unexpectedly warm day here today, and I spent it— all of it— in a kayak on the water. Am so tired tonight that I can barely lift my arms to type. I have things to say, but they will have to wait.

This was the scene shortly before sunset as I rounded the northern end of an island to turn toward home.

I'll see you tomorrow.

mickeyrat

  October 29, 2023 (Sunday)

On October 29, 1929, the U.S. stock market crashed. It had been rocked five days before, when heavy trading early in the day drove it down, but leading bankers had seen the mounting crisis and moved in to stabilize the markets before the end of the day. October 24 left small investors broken but the system intact. On Monday, October 28, the market slid again, with a key industrial average dropping 49 points.

And then, on October 29, the crisis hit. When the gong in the great hall of the New York Stock Exchange hit at ten o’clock, the market opened with heavy trading, all of it downward. When the ticker tape finally showed the day’s transactions, two and a half hours later, it documented that more than 16 million shares had changed hands and the industrial average had dropped another 43 points.

Black Tuesday was the beginning of the end. The market continued to drop. By November the industrial average stood at half of what it had been two months before. By 1932, manufacturing output was less than it had been in 1913; foreign trade plummeted from $10 billion to $3 billion in the three years after 1929, and agricultural prices fell by more than half. By 1932 a million people in New York City were out of work; by 1933, thirteen million people—one person of every four in the labor force—were unemployed. Unable to pay rent or mortgages, people lived in shelters made of packing boxes.

While the administration of Republican president Herbert Hoover preached that Americans could combat the Depression with thrift, morality, and individualism, voters looked carefully at the businessmen who only years before had seemed to be pillars of society and saw they had plundered ordinary Americans. The business boom of the 1920s had increased worker productivity by about 43%, but wages did not rise. Those profits, along with tax cuts and stock market dividends, meant that wealth moved upward: in 1929, 5% of the population received one third of the nation’s income.

In 1932, nearly 58% of voters turned to Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who promised them a “New Deal”: a government that would work for everyone, not just for the wealthy and well connected.

As soon as Roosevelt was in office, Democrats began to pass laws protecting workers’ rights, providing government jobs, regulating business and banking, and beginning to chip away at the racial segregation of the American South. New Deal policies employed more than 8.5 million people, built more than 650,000 miles of highways, built or repaired more than 120,000 bridges, and put up more than 125,000 buildings. They regulated banking and the stock market and gave workers the right to bargain collectively. They established minimum wages and maximum hours for work. They provided a basic social safety net and regulated food and drug safety.

When he took office in 1953, Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower built on this system, adding to the nation’s infrastructure with the Federal-Aid Highway Act, which provided $25 billion to build 41,000 miles of highway across the country; adding the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to the government and calling for a national healthcare system; and nominating former Republican governor of California Earl Warren as chief justice of the Supreme Court to protect civil rights. Eisenhower also insisted on the vital importance of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to stop the Soviet Union from spreading communism throughout Europe.

Eisenhower called his vision “a middle way between untrammeled freedom of the individual and the demands of the welfare of the whole Nation.” The system worked: between 1945 and 1960 the nation’s gross national product (GNP) jumped by 250%, from $200 billion to $500 billion.

But while the vast majority of Americans of both parties liked the new system that had helped the nation to recover from the Depression and to equip the Allies to win World War II, a group of Republican businessmen and their libertarian allies at places like the National Association of Manufacturers insisted that the system proved both parties had been corrupted by communism. They inundated newspapers, radio, and magazines with the message that the government must stay out of the economy to return the nation to the policies of the 1920s.

Their position got little traction until the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision declaring segregation in public schools unconstitutional. That decision enabled them to divide the American people by insisting that the popular new government simply redistributed tax dollars from hardworking white taxpayers to undeserving minorities.

A promise to cut the taxes that funded social services and the business regulations they insisted hampered business growth fueled the election of Ronald Reagan for president in 1980. But by 1986 administration officials recognized that tax cuts that were driving the deficit up despite dramatic cuts to social services were so unpopular that they needed footsoldiers to back businessmen. So, Reagan backed the creation of an organization that brought together big businessmen, evangelical Christians, and social conservatives behind his agenda. “Traditional Republican business groups can provide the resources,” leader of Americans for Tax Reform Grover Norquist explained, “but these groups can provide the votes.”

By 1989, Norquist’s friend Ralph Reed turned evangelical Christians into a permanent political pressure group. The Christian Coalition rallied evangelicals behind the Republican Party, calling for the dismantling of the post–World War II government services and protections for civil rights—including abortion—they disliked.

As Republicans could reliably turn out religious voters over abortion, that evangelical base has become more and more important to the Republican Party. Now it has put one of its own in the House Speaker’s chair, just two places from the presidency. On October 25, after three weeks of being unable to unite behind a speaker after extremists tossed out Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), the Republican conference coalesced behind Representative Mike Johnson (R-LA) in part because he was obscure enough to have avoided scrutiny.

Since then, his past has been unearthed, showing interviews in which he asserted that we do not live in a democracy but in a “Biblical republic.” He told a Fox News Channel interviewer that to discover his worldview, one simply had to “go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.”

Johnson is staunchly against abortion rights and gay rights, including same-sex marriage, and says that immigration is “the true existential threat to the country.” In a 2016 sermon he warned that the 1960s and 1970s undermined “the foundations of religion and morality in the U.S.” and that attempts to address climate change, for example, are an attempt to destroy capitalism.

Like other adherents of Christian nationalism, Johnson appears to reject the central premise of democracy: that we have a right to be treated equally before the law. And while his wife, Kelly, noted last year on a podcast that only about 4% of Americans “still adhere to a Biblical worldview,” they appear to reject the idea we have the right to a say in our government. In 2021, Johnson was a key player in the congressional attempt to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 presidential election.

In his rejection of democracy, Johnson echoes authoritarian leaders like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, both of whom have the loyal support of America’s far right. Such leaders claim that the multiculturalism at the heart of democracy ruins nations. The welcoming of various races and ethnicities through immigration or affirmative action undermines national purity, they say, while the equality of LGBTQ+ individuals and women undermines morality. Johnson has direct ties to these regimes: his 2018 campaign accepted money from a group of Russian nationals, and he has said he does not support additional funding for Ukraine in its fight against Russian aggression.

The rejection of democracy in favor of Christian authoritarianism at the highest levels of our government is an astonishing outcome of the attempt to prevent another Great Depression by creating a government that worked for ordinary Americans rather than a few wealthy men.

But here we are.

After Johnson’s election as speaker, extremist Republican Matt Gaetz of Florida spelled out what it meant for the party…and for the country: “MAGA is ascendant,” Gaetz told former Trump advisor Steve Bannon, “and if you don’t think that moving from Kevin McCarthy to MAGA Mike Johnson shows the ascendance of this movement, and where the power of the Republican Party truly lies, then you’re not paying attention.”

mickeyrat

  October 30, 2023 (Monday)

After three weeks without a speaker, the House today tackled one of the key items on its agenda: providing additional funding for Israel and Ukraine. Immediately, the majority under Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) made it clear that they have every intention of pushing their extremist agenda. Despite pressure from Republican Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), they have split funding for Israel away from the funding for Ukraine and funding for humanitarian assistance for Ukraine, Israel, and Gaza that President Biden has requested.

They have gone further, though, to push the far right’s agenda. The House Republicans’ $14.3 billion aid package for Israel claims that it will “offset” that spending by taking $14.3 billion from funding for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) passed by Congress in the Inflation Reduction Act. But this “offset” is nothing of the sort: funding the IRS brings in significantly more than it costs. For each dollar spent auditing the top 1% of U.S. earners, the IRS brought in $3.18; for each dollar spent auditing the top 0.1%, it brought in $6.29.

In September the IRS noted that it recovered $38 million in delinquent taxes from 175 high-income taxpayers within a few months and would be increasing that effort. A 2021 study showed that people whose income is in the top 1% of earners fail to report more than 20% of their earnings to the IRS.

The House measure, providing aid for Israel only if Democrats agree to set aside Ukraine and Gaza and permit rich people to cheat on their taxes, will set up a fight with the Senate.

Tonight, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre released a statement saying the Republicans’ politicization of our national security interests is a “nonstarter. Demanding offsets for meeting core national security needs of the United States—like supporting Israel and defending Ukraine from atrocities and Russian imperialism—would be a break with the normal, bipartisan process and could have devastating implications for our safety and alliances in the years ahead.”

She noted that there is strong bipartisan agreement that it is in our national security interest to stop the suffering of innocent people in Gaza, “help Ukraine defend its sovereignty against appalling crimes being committed by Russian forces against thousands of innocent civilians,” and invest more in border security.
 
“Threatening to undermine American national security unless House Republicans can help the wealthy and big corporations cheat on their taxes—which would increase the deficit—is the definition of backwards,” she said.
 
The chaos among the Republicans and the emergence of a Christian nationalist as their choice to lead the House seem to have drawn increased attention to the successes of the president.

Today, for example, the United Auto Workers announced a tentative deal with General Motors, marking the third such agreement in the union’s six-week strike against GM, Ford, and Stellantis. The agreements include a 25% raise in base wages over 4.5 years, after years in which workers’ pay did not keep up with inflation. The agreements will also protect workers against the conversion to electric vehicles, helping unionized workers to make the transition to a green economy, and reopen certain closed plants.

As Jeanne Whalen noted in the Washington Post, this agreement comes after United Parcel Service (UPS) workers this summer won their strongest contract in decades and 75,000 striking Kaiser healthcare workers won strong wage increases.

Biden was the first president to join a picket line when he stood with the UAW. Today, he said: “Today's historic agreement is yet another piece of good economic news showing something I have always believed: Worker power…is critical to building an economy from the middle out and the bottom up…. We’re finally beginning to build an economy that works for working people, for the middle class, for the entire…country, including the companies.  

“Because when we do that, the poor have a ladder up, the middle class does well, and the wealthy still do very well. We all do well.”

As Michael Tomasky put it in The New Republic, “We have a president who takes seriously the fundamental economic fact of American life of the last 40 years, which is that trillions of dollars of wealth have been transferred from the lower and middle classes to the top 1 percent, and even to the top 0.1 percent. Moreover, it’s rivetingly clear that he thinks that it’s long past time to get that river flowing in the other direction.”

