For the first time in U.S. history, voters in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. will have the chance to vote for an LGBTQ candidate, a new report finds.
According to a new report by the LGBTQ Victory Fund, there will be at least 678 LGBTQ candidates on the ballot for the general election in November, an increase of 18 percent from 574 in 2020. This is partially due to an increase in the proportion of LGBTQ candidates tracked by the organization who won their primaries earlier this year, at 64 percent compared to 57 percent in 2020.
The proportion of LGBTQ candidates who are people of color also increased this year. While people of color accounted for 31 percent of LGBTQ candidates in 2020 and 29 percent in 2018, 38 percent of LGBTQ candidates appearing on general election ballots are people of color this year. Fourteen percent of these candidates are Black and 13 percent are Latinx.
Meanwhile, the proportion of candidates running for office who are not cisgender has hit an all-time high, representing 14 percent of LGBTQ candidates this year, compared to 8 percent in 2020.
The vast majority of these candidates are Democrats or leftists, the report finds. Of the 1,065 LGBTQ people who ran for offfice in this election cycle, 903 ran as Democrats, while several others ran under a progressive or socialist label. On the conservative side, two ran as libertarians and 45 ran as Republicans.
The increase in LGBTQ candidates comes amid a surge of attacks on LGBTQ people. Far right politicians have proposedhundreds of anti-LGBTQ bills this year, seeking to bar trans children from participating in school sports, censor books about LGBTQ characters, and more.
LGBTQ Victory Fund President Annise Parker says that the increase in LGBTQ candidates is a response to such attacks. “As politicians in state legislatures and on school boards levied unprecedented attacks on our community and our kids, LGBTQ leaders responded, running for office in record numbers,” Parker said in a statement.
“Voters are sick and tired of the relentless attacks lobbed against the LGBTQ community this year,” she said. “Bigots want us to stay home and stay quiet, but their attacks are backfiring and instead have motivated a new wave of LGBTQ leaders to run for office.”
Some of these candidates are set to be the first LGBTQ people in their particular seat if they win. Maura Healey and Tina Kotek, both Democrats, are slated to be the U.S.’s first-ever openly lesbian governors if they win office, in Massachusetts and Oregon, respectively. If U.S. House Democratic candidate Becca Balint wins, she will be the first-ever openly LGBTQ person from Vermont to be elected to Congress.
Over two in five Americans polled over the past week say they are concerned about being subject to intimidation or violence when voting in the midterms, new polling finds, in an alarming show of the state of democracy in the U.S.
According to a poll from Reuters/Ipsos of over 4,400 U.S. adults, about 43 percent of Americans say they are worried about facing threats at polling locations. Democrats are more likely to be concerned about violence, at about 51 percent versus Republicans’ 38 percent.
Likely fueled at least in part by the far right’s attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, Americans are also concerned that groups will carry out violence after the election if they’re unsatisfied with the outcome, the poll found, with over two in three Americans saying as such.
The poll comes as there have been reports of armed far right vigilantes intimidating voters in Arizona. Though there have not yet been reports of violence, the vigilantes have apparently been taking pictures of people using ballot drop boxes and threatening to post their information online.
The vigilantes appear to have been galvanized by debunked right-wing claims that so-called ballot mules are stuffing boxes with ballots for Democrats. While there is zero evidence of widespread voter fraud or anything resembling ballot stuffing, the belief appears to have become so entrenched that vigilantes are taking it upon themselves to supposedly “guard” ballot boxes.
Despite having no basis in reality, voter fraud has become a concern among the public as well. The Reuters/Ipsos poll found that nearly half of Americans think that voter fraud is a “widespread problem,” while only 40 percent disagree. Republicans are more likely to believe in this lie popularized by Donald Trump, with two-thirds of Republicans saying they believe that widespread voter fraud is an issue and about one-third of Democrats saying as such.
There have been other threats to voters from the right. In Florida, Gov. Ron Desantis’s fascist election policearrested 20 people earlier this month, claiming that they knowingly violated election guidelines — but like many others who have been prosecuted for election-related offenses, those arrested were simply unaware of their voter eligibility status.
In this case, some of the voters arrested were supposedly previously told that they were eligible to vote, but then were arrested for illegally registering. At least 13 of the people who were arrested were Black.
The fact that concerns of violence in relation to casting a vote are so widespread and that there are already reports of intimidation is an alarming show of the erosion of democracy in the U.S.
The far right has been ramping up voter suppression efforts in recent years; between the Republican Party’s gerrymandering, plans to mass-challenge election results and infiltrate Democratic-majority polling places, or bills to flat-out allow Republican officials to overturn election results, experts say the GOP is setting the stage to rig elections so that they never lose — or effectively lose, despite voters’ will — again.
