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Author: Sasha Abramsky

  • Despite Trump’s Legal Woes, GOP Political Candidates Are Leaping to His Defense

    Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney’s overwhelming primary loss on Tuesday to Trump-endorsed Harriet Hageman makes it clear (in case there was any remaining doubt) just how cultist the debased modern-day Republican Party is.

    Last week, Donald Trump’s home was raided by FBI agents armed with a warrant indicating there was probable cause that the Espionage Act had been violated. Last month, the networks broadcast the most recent January 6 House hearings, which showed the extent to which Trump and his acolytes marshaled the mob in an attempt to obstruct the peaceful transfer of power. Yet after all of this, Trump remains wildly popular among GOP voters, and Trump’s most vocal critic from within the GOP received less than one-third of the votes cast in the Republican primary in Wyoming. She was ousted by a candidate whose previous career highs as an attorney involved attacking any and all environmental regulations, and who, on the stump, urged voters to dump Cheney because, in joining the House committee investigating January 6, she “betrayed Wyoming, betrayed the country and she betrayed me.”

    Trump responded gloatingly to Cheney’s primary defeat, framing it explicitly as payback for her role on the January 6 committee. On his Truth Social site, he declared Cheney a “fool,” and opined that she “should be ashamed of herself.” Trump’s post attacked the “Unselect Committee” as being made up of “political Hacks and Thugs,” and welcomed Cheney’s descent into “political oblivion.”
    Apart from the puerile nature of the post, it’s the venom that stands out. In race after race around the country this election season, Trump has attempted — and with some notable exceptions, such as in Georgia — largely succeeding in purging the GOP of any and every independent voice capable of standing up to his authoritarian hold over the party’s rank and file. Eight of the ten Republican Congress members who voted for his impeachment will now be out of office come January. Outgoing Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, who was running for a state Senate seat, and who angered Trump World by testifying before the January 6 committee, lost his primary. “Stop the steal” candidates are now positioned as GOP candidates to run for secretary of state in four of the five swing states of 2020 — Georgia, again, being an outlier here. Trump-backed Senate candidates rode high in primaries in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and many other states. And so on.

    Despite Trump’s growing legal woes and the escalating risk he now faces of felony charges and conviction, large numbers of GOP political candidates continue to leap to his defense and to attack his opponents within the GOP as being RINOs — Republicans In Name Only. They are, in their embrace of ever more extreme language, buying popularity by espousing a particularly dangerous and anti-democratic stew of lies, rumors and conspiracy theories.

    Just this week, for example, New York congressional hopeful Carl Paladino, who not too long ago got into hot water for saying the U.S. needs a political leader capable of moving the crowd like Adolf Hitler did, went on Breitbart Radio to say that Attorney General Merrick Garland “probably should be executed” for authorizing the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago. Florida Sen. Rick Scott compared the FBI raid to the actions of the Gestapo. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene called for defunding the entire Department of Justice.

    As he flails in the legal realm, Trump, the GOP’s puppet master, is becoming more dangerous by the minute in the political realm. Cheney appears to recognize this, and stated, after her defeat, that she would do everything in her power — including possibly running for president — to thwart the twice-impeached ex-president’s ambitions to return to the White House. If she does so, however, she will undoubtedly run into a buzzsaw of organized GOP opposition, from state GOPs preventing her name from appearing on primary ballots, to decisions by the Republican National Committee to stop her from appearing on the same debate stage as Trump. She has also set up a political action committee, called The Great Task, aimed at educating Americans about the dangers to the democratic system posed by Trump and by his efforts to rewrite history surrounding the events of 2020 and of January 6, 2021.

    Now, I’m not a fan — to say the least — of Cheney’s political career prior to her star turn on the January 6 committee. She’s always been fiercely anti-abortion, opposes gun control, was supportive of Trump’s most restrictive anti-immigration policies, and, when he was president, voted in line with his priorities 93 percent of the time. She also strongly supported the waterboarding of terrorism suspects, a ghastly practice approved by her father, Vice President Dick Cheney, and by President George W. Bush, that put a U.S. government stamp of approval on torture.

    But in this moment, when a large part of the GOP has overtly embraced paramilitarism, when political candidates run attack ads showing them toting assault rifles and hunting down their less ideologically pure party brethren, and when the GOP’s congressional leadership has come out in support of tactics designed to secure electoral victory even in the face of massive opposition from a majority of the electorate, Cheney’s voice is important.

    This past June, she spoke of the “personality cult” gripping the Republican Party. After her primary election defeat this week, she opined about Trump representing a “very grave threat and risk to our Republic” and came as close as any senior politician has done in recent years to calling for the creation of something akin to a popular front, bringing together Republicans of good conscience, Democrats and independents to stop the drift toward authoritarian governance represented by the MAGA movement and its power-hungry leader.

    Cheney is absolutely right about the dangers posed by Trump and by Trumpism, even if it took her several long years to reach these conclusions. But I fear her ongoing faith in the ability of the GOP to right itself is entirely misplaced. This is not a story of a good barrel with a few rotten apples. At this point, the entire barrel is corrupted, with only a few good apples left in stock. It’s a bad barrel filled with contamination. Or, to abandon the metaphor, it’s a political party that from top to bottom has, over the past several years, almost entirely remade itself as an extremist tool intended to fluff up one man’s vanity and enable his every assault on the democratic institutions, culture and norms of the Republic. Given that, the idea that its Trumpian mantle can be thrown off seems little more than wishful thinking. And even if it could be, the anti-abortion, anti-immigrant, anti-democratic, pro-torture policies of the pre-Trump GOP should not be idealized either.

  • George Gascón Survives Another Recall

    Sasha Abramsky

    The progressive district attorney kept his office, defying the latest conservative attempt to overturn an election that didn’t go their way.

    The post George Gascón Survives Another Recall appeared first on The Nation.

  • California Needs to Think Outside the Box on Homelessness

    Sasha Abramsky

    Restricting encampments doesn’t get at the root of the problem.

    The post California Needs to Think Outside the Box on Homelessness appeared first on The Nation.

  • Kari Lake and Blake Masters Bring the Trump Train to Arizona

    Sasha Abramsky

    For decades now, Arizona’s GOP has swung ever further rightward, even as the broader electorate in Arizona has become more liberal.

    The post Kari Lake and Blake Masters Bring the Trump Train to Arizona appeared first on The Nation.

    This post was originally published on Article – The Nation.

  • Media Mogul Murdoch Dumps Trump for DeSantis. How Will This Impact the Election?

    Sometimes things end with a whimper rather than a bang. In the nearly two years since Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, the would-be-strongman has done everything in his power to keep himself in the spotlight and to fuel a sense of inevitability that he will be the GOP’s standard-bearer in the 2024 presidential election.

    Now, in the wake of Congress’s ongoing January 6 hearings, Trump’s lock on the right, and his ability to commandeer undying loyalty from conservative media organs, may finally be corroding. With this change in how he is portrayed, Trump’s hold on the foot soldiers of the conservative and far right movements entirely in his thrall may be weakening.

    Last week, after the congressional hearing detailing how for three hours Trump refused to activate any military or law enforcement responses to the invasion of the Capitol, and how even afterwards he found it all but impossible to speak words of condemnation about January 6, Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers and television stations began quietly, but very definitely, turning against him. Given the extraordinary power and reach of the Murdoch empire, and its long-tested ability to make and break political leaders, this was a huge moment.

    The New York Post, which was one of Trump’s longtime media cheerleaders, editorialized that Trump’s purpose on January 6 was to “find any means — damn the consequences — to block the peaceful transfer of power.” This was an action worthy of “eternal shame” for Trump, the editorial continued. As a result, it concluded, “Trump has proven himself unworthy to be this country’s chief executive again.”

    The editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal explained to readers that, “Mr. Trump took an oath to defend the Constitution, and he had a duty as Commander in Chief to protect the Capitol from a mob attacking it in his name. He refused.” The editorial reached strikingly similar conclusions to that in the Post. “Character is revealed in a crisis, and Mr. Pence passed his Jan. 6 trial. Mr. Trump utterly failed his.”

    A few days later, Trump came to D.C. to deliver his first speech there since January 2021. It was billed as a major policy address to the America First Policy Institute, the sort of event that in years gone by would have received saturation coverage by Fox News. This time around, however, the flagship Murdoch TV network ignored the event entirely, choosing, instead, to broadcast live a Mike Pence speech in D.C. later that same evening. I would dearly have loved to have been a fly on the wall when the TV-obsessed Trump realized Fox News had ditched him for Pence.

    Murdoch is not a sentimentalist. He makes and breaks politicians and political movements at a moment’s notice, pulling the plug on conservatives he has long supported when he concludes they no longer service his political needs or have ceased to drive audiences to his money-making media outlets. In other words, he both drives public opinion but is also remarkably cognizant of subtle shifts in that opinion that indicate whether sticking with a previously popular leader for too long will end up losing valuable parts of his readership or viewership.

    In the mid-1990s, Murdoch’s tabloids in the U.K. suddenly turned against the Conservative Party, which, with Murdoch’s fervent backing, had governed the country since 1979 (first under Margaret Thatcher and then under John Major), and threw their support behind Labour leader Tony Blair. (The best-selling Sun newspaper, the jewel in Murdoch’s tabloid crown, claimed that its barrage of anti-Labour headlines in 1992 were instrumental in securing John Major’s election victory that year.) Blair won in a landslide in 1997 after making nice to Murdoch, whose papers spent the next several years attacking the Conservative Party and extolling Blair’s virtues. Later on, however, Murdoch’s U.K. papers abandoned Labour again, became rabidly pro-Boris Johnson and pro-Brexit, and helped push British politics ever further toward a world of right-wing populism.

    In Australia, two recent prime ministers, Malcolm Turnbull and Kevin Rudd, have gone on record as saying their political fates were sealed when Murdoch’s News Corp media empire turned against them.

    Murdoch’s been losing patience with Trump since the last election, after Trump emerged as the sort of “loser” that both he and Murdoch despise. A new book suggests that on 2020 election night, Murdoch told Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, that the Arizona result wasn’t even close, that it was a clear loss for Trump. Another book quoted Murdoch as saying “Fuck him,” when Trump’s minions attempted to cast doubt on Fox’s calling of Arizona for Joe Biden. Last November, Murdoch excoriated Trump for staying focused on relitigating losses from the past rather than focusing on the future.

    Recent polling of GOP primary voters has suggested that while Trump remains the favorite among a large plurality of supporters, Ron DeSantis is fast gaining ground. Murdoch, who seems to have thrown his support behind DeSantis, clearly believes that over the coming months Trump’s support will further erode, as younger, less 2020-focused leaders emerge from the GOP pack, and he wants to get ahead of the curve by helping to speed up the demise of the cantankerous man from Mar-a-Lago.