In The Bulwark, Jill Lawrence wrote that Biden has a “surprising focus on the future” as he “moves to meet U.S. challenges that former President Donald Trump largely ignored, failed at, or made worse.” She noted Biden’s achievement of infrastructure legislation after Trump failed, and contrasted Biden’s successful CHIPS and Science Act with the trade war of the Trump years, which cost as many as 245,000 jobs and so badly hurt midwestern farmers that 90% of the proceeds from Trump’s tariffs went to bail them out.

Biden also has looked forward by pushing and securing the Inflation Reduction Act, which invests in a transition to a green economy.

But Lawrence’s focus was primarily on today’s sweeping executive order on artificial intelligence, an order Politico called “the most significant single effort to impose national order on a technology that has shocked many people with its rapid growth.” The administration has been working to establish responsible AI practices, recognizing the need to address discriminatory algorithms, data privacy violations, and deep fakes.

Today, Biden signed an executive order requiring companies to share safety information about their systems before allowing them to be used, in order to make sure they don’t pose a safety or a national security risk. It orders the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security to secure critical infrastructure. It will require AI-generated content to bear a watermark that clearly labels it. It will protect personal data, and Biden promised he would ask Congress to pass bipartisan legislation to stop technology companies from collecting the personal data of children and teenagers, to ban advertising directed at children, and to limit companies’ collection of personal data in general.  

The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a technology think tank, applauded the order, saying its guidelines set “a clear course for the United States…. With this EO, the United States is demonstrating it takes AI oversight seriously.”

Vice President Kamala Harris will attend the two-day AI Safety Summit meeting in the United Kingdom on November 1–2 as the European Union closes in on laws about artificial intelligence that would enable the E.U. to shut down services that harm society. The E.U. has been ahead of the U.S. in its regulation of the internet: in August 2023 its Digital Services Act went into effect, requiring users to agree to the use of their personal data for targeted advertising and requiring digital platforms to police the disinformation on their platforms. Most of the companies it regulates are based in the United States.

mickeyrat

  October 31, 2023 (Tuesday)

Today, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin testified before the Senate Appropriations Committee about the need to fund military aid to both Ukraine and Israel, along with humanitarian aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Gaza and increased U.S. border security, rather than accept the new measure from extremist House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA). Johnson wants to split off funding for Israel into its own bill and couple it with cuts to the Internal Revenue Service. Those cuts would dramatically decrease tax audits of those with the highest income and thus decrease revenue for the U.S. Treasury; they are popular with Republicans.

Johnson and other extremist Republicans have made it clear they are not interested in continuing to help Ukraine fight off Russia’s invasion.

Blinken and Austin got strong support not only from Senate Democrats, but also from many Senate Republicans, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who explained why it is important for the United States to “help Ukraine win the war” in a speech at the University of Louisville where he introduced Ukraine’s ambassador to the United States, Oksana Markarova.
 
“If Russia prevails, there’s no question that Putin’s appetite for empire will extend to NATO [the North Atlantic Treaty Organization], raising the threat to the U.S. transatlantic alliance and the risk of war for America. Such an outcome would demand greater permanent deployment of our military force in Europe, a much greater cost than the support we have provided to Ukraine. And of course, Russian victory would embolden Putin’s growing alliance with fellow authoritarian regimes in Iran and China.”

“So this is not just a test for Ukraine,” McConnell said. “It’s a test for the United States and the free world.”

But at the Senate hearing, protesters from CodePink, the group that describes itself as “a feminist grassroots organization working to end U.S. warfare and imperialism,” had a different agenda. They held up their hands, covered in red paint, with the word “GAZA” written on their forearms, repeatedly interrupting Blinken and calling for an end to funding for Israel, citing what the organization calls “Israel's genocide of Palestine.”

Over the weekend, as Palestinian militants continued to fire rockets into Israel and skirmish with Israeli troops, Israel began to push into northern Gaza in a ground operation U.S. officials said had been changed from the originally planned massive Israeli ground offensive to “surgical” strikes that would hit high-value Hamas targets but spare Palestinian civilians.

That advance was accompanied by even fiercer airstrikes than previous ones, and today an attack on a Palestinian refugee camp appears to have caused significant civilian loss. The Israeli military said the attack “eliminated many terrorists and destroyed terror infrastructure,” with underground Hamas installations collapsing and taking adjacent buildings down with them.

From the time of Hamas’s initial strike against Israel on October 7, the Biden administration has been keen to stop the crisis from spreading. President Joe Biden was firm in his repeated declarations that the U.S would stand firmly behind Israel, warning “any country, any organization, anyone thinking of taking advantage of this situation, I have one word: Don’t.  Don’t.”

To deter militants backed by Iran, the U.S. moved two American aircraft carrier strike groups into the region. After repeated drone strikes against U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria, on Wednesday, October 25, Biden warned Iran that the U.S. would respond if Iran continued to move against U.S. troops. On October 27 the U.S. carried out airstrikes against munitions stockpiles stored at two facilities in eastern Syria linked to militants backed by Iran. Secretary of Defense Austin emphasized that the U.S. actions were “precision self-defense strikes” and were separate from the conflict in Gaza.

Drone attacks on U.S. troops in the area have increased, and the Institute for the Study of War assessed today that Iranian-backed militants, including Lebanon’s Hezbollah, “are creating the expectation in the information environment that Hezbollah will escalate against Israel on or around November 3.” The U.S. today announced it is sending 300 additional troops to U.S. Central Command, whose responsibility includes the Middle East, Central Asia and parts of South Asia, to protect U.S. troops from drone attacks by Iran-backed militant groups. Air Force Brigadier General Pat Ryder told reporters the troops are not going to Israel.

In addition to trying to hold off Iran from expanding the conflict, the U.S. has been trying to support Israel’s right to respond while also demanding that Israel follow the rules of war. The U.S. has firmly condemned the October 7 attack by Hamas on Israeli civilians as “an act of sheer evil.” That evil included the taking of hostages—which is a war crime—including U.S. citizens.

But, all along, the administration has warned Israel that it must not violate international law in its retaliation for the attack. On October 18, in a remarkable admission, Biden advised Israelis not to be consumed by their rage. “After 9/11, we were enraged in the United States. And while we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes.”

Responding to the October 7 massacre, he said, “requires being deliberate. It requires asking very hard questions. It requires clarity about the objectives and an honest assessment about whether the path you are on will achieve those objectives.”

Despite the administration's warnings, while international eyes are on Gaza, according to the United Nations, settlers in the West Bank encouraged by the policies of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu have killed at least 115 Palestinians, injured more than 2,000 more, and forcibly displaced almost 1,000. The United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross are concerned that Israel’s pursuit of Hamas militants has led it to commit war crimes of its own, enacting collective punishment on the civilians of Gaza by denying them food, water, and electricity as well as instructing them to leave their homes, displacing well over a million people.

While the U.S. says it does not trust the numbers of casualties asserted by Hamas, it believes from other sources that there have been “many thousands of civilian deaths in Gaza thus far in the conflict…. Way too many.” Today the National Security Council’s coordinator for strategic communications, John Kirby, reminded reporters: “We aren’t on the ground fighting in this war. There’s no intent to do that…. [T]hese are Israeli military operations. They get to decide what their aims and strategy are. They get to decide what their tactics are. They get to decide how they’re going to decide to go after Hamas.

“We’re doing everything we can to support them—including providing our perspectives, including asking them hard questions about their aims and their strategy and—the kind of questions we’d ask ourselves.”

The administration appears to be trying to defend Israel’s right to self-defense in the face of a massacre that took the lives of 1,400 Israelis, while also trying to recover the hostages, get humanitarian aid into Gaza, and prevent U.S. ally Israel from committing war crimes in retaliation for the attack. It is also insisting there must be a long-term plan for Israel and the Palestinians. To that end, it is throwing its weight behind the long-neglected two-state solution.

On October 27, U.S. Representative to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield echoed Biden’s statement that “there is no going back to the status quo as it stood on October 6th. We must not go back to the status quo where Hamas terrorizes Israel and uses Palestinian civilians as human shields,” she said. “And we must not go back to the status quo where extremist settlers can attack and terrorize Palestinians in the West Bank. The status quo is untenable and it is unacceptable.”

“[W]hen this crisis is over,” she said, “there has to be a vision of what comes next. In our view, that vision must be centered around a two-state solution. Getting there will require concerted efforts by all of us—Israelis, Palestinians, regional partners, and global leaders—to put us on a path for peace. To integrate Israel with the region, while insisting that the aspirations of the Palestinian people be part of a more hopeful future.”

The current crisis might have made that two-state solution more possible than it has been for a generation. Neither Hamas nor Netanyahu’s government supports a two-state solution, but other leaders in the region, including Jordan’s King Abdullah II and Egypt’s Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, say they do.

Hamas has little support outside of Iran, and up to 80% of Israelis blame Prime Minister Netanyahu for the October 7 attack. His leadership of a right-wing coalition has shielded him from corruption charges even as his attempts to gain more control over Israeli society sparked the largest protests in Israeli history, and there is no doubt the attack and his response to it have weakened him dramatically. At a news conference yesterday, a reporter asked if he would resign.

The recent peace talks in Egypt excluded Hamas, Iran, and Israel. Instead, the organizers invited Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian Authority that oversees the West Bank. President Biden, Secretary of State Blinken, and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan have been meeting with officials from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan. On Friday, Blinken will travel back to Israel to meet with officials there, after which he will make other stops in the region.

[A reminder: these posts are an attempt to keep a record of events that are important to the U.S. and how officials and other actors respond to them. It is not advocacy. We will assume that inflammatory comments come from trolls, and ban the account.]

mickeyrat

  November 1, 2023 (Wednesday)

A follow-up to some stories I've mentioned:

Egypt has opened its border crossing into Gaza, permitting ambulances to carry 76 badly injured Palestinians to Egypt, while 335 people who hold foreign passports were able to cross.

Jonathan Lemire, Nahal Toosi, and Alexander Ward of Politico reported today that the White House suspects Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanhayu’s days in office are numbered.

Here at home, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has scored the House Republicans’ bill to provide $14.3 billion in aid to Israel and to “offset” that spending with $14.3 billion in cuts to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). As those of us who have followed the economics of adequately funding the IRS predicted, the CBO found that the cuts to the IRS would cost far more than they save. As it is currently constructed, the bill would add $26.8 billion to the national budget deficit.