Today marks the two-year anniversary of the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to the U.S. Supreme Court on the eve of the 2020 election. For two years, she has proven to be an ongoing disaster for democracy.
Barrett was chosen because she secures the extreme agenda of the right-wing faction now in control of the United States’ highest court. The spinby right-wing dark money groups during her nomination hearings that she would set aside her personal views, follow settled law, and rule fairly has been refuted by the repressive dictates from the court that her installation has made possible. (Recent revelations of Samuel Alito’s express assurance to former Sen. Ted Kennedy that he would not overturn Roe further demonstrate that such promises are empty.)
Barrett is a destructive force aimed at 20th-century legal precedents that belatedly made some of the U.S. Constitution’s promises real for many Americans rather than mere parchment that served the elite.
If voters decide to elect a much more progressive Congress this November, lawmakers could expand the number of justices on the court and set term limits on the current appointees, as Demand Justice and other progressive groups have suggested. An emboldened House could even begin impeachment proceedings, where evidence supports such action, as with Brett Kavanaugh’s perjury and Clarence Thomas’s ethical failures.
On this inglorious anniversary, it is worth remembering that but for the 2020 installation of Barrett — as Donald Trump was literally being voted out of the White House — there would not have been enough votes for the Supreme Court to fully overturn Roe v. Wade.
Chief Justice John Roberts’s time on the court before Barrett was on board has been marked by the hollowing out of Americans’ rights, while he was pretending to follow precedent — and garnering some fawning press with his claim that he would be a humble umpire calling balls and strikes rather than a player on a team. Think Citizens United, where Roberts deputized Justice Anthony Kennedy to write a majority opinion that reinterpreted the First Amendment and destroyed Congress’s power to limit dark money. The ruling unleashed a tsunami of secret cash that has engulfed U.S. elections and the court.
And recall Shelby County, where Roberts himself wrote the ruling gutting key protections of the Voting Rights Act (which he had attacked as a young lawyer in the Reagan administration) by claiming that U.S. society had transcended the anti-Black racism of the 1960s, despite congressional findings to the contrary. He thus enabled 21st century-style anti-Black racism through voting restrictions schemed by the GOP and its id, Donald Trump. A federal court, for example, found that a 2013 law that restricted voter IDs and more in North Carolina “target[ed] African Americans with almost surgical precision.” That measure would not have been allowed to proceed without pre-clearance by the Justice Department under the Voting Rights Act before Roberts gutted it. A similar Texas measure that had been held back due to pre-clearance because the state could not prove it would not harm Black and Latino voters became binding law immediately after Roberts’ ruling. Some Republican legislators adopting voter restrictions schemes even said the quiet part out loud.
But with Barrett on the Court, Justice Alito did not have to bend to Roberts’ artifice of gradualism to get a fifth vote to destroy the protections guaranteed by Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
So, Alito was unrestrained in advancing the kind of religious decree he had seemingly coveted to impose with his longtime ally, Justice Clarence Thomas.
Alito’s ruling in Dobbsv. Jackson Women’s Health Organization rescinded the constitutional right to have an abortion without state interference in the early months of a pregnancy. It is larded with so much bombastic rhetoric that it’s almost as if the court that is entrusted with protecting the rights of “We the People” is actually a partisan editorial board housed inside the nation’s most ornate government building — Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal editorial page but with neoclassical columns outside, plus life tenure. Unlike the right-wing rantings of the Journal’s editorial board however, Alito’s tirade carries the force of law and is forcing people into crises that threaten their lives, their mental health and their future ability to start a family when and if they choose.
In my view, Roberts is too politically attuned to have overturned Roe all at once in an election year that could hurt the political party that enthroned him. Before Barrett’s appointment, Roberts was the swing vote in a five-GOP majority, so he could set the pace for the reversals of legal precedents that right-wing lawyers had selected to target.
Most Americans don’t realize that almost all of the cases heard by the Supreme Court are discretionary and not part of any mandatory jurisdiction under the Constitution. The right-wing faction in control of the court is able to handpick which legal precedents it wants to overturn and it is busy inventing new supposed legal “doctrines” like the “major questions” theory put forward by Charles Koch-funded groups, for example, to give a veneer of legitimacy to what is in reality a dramatic power grab. The newest democracy-destructive gimmick right-wing groups are advancing is the utterly discredited “independent state legislature” theory that suddenly bars courts from any oversight over what state legislatures can do in elections, including setting aside the popular vote.