    There’s no principle involved here, no Road to Damascus moment in which Murdoch has finally realized the appalling way he has wielded power and paved the way for Trump’s autocratic, violent movement. After all, this is the same tycoon who elevated the likes of Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson to top spots on his network, with a mandate to pander to the worst and most extreme excesses of Trumpism. Rather, the media mogul has come to a cold and calculated decision. In his reading of the moment, and his understanding of the damage done to the Trump brand by the January 6 hearings — a clear majority of Americans, including a majority of independent voters, now say Trump is to blame for the attack on the Capitol — the wannabe-strongman has become a political liability to conservatives and, ultimately, risks becoming a drag on Murdoch’s bottom line.

    None of this means that Trump will now go quietly off into the political night. He does, after all, still have shills like Tucker Carlson in his camp, still has Steve Bannon and his podcasts, still has a slew of new media outlets such as OAN. But if history’s any guide here, usually when the vastly powerful Murdoch empire goes to war against a politician it once favored, at some point in the not-too-distant future, that politician’s star begins to wane quite quickly.

  • Gavin Newsom’s Letter to Biden Urges Climate Action

    Sasha Abramsky

    The California governor called on the president to ramp up climate change interventions, while decrying obstruction in Congress.

    The post Gavin Newsom’s Letter to Biden Urges Climate Action appeared first on The Nation.

    This post was originally published on Article – The Nation.

  • Outgoing Boris Johnson Government Passes Anti-Union Law Amid Looming Strike Wave

    The spring and summer of 2022 have been seasons of discontent in the United Kingdom. Not only was Prime Minister Boris Johnson toppled after a cascade of all-too-public scandals eroded confidence in his government, but the economy has also been hit by a slew of major industrial actions.

    A series of rolling strikes have brought the country’s rail network and London’s underground rail system to a standstill on several days over the past months, with the prospect of more strikes through August. Ten thousand underground system workers struck over efforts by Transport for London, the body that oversees the city’s transport, to cut more than 500 jobs and to “review” the pensions package negotiated by the unions. Railway workers are striking over pay: The union claims railway companies froze pay several years ago, and in the current round of negotiations they are proposing small increases that don’t even begin to match the near-10 percent inflation the U.K. economy is currently experiencing. They are also striking over efforts by owners to cut the number of maintenance crews on the lines.

    Strikes aren’t limited to the transit sector. Pay increases in most industries are failing to come close to cost of living increases: The Office of National Statistics reports that this year real wages have declined by 2.8 percent, the largest such decline since records on this began being kept 21 years ago. As a result, unions have gotten more assertive. Moreover, while the public’s support for striking workers is uneven, sympathies have shifted towards the unions in recent months, and large numbers of Brits polled do support strike actions — if not across the board, then by workers in particular industries, such as firefighters, nurses and doctors.

    The National Health Service, Britain’s beleaguered publicly funded health care system, is facing the threat of strikes, but not only by nurses. Doctors are dismayed by a new contract that would force them to offer primary care appointments to patients on evenings and weekends, presumably as a way to clear backlogs in access to care built up during the pandemic.

    Firefighters are also threatening to walk off the job, as are teachers, civil servants, postal workers, telecommunications engineers and even some lawyers. Arguably not since the late 1970s have so many sectors of the U.K. economy faced industrial action simultaneously.

    The Conservative government is as hostile to trade union rights as the GOP in the United States, viewing these strikes as something akin to an existential threat. The U.K. transport secretary has attempted to discredit the striking railway workers by claiming they are being led by “Marxists.”

    Nearly 40 years ago, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher used the miners’ strike as a way to break the most militant of Britain’s unions and usher in neoliberalism. Today, the government has rushed through legislation essentially greenlighting the hiring of scab workers, via temp agencies, to fill labor shortfalls created by workers going on strike.

    Seven years ago, the Conservative Party tried to enact a similar reform. But the change ran into a barrage of criticism from the Regulatory Policy Committee, a governmental watchdog agency that looks at the credibility of proposed legislation, which concluded that the benefits to employers would actually be negligible, not least because of the difficulty of finding large numbers of skilled temp workers to stand in at short notice for strikers. Ultimately, because of the committee’s findings, and its damning conclusion that the proposal wouldn’t actually save employers any money, the law change wasn’t enacted.

    Now, with the country mired in industrial strife, and with the government in shambles, the outgoing Johnson and his colleagues have decided that the time is right to resurrect this scab-labor charter.

    The law, which kicked in on July 21, allows businesses to rapidly access pools of temporary workers from employment agencies to, in the words of the government press release on the change, “plug essential positions.” This undoes nearly 50 years of labor law in the U.K., since unions pressured a beleaguered Conservative government in 1973 to ban the practice of temp hires being used as strikebreakers; since then, it has been against the law in the U.K. for employment agencies from farming out workers to break strikes. The law was updated in 2003, but essentially remained as it had been since the 1970s.

    The new legislation, which was rushed through parliament in the last weeks of the session, after members of parliament dispatched Johnson but before they went on their summer recess, also quadruples the penalties that courts can assess against unions deemed to be involved in illegal strikes, raising the fine from £250,000 to £1 million.

    The language of the law change is unambiguous in its anti-union ambitions. It states that:

    The Government is committed to ensuring strikes only happen as the result of a clear, democratic decision and commits to tackling the disproportionate impact of strikes on important public services. In addition, there are sectors in which industrial action has a wider impact on members of the public that is disproportionate and unfair. Strikes can prevent people from getting to work and prevent businesses from managing their workforces effectively.

    In other words, if a strike is actually effective, and thus inconveniences people — which is literally the aim of such actions — it becomes illegitimate and ought to be broken.

    The bill continued that, “Once this instrument comes into force, employment businesses will be permitted to supply temporary workers (agency workers) to employers facing industrial action. The workers supplied by employment businesses will be permitted to perform the work normally carried out by those workers taking part in industrial action.”

    This is a fiercely anti-union position, and in response UNISON, the largest union in the country, has already announced that it plans to take the government to court to try to block the new law from taking effect. Yet, despite the ominous timbre of the new law, it’s not at all clear that, ultimately, it will end up being anything much more than right-wing, populist symbolism.

    Like the U.S., Britain is facing huge labor shortages (there are more than 1.3 million job vacancies at the moment), a crisis that has been worsened by Brexit having led to hundreds of thousands of workers from the continent leaving the U.K. and returning to European Union countries. Given this, the idea that temp agencies could quickly provide thousands of skilled firefighters, teachers, nurses or train drivers at short notice is little more than a fiction. But it’s a convenient fantasy for a Conservative Party mired in a messy leadership contest in which the candidates have vied with each other to prove their hardline, Thatcherite credentials. The party and its standard-bearers are desperate to prove to the Conservatives’ political base that it is only they who are able to get “tough” on workers whose strike actions are causing inconveniences to Brits right at the start of the summer holiday season.

    This isn’t a serious industrial policy, nor is it even an effective anti-union policy. Rather, it’s the floundering and the posturing of a party increasingly at the mercy of events beyond its control. It won’t end Britain’s summer of discontent. It probably won’t make much of a difference to the Conservative Party’s downward spiral in public opinion polls. It certainly won’t solve the underlying problem that soaring inflation is rapidly corroding the real wages of workers in the U.K., thus triggering a huge upswing in the number of strikes. But it might allow the new leaders of the party to at least pretend that they’re wielding a sharp sword against political and economic menaces that, seemingly, are now lurking around every corner.

    Meanwhile, Britain’s unions are embracing more militant strike tactics than they have since the Thatcher years, and much of the public is supporting them despite the inconveniences that result. Far from weakening Britain’s union movement, the new laws regarding temp workers seem likely to harden union stances and trigger even more strike action over the coming months.

  • Roads Are Literally Melting in Europe During Unprecedented Heat Wave

    My personal experience of this week’s “heat apocalypse” in Europe involved discovering large globs of hot, sticky tar stuck to my leg after I trod in melted asphalt on a mountain road in France on Sunday afternoon: The road that I was walking on had literally begun to melt.

    I was standing on the melted road because the heat was so extreme that my car’s engine had overheated, and my kids and I ended up stranded on top of a steep mountain pass in the Pyrenees until a tow truck finally came to tow us down the mountain to a nearby town. Around the continent, roadside assistance agencies predicted spikes in the number of car breakdowns as the thermometer readings headed north.

    Meanwhile, others across Europe were facing much more frightening emergencies as fires engulfed swathes of forest in Spain, Portugal, Greece, Hungary and France, and as the extreme heat triggered housefires and wildfires in and around London. Europe is finally waking to the ghastly realities of the climate crisis and the rampant fires that come with it.

    After days of record-breaking temperatures, calamitous forest fires and mounting numbers of deaths associated with the heat, French President Emmanuel Macron called this week for the creation of a European-wide fire-fighting air fleet.

    Touring the Gironde, a picturesque region in southwestern France hammered by the fires, Macron pledged a “major national project” of reconstruction and called for new rules and prevention plans designed to mitigate the worst impacts of climate change.

    Europe’s leaders have realized that the continent has got to play catch-up to shore up its infrastructure, and to protect its fire-vulnerable lands from wildfires.

    European countries currently spend only 0.4 percent of their budgets on firefighting services. The German federal government has repeatedly refused to invest in fire-fighting aircraft, apparently believing the country is unlikely to face the sorts of megafires that routinely consume vast tracts of land in the U.S. and Australia.

    France does have one of Europe’s best-equipped firefighting fleets, but it tops out at 22 planes. In addition to the national fleets, such as the one France has, the entire EU currently has a dozen firefighting planes that are pooled for use across national boundaries during fire emergencies. Clearly, that’s not adequate to the needs of this climate change moment. By contrast, California, which has been on the frontline of climate change-fueled fires for years, has more than 60 firefighting aircraft.

    California, which has, over the past decade, had to adjust to the new realities of fighting vast fires every year, now spends more than 1 percent of its state budget on the Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. The state is, at least, fortunate in having vast financial resources at its disposal. Many of its neighbors aren’t so lucky; in one western U.S. state after the next, extreme fires have strained state budgets in recent years.

    Now, as heat waves become more common and more ferocious in Europe, the continent’s governments (both in national capitals and in Brussels, headquarters of the EU) will also have to adjust upward the amounts they invest in fire prevention services, as well as in firefighting equipment and personnel. It will, inevitably, put a strain on state budgets, and will do so just at the moment when the continent is teetering on the edge of recession and is being battered by stubbornly high inflation.

    Taken as a whole, Europe has been caught remarkably unprepared by July’s heat wave. Thousands of people, most of them elderly, died last week as the blast of hot air moved slowly northward from the Mediterranean.

    The human dislocation that the heat caused has also threatened to magnify Europe’s already stark economic woes — its currency in decline against the dollar, inflation running at above 9 percent, its loss of stable supplies of Russian gas and oil. If Europe does fall into a severe recession later this year, no single factor will be to blame; but the hit to the region’s economy brought on by a string of debilitating heat waves will certainly be one of the causes contributing to the malaise.