New House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) tried to spin this information in a way that can only be described as dishonest: “Only in Washington when you cut spending do they call it an increase in the deficit,” he said.

Johnson rejects the separation of church and state in our government, saying that the framers’ idea “clearly did not mean…to keep religion from influencing issues of civil government. To the contrary, it was meant to keep the federal government from impeding the religious practice of citizens. The Founders wanted to protect the church from an encroaching state, not the other way around.”

Actually, James Madison of Virginia, the key thinker behind the Constitution, had quite a lot to say about why the government and religion must be kept apart.

In 1772, when he was 21, Madison watched as Virginia arrested itinerant preachers for attacking the established church in the state. He was no foe of religion, but by the next year, he had begun to question whether established religion, which was common in the colonies, was good for society. By 1776, many of his broad-thinking neighbors had come to believe that society should “tolerate” different religious practices; he had moved past tolerance to the belief that men had a right of conscience.

In that year, he was instrumental in putting Section 16 into the Virginia Declaration of Rights, on which our own Bill of Rights—the first ten amendments to the Constitution—would be based. It reads: “That religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience; and that it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love, and charity toward each other.”

In 1785, in a “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments,” Madison explained that what was at stake was not just religion, but also representative government itself. The establishment of one religion over others attacked a fundamental human right—an unalienable right—of conscience. If lawmakers could destroy the right of freedom of conscience, they could destroy all other unalienable rights. Those in charge of government could throw representative government out the window and make themselves tyrants.

Madison believed that a variety of religious sects would balance each other out, keeping the new nation free of the religious violence of Europe. He drew on that vision explicitly when he envisioned a new political system, expecting that a variety of political expressions would protect the new government. In Federalist #51, he said: “In a free government the security for civil rights must be the same as that for religious rights. It consists in the one case in the multiplicity of interests, and in the other in the multiplicity of sects.”

In order to make sure men had the right of conscience, the First Amendment to the Constitution reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….”

In 1802, President Thomas Jefferson called this amendment “a wall of separation between Church & State.” In a letter of January 1, 1802, he explained to a group of Baptists from Danbury, Connecticut, how that principle made him refuse to call for national religious days of fasting and thanksgiving in his role as head of the government.  

Like Madison, he maintained that “religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship.” “[T]he legitimate powers of government reach actions only,” he wrote, “[and] not [religious] opinions.”

“[T]hat act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’” he wrote, built “a wall of separation between Church & State." It prevented him even from such religious practices as declaring a day of fasting in times of trouble, or thanksgiving in times of triumph.

mickeyrat

  The Future Is Unwritten: With Heather Cox Richardson
The Michael Steele Podcast
Duration: 1:17:37
Published: Wed, 01 Nov 2023 18:48:12 +0000
Episode: https://www.spreaker.com/user/11313090/msp-heathercoxrichardson

Media: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/api.spreaker.com/download/episode/57474889/msp_heathercoxrichardson.mp3

Podcast: https://www.podcastrepublic.net/podcast/1412905534

Michael speaks with historian Heather Cox Richardson about her new book, "Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America." The pair discuss Lincoln Republicanism, how the culture wars of the '90s ...

Subscribe to this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/show/3668522/episodes/feed

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mickeyrat

  November 2, 2023 (Thursday)

In a speech yesterday in Northfield, Minnesota, President Joe Biden explained his economic vision to rural Americans. “Over the past 40 years or so, we’ve had a practice in America—an economic practice called trickle-down economics, and it hit rural America especially hard,” he said. “It hollowed out Main Street, telling farmers the only path to success was to get big or get out.”

At the same time, he said, “[t]ax cuts for big corporations encouraged companies to grow bigger and bigger, move jobs and production overseas for cheaper labor, and undercut local small businesses. Meat-producing companies and the retail grocery chains consolidated, leaving farmers [and] ranchers with few choices about where to sell their products, reducing their bargaining power. Corporations that sell seed, fertilizer, and even farm equipment used their outsized market power to change farmers and charge them and ranchers unfair prices.”

Biden noted that the U.S. has lost more than 400,000 family farms in the past 40 years, an area of more than 140 million acres of farmland, equivalent to an area the size of Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota combined. Family farms have failed, and as they did so, small businesses, hospitals, schools, and communities also suffered.

Young people feel they have no choice but to leave home “in search of good-paying jobs and a chance at the American Dream.”

Biden explained that his plan to invest in America would create new and better markets and new income streams to help rural areas thrive. He noted that $20 billion of the Inflation Reduction Act will go to helping farmers and ranchers adjust to climate change by changing cover crops and managing nutrients and grazing, while urging farmers to diversify from single crops and sell in local markets.

Biden emphasized that the administration is promoting competition in agricultural markets, noting that currently just four big corporations control more than half the market in beef, pork, and poultry. If just one of their processing plants goes offline, it can cause massive supply chain disruptions (as the closing of a baby formula plant did in 2022). “[T]here’s something wrong,” he said, “when just 7% of the American farms get nearly 90% of the farm income.”

In addition to the existing national investments in power grids and broadband that will help rural communities, Biden announced $1 billion to fix aging rural infrastructure systems like electricity, water, and waste water systems that haven’t been updated in decades; $2 billion to help farmers fight climate change; $145 million for clean energy technologies like solar panels that will help lower electric bills; and $274 million for rural high-speed internet expansion.

The administration’s vision for rural America appears to be part of a larger vision for restoring competition to the U.S. economy and thus is closely tied to the administration’s push to break up monopolies. In July 2021, Biden promised to interpret antitrust laws in the way they had been understood traditionally, not as the U.S. government began to interpret them in the 1980s. Then, following the argument advanced by the solicitor general of the United States at the time, Robert Bork, the government concluded that economic consolidation was fine so long as it promoted economic efficiencies that, at least in the short term, cut costs for consumers.

Biden vowed to return to the traditional understanding of antitrust principles championed by presidents all the way back to Theodore Roosevelt at the turn of the last century, arguing that protecting economic competition protects workers, promotes innovation, and keeps consumer prices down. To that, the coronavirus pandemic added an awareness of the need to protect supply chains.

“Bidenomics is just another way of saying ‘the American Dream,’” Biden said. “Forty years ago, trickle-down economics limited the dream to those at the top. But I believe every American willing to work hard should be able to get a job, no matter where they live—in the heartland, in small towns—to raise their kids on a good paycheck and keep their roots where they grew up.”

In contrast to Biden’s outreach to farmers, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is facing a dilemma over the nation’s next farm bill, which must be passed by the end of the year. According to Clark Merrefield of The Journalist’s Resource, Congress usually debates and renews the farm bill every five years, and the last one passed in 2018.

Farm bills include price support for farm products, especially corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, rice, peanuts, dairy, and sugar. It also includes crop insurance, conservation programs, and a wide variety of other agricultural programs, making the farm bill hugely popular in rural areas that focus on farming.

Also included in the measure are nutritional programs for low-income Americans, such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps. SNAP serves 41 million low-income Americans, but as a member of the far-right Republican Study Committee, Johnson called for cutting SNAP benefits. Now his far-right colleagues are echoing his position, saying that the need to renew the farm bill is a great opportunity to make significant cuts to SNAP, especially since the farm bill is expected to bear a price tag of more than $1 trillion for the first time in our history.

“I can’t imagine the Mike Johnson that we know would pass up the opportunity to secure as many conservative wins as possible in this farm bill,” a Republican aide told Meredith Lee Hill of Politico, “[a]nd that means serious SNAP reforms.”

But even some Republicans—primarily those who hail from agricultural states—object to loading the farm bill up with the poison pill of SNAP cuts, knowing such a tactic would repel Democrats, whose votes will be necessary to pass the measure as far-right Republicans balk.

It will take a deft hand to get the measure through Congress, and its failure at Johnson’s hands will infuriate hard-hit rural areas. It is one more thing to add to the new speaker’s to-do list, as the deadline for funding the government is looming. The continuing resolution funding the government at 2023 levels, the measure that cost Representative Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) his speakership, expires in just over two weeks, on November 17.

Johnson’s willingness to load bills with poison pills that his conference likes showed today in the House’s passage of Republicans’ aid bill for Israel—Ukraine aid had been cut away—along with dramatic cuts to funding the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), a provision that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office warned would add to the deficit rather than reducing it. Knowing that the measure will not pass the Senate, a number of Democrats voted for it, likely to avoid attacks from conservative opponents.

Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) says the Senate won’t even take up the House bill. Instead, the Senate continues to work on its own strongly bipartisan bill that ties together aid to Israel and Ukraine.

As Kate Riga of Talking Points Memo put it, if the Senate continues to work in this bipartisan way, we will continue to see the same pattern we’ve seen throughout this Congress: “Senate Democrats, Senate Republicans and House Democrats all supporting more or less the same thing, with a chunk of House Republicans out on a branch alone.”

After an angry fight last night over Senator Tommy Tuberville’s (R-AL) holds on military promotions, in which Republican senators joined Democrats in confronting him, the Senate today confirmed General David Allvin to be Air Force chief of staff and Admiral Lisa Franchetti as chief of naval operations, by votes of 95 to 1. Franchetti is the first woman to serve on the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Wednesday’s fight appears to have been prompted by the hospitalization of acting Marines Commandant General Eric Smith after an apparent heart attack. Smith was holding down two high-level positions at once owing to Tuberville’s holds, and he had warned his schedule was “not sustainable.” Although the Pentagon says Tuberville is endangering national security, Tuberville insists that his hold on almost 400 military promotions is not hurting the military.

The new additions mean there are no vacancies on the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the first time since July.

mickeyrat

  November 3, 2023 (Friday)

Today, Representative Ryan Zinke (R-MT), who was former president Trump’s Interior Secretary until he left under accusations of misconduct, introduced a bill to ban Palestinians from the United States and to revoke any visas issued to Palestinians since October 1 of this year. Although the U.S. has resettled only about 2,000 Palestinians in the last 20 years, ten other far-right members of the House signed onto Zinke’s bill, which draws no distinction between Hamas and Palestinian civilians.