On the surface, Dobbsoverturned decades of Supreme Court rulings in order to ratify a Mississippi law that banned abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy. But the aim of the Dobbs ruling was to attack access to abortion care well beyond one state’s borders. Mississippi has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the U.S., which has the world’s highest maternal mortality rate among economically developed countries, and it has the highest teen pregnancy rate in the country.
The good news is that the voter registration of women since Dobbs is up — way up — as seen in the massive pushback shown in the Kansas election this summer.
In response, right-wing groups like the so-called Independent Women’s Voice (IWV) are right now targeting women voters in swing states to downplay the reversal of Roe. IWV and its related group, the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF), state they have no position on abortion, but they have backed every justice who voted to overturn Roe, starting with Thomas and including Barrett.
IWV previously backed U.S. Senate candidates who made outlandish and grotesque claims that women could not get pregnant from rape or that pregnancies that resulted from rape were “something that God intended,” as arguments for abortion bans without exceptions for rape or incest. Its ad campaign targeting this year’s midterm elections does not disclose who is bankrolling it but, notably, that woman’s “voice” group has thrown the voices of very rich men. Under old disclosure rules, IWV had to reveal that one of its biggest funders was the late Foster Friess, the multimillionaire Trump donor who once thought it was funny to remark: “You know, back in my days, they used Bayer aspirin for contraception. The gals put it between their knees and it wasn’t that costly.”
It should come as no surprise that IWV CEO and IWF Board Chair Heather Higgins was part of the elite throng invited to celebrate Barrett’s nomination at Trump’s Rose Garden event. Higgins is the heir to the Vicks VapoRub fortune — brought to you by the same corporation that was the sole U.S. distributor of thalidomide, the anti-morning sickness drug that maimed thousands of children. IWF opposed a Senate vote to confirm Obama nominee Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court vacancy that arose when Justice Antonin Scalia died in February 2016, because it was an election year. But when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died less than two months before the 2020 election, they were all-in for Barrett.
When you look closely at that Rose Garden event that practically anointed Barrett — and infected dozens with COVID-19 — what you see is a sea of right-wing groups celebrating what Barrett herself would later deny under oath. That is that Barrett was chosen not because she would faithfully follow legal precedents but because she was seen as a sure vote for overturning them, in Roe and more.
Which other very special interests were there to celebrate this new era of regression?
*Carrie Severino, a former Thomas clerk who is the public face of the Judicial Crisis Network, which is a core lever in the court-packing operation of the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo;
*Gary Marx, president of Madison Strategies and co-creator of the Judicial Crisis Network;
*Mike Davis, president of the Article III Project, which also has ties to Leo;
*Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life, which Leo helps steer;
Twelve other vehemently anti-choice groups were represented at the ceremony by: Carol Tobias (president of the National Right to Life), Jeanne Mancini (president of March for Life), Penny Nance (leader of “Concerned Women for America”), Tony Perkins (president of the Family Research Council, Ralph Reed (chair of the Faith and Freedom Coalition and former head of the Christian Coalition), Michael Farris (president of Alliance Defending Freedom, which helped orchestrate the Dobbs case and other attacks on reproductive rights), Kelly Shackelford (president of the First Liberty Institute), Kay Coles James and John Malcolm (of the Heritage Foundation), Matt Schlapp (leader of the American Conservative Union), Tom Fitton (president of Judicial Watch), David Bossie (president of the group called “Citizens United”) and Jenny Beth Martin (head of the Tea Party Patriots).
In all, more than 30 special interest groups with an agenda to have the court to reverse Roe and other major legal precedents were there. There were so many operatives against Roe that it’s almost as though they knew something Barrett would deny under oath.
In addition to numerous Trump appointees, a group of anti-choice senators was there, including Josh Hawley (R-Missouri), Mike Lee (R-Utah), Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee), Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina), Ben Sasse (R-Nebraska) and Kelly Loeffler (R-Georgia). Fox Newshosts Laura Ingraham and Pete Hegseth were also in attendance. There were also some intriguing lesser-known attendees, such as Anthony De Nicola, a partner at a hedge fund, and Maureen Blum, the president of “Strategic Coalitions and Initiatives,” who describes her work as “strategic political warfare.”
Next to Heather Higgins at the Rose Garden festivities sat Cleta Mitchell, one of the lawyers now infamous for aiding Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. Mitchell was on the call with Trump when he seemingly tried to extort the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to just find more votes for him. Though she lost her job at a big law firm, the ongoing investigation into that call has not deterred Mitchell from continuing to attack the election and trying to change state laws to make it harder for Americans to vote. She’s also been caught on tape telling Republican legislators to destroy their notes about her advice on how to redraw voting district maps as part of extreme partisan redistricting schemes to control state power.