    Heat is something of a relative concept. In California or Texas, in Arizona or Oklahoma, summer temperatures a few degrees north of 100 degrees Fahrenheit (100°F) would barely raise eyebrows. Even higher temperatures, such as the 120°F sometimes reached in Las Vegas, Phoenix or Tucson, don’t tend to do quite the same damage that soaring temperatures inflict in Europe. In the American West, populations are accustomed to such temperatures; and houses, public transport systems, office buildings, entertainment centers, malls and so on are designed to include air conditioning. By contrast, in Europe, most buildings, both public and private, do not have air conditioning; many transit systems are similarly lacking; and populations are woefully unfamiliar with how to navigate extremely hot weather.

    Moreover, electricity prices have soared so quickly in Europe this past year that even those with air conditioning have had to think twice before using their systems. Electricity wholesale prices rose more than 400 percent in Spain and Portugal from the winter of 2021 through early 2022, and by more than 300 percent in Greece and France. While not all of that has been passed onto consumers, much has; in the 12 months leading up to March of this year, home energy prices around the EU increased by 41 percent. Since then, as gas and oil prices have soared, they have gone up still higher. Faced with shortages of Russian natural gas, the EU has announced a rationing plan to try to cut usage by 15 percent over the coming months. Vastly increased reliance on air conditioning simply isn’t possible in Europe at the moment, given current energy supply and price conditions.

    When the heat soared to around 104°F in London on Tuesday, the agency responsible for managing London’s complex public transport system was forced to urge people not to use its un-air conditioned buses and trains. Faced with lack of staff coming into work, many businesses shuttered. In Scotland, the government appealed to the public to cut down on alcohol consumption so as to avoid inebriated people becoming dehydrated in the unusual heat. By Tuesday evening, the London fire brigade was experiencing its busiest day since World War II, as more than 40 properties burned and numerous parks and heaths blazed in the fierce heat.

    At Luton airport, just outside of London, outbound flights were canceled and incoming flights had to be diverted after a runway buckled in the heat. Railway tracks around the country also started to fail. Put simply, the U.K.’s infrastructure simply isn’t built to withstand triple-digit temperatures.

    For years, European leaders have been at the forefront of global efforts to create meaningful climate change agreements. Yet, despite the strong rhetoric, when push came to shove last week, the continent’s preparedness for extreme weather events was shown to be inadequate. In the U.S., activists are pressuring President Biden to declare a climate emergency. In Europe, where the populace is far more in favor of strong actions to tackle climate change than are Americans, leaders have long realized this is an emergency. Yet the crisis is worsening seemingly by the day. This past week is a preview of just how bad things can get. It’s far past time to tackle this catastrophe with the focus and urgency it so clearly merits.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Biden Is All Talk as Fires Take Over the American West

    Sasha Abramsky

    By any stretch of the imagination, what is happening now is a climate emergency.

    The post Biden Is All Talk as Fires Take Over the American West appeared first on The Nation.

    This post was originally published on Article – The Nation.

  • The Democratic Party Is No Match for a Nation on Fire

    Sasha Abramsky

    The gerontocrats currently running the country seem to have no ability to comprehend the five-alarm urgency of the moment.

    The post The Democratic Party Is No Match for a Nation on Fire appeared first on The Nation.

    This post was originally published on Article – The Nation.

  • Boris Johnson Spends Last Days in Office Laying Minefield for His Successor

    A day after Boris Johnson resigned as British prime minister but announced that he would remain as “caretaker prime minister” while the Conservative Party chose its new leader, the disgraced leader was hit with another scandal. Several media outlets reported that one of the reasons he wanted to stay in office for a few months was so that he could continue to have access to Chequers, the PM’s country residence, where he and his wife, who had gotten married during the COVID-19 lockdowns, were planning a belated wedding bash.

    Others gleefully reported that any incoming resident to Number 10 Downing Street would, as a first order of business, have to replace the extraordinarily gaudy, and pricey, gold wallpaper and other baubles that the prime minister and his wife had ordered installed — using money donated by lobbyists — in their official residence.

    Johnson’s tenure was defined by lawlessness and cronyism, dolled up by his carefully cultivated shambolic charisma and his ability to turn a phrase to his advantage. He was, as the Observer and Guardian columnist Andrew Rawnsley put it this weekend, a master of “verbal flatulence” void of any underlying philosophical principles. On Brexit, he talked a big talk of “getting the job done” and implemented changes that led to startlingly high inflation and low growth, to a damagingly weak currency, and to almost daily diplomatic spats with the EU. On “leveling up” the economy, he preached about the need to economically boost depressed areas of the country — yet, by the end of his tenure, inequality (including the geographic divisions that Johnson decried) was up and reliance on food charities was becoming a defining feature of the economic landscape.

    The GINI coefficient, a number used to measure inequality in individual countries, rose slightly for the first two years of Johnson’s premiership; when it fell marginally last year, that was due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the initial hit to top earners’ wealth in 2020, rather than to broader long-term policy changes. Months into his premiership, Johnson was forced to admit that the U.K. was more geographically unequal, in terms of income, than any other major industrial democracy.

    On COVID, he talked of the need for everyone to pitch in and sacrifice, yet it turns out that he and his colleagues were cavalierly breaking their own lockdown rules pretty much whenever the opportunity presented itself.

    As with Trump, Johnson felt a need to install “loyalists” around him. While Trump’s loyalists were almost all white and Christian, Johnson’s government was more ethnically and religiously diverse. Yet, despite that fact, its members generally shared the same elite class position and opted not to force the larger-than-life PM to share the spotlight with them. In the end, when push came to shove, Johnson valued sycophancy far more than diversity of opinion.

    Given this, it’s something of a miracle that Johnson sowed so much discord and distrust that even the loyalists who had spent the last several years compromising their own decency in pursuit of power felt the need to resign by the dozens last week, so as to force an end to his calamitous tenure in office.

    But, now that he has resigned in disgrace, Johnson seems to have no intention of going quietly into the political night. Within a day of resigning, the caretaker prime minister had put together a new cabinet, many of whose members were promptly derided by Conservative insiders as being so politically toxic that their presence in government could only have been considered by a prime minister looking to set in place political landmines for whomever his successor might be.

    His diehard supporters were already launching whispering campaigns against the frontrunner in the succession race, the ex-Chancellor Rishi Sunak. And despite promises not to embark on any controversial policy initiatives during his months as a caretaker, Johnson made it clear he would continue his policy of unilaterally ripping up the agreement with the EU regarding trade routes and inspection protocols in and out of Northern Ireland — a policy that threatens to trigger a trade war with Europe.

    There are, at last count, at least 15 likely contenders to succeed Johnson as Conservative Party leader and thus, as prime minister. Some of them are backbench nonentities who will surely fall to the wayside over the coming days and weeks; but several others are top Cabinet ministers, who will be in the campaign for the long haul. There’s Sunak, who until last week was the chancellor (the rough equivalent to the U.S. treasury secretary, though with more powers to set tax rates and craft a governing agenda); there’s Liz Truss, the hardline foreign secretary; and there’s Transport Secretary Grant Schapps. And then there’s Attorney General Suella Braverman, who has made a name for herself championing the most right-wing of Johnson’s policies, and who many in the British commentariat have described as being the most Trumpian in temperament of the whole gaggle. It’s likely that Sajid Javid — whose resignation from his position as health secretary was, along with Sunak’s exit, the trigger for the revolt that led to Johnson’s demise — will put his hat in the ring, as will the fiercely anti-immigrant, “law-and-order” Home Secretary Priti Patel.

    In this list of contenders, one can see the outlines of a Conservative Party at war with itself. There are one-nation moderates, such as the ex-military man Tom Tugendhat; but there are also a slew of hard-liners who care far more about the old Thatcherite project of lowering taxes and deregulating the economy. There are those opposed to recent National Insurance tax increases, and those who argue that every penny allocated for vital social goods, such as increased spending on the National Health Service and subsidies to tide poor residents over during this period of historically high energy prices, need to be paid for by taxes levelled not on the wealthiest but on ordinary, already financially strapped residents.

    Despite Johnson’s efforts to purge the party of anti-Brexiteers, there are at least some contenders who would, if asked privately, probably want to round out the sharpest edges of Britain’s ugly divorce from the EU. On the other side of the divide, there are those who would like nothing more than to make Brexit as hard, and as ironclad as possible, to entirely separate the U.K. from Europe’s human rights court, and to shred the environmental and workplace rules that broadly harmonize the U.K.’s labor market with that of continental Europe.

    Throughout, as this political saga has unfolded, the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties have largely been sidelined, watching as the Conservatives tear into each other and as their standing with the public has cratered. Some Conservative Party insiders have reportedly started talking about the prospects of the party splitting in the face of this bloodbath and these irreconcilable political differences, as did the Labour Party in the early 1980s, with disastrous consequences for its election prospects.

    Labour’s leader, Sir Keir Starmer, himself not the most charismatic or imaginative of leaders, was until recently also facing investigations by police into possible breaches of COVID lockdown restrictions. But last week, the local police force involved cleared him of any wrongdoing.

    Now, improbably, less than three years after Johnson led the Conservatives to an election victory that resulted in an 80-seat parliamentary majority, a newly refashioned Labour Party is far ahead of the Conservatives in the polls.

    If there were an election tomorrow, Labour, which is generally seen as being less corrupt and more in tune with the needs of economically struggling voters, would, according to these polls, come out with roughly 50 seats more than the Conservatives. As a result, it would be in a strong position to be able to form a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, and a smattering of nationalist groups — though the Scottish Nationalists, in particular, would likely drive a hard bargain before agreeing to support a Starmer premiership.

    Last month, when Johnson survived a no-confidence vote in his leadership, he made it clear he was hoping to rule for a decade. Now, barely a month later, he is about to be out on his ear, having suffered one of the most stunning turnarounds in British political history. Johnson the individual will soon be departing Downing Street, and Johnsonism as a political project has hit the rocks. Moreover, the party that he presided over so ruthlessly since 2019 is sliding into a summer of knives-out political infighting that could easily fracture it for years to come and ultimately lead to its electoral implosion two years from now when the next general election is held.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The UK Held Corruption Accountable. Why Can’t We?

    Sasha Abramsky

    Despite an extraordinary effort by Boris Johnson to cling to power, the parliamentary system and the principles of collective responsibility within the cabinet have held firm.

    The post The UK Held Corruption Accountable. Why Can’t We? appeared first on The Nation.

    This post was originally published on Article – The Nation.