This blanket attack on a vulnerable population echoes Trump’s travel ban of January 27, 2017, just a week after he took office. Executive Order 13769 stopped travel from primarily Muslim countries—Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen—for ninety days. The list of countries appeared random—Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, countries from which terrorists have sometimes come directly to the U.S., weren’t on the list—and appeared to fulfill a campaign promise and assert a new view of executive power.

Insisting that immigrants endanger the country is a key tactic of authoritarians. Excluding them is a central principle of those eager to tear down democracy: they insist that immigration destroys a nation’s traditions and undermines native-born Americans. With tensions in the nation mounting over the crisis in the Middle East, this measure, introduced now with inflammatory language, seems designed to whip up violence.

Representative Greg Landsman (D-OH) called out his Republican colleagues on social media. “Un-American and definitely NOT in the Bible, [Speaker Johnson],” he wrote. “You going to tell them to pull this bill?”

But, far from trying to work across the aisle, Johnson has been throwing red meat to his base. In the last two days, for example, the House has voted to slash 39% of the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and 13% of the budget of the National Park Service. It voted to require the Biden administration to advance oil drilling off the Alaska coast. It has voted on reducing the salary of the EPA administrator, the director of the Bureau of Land Management, and the Secretary of the Interior to $1 each.

Yesterday, Johnson told reporters he considers extremists Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Thomas Massie (R-KY) close friends and said “I don’t disagree with them on many issues and principles.”

To direct his communications team, Johnson has tapped Raj Shah, a former executive from the Fox News Corporation, who was a key player in promoting the lie that Trump won the 2020 presidential election. As the head of the “Brand Protection Unit,” Shah demanded that the Fox News Channel continue to lie to viewers who would leave the station if it told the truth. Johnson has hired Shah to be his deputy chief of staff for communications and, according to Alex Isenstadt of Politico, “help run messaging for House Republicans.”

The extremists are doubling down on Trump and his election lies even as his allies are admitting in court that they are, indeed, lies. Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows is in trouble with the publisher of his memoir after admitting that under oath that the election had been fair. The publisher is suing him for millions in damages for basing his book on the idea that the election had been stolen and representing that “all statements contained in the Work are true.”

The publisher says it has pulled the book off the market.

House extremists continue to back Trump even as he is openly calling for an authoritarian second term. In September, former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley had to take “appropriate measures” for his own security after Trump accused him of disloyalty to him, personally, and suggested that in the past, such “treason” would have been punished with death.

On Wednesday, Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage, and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reported that Trump was frustrated in his first term by lawyers who refused to go along with his wishes, trying to stay within the law, so Trump's allies are making lists of lawyers they believe would be “more aggressive” on issues of immigration, taking over the Department of Justice, and overturning elections.

They are looking, they say, for “a different type of lawyer” than those supported by the right-wing Federalist Society, one “willing to endure the personal and professional risks of association with Mr. Trump” and “to use theories that more establishment lawyers would reject to advance his cause.”

John Mitnick, who served in Trump’s first term, told the reporters that “no qualified attorneys with integrity will have any desire to serve as political appointees” in a second Trump term. Instead, the lawyers in a second term would be “opportunists who will rubber-stamp whatever Trump and his senior White House staff want to do.”

Trump has also made it clear he and his allies want to gut the nonpartisan civil service and fill tens of thousands of government positions with his own loyalists. Led by Russell Vought, who served as Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, Trump’s allies believe that agencies like the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Securities and Exchange Commission should not be independent but should push the president’s agenda.

This week, Trump vowed to take over higher education too. In a campaign video, he promised to tax private universities with large endowments to fund a new institution called “American Academy.” The school, which would be online only, would award free degrees and funnel students into jobs with the U.S. government and federal contractors.

“We spend more money on higher education than any other country, and yet they’re turning our students into communists and terrorists and sympathizers of many, many different dimensions,” Trump said. “We can’t let this happen.” In his university, “wokeness or jihadism” would not be allowed, he said.

In admirable understatement, Politico’s Meridith McGraw and Michael Stratford noted: “Using the federal government to create an entirely new educational institution aimed at competing with the thousands of existing schools would drastically reshape American higher education.”

Trump has made no secret of his future plans for the United States of America.

Meanwhile, Republicans appear determined to push their agenda over the wishes of voters. In Ohio, where voters on Tuesday will decide whether to amend the state constitution to make it a constitutional right to “make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions,” Republicans first tried to make it harder to amend the state constitution, and then, when voters rejected that attempt, the Republican-dominated state senate began to use an official government website to spread narratives about the constitutional amendment that legal and medical experts called false or misleading.

Adding reproductive health protections to the state constitution is popular, but In an unusual move, the Republican secretary of state, Frank LaRose, quietly purged more than 26,000 voters from the rolls in late September. LaRose is a staunch opponent of the constitutional amendment and is himself running for a seat in the U.S. Senate.

In Virginia, where Republicans are hoping to take control of the state legislature to pass new abortion restrictions as well as the rest of Republican governor Glenn Youngkin’s agenda, a study by the Democratic Party of Virginia shows that officials are flagging the mail-in ballots of non-white voters for rejection much more frequently than those of white voters. As of today, 4.82% of ballots cast by Black voters have gotten flagged, while only 2.79% of the ballots of white voters have been flagged.

In Richmond, The Guardian’s Sam Levine reported, city officials flagged more than 11% of ballots returned by Black voters but only about 5.5% of ballots cast by white voters. After the ballots are fixed, or cured, the rate of rejection for Black voters remains more than twice as high as that of white voters.

Virginia officials also reported last week that they had accidentally removed more than 3,400 eligible voters from the rolls.

brianlux

Another excellent and revealing letter from Heather.  What the MAGA House is doing to wreck this county and the planet leaving my stomach churning.  We are so screwed.

mickeyrat

  November 4, 2023 (Saturday)

October, as usual, was a month of contradictions.

I love this month, with its quiet, crisp air, apples, and a return to hunkering down around a fire in the woodstove. But October is also traditionally a month of drama: economic crashes as accountants take a closer look at their books after taking the summer off; political surprises as politicos jockey for advantage before November elections.

For me, traveling the country this October seemed like coming home as I met so many people who felt like family and as you kept the new book on the top of bestseller lists. I did not see that coming, and I thank you all, profoundly.

But the month was also one of tragedy, both at home and around the world.

I could not work on the day after the mass shooting in Lewiston, Maine, and finally quit trying and drove uptown. On my way back home, I passed by a pond and caught this scene out of the corner of my eye. I swung back around to capture it.

It strikes me that this was October 2023: calm and chaos.

Taking the night off. Will see you tomorrow.

brianlux

I don't know if there is a god or what that god is but I will say this:  God bless Heather Cox Richardson.

mickeyrat

  November 5, 2023 (Sunday)

The Biden administration's use of the Federal Trade Commission to break up monopolies— suing Amazon, for example, on September 26—resurrects the nation’s traditional antitrust vision. By trying to weaken the economic power of large entities in order to restore competition, innovation, and the rights of workers and consumers, Biden officials are echoing the principles articulated by politicians of all political stripes in the early twentieth century. Those principles were in full flood during the presidential election that took place on November 5, 1912.

The progressive impulse grew in response to the rise of the business trusts that grew to control the economy in the 1880s, gathered steam in the 1890s as muckrakers like those writing for McClure’s Magazine explained in detail how a few well-connected men ran business and government in their own interests, and grew stronger as at least 303 firms disappeared in mergers every year between 1898 and 1902. The idea of restoring competition gained a champion in the White House in 1901 when Republican Theodore Roosevelt stepped into the office of the slain big-business defender William McKinley.

But Roosevelt quickly found that progressives had little luck passing bills to regulate business and protect ordinary Americans. House speaker Joseph G. “Uncle Joe” Cannon, a key member of the so-called Republican Old Guard who supported big business and ran the House with an iron fist, stood in the way. Roosevelt turned to litigation and executive orders to break up trusts and protect lands from industrial development.

When Roosevelt stepped aside in 1908 for his hand-picked successor, Willam Howard Taft, he warned the nation in his last message that the new conditions of industry had enabled corporations to become a “menace” and required that government regulate them to protect economic competition in general and workers in particular.

Roosevelt tried to stay out of Taft’s way by traveling to Africa to hunt big game (prompting banker J. P. Morgan to cheer on Roosevelt’s demise with his famous quip, “Let every lion do his duty”), leaving Cannon free to go on the attack. In February 1910 he gave a widely reprinted speech that called anyone supporting government regulation of business and protection of workers a wild-eyed radical.

But momentum for economic reform was gathering speed. Back in the U.S. a few months later, Roosevelt countered that if this were the case, President Abraham Lincoln was “a great radical…. To-day,” Roosevelt said, “many well-meaning men who have permitted themselves to fossilize, to become mere ultra-conservative reactionaries, to reject and oppose all progress, but who still pay a conventional and perfunctory homage to Lincoln’s memory, will do well to remember exactly what it was for which this great conservative leader of radicalism actually stood.”

Lincoln, Roosevelt said later that year in Osawatomie, Kansas, had stood against the special interests that had perverted government to their own ends and robbed hard workers of what they had earned. In Lincoln’s day the threat came from the Slave Power; in 1910 it came from business interests. The nation was currently governed by “a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power.”

Roosevelt demanded that the government restore an even economic playing field in the country, forcing businesses to operate transparently, submit to regulation, and stop funding political campaigns. He also called for graduated income taxes, inheritance taxes, the protection of national resources so industrialists could not strip them all from future generations, minimum wages, maximum hours of work, and better factory conditions.

Roosevelt was echoing the language that Democrats had embraced since 1884, when Grover Cleveland, whose base was in the urban areas of New York, won the White House. That message was not limited to politicians; indeed, it came from ordinary Americans of all stripes, including women, who could not vote but who had begun to exercise their power as consumers. They were more and more vocal, demanding an end to milk adulterated with chalk and formaldehyde, streets running with industrial pollution, and factories that overworked and maimed husbands and children.

Roosevelt added a Republican endorsement to that impulse, and momentum built. In 1910, voters gave control of the House to the Democrats, who backed an investigation into the power of bankers to direct the economy. In 1912 the House Committee on Banking and Currency under Arsène Pujo (D-LA) began to investigate the growing concentration of wealth in the economy.

Four major parties fielded presidential candidates in the election of 1912; all were progressives. The Republicans renominated President Taft, who during his first term had broken up more trusts even than Roosevelt had. Taft’s nomination prompted Roosevelt to run on a third-party Progressive ticket, where he warned Americans that the government had sold out to business and that “[we] stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.”

The Democrats nominated former college president and New Jersey governor Woodrow Wilson, whose advisor, the jurist Louis Brandeis, called for restoring competition to the economy to protect the welfare of all the people. The American Socialist Party also fielded a candidate, Eugene V. Debs, who called for an ultimate end to capitalism and for workers to seize control of the government.

On November 5, 1912, voters elected Democrat Woodrow Wilson to the White House and gave the Democrats control of both chambers of Congress. Although he won only 42% of the popular vote, Wilson garnered 409 electoral votes to Roosevelt’s 107 and Taft’s 15. In an even more pointed message, the split in the Republican Party also led to the ouster of Uncle Joe Cannon from Congress.

In February 1913, a month before Wilson took office, the report of the Pujo Committee—so called even though an illness in Pujo’s family made him cede the chair to Hubert Stephens (D-MS)—showed that overlapping directorates and corporate boards had enabled a handful of men to control more than $22 billion in 112 corporations, where they stifled competition.

Although banks refused to cooperate with the investigation, the committee had learned enough to be “satisfied from the proofs submitted, even in the absence of data from the banks, that there is an established and well-defined identity and community of interest between a few leaders of finance, created and held together through stock ownership, interlocking directorates, partnership and joint account transactions, and other forms of domination of banks, trust companies, railroads, and public-service and industrial corporations, which has resulted in great and rapidly growing concentration of the control of money in the hands of these few men.”

Outraged, Americans got behind the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution establishing the power of the federal government to levy an income tax, which was ratified in February 1913. In December 1913, Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act, providing federal oversight of the country’s banking system. The following year it passed the Clayton Antitrust Act, which prohibited anticompetitive economic practices. And it established the Federal Trade Commission to prevent unfair methods of competition.

November 5, 1912, turned out to be a crucial day in the history of our country. But when the day dawned, it was not clear what the evening would bring. For their part, Mr. and Mrs. J. H. Kyler of Denison, Texas, were hedging their bets: when their newborn triplets arrived shortly before the election, they named the boys William Howard Taft Kyler, Theodore Roosevelt Kyler, and Woodrow Wilson Kyler.

mickeyrat

  November 6, 2023 (Monday)

Since taking office, the Biden administration has focused on using diplomacy in foreign affairs and has used it to solve global issues by strengthening regional partnerships.

On Friday, President Biden hosted the first leaders’ summit for the Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity (APEP). Biden announced the creation of APEP in June 2022 to establish a forum positioned to improve the economies of countries in the western hemisphere, with the idea that stronger economies will be able to address economic inequality, bolster supply chains, and “restore faith in democracy by delivering for working people across the region.”

APEP is also designed to strengthen the Los Angeles Declaration for Migration and Protection that established a responsibility-sharing approach to addressing this era’s historic migration flows. Rather than working solely on getting Congress to pass legislation to fix the border—as Biden has urged since the beginning of his term—the administration has focused on the prosperity and security of the countries from which migrants come, so that they feel less pressure to leave.

The administration has worked hard to develop that strategy. Vice President Kamala Harris took the lead in “diplomatic efforts to address root causes of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras,” and in July 2021 she released a report on strategies to slow migration from the region.

In June 2022, at the 9th Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles, the administration helped to bring to reality a long-standing realization among many countries that migration must be addressed on a regional level rather than with patchwork attempts by individual nations. That’s when the U.S. got 21 governments to sign on to “a comprehensive response to irregular migration and forced displacement in the Western Hemisphere,” known as the Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection.

The Biden administration has emphasized that it wants to work with the region, not dictate to it, and the leaders of APEP are working with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) to fund improvements to infrastructure and train skilled workers and entrepreneurs. The IDB is an international financial institution, owned by 48 member states and headquartered in Washington, D.C., that provides development financing for Latin American and Caribbean countries.  

A senior administration official on a background call on Friday noted that “the APEP countries are collectively hosting the majority of refugees and migrants in the Western Hemisphere” and that “each has been significantly impacted by the historic flows in recent years.” The official said that President Biden deeply appreciates how regional partners have offered new legal status to millions of people displaced in the western hemisphere, and noted that APEP is part of stepping up to support those countries and create incentives for other countries to do the same.

“The bottom line is that President Biden believes that targeted economic investment in top refugee and migrant host countries is critical to stabilizing migration flows,” the official said.

Today the U.S. State Department announced nearly $485 million in additional humanitarian assistance to address the needs of refugees, migrants, and other vulnerable populations across the western hemisphere. It specified that the funding advanced the goals of the Los Angeles declaration and noted that the U.S. is “the largest single donor of humanitarian assistance for the Western Hemisphere,” providing more than $2.1 billion in humanitarian aid in the past two years.

“We are committed to working collaboratively with governments, civil society, international organizations, and other partners to help protect displaced persons and migrants in situations of vulnerability, to address the root causes of irregular migration and displacement, and to humanely manage migration in the Western Hemisphere,” the State Department said. “We urge other donors to help support the humanitarian response in the region.”

On November 11–17 the U.S. will host the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in San Francisco, where world leaders from 21 countries that border the Pacific Ocean, along with around 1,200 chief executive officers and about 20,000 other attendees, will meet to facilitate trade in the region. The APEC countries have almost 40% of the world’s population and support almost 50% of the world’s trade. They absorb more than 60% of U.S. exports, while the member states have invested an estimated $1.7 trillion in the U.S. and, as of 2020, employed 2.3 million U.S. workers.

The U.S. has hosted APEC this year, and Chinese president Xi Jinping is expected to attend this final event, where he will meet with Biden. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters: “Intense competition means intense diplomacy. That’s what you’re going to see.”

“[P]retty intensive negotiations with all sides relevant to this conflict” were what enabled 300 U.S. citizens, lawful residents, and their families to leave Gaza, according to Jon Finer, the deputy national security adviser, on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday. More remain as negotiations to gain the release of hostages continue.  

The administration’s focus on diplomacy and regional partnerships contrasts dramatically these days with Pakistan’s expulsion of as many as 1.7 million Afghan, Uyghur, and Rohingya refugees because leaders blame members of the refugee community for terrorist attacks. Some of the Afghans have been in Pakistan since the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. The Taliban, currently in control of Afghanistan though not the internationally recognized government of the country, is struggling to manage the influx of people who are being pushed back across the border.

In the U.S., in the face of House Republicans’ repeated votes on bills to slash funding far below the amounts Republican leadership agreed to in May as a condition for passing a bipartisan law to raise the debt ceiling and fund the government, the administration on October 30 issued a “statement of administration policy” insisting that the Republicans honor their agreement on funding for transportation, housing, and development.

On Friday the U.S. Department of Transportation announced an investment of more than $653 million to fund 41 port improvement projects across the nation. They are part of the work being done under the nearly $17 billion dedicated to ports and waterways in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, designed to strengthen supply chains, whose weaknesses we discovered the hard way during the pandemic.

This week the Republicans have before the House a bill to cut more than 64%—about a billion dollars—out of Amtrak, as well as other significant parts of the country’s passenger rail system. Most of the cuts would come from the heavily traveled northeast corridor, which carries about 800,000 people a day and serves the region that produces about 20% of the country’s gross domestic product.  

In contrast, President Biden today announced $16.4 billion in railroad investment from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law in the northeast corridor. It will rebuild century-old tunnels and bridges and upgrade tracks, power systems, signals, stations, and other infrastructure, enabling higher speeds on the route and cutting delays.

Overall, the administration will invest $66 billion in passenger rail, the largest such investment since Congress founded Amtrak in 1971 under the Nixon administration.

In contrast to the slow, steady work of governance, we had today the pyrotechnics of former president Trump in Manhattan, where he testified in the civil trial in which Judge Arthur Engoron has already found that the Trump Organization, Donald Trump, the two oldest Trump sons, and two organization employees committed fraud. The trial is to determine damages.

Trump used his time on the stand to shout, accuse the judge and New York Attorney General Letitia James of engaging in a political persecution, and yell about how unfair the whole lawsuit is. Whether or not it will work—he hardly sounded like a strong man while he was complaining that the judge was being mean to him—he was playing to his political base.

mickeyrat

  November 7, 2023 (Tuesday)

Today was Election Day across the country. In a number of key state elections, voters rejected the extremism of MAGA Republicans and backed Democrats and Democratic policies.

Four of the most closely watched races were in Ohio, Virginia, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania.

In Ohio, voters enshrined the right of individuals to make their own healthcare decisions, including the right to abortion, into the state constitution. Opponents of abortion rights have worked hard since the summer to stop the measure from passing, trying first to make it more difficult to amend the constitution—voters overwhelmingly rejected that measure in an August special election—then by blanketing the state with disinformation about the measure, including through official state websites and with ads by former Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson, and finally by dropping 26,000 voters from the rolls.

None of it worked. Voters protected the right to abortion. Since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing the constitutional right to abortion in June 2022, voters in all seven state elections where the issue was on the ballot have fought back to protect abortion rights.

Today’s vote in Ohio, where the end of Roe v. Wade resurrected an extreme antiabortion bill, makes it eight.

Abortion was also on the ballot In Virginia, where the entire state legislature was up for grabs today. Republican governor Glenn Youngkin made it clear he wanted control of the legislature in order to push through a measure banning abortion after 15 weeks. This ploy was one Republicans were using to seem to soften their antiabortion stance, which has proven terribly unpopular. Youngkin was taking the idea out for a spin to see how it might play in a presidential election, perhaps with a hope of entering the Republican race for the presidential nomination as someone who could claim to have turned a blue state red.

It didn’t work. Voters recognized that it was disingenuous to call a 15-week limit a compromise on the abortion issue, since most serious birth defects are not detected until 20 weeks into a pregnancy.

Going into the election, Democrats held the state senate. But rather than giving Youngkin control over both houses of the state legislature, voters left Democrats in charge of the Senate and flipped the House of Delegates over to the Democrats. The Democrats are expected to elevate House minority leader Don Scott of Portsmouth to the speakership, making him the first Black House speaker in Virginia history.  