  • Johnson’s Downfall Presents Rare Opportunity for Massive Political Reset in UK

    As I began writing this column from London late Wednesday night, Boris Johnson was still the U.K. prime minister. By 9:15 Thursday morning local time, after an extraordinary 36 hours in which dozens of his ministers and Conservative Party officials had resigned, he’d bowed to the inevitable and announced that he would resign, though he tried to fudge the issue by announcing he would remain in power until the autumn. More likely, however, is that he’ll be forced out of office by his own party within days. It is a hard landing for a man who has flown so high for so long.

    Johnson’s demise presents a rare opportunity for a political reset in Britain; for a rejection of the demagoguery, the scapegoating, the corruption and ultimately the sheer ineptitude of his years in office; and for new, less deliberately conflictual thinking on post-Brexit Britain’s relationship to the European Union. It will also remove from the Westminster scene a man who has used his manifest skills to such malign effect over the past decade, building up coalitions, both in Parliament and amongst the electorate at large, based largely around a slew of resentments and misrepresentations of reality.

    Johnson, like Donald Trump, has been a wrecking ball of institutions and of political norms for years now. Having made his name as a sensationalist contrarian journalist and commentator, he went on to become mayor of London. As a mayor, he defied easy political stereotypes. He was conservative, yet he claimed to be an environmentalist and loved being seen riding around on his bike. He was an unabashed nostalgist for empire and traditionalism, yet at the same time supported LGBTQ rights and abortion rights. Throughout his tenure he built his national profile, and, when he entered Parliament, he swiftly rose up the ranks of the Conservative Party and into the cabinet.

    Always nakedly ambitious, Johnson saw a road to power during the Brexit years by opportunistically siding with the Brexiteers, and then sabotaging Theresa May’s government and her leadership by positioning himself as a hard-liner willing to go to (at least rhetorical) war with Europe in order to “get Brexit done.” It worked; in the summer of 2019, he orchestrated a palace coup against May, then, as the party’s new leader, called a snap general election, which the Conservatives, running on populist, nativist themes, won in a landslide.

    Throughout, however, even as his career thrived, he bounced from one scandal to another to another.

    Again, like Trump, Johnson long defied political gravity, essentially bulldozing his way through the opposition and practicing a take-no-prisoners kind of politics that knocked down institutions deemed to stand in the way of his political and personal vision, as well as individuals who didn’t tow the Johnson line enough.

    In June, after months of scandals surrounding lockdown-era booze-filled parties at 10 Downing Street, stories of influence peddling and concomitant declines in the popularity of Johnson as an individual and of the party that he leads, the prime minister survived an internal Conservative Party no-confidence vote in his leadership, organized through the arcane party governing organization known as the 1922 Committee. But he came out of the vote politically mauled, with more than 40 percent of his own MPs having voted against him. Where most political leaders, faced with an internal rebellion of such a magnitude would have either resigned, or at the very least publicly eaten humble pie, Johnson relentlessly ploughed on, declaring his narrow victory to be definitive, and vowing to implement his “mandate” over the coming years.

    This week, however, Johnson’s high-wire act finally came crashing down. The scandal that did him in involves an MP, Chris Pincher, who has a slew of allegations surrounding him regarding the drunken groping of fellow male parliamentarians and others at various Conservative Party functions. Despite knowing of the allegations, Johnson promoted Pincher to deputy chief whip; then, when the allegations became publicly known, he denied he had been aware of them, and corralled his fellow cabinet members to defend him [Johnson]. When it became clear that he was lying to the public, to Parliament and to his own colleagues in the cabinet, Johnson’s already fragile support quickly began to evaporate.

    Over an extraordinary 24-hour period, from Tuesday night through Wednesday evening, nearly 40 ministers, including Johnson’s chancellor, Rishi Sunak, and his health secretary (and former chancellor), Sajid Javid, resigned. By breakfast time on Thursday, another 14 had called it a day.

    Wednesday afternoon, in what must count as one of the most brutal Parliamentary Question Times in U.K. history, Johnson was subjected to hours of unrelenting questions, many of them from members of his own party. Time and again, MPs called on him to resign, and time and again he refused, shouting at, berating, insulting his colleagues and promising — perhaps more to himself than to anyone else — that he would finish the job he had been elected to do. It was a stunningly truculent, albeit entertaining, performance. As he dug in, the questions got angrier. “Was there any circumstance that he could imagine in which he would resign?” one of his Conservative colleagues angrily asked. Johnson, almost visibly wincing, sidestepped the query.

    After Question Time ended, Javid, his longtime friend and colleague, dug in the knife, making a deeply personal appeal to integrity and honor and public service in explaining to the House of Commons why he felt he could no longer stay in Johnson’s cabinet, and publicly appealing to others of good conscience in the cabinet to force Johnson’s hand by resigning en masse.

    Throughout that afternoon and evening, and into Thursday morning, the machinations, the plotting and the counter-plotting continued. Every few minutes, the bottom of the BBC’s television news feed updated the numbers of ministers who had resigned; the number of backbench MPs who were saying they no longer had confidence in Johnson’s leadership; the number of senior cabinet ministers — including his newly appointed chancellor, and his home secretary — who were either publicly or privately telling Johnson he had no choice but to resign.

    And still the resignation didn’t come. Instead, Johnson dug in. Over the phone, he fired Michael Gove, one of his top cabinet ministers and an erstwhile loyalist who late Wednesday afternoon had told the prime minister it was time for him to go; Gove was, “Downing Street sources” told the media, a “snake.” The beleaguered prime minister announced once again that he had a mandate and wouldn’t let himself be removed from office, even as, practically by the minute, more of his erstwhile colleagues resigned.

    Johnson may not literally have grabbed the steering wheel of his Secret Service-driven car, as Trump reportedly did on January 6; he may not have literally cried out, “I’m the fucking prime minister,” in the way that Trump shrieked, “I’m the fucking president” while trying to convince his driver to drive him to the Capitol where his mob was attempting to stop the peaceful transition of power and lynch Vice President Mike Pence. But for all intents and purposes, Johnson’s undignified actions and his refusal to accept that the political jig was up, were similar. This is a man who thinks that he is the sun around which the world revolves. And, even though his power derives from the parliamentary system, and, in particular, from the Conservative MPs who make up his parliamentary majority, he seemed to have decided that, come hell or high water, he wouldn’t leave office simply because he no longer had majority support even within his own party.

    By early Thursday morning, his stubborn clinging to power had become a constitutional crisis. And by the start of the business day, it had become entirely untenable. So many ministers were resigning around him that he no longer had a functional government to preside over. Eventually, begrudgingly, Johnson bowed to the inevitable and announced that he would be leaving Downing Street.

    From Tuesday to Thursday morning, Johnson was, politically speaking, a dead man walking. Now the corpse has finally stopped walking. It’s an extraordinary moment in U.K. politics.

    Will this tale of corruption and malfeasance yield a new era for the U.K.? Does the widespread condemnation of Johnson’s ways open the door for a wildly different — even opposite — set of political priorities? Possibly, but only up to a point. The unique confluence of corruption, demagoguery and charisma that Johnson channeled will no longer hold such sway; but the damage done by his opportunistic methods of governance, the chaos unleashed by a hard Brexit, and the distrust that he promoted of democratic institutions and customs, will likely scar the British political landscape for years to come.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The Biden Administration Needs to Act Like a Blue State

    Sasha Abramsky

    California, Oregon, and Washington are taking more action to protect abortion rights than the federal government.

    The post The Biden Administration Needs to Act Like a Blue State appeared first on The Nation.

    This post was originally published on Article – The Nation.

  • The Supreme Court Is Now Forcing Taxpayers to Pay for Anti-Gay Religious Schools

    Yesterday’s shameful Supreme Court ruling on Roe v. Wade was telegraphed months ago.

    But, during the angst-laden wait for the Supreme Court’s ruling on Roe, the court, so radically reshaped during the Donald Trump years, made hay trashing other vital precedents in its stampede to remake the country’s legal priorities in an extreme-right direction. This court will, with the Roe ruling and with a slew of other rulings from the past weeks, go down as arguably the most destructive court in United States history, certainly the most destructive in the post-Civil War era.

    The six members who make up the majority on the court must be understood as far right extremists, not “conservatives.” By definition conservatives are not supposed to like sudden, jarring change; they are supposed to put a premium on stability and continuity. This court, by contrast, is a radically activist court, selectively trashing precedents to inject a far right vision of the role of religion in U.S. society, as well as reimagining labor and environmental law so as to harm consumers, immiserate the environment and benefit powerful corporate interests.

    In no realm have they done more harm recently than in education. This week’s startling Carson v. Makin decision, in a case coming out of Maine, effectively mandates that schools subsidize parochial religious education institutions at taxpayers’ expense.

    The background for the case is pretty straightforward: For more than 40 years, Maine has been providing subsidies to a few residents, who lived in very remote rural areas without easy access to public schools, to send their children to private schools. But, in keeping with state law on the issue, it has limited the funding to “nonsectarian” schools. Recently, two sets of parents sued, arguing that the state should fund their children’s attendance at Christian schools.

    Had precedent held any weight whatsoever, this case wouldn’t have made it past first base. After all, roughly three dozen states have long had constitutional provisions, known as Blaine Amendments, many of them dating back to the 19th century, banning the public funding of religious schools.

    The Blaine Amendments are a critical pillar supporting the notion that states have an obligation to fund non-religious education institutions available to all children. They are — ironically, given that this week’s Maine-originated ruling essentially struck them down — named after a 19th century Republican politician in Maine, James Gillespie Blaine. They were pushed federally from 1875 onward, when Congress passed a law requiring all new states to add a Blaine Amendment into their state constitutions.

    In 2004, in Locke v. Davey, seven of the nine Supreme Court justices ruled that a state-funded university scholarship program in Washington State could exclude theology majors, owing to the fact that the state’s Blaine Amendment prohibited stated funding for religious “worship, exercise, or instruction.”

    That Supreme Court-endorsed wall separating public funding from religious education started to break down in the following decade, as the court’s composition shifted rightward.

    In 2020, the Supreme Court chipped away at the separation of church and state, when, in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue it allowed to stand a Montana law providing tax credits to people who wanted to contribute to a scholarship fund for parents sending children to religious schools. But that ruling simply said a state may provide such credits; and, moreover, it only provided for indirect state funding of religious schools.

    Now the court has gone much further: The Carson v. Makin ruling is far more radical in its implications than the Montana case was. It essentially asserts that if states do choose to have a program to subsidize some private schools, they must include in that program direct subsidies for religious schooling as well, and, in so doing, it lays the groundwork for what could soon become a concerted legal effort to undermine the principle of universally available, secular, public education.

    In a six-three ruling issued Tuesday, the Supreme Court declared that the Maine restrictions were discriminatory against religion and against religious people, and ruled the law — which emerged out of the bedrock principle of separation of church and state — null and void.