Virginia voters also elevated Delegate Danica Roem, the first known transgender delegate, to the state senate. At the same time, voters in Loudoun County, which had become a hot spot in the culture wars with attacks on LGBTQ+ individuals and with activists insisting the schools must not teach critical race theory, rejected that extremism and turned control of the school board over to those who championed diversity and equity.

In Kentucky, voters reelected Democratic governor Andy Beshear, who was running against Republican state attorney general Daniel Cameron. A defender of Kentucky’s abortion ban, Cameron was also the attorney general who declined to bring charges against the law enforcement officers who killed Breonna Taylor in her bed in 2020 after breaking into her apartment in a mistaken search for drugs.

In Pennsylvania, Democrat Daniel McCaffery won a supreme court seat, enabling the Democrats to increase their majority there. McCaffery positioned himself as a defender of abortion rights.

There will be more news about election results and what they tell us in the coming days. Tonight, though, political analyst Tom Bonier wrote: “My biggest takeaway from tonight: in '22 abortion rights had the biggest impact where it was literally on the ballot, less so when trying to draw the connection in candidate races. That has changed. Voters clearly made the connection that voting for GOP candidates=abortion bans.”

mickeyrat

  November 8, 2023 (Wednesday)

Yesterday was a bad day for extremism in the United States of America.

In Ohio, voters enshrined the right to abortion in the state constitution; in Kentucky, voters reelected Governor Andy Beshear, a Democrat, for another four-year term; in Pennsylvania, voters put Democrat Daniel McCaffery, who positioned himself as a defender of abortion rights, on the state supreme court; in Rhode Island, Gabe Amo, a former Biden staffer who emphasized his experience in the Biden White House, won an open seat in the House of Representatives to become Rhode Island’s first Black member of Congress; and nationwide, right-wing Moms4Liberty and anti-transgender-rights school board candidates tended to lose their races.

In Virginia, Governor Glenn Youngkin campaigned hard to flip the state senate to the Republicans, telling voters that if his party had control of the whole government he would push through a measure banning abortion after 15 weeks. This has been a ploy advanced by Republicans to suggest they are moderating their stance on abortion, and Youngkin appeared to be trying out the argument as a basis for a run for the presidency.

But voters, who are still angry at the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which protected abortion rights until about 24 weeks, after fetal abnormalities are evident, rejected the suggestion they should settle for a smaller piece of what they feel has been taken from them by extremists on the Supreme Court.

Today, Youngkin indicated he will not run for president in 2024.  

The Democrats who won have prioritized good governance, including the protection of fundamental reproductive rights. In Kentucky, Beshear focused on record economic growth in the state—in his first term he secured almost $30 billion in private-sector investments in the economy, creating about 49,000 full-time jobs—and his able handling of emergencies, as well as his support for education and, crucially, reproductive rights.

In Virginia, Democrat Schuyler VanValkenburg beat incumbent Republican state senator Siobhan Dunnavant, the sponsor of a culture war “parents’ rights” law that was behind the removal of books from schools. While Dunnavant tried to convince voters that VanValkenburg, a high school history and government teacher, was in favor of showing pornography to high school students, he responded with a defense of teachers and an attack on book banning, reinforcing democratic principles. As Greg Sargent noted in the Washington Post, right-wing culture wars appear to be losing their potency as opponents emphasize American principles.

In Ohio, exit polls showed that Republicans as well as Democrats backed the protection of reproductive rights. As Katie Paris of the voter mobilization group Red Wine and Blue put it: “Reproductive freedom and democracy are not partisan issues.”

After such a rejection, a political party that supports democracy would accept its losses and rethink the message it was presenting to voters. But since the 1990s, far-right Republicans have insisted that election losses simply prove they have not moved far enough to the right.

That pattern was in full view today as front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination Donald Trump explained away Republican Daniel Cameron’s loss in Kentucky by blaming it on Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who MAGA Republicans insist is too moderate.

Cameron had tied himself closely to Trump, antiabortion, and the police officers who killed Breonna Taylor in her own home in a mistaken drug raid. Three days ago, Trump had said that Cameron had made “a huge surge” after Trump endorsed him and voters saw “he’s not really ‘a McConnell guy.’ They only try to label him that because he comes from the Great State of Kentucky.” Trump assured Cameron, “I will help you!”  

Now Trump blames McConnell. Right-wing podcast host Mark R. Levin echoed Trump when he told his 3.8 million followers on X that “RINOs have no winnable message.”

They are not alone in insisting that Republicans lost not because they are extremist but because they aren’t extremist enough. Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote that “Republicans are losing Republican voters because the base is fed up with weak Republicans who never do anything to actually stop the communist democrats…. The Republican Party is tone deaf and weak…. Republican voters are energized and can not wait to vote for President Trump…. [T]he Republican Party has only a short time to change their weak ways before they lose the base for years to come.”

It is worth remembering that just six days ago, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) called Greene a close friend and said he did not disagree with her on many issues.

Last night’s results highlight a key problem for the Republicans going into 2024. Their presumptive front-runner, former president Trump, is responsible for putting on the Supreme Court the justices who overturned Roe v. Wade and is on video saying he thinks that women who get abortions must be punished. That position has made him a hero with the party’s evangelical base, including lawmakers such as House speaker Johnson. But it is demonstrably unpopular in the general voting population.

As writer Molly Jong-Fast said today: “Women don’t want to die for Mike Johnson’s religious beliefs.”

Within MAGA Republicans’ refusal to admit that their far-right positions are unpopular is a disdain for those voters who disagree with them. Journalist Karen Kasler, who covers the Ohio statehouse, reported the statement of Republican Senate president Matt Huffman in the wake of yesterday’s election loss. "This isn't the end,” he said. “It is really just the beginning of a revolving door of ballot campaigns to repeal or replace Issue 1."

Ohio House speaker Jason Stephens’s statement more explicitly rejected the decision of 56.62% of Ohio voters. “I remain steadfastly committed to protecting life, and that commitment is unwavering,” he said. “The legislature has multiple paths that we will explore to continue to protect innocent life. This is not the end of the conversation.”

Later today, 27 of the 67 Ohio House Republicans signed a statement taking a stand against the abortion measure approved yesterday and vowing to “do everything in our power” to stop it.

In a conversation on the right-wing cable show Newsmax, former senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) complained that young people turned out because there were “sexy things” on the ballot like abortion and marijuana. He warned: “[P]ure democracies are not the way to run a country.”

The sentiment that it is not important to let everyone vote appeared to be at work yesterday in Mississippi, where at least nine precincts in Democratic-leaning Hinds County ran out of ballots. The most populous county in the state, Hinds County is 70% Black and includes the city of Jackson, which is almost 83% Black. Officials rushed to print more ballots, but the lines ballooned. After a judge tried to remedy the situation by extending the voting hours in the county by an hour, the Republican Party of Mississippi fought that order.

Republican governor Tate Reeves won reelection.

There was, though, another blow to the Republicans yesterday: special counsel David Weiss, who has been investigating President Biden’s son Hunter for the past five years, undermined Republican conspiracy theories when he told the House Judiciary Committee that no one is interfering with his investigation and that he, alone, makes the decisions about it.

Earlier this year, House Republicans produced an IRS employee who claimed that Biden administration officials had pressured the IRS to back off from the investigation. Weiss made it clear that accusation was wrong. “At no time was I blocked, or otherwise prevented from pursuing charges or taking the steps necessary in the investigation by other United States Attorneys, the Tax Division or anyone else at the Department of Justice,” he told the committee.

Nonetheless, in the wake of yesterday’s damaging election results, the chair of the House Oversight Committee, Representative James Comer (R-KY), today issued subpoenas to Hunter Biden and the president’s brother James.

mickeyrat

  November 9, 2023 (Thursday)

The Republican-dominated House of Representatives remains unable to agree even to a way forward toward funding the United States government. This is a five-alarm fire.

The continuing resolution for funding the government Congress passed in September when then–House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) couldn’t pass appropriations bills runs out on November 17. If something is not done, and done quickly, the U.S. will face a shutdown over Thanksgiving. This will not only affect family gatherings and the holiday, it will hit Black Friday—which, as the busiest shopping day of the year, is what keeps a number of businesses afloat.

The problem with funding the government is the same problem that infects much else in the country today: far-right Republicans insist that their position is the only acceptable one. Even though the majority of the country opposes their view, they refuse to compromise. They want to gut the government that regulates business, provides a basic social safety net, promotes infrastructure, and protects civil rights.

To impose their will on the majority, they don’t have to understand issues, build coalitions, or figure out compromises. All they have to do is steadfastly vote no. If they can prevent the government from accomplishing anything, they will have achieved their goal.

Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) perfectly illustrated how much easier it is to destroy than to build today as he objected to the promotion of military leaders, one at a time. Democrats tried to bring up each promotion of career military personnel, many of whom have served this country for decades, by introducing them by name; Tuberville had only to say “I object” to prevent the Senate from taking up those promotions.

That refusal to budge from an extreme position weakens our military. It also weakens our democracy, as was apparent today in Michigan as Republican lawmakers joined an antiabortion group in suing to overturn a 2022 amendment to the state constitution protecting abortion rights. Voters approved that amendment with 57% of the vote in a process established by the state constitution, but the plaintiffs want to stop it from taking effect, claiming that by creating a new right, it disfranchises them and prevents the legislature from making laws. They could launch their own ballot initiative to replace the amendment they don’t like, but as that seems unlikely to pass, they are instead trying to block the measure the voters have said they want.

The decision of Ohio’s voters to protect abortion rights on Tuesday has prompted a similar disdain for democracy there. The vote for that state constitutional amendment was not close—56.6% to 43.4%—but Republican legislators immediately said they would work to find ways to stop the amendment from taking effect.

North Dakota state representative Brandon Prichard was much more explicit. Opposed to the measure, he wrote, “Direct democracy should not exist…. It would be an act of courage to ignore the results of the election….” According to James Bickerton of Newsweek, Prichard has previously called for Republican-dominated states to “put into code that Jesus Christ is King and dedicate their state to Him.”