    “Maine has chosen to offer tuition assistance that parents may direct to the public or private schools of their choice,” page 3 of the majority opinion, penned by Chief Justice Roberts, notes. “Maine’s administration of that benefit is subject to the free exercise principles governing any public benefit program—including the prohibition on denying the benefit based on a recipient’s religious exercise.”

    Religious schools don’t have to adhere to state standards or abide by anti-discrimination laws — the schools involved in the lawsuit don’t accept gay students. Moreover, religious schools don’t have to teach secular subjects, such as science, that would be mandated in any public school.

    In his dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer argued that this ruling, which mandates Maine to fund religious schools, opens the door to a broad-based assault on the concept of universal, secular, education. “What happens once ‘may’ becomes ‘must’?” he asked of his colleagues. “Does that transformation mean that a school district that pays for public schools must pay equivalent funds to parents who wish to send their children to religious schools? Does it mean that school districts that give vouchers for use at charter schools must pay equivalent funds to parents who wish to give their children a religious education?”

    Those same states, set to ban abortion now that this radical-right Supreme Court has given them the green light by overturning Roe, already have disproportionately influential religious-right movements.

    How long will it be, now that the Supreme Court has so weakened the ability of states to withhold public education dollars from sectarian schools, before one or another legislative house or right-wing governor looking for a radically disruptive educational policy to champion, backs the notion of widespread state payments to religious schools?

    How long will it be before states or individual school districts start proposing educational “reforms” that have the effect of utterly undermining secular public schools and ultimately replacing them, or at least complementing them, with growing networks of sectarian education institutes?

    Given all the other major stories competing for the headlines this week — from the overturn of Roe, to congressional hearings into the insurrection of January 6, to the war in Ukraine, to inflation, to primary season — it’s unlikely that Carson v. Makin will make it onto the public’s radar, but it should.

    With this ruling, largely flying under the radar, the Supreme Court has just set the stage for ferocious battles over the future of publicly funded education in the U.S. over the coming years and decades.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • For Once, a Republican Tells the Truth About Trump

    Sasha Abramsky

    At the ongoing Jan. 6 hearings, Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers made clear the depth of the former president’s abuse of power.

    The post For Once, a Republican Tells the Truth About Trump appeared first on The Nation.

    This post was originally published on Article – The Nation.

  • Trumpist Election Denier Could Beat Democrat in Nevada Race If Turnout Is Low

    The midterm elections are still more than four months away, but for a year now the GOP’s front-runner candidate for the United States Senate race in Nevada has been telling radio show hosts that he’s ready to sue should the results not go his way.

    Adam Laxalt — an erstwhile naval officer who served as a one-term state attorney general, ran for and lost a race for the governorship in 2018 and then moved on to head Donald Trump’s reelection campaign in the state — is a dyed-in-the-wool Trumpite. In 2020, that meant that he went to bat for the embattled president in going to court to challenge votes cast for Joe Biden in Las Vegas, and to cast doubt on the accuracy of the signature-verification machines used for mail-in ballots in Clark County.

    Like other such lawsuits around the country, Laxalt’s went nowhere, and Nevada’s Electoral College votes were certified for Biden. Outside of the courts, however, he also mounted a full-court effort in conservative media to convince audiences that thousands of dead people and people who were alive but no longer in Nevada had illegally voted in the presidential election.

    These days, Laxalt’s fealty to Trumpism largely means that he continues to buy hook, line and sinker into the notion that the 2020 presidential election, certified by Congress after dozens of lawsuits failed and after the January 6 insurrection fizzled, was stolen and that, moving forward, his primary duty is to push to manipulate the franchise in ways likely to secure ongoing GOP electoral victories.

    His reward? A Trump endorsement in the primary, as well as a Mar-a-Lago fundraiser that helped him fend off a late-stage challenge from retired Army Capt. Sam Brown. Unlike in a number of other states — where the conservative, anti-tax, anti-regulatory Club for Growth broke with Trump and endorsed alternative candidates — in Nevada, Trump and the Club for Growth marched in lockstep, both supporting Laxalt.

    Laxalt emerged victorious in the Nevada primaries on June 14. In November, he will take on Democratic incumbent Catherine Cortez Masto, a vulnerable senator in a swing state won by Biden by only 2 percentage points in 2020.

    Pre-primary polling in the spring by Insight showed that Masto had an 8-point lead over Laxalt in a potential head-to-head. But since then, inflation has worsened (as epitomized by soaring gas prices), interest rates have headed north at a trot and President Biden’s poll numbers have further skidded into negative territory.

    In the months since, a range of polling — which, in the run-up to the primaries, and before voters have really dialed into the races, is notoriously fickle — has produced an all-over-the-map set of outcomes: Some polls show Cortez Masto with a double-digit lead; others have Laxalt up by as much as 7 percent. Overall, The New York Times’s FiveThirtyEight site estimates that the incumbent Democrat currently has a roughly 4-point lead over Laxalt.

    Cortez Masto is boosted by the fact that, even with the declining national climate for Democrats, she enjoys huge leads among Latino voters in the state and also stands to benefit from blowback against the raft of court rulings, and follow-on legislative restrictions undermining the right to an abortion nationally; in Nevada, polling shows overwhelming public support for the right to access abortion care.

    In a high-turnout election, it’s hard to see how Cortez Masto would lose to Laxalt. But 2022 could clearly shape up to be a low-turnout election, especially if inflation, high interest rates and a slowing economy combine to create a general sense of malaise — a gnawing feeling that no politician, whatever their party affiliation is capable of turning things around — and of anxiety about the direction the country is heading in. Turnout in the June primaries was a mere 25 percent; this compares with nearly 30 percent in the 2020 primaries (and fully 77 percent in the 2020 general election).

    Yet even these numbers aren’t entirely doom and gloom for Cortez Masto. In fact, despite the decline between 2020 and 2022, the percentage of the electorate participating in this year’s primaries is actually far higher than was the miserably low primary turnout in 2018 and in 2016; and that augurs well for Cortez Masto in her contest against Laxalt. If she can motivate enough of the Democratic base to turn out in November, she should eke out a win. But there are a lot of “ifs” in that scenario.

    Laxalt, by contrast, is hoping that his fealty to Trumpism will rally the faithful to his cause. Laxalt’s career trajectory, from his being a traditional conservative to becoming a conspiracy theorist willing to carry water for Trump at all times, is similar to much of what is going on at a state level in the GOP throughout the country. Look around the U.S., and you see one Republican Party organ after the next working to outdo their rivals in embracing evermore outlandish conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and the COVID-19 crisis. And Republican candidates and leaders are pursuing ever more conservative goals to restrict voting rights and promote a highly partisan vision of election oversight.

    Just this past week, the Texas GOP, for example, voted to include in its far right party platform a bizarre statement asserting that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, that Biden is only the “acting president,” and that the Voting Rights Act ought to be repealed in its entirety. In Pennsylvania, a “Stop the Steal” supporter is the GOP’s candidate for governor. In Arizona, the Trump-backed front-runner in the race to be GOP nominee for governor has called for the arrest of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci, and so on.

    Back in his home state, Laxalt’s GOP has an ominous warning on its website, announcing that the state is “Ground Zero” for “Democrat skullduggery.” The Clark County GOP site pushes a package of “election integrity reforms,” chief among which are voter ID requirements. Further, Jim Marchant, the winner of the primary contest to be the GOP candidate for secretary of state, says that his first priority, if elected, would be to “overhaul the fraudulent election system in Nevada.”

    The race between Laxalt and Cortez Masto may well determine which party controls the U.S. Senate come next year. Given the policy stances of the Nevada GOP and its leading candidates, as well as Laxalt’s history over the past few years, it’s a fair bet that if the GOP Senate candidate makes it to D.C., he will use his power to further erode voting rights and further damage the U.S.’s already fragile democratic infrastructure.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Does the Future of US Democracy Hang on Talks Between Clarence and Ginni Thomas?

    Virginia “Ginni” Thomas — the far right political activist who is married to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas — is once again in the news due to reports that the House select committee investigating the January 6 attack has unearthed a string of email correspondence between her and conservative attorney John Eastman, who pushed Mike Pence to refuse to certify the election results that booted Donald Trump out of the White House.

    Reporters have not yet accessed details about the email thread’s contents, but its existence alone has raised even more red flags about Ginni Thomas’s alleged involvement in Trump’s plot to overturn the election.

    According to CNBC, the January 6 committee announced today that it now plans to “invite Ginni Thomas to testify about her involvement in efforts to reverse Donald Trump’s presidential election loss.”

    This is not the first time that evidence has emerged about Ginni Thomas’s role in ​​strategizing ways to find legal rationales to pressure Mike Pence to essentially declare various state elections null and void, and simply reinstall Trump as president.

    Back in March the House committee investigating January 6 obtained details about text messages that Ginni Thomas sent to former President Donald Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, urging him to continue the fight to overturn the election results. As stories like these have done the rounds, calls have grown for Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from any and all Supreme Court cases relating to elections and their legitimacy. To date, he has refused to recuse himself.

    This is a story that gets more awful the more we know. Last week’s devastating revelation was that in the weeks after the election, Ginni Thomas contacted 29 Arizona legislators, urging each and every one of them to decertify Arizona’s vote and instead “choose” alternative electors who would cast their lot with Trump. Had they done so, they would have taken a very deliberate step to overturn the will of the people, and a significant step to destroy democracy in the United States.

    Thomas isn’t some lone eccentric simply trying to project her personal opinion. She is a leading operative on the board of a shadowy right-wing coordinating group called the Council for National Policy (CNP).

    In the mid-1990s, when I was fresh out of journalism school and accepting pretty much any freelance assignment that I could lay my hands on, I worked for several months as a researcher on a book called The Armchair Activist. It documented the various organizations that made up the spine of the U.S.’s fast-growing far right and ultraconservative movements, and was intended as a how-to handbook providing organizing tools for progressives to counter these groups.

    One memory of the project that stands out is the tentacle-like behind-the-scenes power of the CNP. Out of the public eye, the organization, which had been set up 15 years earlier, in 1981, quietly but extraordinarily effectively developed policy goals — and organizing methods to reach those goals — that covered pretty much everything from restricting the franchise, to demolishing the social safety net, to ending access to abortion and expanding access to guns.

    The New York Times has, quite correctly, labeled the CNP a “little known club of a few hundred of the most powerful conservatives in the county.” Think of it as a sort of exclusive country club, where conservative icons, such as the Koch brothers, the DeVoses, the Scaifes, and other wealthy luminaries of the right go to brainstorm and break bread with less wealthy but politically well-connected men and women such as Ginni Thomas.

    In recent years, it has gotten increasingly influential. During Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings, the CNP met, in secret, for a three-day strategy meeting, to plot a way toward implementing a hyper-conservative social, cultural and religious agenda given the new conservative majority on the Supreme Court. Attendees included a slew of top Republican political figures — including Rep. Jim Jordan — conservative donors, and Christian-right leaders.

    In March 2020, Vice President Mike Pence thanked the organization for “consistently amplifying the agenda of President Trump.” That same year, Trump himself spoke for a full hour at the organization’s annual meeting.

    When I was researching The Armchair Activist, I remember drawing a series of diagrams, putting the CNP in a big circle in the center, and, with great theatricality, explaining to my fellow researchers how all of these different individuals and organizations connected via this coordinating hub.

    In the decades since, every so often I’ve encountered a policy or organizing effort in which the CNP was involved and been startled, all over again, at just how powerful this secretive organization is.

    A hundred years from now, when historians want to understand how this country lurched so far rightward in such a relatively brief period of time, the critical role of the CNP in helping to shape and implement the right-wing agenda will, I am sure, be pored over.

    That the spouse of a sitting U.S. Supreme Court justice is a board member of this group and an activist pushing its radical right causes, ought to give anyone who cares both about the state of U.S. democracy and about the legitimacy and independence of the country’s top judicial institution serious pause. In a stunning exposé earlier this year, The New York Times Magazine argued that no spouse of a sitting Supreme Court Justice has ever, in U.S. history, been more of an overt political activist than Ginni Thomas.

    The Thomases claim that there is somehow an iron wall separating their two careers — that Clarence Thomas has nothing to do with Ginni Thomas’s political organizing efforts. That’s clearly not the case. In 2002, Justice Thomas was a headline speaker at a CNP gathering outside Washington, D.C. In 2020, as Trump sought desperately to cling to power, the CNP was central to the messaging effort to try to frame the election as having been stolen; and while the Supreme Court repeatedly threw out Trump campaign efforts to overturn state results, Clarence Thomas came closer than other justices to entertaining sympathies for at least some of the Trump arguments, in particular vis-à-vis the nebulous notion that there had been widespread election fraud in November 2020.

    His dissent in one of the Pennsylvania lawsuits around mail-in ballots borrowed heavily from the sorts of arguments developed by the CNP and related groupings.

    Had Arizona’s legislators responded to pressure from the CNP and other right-wing groups by overturning their state’s election result, all hell would have broken loose. It would have triggered a constitutional crisis, would have likely precipitated mass protests, and would, almost certainly, have resulted in the Supreme Court eventually having to get involved in arbitrating the process.

    Moreover, Clarence Thomas was the lone dissenter to the Supreme Court’s January order rejecting Trump’s bid to withhold documents from the House select committee investigating the January 6 attack. Maybe he did so out of genuine legal concern for precedents that would be set in the perennial power struggle between the executive and legislative branches. It’s at least possible, however, that he was concerned that his spouse’s intemperate emails and other exchanges would, if the documents were released, become part of the public record. Perhaps Ginni Thomas had mentioned to him just how involved she was in the efforts to challenge the results of the 2020 election.

    It is surreal to think that, in a moment of national peril, the future of the country continues to hang, not on weighty legal arguments, but on at-home conversations between one U.S. Supreme Court justice and his far right activist spouse.

  • Kevin McCarthy Is Still Trump’s Accomplice

    Sasha Abramsky

    The congressman’s attempts to deflect from the January 6 hearings show that he is willing to continue leading the country down the path to tyranny.

    The post Kevin McCarthy Is Still Trump’s Accomplice appeared first on The Nation.

    This post was originally published on Article – The Nation.

  • Why California Voters Recalled Chesa Boudin

    Sasha Abramsky

    The ousting of the progressive San Francisco district attorney suggests that Democrats have failed to win the public with their messaging on criminal justice.

    The post Why California Voters Recalled Chesa Boudin appeared first on The Nation.

    This post was originally published on Article – The Nation.

  • High Voter Apathy and Amped-Up Fears About Crime Shaped California Primaries

    There are three main takeaways from California’s elections this week.

    First, the level of voter apathy ought to send a shudder through the political establishment. Voter turnout was shockingly low. Despite all 22 million registered voters in the state being sent mail-in ballots weeks ago, as of Election Day, only 18 percent of ballots had been returned early.

    Voters’ fury at high inflation and, in particular, high gasoline prices, as well as the sense of lingering anxiety unleashed by the pandemic, didn’t necessarily translate to a tsunami against California’s Democratic state leadership; but it did result in a mass abstention from an election that generated precious little of the political passion and engagement that became something of a routine during former President Donald Trump’s years.

    With voter turnout flagging on Election Day itself, the percentage of voters taking part in the election was hovering somewhere around 25 percent, which was the record low for participation set during the primary elections in 2014. Contrast this with the June primary elections two years ago, when nearly half of all registered voters cast their ballots.

    Second, of those who voted, most stuck with the marquee-name Democrats. Gov. Gavin Newsom, Attorney General Rob Bonta and U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla all cruised to large primary wins, and all head into November’s election with what ought to be insurmountable leads in the opinion polls. Despite the sense of angst throughout the electorate, this didn’t translate to an automatic tilt rightward across the board. In other words, whatever the hype in the media in the next few days, California as a whole isn’t about to shift red.

    In fact, in at least one of the GOP congressional seats in the state, a Republican incumbent stumbled badly. In the 41st District, Rep. Ken Calvert appears to have won roughly 43 percent of the vote, which put him eight points up on his nearest Democratic rival but far behind the total Democratic vote, split between two candidates, of about 50 percent. Come November, these numbers give Democrats more than a fighting chance of picking up the seat.

    Meanwhile, in the 22nd District, currently represented by Republican David Valadao, who was one of a handful of GOP congressmembers who voted to impeach Trump in the wake of the January 6 insurrection, GOP primary voters appear to have sat on their hands. With counting still underway, it’s entirely possible that Valadao, the incumbent, will end up with less than a quarter of the total vote.

    But the third takeaway arguably has the biggest impact on the national stage. In a recall election flooded with cash from conservative GOP billionaires and with misinformation on crime data in the Bay Area, San Francisco voters decisively voted to recall progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin.

    On one hand, the vote can be seen as a backlash against progressives’ efforts to decrease mass incarceration and instead address the root causes that lead people to commit crimes. For weeks, polls had suggested Boudin was going to lose, with voters citing their discomfort with homeless encampments, in-the-open drug use and crime rates as top issues in the lead-up to the vote.

    But the outcome must also be understood in the context of massive dark money PAC spending from Republican billionaires like William Oberndorf and Ron Conway, who have bankrolled an effort to spread narratives about soaring crime rates in San Francisco.

    In reality, however, the Washington Post offers a different snapshot of crime in the city: “Like most big U.S. cities, San Francisco has seen a rise in homicides during the pandemic, although rates remain far below those of past decades, and other cities have experienced bigger per capita jumps. Overall violent crime here remains at some of the lowest levels it has been in four decades.” The Post goes on to note that property crime is in the process of “declining gradually to pre-covid levels” but that residential burglaries currently remain higher than pre-pandemic levels.

    In the face of this billionaire-bankrolled recall effort, Boudin — who had pushed forward efforts related to jail-diversion, to further the rehabilitation of people with criminal convictions, and to address the deeper causes that trigger young people to engage in crime — lost by an even larger margin than was expected. The outgoing DA in many ways got the short end of the stick, as a critical mass of voters blamed him, and his progressive prosecutor priorities, for problems like the rampant and highly visible overdose crisis — in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, more San Franciscans died of overdoes than of COVID — that began festering decades before he ran for office.

    So large was the “yes” vote that the Associated Press called the result within a half hour of the polls closing. Boudin will now have to step down, and the city’s mayor, London Breed, who has been urging the DA’s office to take a tougher, more pro-policing stance, will be tasked with appointing his replacement.

    Given the large number of progressive DAs who have been elected around the country in the past few years — from Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner to Los Angeles’s George Gascon — and who have struggled mightily with messaging in recent months, Boudin’s recall in one of the country’s most liberal cities could have huge ramifications, raising questions about whether voters are wavering in their support for exploring alternatives to the violent, racist and stunningly expensive, lock-‘em-up-and-throw-away-the-key strategies of broken-windows policing and the “war on drugs.”

    It’s clear that voters have grown increasingly concerned about homelessness, addiction, mental illness and street crime, so any progressive efforts at decarceration need to explicitly speak to those issues. Boudin struggled to do so when addressing his constituents.

    In the end, tens of thousands of liberal San Franciscans — people who wouldn’t in a million years have voted for Trump, and wouldn’t in a million years vote for a Republican for statewide office in California — were persuaded by a dark money-funded recall effort emphasizing concerns about street conditions and public safety to upend the apple cart and ditch Boudin.

    It’s important to note, however, that voters up and down the state did not follow suit in giving conservative law-and-order voices a carte blanche: In the high profile race for Sacramento County sheriff, for example, the more liberal candidate, Jim Cooper, beat his conservative rival in the race to replace Trumpite outgoing sheriff and congressional hopeful Scott Jones.

    However, California voters’ concerns about highly visible issues of homelessness, addiction and mental illness, as well as concerns about crime, also played out in important ways in the Los Angeles’s mayor’s race. In LA’s case, it translated into a large vote against progressive Rep. Karen Bass, who went into the election as far-and-away the odds-on favorite to be the city’s next mayor, but who ended up losing ground to mall developer Rick Caruso.

    Caruso picked up endorsements from a slew of top business figures, including Elon Musk; and his campaign closed hard, his support noticeably improving in the last weeks of the campaign. He built a strong base of support, across ethnic and class groups, in part by convincing voters that he was serious about tackling a homelessness crisis that has become visible with the emergence of encampments even in uber-affluent neighborhoods of LA such as Venice Beach.

    In the end, it looks as if the wealthy developer has eked out a slight win over Bass, and, in so doing, put himself in poll position to be the next mayor of the country’s second-largest city. If that does indeed go down, it would be a huge, and catastrophic, reversal in fortune for a Democratic Party that has, since at least Barack Obama’s election in 2008, recast itself as the party of the U.S.’s great metropolises.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Fertilizer Shortage Will Drive Global Food Prices Higher as Ukraine War Drags On

    Across the country, people are struggling to purchase nutritious food as global inflation takes root. Low-income people already spend a disproportionate proportion of their income on groceries.

    The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that between April 2021 and April 2022, food prices increased by an average of 9.4 percent. But that includes restaurants prices, which increased at a slightly lower clip than grocery prices. Grocery and supermarket prices, by contrast, in April were fully 10.8 percent higher than in the previous year. The department’s Economic Research Services estimates that these prices will increase a further 8 percent this year.

    This isn’t just an American problem. Globally, the disruptions to supply chains triggered by the pandemic, the rolling environmental catastrophe of climate change, and the war in Ukraine — which has bottled up millions of tons of vital supplies of wheat in blockaded Ukrainian ports and also led to a massive shortage of fertilizer — have combined to wreak havoc on food markets. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization has, in recent months, recorded record-high prices around the world for cereals, dairy products, meat, sugar, and vegetable oils, among other food products. Since Russia and Ukraine between them account for nearly a quarter of the world’s wheat exports, economic embargoes against Russia, combined with Russia’s blockade of Ukraine, risk a global food calamity on a scale not seen in decades.