Now that refusal to compromise threatens the U.S. government itself. It has been apparent that the Republicans were unable to agree on a funding plan even among themselves. On Tuesday, as Nicole Lafond of Talking Points Memo pointed out, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said Americans should just trust the Republicans. He told reporters: “I’m not going to tell you when we will bring [appropriations bills] to the floor, but it will be in time, how about that? Trust us: We’re working through the process in a way that I think that people will be proud of…. [M]any options…are on the table and we’ll be revealing what our plan is in short order.”

Today, although the House managed to vote on a series of extremist bills designed to signal to their base—lowering the salaries of government officials they dislike to $1 a year—the House Republicans had to pull the Financial Services and General Government appropriations bill after extremists loaded it with antiabortion language so they could not get the votes to pass it even through the Republican side of the aisle; earlier they had to pull the bill to fund Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and related agencies.

“We’re still dealing with the same divisions we always have had,” a House Republican told Sahil Kapur, Scott Wong, and Julie Tsirkin of NBC News. “We’re ungovernable.”

And then, after pulling the bill, Speaker Johnson adjourned the House until Monday. As Representative Abigail Spanberger (D-VA) put it this afternoon: “We are just 8 days away from a devastating government shutdown—and instead of working in a bipartisan way to keep the government open, Speaker Johnson sent Congress home early for the weekend. This is completely unacceptable.”

Representative Ted Lieu (D-CA) wrote: “The training wheels fell off for [Republican] leadership this week. They tried to pass two appropriations bills. They failed twice. The government shuts down in 8 days and [the House Republican Party] HAS NO PLAN. Instead, we voted on stupid stuff today like reducing the salary of [the] W[hite] H[ouse] Press Secretary to $1.”

The problem remains what it has been since the Republican Party took control of the House in 2021: far-right extremists refuse to agree to any budget that doesn’t slash government funding of popular programs, while less extremist Republicans recognize that such cuts would gut the government and horrify all but the most extreme voters. In any case, measures loaded with extremist wish lists will not pass the Senate; this is why appropriations bills are traditionally kept clean.

Former House speaker Kevin McCarthy hammered out just such an agreement with the administration in May 2023 for funding, but the extremists refuse to honor it. For their part, Democrats are holding firm on that agreement. House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) told NBC News correspondent Julie Tsirkin that “[a] clean continuing resolution at the fiscal year 2023 levels is the only way forward… We're asking for the status quo to keep the government open.”

The government budget isn’t the only casualty of the Republican chaos. The farm bill, which funds agricultural programs and food programs, must be renewed every five years. The measure authorized in 2018 expires this year, but extremists are eager to slash funding for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, formerly known as food stamps, endangering the passage of a measure farmers strongly support.

And today the Defense Department pleaded with Congress to pass the supplemental budget request President Biden made in August to fund Ukraine’s military needs in its war against
Russian aggression.

The Republican Party’s problem continues to be America’s problem, and it is getting bigger by the day.

mickeyrat

  November 10, 2023 (Friday)

For months now it has felt weirdly as if life in the United States of America is playing out on a split screen. That sense is very strong tonight.

On one side is a country that in the past three years has invested in its people more completely than in any era since the 1960s. The American Rescue Plan, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act jump-started the U.S. economy after the devastation of the coronavirus pandemic; are rebuilding our roads, bridges, harbors, and internet infrastructure; have attracted $200 billion in private investment for chip manufacturing; and have invested billions in addressing the effects of climate change.

All of these changes need workers, and the economy emerged from the coronavirus pandemic with extraordinary growth that reached 4.9% in the last quarter and has seen record employment and dramatic wage gains. Median household wealth has grown by 37% since the pandemic, with wages growing faster at the bottom of the economy than at the top.

Yesterday, President Biden, in a buoyant mood, reflected this America when he congratulated members of the United Auto Workers in Belvidere, Illinois, for the strong contracts that came from negotiations with the nation’s three top automakers—Ford, Stellantis, and General Motors—thanks to the UAW workers’ 46-day graduated strike. The union demanded the automakers make up the ground that workers had ceded years ago when the plants were suffering.

The final contracts that emerged from long negotiations gave workers wage gains of 30% over the next four and a half years, better retirement security, more paid leave, commitments that automakers would create more union jobs, union coverage for workers at electric vehicle battery plants—the lack of that protection had been a key reason autoworkers had been skittish about electric vehicles—and a commitment from Stellantis to reopen the Jeep Cherokee plant in Belvidere that had been shuttered in February.

The UAW’s success is already affecting other automakers. As workers at non-union plants begin to explore unionization, Honda and Toyota have already announced wage hikes to match those in the new UAW contracts, and Subaru is hinting it will do the same.

Biden had worked hard to get the Belvidere plant reopened, and he joined the UAW picket line—the first president to do such a thing. He told the autoworkers that he ran for the presidency “to…bring back good-paying jobs that you can raise a family on, whether or not you went to college, and give working families more breathing room. And the way to do that is to invest in ourselves again, invest in America, invest in American workers.  And that’s exactly what we’ve done.”

In Belvidere, Biden and UAW president Shawn Fain cut a selfie video. In it, Biden says: “[Y]ou know, the middle class built this country, but unions built the middle class. And when unions do well, everybody does well. The economy does well.” Fain adds: “And this is what happens when working class people come together and stand together. Stand united. You know, one of the best things I’ve ever seen in my life was seeing a sitting U.S. president visit striking workers on the picket line. That goes a long way for showing where this president stands with working-class people.” Biden says: “Well, I want to tell you, from where I stood, you did a hell of a job, pal.” Fain answers: “Yep. Back at you.”

In contrast to this optimistic can-do vision that is making American lives better is the other side of the screen: that of former president Trump and the MAGA Republicans who have doubled down on supporting him.  

In Ohio, after voters on Tuesday approved an amendment to the state constitution protecting abortion rights, Republicans are calling the amendment “ambiguous” and trying to remove it from the jurisdiction of the courts. They want to make the legislature—which they dominate thanks to gerrymandering—the only body that can decide what the measure means. They are openly trying to override the decision of the voters.

In Washington, Republicans have empowered Christian extremist Mike Johnson (R-LA) to lead the House of Representatives as speaker, and today we learned that outside his office he displays a flag associated with the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) network that wants to place the United States government under the control of right-wing Christians. On January 6, 2021, rioters took these flags with them into the U.S. Capitol.

Johnson is also associated with a right-wing movement to call a convention of states to rewrite the Constitution.

In The Bulwark on Wednesday, A. B. Stoddard noted that the Republican Party’s surrender to its MAGA wing is nearly complete. Today, Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY), who is the third most powerful Republican in the House, illustrated that capitulation when she filed a five-page letter to the New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct. Stefanik’s letter drew on an article from the right-wing Breitbart media outlet to accuse Judge Arthur Engoron and his principal law clerk of being partisan operatives. Engoron is presiding over the New York fraud trial of former president Trump and the Trump Organization.

Legal analyst Lisa Rubin noted that Stefanik’s position as a member of Congress shields her from Freedom of Information Act requests, meaning that journalists will be unable to uncover whether members of Trump’s legal defense worked with her to produce the letter. And while the mistrial motion that observers like Rubin expected to see Trump defenders produce could be dismissed quickly by Engoron himself, a complaint to the state’s judicial conduct commission will hang out there until the commission meets again.

Undermining their opponents through accusations of impropriety has been a mainstay of the Republicans since the 1990s, and it is a tactic Trump likes to use. In this case, it illustrates that Stefanik, an official who swore to defend the Constitution, has abandoned the defense of our legal system and is instead embracing Trump’s efforts to tear it down.

Meanwhile, the inability of the Republicans to figure out a way to fund the government has led the credit-rating agency Moody’s to downgrade the outlook for the credit rating of the United States today from “stable” to “negative.” Moody’s expressed concern about the fight over the debt limit last spring, the removal of House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), and the rising threat of a government shutdown.

All of this plays into the hands of former president Donald Trump, who is eager to return to the White House. From there, he promises, he will take revenge on those he thinks have wronged him.

John Hendrickson of The Atlantic was at Trump’s political rally in Hialeah, Florida, on Wednesday, where the former president railed against those “coming into our country,” people he compared to “Hannibal Lecter,” a fictional serial killer who ate his victims. Trump said that under Biden, the U.S. has become “the dumping ground of the world,” and he attacked the “liars and leeches” who have been “sucking the life and blood” out of the country. He also attacked the “rotten, corrupt, and tyrannical establishment” of Washington, D.C.

Hendrickson called it a “dystopian, at times gothic speech [that] droned on for nearly 90 minutes.”

It was a sharp contrast to Biden’s speech in Belvidere.

“We have more to do, but we’re finally building an economy that works for the people—working people, the middle class—and, as a consequence, the entire country,” Biden said. “When I look out at all of you and the communities like Belvidere, I see real heroes of your story—you know, you and the American worker, you’re the American people.

“Because of you, I can honestly say—and I mean this from the bottom of my heart—I’ve never been more optimistic about America’s future than I am today…. Donald Trump often says…, ‘We are now a failing nation. We’re a nation in decline.’”

“But that’s not what I see,” Biden said. “I know this country. I know what we can do if folks are given half a chance. That’s why I’m so optimistic about our future. We just have to remember who we are. We are the United States of America. There is nothing beyond our capacity if we work together.”

mickeyrat

  November 11, 2023 (Saturday)

In 1918, at the end of four years of World War I’s devastation, leaders negotiated for the guns in Europe to fall silent once and for all on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. It was not technically the end of the war, which came with the Treaty of Versailles. Leaders signed that treaty on June 28, 1919, five years to the day after the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand set off the conflict. But the armistice declared on November 11 held, and Armistice Day became popularly known as the day “The Great War,” which killed at least 40 million people, ended.

In November 1919, President Woodrow Wilson commemorated Armistice Day, saying that Americans would reflect on the anniversary of the armistice “with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country’s service and with gratitude for the victory, both because of the thing from which it has freed us and because of the opportunity it has given America to show her sympathy with peace and justice in the councils of the nations…."

But Wilson was disappointed that the soldiers’ sacrifices had not changed the nation’s approach to international affairs. The Senate, under the leadership of Republican Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts—who had been determined to weaken Wilson as soon as the imperatives of the war had fallen away—refused to permit the United States to join the League of Nations, Wilson’s brainchild: a forum for countries to work out their differences with diplomacy, rather than resorting to bloodshed.