    Indeed, the UN estimates that the war alone could push up global food prices by a jaw-dropping 22 percent. It also estimates that many countries, including a large number in Latin America, Eastern Europe and Asia, receive up to 30 percent of their fertilizer supplies from Russia. The food security of these countries now is at risk of becoming collateral damage of the international efforts to isolate Russia from the global economy as a punishment for its actions in Ukraine. Shortages of fertilizer have led to soaring prices; some forms of fertilizer are now selling on the global market at far higher rates even than in 2008, when international markets across the board experienced massive price swings as the financial system began the swoon that would lead it to near-collapse. And as fertilizer prices rise, domestic agricultural production in many countries will take a huge hit. That hit will, of course, come just as the import market for food staples is also under unprecedented stress.

    In countries such as Egypt, which import roughly half of their wheat from Ukraine and Russia, the prospect of hunger and even bread riots is now all too real. Last month, Egypt negotiated a deal to secure Ukrainian wheat exports via rail shipments into Poland, and, from there, via ship to Egypt, but it’s by no means clear that the movement of grain by rail will be of a scale necessary to plug the gaps caused by Russia’s blockade of Ukrainian sea ports.

    In a normal year, Lebanon imports most of its wheat from Ukraine, according to the UN. More than 90 percent of Somalia’s wheat imports come from Ukraine and Russia. Almost all of Eritrea’s wheat imports come from these two countries, along with more than 85 percent of Turkey’s wheat imports. And the list goes on. The scarcity caused by the war, combined with the soaring prices, will, inevitably, push many of the world’s poorest, most vulnerable people further into insecurity and hunger.

    Last year, the Global Report on Food Crises found that 193 million people spread across more than fifty countries were “acutely food insecure.” That was a staggering 40 million more than in 2020, which in turn was higher than the pre-pandemic numbers. The 2022 report warns that the world’s food situation is likely to further deteriorate due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

    This won’t immediately translate into mass hunger or food shortages in the U.S. The food distribution system in this country — combined with the massive, life-saving presence of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and a well-oiled food bank and food pantry distribution system — is too robust to see mass food shortages anytime soon.

    But that doesn’t mean that millions of Americans aren’t suffering tremendous economic dislocation as their weekly grocery bills continue to rise. Meat prices in particular have been spiking over the past couple years: The USDA estimates beef prices could rise by an eye-popping 16 percent this year alone. Poultry prices will likely rise by more than 12 percent. But many other food staples are soaring in price as well: the price of eggs will, the USDA estimates, increase by 11 percent, and fresh fruit by more than 10 percent.

    For middle class people, these price increases are an annoyance, but a manageable one. After all, most Americans, accustomed to endless supplies of cheap things to eat, spend less than 10 percent of their total income on food. But people in the bottom quintile of earnings in the country spend far more — close to 40 percent of their pre-tax income — on buying groceries. This is closer to what an average American at the start of the twentieth century was spending on food than to what an average American in the third decade of the twenty-first century spends on groceries.

    Historically, soaring food prices have often served as triggers, or predictors, for political upheaval. It was, for example, inflation in the bread markets that helped create the conditions for the French Revolution in the years leading up to 1789. The United States is already in turmoil politically. Massive spikes in food prices this year will only increase the political volatility. That could, of course, push more Americans in a progressive direction, building support for income subsidies, progressive tax policies and the like.

    However, discontent could also drain into the pool of right-wing populism, the politics of resentment and of scapegoating out of which former President Trump emerged, a mantle that an increasing number of hard-right politicians are now claiming as their own. Low-income families are already experiencing soaring fuel and housing costs while facing real and immediate economic pain because of rising food prices. Daily life is, for them, already an economic high-wire act, with every unanticipated expense a potential crisis forcing them into a fall. High food prices exacerbate this sense of economic insecurity.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Can California Democrats Do Enough to Block a Rural Right-Wing Revolt?

    Sasha Abramsky

    Democratic legislators are stepping up their efforts to bring relief to voters, but amid soaring gas prices and an intensifying drought, they may not be sufficient.

    The post Can California Democrats Do Enough to Block a Rural Right-Wing Revolt? appeared first on The Nation.

    This post was originally published on Article – The Nation.

  • Paul LePage Is Back!

    Sasha Abramsky

    He called himself “Trump before Trump.” Now, he wants to stage a comeback.

    The post Paul LePage Is Back! appeared first on The Nation.

    This post was originally published on Article – The Nation.

  • California Offers a Rare Alternative to the Pro-Gun Free-for-All

    Sasha Abramsky

    While Texas and other states double down on the gun love, the golden state has at least attempted to enact regulations that will keep kids safe.

    The post California Offers a Rare Alternative to the Pro-Gun Free-for-All appeared first on The Nation.

    This post was originally published on Article – The Nation.

  • Idaho’s GOP Voters Push Back Against Trump’s Picks

    Idaho has been a hotbed of far right organizing for decades. Back in the early 1990s, it helped seed the modern militia movement, and played host to Aryan Nation organizers and other white supremacist groups looking to set up compounds in the remote mountainous reaches of the state.

    More recently, Idaho Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin appeared as a speaker at a white nationalist event, the “America First Political Action Conference.” She has also denounced the governor, fellow Republican Brad Little, as being a sellout for permitting localities to impose mask mandates during the pandemic. At one point in 2021, she used a period when the governor was traveling to put an executive order in place to ban such mandates. (Governor Little reversed that order when he returned.)

    With former President Donald Trump’s backing, the extremist McGeachin ran against Little in the GOP primaries earlier this month. She was soundly beaten. So, too, was the far right candidate running to succeed McGeachin as lieutenant governor, a fighter pilot and state representative named Priscilla Giddings, who was censored by her own colleagues last year for circulating the name of a teenager who had alleged that another former state representative had raped her.

    Giddings soundly lost to Idaho House Speaker Scott Bedke, the epitome of “establishment” in the state’s politics. In the primary for the secretary of state’s position, a moderate county clerk, Phil McGrane, beat out two opponents who denied the legitimacy of President Joe Biden’s November 2020 election victory.

    Given how conservative Idaho — which in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was home to some of the most radical unions and progressive politicians in the country — has become in recent decades, the successful rearguard action fought by traditional Republicans against insurgent far right rivals was, on the surface, surprising. After all, recently, in nearby rural regions with a political makeup similar to that of rural Idaho, such as California’s far northern Shasta County, militia-backed politicians have scored big successes at the ballot box.

    Since Trump won more than 63 percent of the vote in Idaho in the 2020 presidential election, it would not be surprising if candidates either running with his backing or buying into his signature grievances around stolen elections and politicians he denounces as being “Republican in name only” (RINOs) would do well in the primaries. Instead, they have been resoundingly defeated.

    It hasn’t gotten much attention in the national press, but a battle has begun in Idaho between moderate Republicans and the wreckers of the right who want to just blow it all to kingdom come. In 2022, notwithstanding the lurch rightward of much of the GOP throughout the country, the old guard in Idaho seems to have at least temporarily emerged on top.

    In part, this may be a belated recognition by Republicans in the state that their voter majorities are not as secure as, on the surface, they would appear to be. Political insiders in Idaho have, over the past few years, talked about the conflict between ideologues and pragmatists having the potential to weaken the Republican Party even in its moment of greatest ascendance.

    Like nearby Washington, Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado, the state’s population is growing, with increasing numbers of newcomers from more expensive, more liberal states in the west making Idaho their home. Some have even suggested that this means the state is primed to begin a gradual march away from decades of Republican governance and toward a revitalized Democratic Party — though I wouldn’t hold my breath that this will happen any time soon.

    The GOP establishment knows that, while candidates such as McGeachin are skilled at throwing red meat to their base, they are less adept at pivoting to the middle come the general election. McGeachin’s taped address to the white nationalist America First Political Action conference earlier this year may not have phased Trump, but it surely spooked mainstream Republicans in Idaho.

    In the wake of this event, the Take Back Idaho PAC, its board of directors a who’s who of senior moderate Republicans in the state, called on McGeachin to resign. She didn’t, but her gubernatorial ambitions seem to have been effectively self-sabotaged by her incendiary action.

    It’s true that, in many states, Trump’s ongoing death-grip on the GOP remains as tight as ever. Certainly, for example, his intervention was effective in pushing J.D. Vance over the finish line in the Ohio primary contest for the party’s Senate candidate. It was also a key factor in moving Mehmet Oz into the lead in the Pennsylvania primary (although as of May 26, that race, in which Oz maintains a tiny margin over Dave McCormick, remains uncalled, with a recount looking likely).

    Yet, below the radar, in many states what remains of the pre-Trumpian “establishment” within the GOP seems to be mobilizing in support of candidates who aren’t entirely in thrall to Trump, to his outrageous claims about fraudulent elections, and to his allies within the militia and white nationalist movements.

    The primaries’ loss by Trump-aligned candidates in Idaho mirrors failings by the twice-impeached ex-president’s chosen gubernatorial candidates in Nebraska, in Georgia, and, in all likelihood, in Maryland later in primary season.

    If Trump’s star begins to wane in the GOP, as, surely, it eventually will, what happened in Idaho in the spring of 2022 will likely come to be seen as a turning point. That Trump’s backing so spectacularly failed to lift McGeachin’s candidacy shows that even the grand puppet master himself is, at the end of the day, limited in his powers of manipulation.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The Biggest Blue State Is Ready to Invest in Its People

    Sasha Abramsky

    California is showing what a state with vast resources and progressive political leadership can do if it sets its mind to reform.

    The post The Biggest Blue State Is Ready to Invest in Its People appeared first on The Nation.

    This post was originally published on Article – The Nation.

  • Trump’s Attempt to Shut Down All US Embassies in Africa Epitomizes Today’s GOP

    Earlier this month, Politico published an excerpt from the tell-all memoirs of Mark Esper, who served as Trump’s secretary of defense from mid-2019 onward.

    Among the revelations that have gotten the most attention — in addition to Trump’s wanting military personnel to shoot Black Lives Matter protesters in the legs, and expressing an interest in court-martialing ex-generals who disagreed with his policy stances — was that of Trump repeatedly averring his desire to shut all of the U.S. embassies in Africa and bring the diplomatic personnel stateside again.

    On one level, this is so cartoonish as to be instantly dismissible. Of course a profit-and-power-oriented superpower like the United States would never simply remove all of its diplomatic personnel from an entire continent — one that contains 54 countries, 1.4 billion people, and vast natural resources over which trade partners across the globe are jockeying for access. These off-the-cuff statements were, according to this line of reasoning, simply Trump being Trump and blowing off steam about a part of the world that he never showed any desire to understand.