On November 10, 1923, just four years after he had established Armistice Day, former President Wilson spoke to the American people over the new medium of radio, giving the nation’s first live, nationwide broadcast.

“The anniversary of Armistice Day should stir us to a great exaltation of spirit,” he said, as Americans remembered that it was their example that had “by those early days of that never to be forgotten November, lifted the nations of the world to the lofty levels of vision and achievement upon which the great war for democracy and right was fought and won.”

But he lamented “the shameful fact that when victory was won,…chiefly by the indomitable spirit and ungrudging sacrifices of our own incomparable soldiers[,] we turned our backs upon our associates and refused to bear any responsible part in the administration of peace, or the firm and permanent establishment of the results of the war—won at so terrible a cost of life and treasure—and withdrew into a sullen and selfish isolation which is deeply ignoble because manifestly cowardly and dishonorable.”

Wilson said that a return to engagement with international affairs was “inevitable”; the U.S. eventually would have to take up its “true part in the affairs of the world.”

Congress didn’t want to hear it. In 1926 it passed a resolution noting that since November 11, 1918, “marked the cessation of the most destructive, sanguinary, and far reaching war in human annals and the resumption by the people of the United States of peaceful relations with other nations, which we hope may never again be severed,” the anniversary of that date “should be commemorated with thanksgiving and prayer and exercises designed to perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations.”

In 1938, Congress made November 11 a legal holiday to be dedicated to world peace.

But neither the “war to end all wars” nor the commemorations of it, ended war.

Just three years after Congress made Armistice Day a holiday for peace, American armed forces were fighting a second world war, even more devastating than the first. The carnage of World War II gave power to the idea of trying to stop wars by establishing a rules-based international order. Rather than trying to push their own boundaries and interests whenever they could gain advantage, countries agreed to abide by a series of rules that promoted peace, economic cooperation, and security.

The new international system provided forums for countries to discuss their differences—like the United Nations, founded in 1945—and mechanisms for them to protect each other, like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), established in 1949, which has a mutual defense pact that says any attack on a NATO country will be considered an attack on all of them.

In the years since, those agreements multiplied and were deepened and broadened to include more countries and more ties. While the U.S. and other countries sometimes fail to honor them, their central theory remains important: no country should be able to attack a neighbor, slaughter its people, and steal its lands at will. This concept preserved decades of relative peace compared to the horrors of the early twentieth century, but it is a concept that is currently under attack as autocrats increasingly reject the idea of a rules-based international order and claim the right to act however they wish.

In 1954, to honor the armed forces of wars after World War I, Congress amended the law creating Armistice Day by striking out the word “armistice” and putting “veterans” in its place. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, himself a veteran who had served as the supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe and who had become a five-star general of the Army before his political career, later issued a proclamation asking Americans to observe Veterans Day:

“[L]et us solemnly remember the sacrifices of all those who fought so valiantly, on the seas, in the air, and on foreign shores, to preserve our heritage of freedom, and let us reconsecrate ourselves to the task of promoting an enduring peace so that their efforts shall not have been in vain.”

mickeyrat

  November 12, 2023 (Sunday)

Some love from the other side of the country tonight: sunset from San Francisco.

The best part of this book tour has been meeting so many new friends and seeing so many old ones. That part is going to continue for months to come, but I'm not unhappy that tonight I'm winging my way home for a spell.

Late flight so taking tonight off. Will see you tomorrow.

mickeyrat

  November 13, 2023 (Monday)

In a speech Saturday in Claremont, New Hampshire, and then in his Veterans Day greeting yesterday on social media, former president Trump echoed German Nazis.

“In honor of our great Veterans on Veteran’s Day [sic] we pledge to you that we will root out the Communists, Marxists, Racists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our Country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American Dream…. Despite the hatred and anger of the Radical Left Lunatics who want to destroy our country, we will MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.”    

The use of language referring to enemies as bugs or rodents has a long history in genocide because it dehumanizes opponents, making it easier to kill them. In the U.S. this concept is most commonly associated with Hitler and the Nazis, who often spoke of Jews as “vermin” and vowed to exterminate them.  

The parallel between MAGA Republicans’ plans and the Nazis had other echoes this weekend, as Trump’s speech came the same day that Charlie Savage, Maggie Haberman, and Jonathan Swan of the New York Times reported that Trump and his people are planning to revive his travel ban, more popularly known as the “Muslim ban,” which refused entry to the U.S. by people from some majority-Muslim nations, and to reimpose the pandemic-era restrictions he used during the coronavirus pandemic to refuse asylum claims—it is not only legal to apply for asylum in the United States, but it is a guaranteed right under the Refugee Act of 1980—by claiming that immigrants bring infectious diseases like tuberculosis.

They plan mass deportations of unauthorized people in the U.S., rounding them up with specially deputized law enforcement officers and National Guard soldiers contributed by Republican-dominated states. Because U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) doesn’t have the space for such numbers of people, Trump’s people plan to put them in “sprawling camps” while they wait to be expelled. Trump refers to this as “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”

Trump’s people would screen visa applicants to eliminate those with ideas they consider undesirable, and would kick out those here temporarily for humanitarian reasons, including Afghans who came here after the 2021 Taliban takeover. Trump ally Steve Bannon and his likely attorney general, Mike Davis, expect to deport 10 million people.

Trump’s advisors also intend to challenge birthright citizenship, the principle that anyone born in the U.S. is a citizen. This principle was established by the Fourteenth Amendment and acknowledged in the 1898 United States v. Wong Kim Ark Supreme Court decision during a period when native-born Americans were persecuting immigrants from Asia. That hatred resulted in Wong Kim Ark, an American-born child of Chinese immigrants, being denied reentry to the U.S. after a visit to China. Wong sued, arguing that the Fourteenth Amendment established birthright citizenship. The Supreme Court agreed. The children of immigrants to the U.S.—no matter how unpopular immigration was at the time—were U.S. citizens, entitled to all the rights and immunities of citizenship, and no act of Congress could overrule a constitutional amendment.

“Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error: Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,” Trump immigration hardliner Stephen Miller told the New York Times reporters. “The immigration legal activists won’t know what’s happening.”

In addition to being illegal and unconstitutional, such plans to strip the nation of millions of workers would shatter the economy, sparking sky-high prices, especially of food.

For a long time, Trump’s increasingly fascist language hasn’t drawn much attention from the press, perhaps because the frequency of his outrageous statements has normalized them. When Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016 referred to many Trump supporters as “deplorables,” a New York Times headline read: “Hillary Clinton Calls Many Trump Backers ‘Deplorables,’ and G.O.P.* Pounces.” Yet Trump’s threat to root out “vermin” at first drew a New York Times headline saying, “Trump Takes Veterans Day Speech in a Very Different Direction.” (This prompted Mark Jacobs of Stop the Presses to write his own headlines about disasters, including my favorite: “John Wilkes Booth Takes Visit to the Theater in a Very Different Direction.”)  
 
Finally, it seems, Trump’s explicit use of Nazi language, especially when coupled with his threats to establish camps, has woken up at least some headline writers. Forbes accurately headlined yesterday’s story: “Trump Compares Political Foes to ‘Vermin’ On Veterans Day—Echoing Nazi Propaganda.”
 
Republicans have refused to disavow Trump’s language. When Kristen Welker of Meet the Press asked Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel: “Are you comfortable with this language coming from the [Republican] frontrunner,” McDaniel answered: “I am not going to comment on candidates and their campaign messaging.” Others have remained silent.
 
Trump’s Veterans Day “vermin” statement set up his opponents as enemies of the country by blurring them together as “Communists, Marxists, Racists, and Radical Left Thugs.” Conflating liberals with the “Left” has been a common tactic in the U.S. right-wing movement since 1954, when L. Brent Bozell and William F. Buckley Jr. tried to demonize liberals—those Americans of all parties who wanted the government to regulate business, provide Social Security and basic welfare programs, fund roads and hospitals, and protect civil rights—as wannabe socialists.
 
In the United States there is a big difference between liberals and the political “Left.” Liberals believe in a society based in laws designed to protect the individual, arrived at by a government elected by the people. Political parties disagree about policy and work to change the laws, but they support the system itself. Most Americans, including Democrats and traditional Republicans, are liberals.

Both “the Left,” and the “Right” want to get rid of the system. Those on the Left believe that its creation was so warped either by wealth or by racism that it must be torn down and rebuilt. Those on the Right believe that most people don’t know what’s good for them, making democracy dangerous. They think the majority of people must be ruled by their betters, who will steer them toward productivity and religion. The political Left has never been powerful in the U.S.; the political Right has taken over the Republican Party.

The radical right pushes the idea that their opponents are “Radical Left Thugs” trying to tear down the system because they know liberal policies like Social Security, Medicare, environmental protection, reproductive rights, gun safety legislation, and so on, are actually quite popular. This weekend, for example, Trump once again took credit for signing into law the Veterans Choice health care act, which was actually sponsored by Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and signed by President Barack Obama in 2014.

The Right’s draconian immigration policies ignore the reality that presidents since Ronald Reagan have repeatedly asked Congress to rewrite the nation’s immigration laws, only to have Republicans tank such measures to keep the hot button issue alive, knowing it turns out their voters. Both President Joe Biden and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas have begged Congress to fund more immigration courts and border security and to provide a path to citizenship for those brought to the U.S. as children. They, along with Vice President Kamala Harris, have tried to slow the influx of undocumented migrants by working to stabilize the countries from which such migrants primarily come.

Such a plan does not reflect “hatred and anger of the Radical Left Lunatics who want to destroy our country.” It reflects support for a system in which Congress, not a dictator, writes the laws.

A video ABC News published tonight from Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis’s plea deal makes the distinction between liberal democracy and a far-right dictatorship clear. In it, Ellis told prosecutors that former White House deputy chief of staff and social media coordinator Dan Scavino told her in December 2020 that Trump was simply not going to leave the White House, despite losing the presidential election.

When Ellis lamented that their election challenges had lost, Scavino allegedly answered: "'Well, we don't care, and we're not going to leave.” Ellis replied: “'What do you mean?” Scavino answered: “The boss is not going to leave under any circumstances. We are just going to stay in power." When Ellis responded “Well, it doesn't quite work that way, you realize?” he allegedly answered: “We don't care."

*The GOP, or Grand Old Party, is an old nickname for the Republican Party.