    In reality, such a proposal wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of passing muster with the State Department, the Department of Defense, the national security agencies, Congress, not to mention the great resource-extraction companies — all of which are at least partly motivated by crass logics of self-interest, and all of whom would instantly see the harm such an unprecedented move would entail. These institutions would never tolerate an act of diplomatic vandalism that would massively weaken the U.S. state and U.S. companies in relation to geopolitical competitors.

    But Trump’s uncontrolled speaking-from-the-id remarks are worth noting because they tell a larger truth about his narrow, bigoted, worldview and the degree of his racist disrespect for anyone in the world who is not both white and wealthy. And, as such, they give more than a glimpse of how utterly bizarre, inept, cruel and dangerous a Trump administration-redux would be for the world.

    Trump is not the first U.S. president to have snubbed the entire continent of Africa. Ronald Reagan and Lyndon Johnson both traveled widely, but didn’t set foot in a single African country. Similarly, as president, Trump visited two dozen countries while in office, but not one of them was in Africa. Nor did he much spend time in the Caribbean. In fact, he seems to have studiously avoided visiting majority-Black countries.

    Yet Trump’s disinterest in the world beyond the U.S.’s borders seems far more engrained than that of other post-World War II presidents, even others who, like Trump, were extremely limited in their travel itineraries. In fact, according to the Atlantic, Trump traveled abroad far less often and far less extensively than did almost all of his post-war predecessors. When he was abroad, he frequently picked fights with other international leaders, at NATO summits, G7 meetings, and other international gatherings, and made clear his desire to be somewhere else. Most of his trips lasted one or at most two days — enough time to have a state dinner and engage in some photo ops, but not enough time to even begin to have meaningful exchanges with people in the country he was ostensibly visiting.

    Contrast that with Eisenhower’s 11-nation “Flight to Peace” tour in December 1959; or with Barack Obama visiting 58 countries in his eight years in office. Twenty-one of those were in his first year as president. It’s pretty much impossible to imagine Trump doing the sort of traveling that these two presidents did. Obama, for example, visited South Africa, Senegal, Tanzania, and several other countries in Africa, and made a point to talk to ordinary people in ordinary places for as long as he possibly could. That doesn’t mean all of the policies that Obama directed at Africa were progressive — witness the ongoing military and drone actions in Libya, Somalia, and elsewhere, and the foreign policy failures that triggered a resurrection of the slave trade in Libya — but it does show a president willing to at least listen to, and hopefully learn from, people from different walks of life living far from Washington, D.C.

    From the get-go, Trump made clear that he viewed much of the world — and especially non-white, poorer parts of the world — with contempt. His notorious “travel bans,” designed to prevent Muslims from entering the country, disproportionately impacted African countries, although they did also target a handful of Middle Eastern and Asian countries. By the time Trump left office, the ban impacted a total of 13 countries; of these, seven were in Africa. Libya, Somalia and Chad were on the original list released in 2017, and then Nigeria, Eritrea, Sudan and Tanzania were added in in 2021.

    The 2021 revision was a largely symbolic addition at that point, given that global travel and migration in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic had largely ground to a standstill anyway; but it was clearly intended to show that Trump, who was on record as favoring migration into the U.S. from predominantly white countries such as Norway, and opposing migration from the southern hemisphere, was intent on further tightening the U.S.’s borders, over the long term, against immigration from countries he had previously deemed to be “shitholes.” That comment, in early 2018, prompted global outrage and led the African Union to demand an apology — one that was, it goes without saying, not forthcoming.

    None of this ought to have been a surprise. Trump has a long track record of disparaging majority-Black nations and Black individuals. In 2017, six months into his presidency, he reputedly declared that all immigrants from Haiti have AIDS. His own former adviser has said Trump frequently uttered anti-Black slurs during his time as a TV star on Celebrity Apprentice. In 1989, when he was best known as a brash real estate mogul in New York, he took out a full-page ad in the New York Times calling for the death penalty against five young Black and Latino men wrongly accused of raping a Central Park jogger. Decades later, when the men were all exonerated, settling with the city for millions of dollars, Trump continued to proclaim their guilt. And Trump’s businesses have also been caught up in allegations of racism — from lawsuits against Fred Trump (Donald’s father) and Donald Trump, alleging violations of the Fair Housing Act in their rental properties in the 1970s, through to allegations that Trump hotels and casinos discriminated against Black customers and Black employees into the 1990s.

    Esper ought to have gone public with his allegations about Trump wanting to walk the U.S.’s diplomatic presence off of the African continent years ago, while he was still in office. At this point, it’s a bit late in the day to have a Road to Damascus moment and suddenly proclaim, in an effort to hype one’s book, one’s alarm about the degree to which Trump’s racism made him an “irrationalist” poised to sabotage the geopolitical power of his own nation.

    But that doesn’t make the allegations any less shocking. It’s simply terrifying that this man, who holds a cult-leader-like death grip over the modern Republican Party, could quite conceivably return to power in the next election, emboldened even further to implement his fever-dreams of racial hate.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • California’s Undocumented Children Are Going Hungry

    Sasha Abramsky

    A report shows that 45 percent of the state’s undocumented residents are facing food insecurity, mostly children.

    The post California’s Undocumented Children Are Going Hungry appeared first on The Nation.

    This post was originally published on Article – The Nation.

  • Texas Governor Intensifies Cruel Rampage Against Undocumented Immigrants

    Over the last few weeks, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has gone on a particularly cruel, opportunistic, rampage against undocumented immigrants.

    First, he ordered state troopers to inspect every commercial truck coming into Texas from Mexico, arguing that this was a vital part of his effort to stop the smuggling of undocumented immigrants into the state. Of course, the move, which was always more of a PR stunt than a genuine effort to rein in people-smuggling cartels, was telegraphed so far in advance that the smugglers went elsewhere.

    Governor Abbott’s troopers snarled traffic with their searches, leading Democratic gubernatorial challenger Beto O’Rourke to accuse the governor of worsening already tough supply chain conditions. Ultimately, over the eight days the order was in effect, state troopers didn’t find huge numbers of hidden, would-be immigrants, hardly a surprise given they had telegraphed the whole operation in advance.

    Then, in another PR stunt, the governor announced his officers would start rounding up undocumented immigrants caught along the border, and, on his order, would bus them off to Washington, D.C. This, too, backfired when many of the migrants began publicly thanking Abbott for the free ride to D.C.

    Now, as the Biden administration moves toward lifting the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Title 42 restrictions on the southern border, Abbott has, according to media reports, begun studying the possibility of declaring the large numbers of undocumented people currently attempting to cross the border into the United States an “invasion.” This move would essentially allow the governor to use war powers to deputize state law enforcement officers to serve as immigration enforcement, and permit those officers to summarily deport migrants unlucky enough to fall into their clutches.

    It’s a grotesque policy proposal that gives more than a nod of homage to the unsavory role played by the Texas Rangers, a state agency that too often acted as a murderous vigilante group deployed to violently police the borderlands in decades and centuries past. Even though it would almost certainly trigger a huge legal battle, the governor clearly believes the optics are in his favor as immigration rises on the list of concerns that Americans talk about to pollsters.

    The Texas governor has been cheered on by members of Texas’s increasingly far right legislature, as well as by onetime members of former President Donald Trump’s administration — who have urged him to allow state troopers and National Guardsmen to send would-be migrants back across the border.

    The National Border Patrol Council (NBPC), the union that represents Border Patrol officers and staff, also supports Abbott’s proposal. Indeed, the NBPC’s president, Brandon Judd, recently told Fox News he believed President Joe Biden was pushing an open borders policy, and that he was doing so specifically to change the demographics of the U.S. electorate. In addition to these statements being a horrifying echo of white supremacist “Great Replacement” rhetoric, they ignore the fact that undocumented immigrants and legal residents are actually already denied the right to vote.

    Governor Abbott, coming off of Texas’s recent victories at the U.S. Supreme Court regarding its law allowing private citizens to sue abortion providers and others who assist people in getting abortions, has also now set his sights on another judicial precedent: He has proposed allowing local school districts to deny undocumented children access to public schools.

    As the governor knows too well, undocumented children’s right to access to public schools has long been settled case law. Texas tried this once before, in 1975, when it amended its education laws so as to deny local school districts funds for educating undocumented children. Six years later, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in Plyler v. Doe that this was unconstitutional.

    It was this ruling that kicked in more than a decade later, in 1994, when voters in California — at the time headed by Republican Gov. Pete Wilson, and with an electorate that had swung far to the right both on crime and on immigration — overwhelmingly passed Proposition 187, that barred undocumented kids from its public schools, and undocumented people of all ages from public health services and an array of other benefits.

    Even before Latinx activists began counter-organizing against the measure, and even before California’s increasingly diverse electorate started having second thoughts about its response to mass immigration, the courts got involved. Days after the election, a federal district court judge issued an injunction barring the proposition’s provisions from being implemented. Nearly five years later, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the measure was unconstitutional.

    Abbott and his Texas GOP cheerleaders would do well to pause a moment in their stampede toward xenophobia and ponder what happened to the California GOP in the years following Proposition 187.

    In 1994, when Governor Wilson whipped up voters’ fears of crime and immigration, the Republicans controlled the governorship. They had controlled it for all but eight years since 1967. For most of that time, one of California’s two U.S. senators had also been Republican. The state attorney general was Republican. The mayor of Los Angeles was a Republican, and many other top city officials around the state were members of the GOP as well. Although the legislature was controlled by the Democratic Party, the margins were small and the GOP remained influential.

    Proposition 187 marked a decisive turning point in California politics. In the decades following, the number of Latinos registered to vote in California increased roughly threefold. Young people also began voting in much higher numbers. Those new voters were key to driving xenophobic officials out of office in the Golden State and shifting its state and city politics leftward.

    Wilson would serve out his full term and leave office in January 1999. Since then, the only GOP governor has been Arnold Schwarzenegger, a moderate who, by modern GOP standards is what the Trumpites derogatively term a “Republican In Name Only,” or “RINO.” The state’s attorney general is a Democrat. Both legislative houses have Democratic supermajorities, and virtually every major city in the state, with the exception of Fresno, is run by Democratic mayors.

    Abbott is doing in 2022 what Governor Wilson did in California in 1994. He’s using undocumented immigration as a way to demagogue himself into reelection. It may well work in the short term. In the long run, however, Abbott’s shameless political stunts, if they enrage enough people in his state that new political coalitions start to emerge to counter them, could end up costing his state party dearly.

    Yet, regardless of the possible consequences for the GOP down the line, we must remember the concrete consequences for migrants in the here and now. Abbott is treating human beings as political pawns, and he’s showing no signs of easing off on his demagogic campaign.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.