There were also 10 big church reps who backed Trump and his anti-abortion stance, including Franklin Graham, Billy Graham’s son, and Jerry Prevo, acting president of the right-wing Liberty University.
As could be expected, the event also included Barrett’s family and former colleagues from Notre Dame Law School, including law professor O. Carter Snead. Snead was one of several attendees to submitamicus briefsthat called for Roe to be overturned to the court after Barrett’s confirmation . Barrett did not recuse herself for her lack of impartiality and her documented history of attacking Roe. SenatorsJosh Hawley and Mike Lee, who were at the Rose Garden event, also submitted an amicus brief with Sen. Ted Cruz calling for Roe to be overturned. Erin Hawley — who is married to the January 6 jogger and insurrectionist senator who shares her surname — helped Alliance Defending Freedom coordinate the legal assault on Roe through the Mississippi case and other vehicles.
What few knew back then, despite the spirited opposition to Barrett’s confirmation, was how the Federalist Society’s Co-Chairman Leonard Leo maneuvered Barrett onto the Supreme Court. As I previously noted in testimony to the Senate Committee on the Judiciary:
According to a new book co-authored by Severino — who worked closely with Leo on the pressure campaigns to block Garland and install Gorsuch — Leo met with then-White House Counsel Don McGahn in April 2017 about expanding Trump’s Supreme Court list to include Barrett. At that time, Barrett had been a law professor for 15 years and had no judicial experience, but Leo and the White House Counsel’s Office were going to remedy that by getting her some time sitting on a federal circuit court. In May of that year, Trump nominated Barrett to a vacancy on the Seventh Circuit created by [Sen. Mitch] McConnell’s refusal to allow President Obama’s nominee, Myra S. Powell (the first black woman appointed to the Indiana Supreme Court), a hearing for nearly a year….
Leo met for dinner twice, in June and September 2017, with Trump to discuss nominations including Barrett a candidate on Trump’s list for the next vacancy on the Supreme Court, which was expected to be Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Barrett was confirmed to the Seventh Circuit on Halloween of 2017. [Then] on November 17, McGahn announced that Trump had added Barrett to his short list. That announcement came during the Federalist Society’s National Convention, where Barrett spoke…
Before Barrett could be nominated to the Supreme Court though, another vacancy arose with Anthony Kennedy’s announcement that he would be stepping down in 2018. Leo mobilized groups to which he steered funding to support Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the seat despite evidence that Kavanaugh had previously lied under oath to Congress and in spite of the compelling testimony of Ford about his attempt to assault her, which he denied. IWV was one of the groups that flanked Kavanaugh; along with its 501(c)(3) arm, IWF, it had received substantial funds from Leo-tied groups and dark money entities as Trump began packing the court with Leo’s assistance.
After millions in dark money spending helped propel Kavanaugh onto the court, the Washington Post began an in-depth investigation of Leo’s court-packing operation, culminating in a story by Robert O’Harrow Jr. and Shawn Boberg in May 2019. That investigation tallied the money raised by Leo’s umbrella groups at more than $250 million, along with revealing that Leo’s personal assets seemingly increased dramatically in 2018. (True North Research updated that figure to nearly $600 million, earlier this year.)
As a “volunteer” for Trump, Leo was not required to file any financial disclosure forms about his sources of income while he chose the list of Supreme Court candidates from which Trump chose. The Post’s story sparked a firestorm of controversy around Leo, who claimed to the paper’s documentary crew that he was uninterested in money. By the year’s end, Leo had left his day job at the Federalist Society to form a for-profit group called CRC Advisors with his longtime ally Greg Mueller. He continues to be a co-chair on the Federalist Society’s board and aid in its finances.
So when Ginsburg died, Leo was operating under the rubric of CRC, which was deploying the Judicial Crisis Network. That dark money group had been given a new operational name: the Concord Fund, presumably named after the first battle in the Revolutionary War.
But what was not publicly known then was that behind the scenes, Leo had secretly been staked by a right-wing Chicago billionaire, Barre Seid. As Barrett’s nomination was pending Seid was in the process of selling his company and giving the assets to Leo in what was dubbed the “Marble Freedom Trust.” As the The New York Times and ProPublica with The Lever wrote a few weeks ago, Seid was able to use tax lawyers and loopholes to transfer $1.6 billion into Leo’s hands as the sole operative trustee of Marble, tax-free.
Despite this mammoth infusion of cash to fund Leo’s extreme agenda for the Supreme Court, other courts and political offices, Marble has no real address, no website and not even its own phone number. The phone number listed on its first tax filing goes to Corkery, Leo’s longtime collaborator on dark money operations.
What kind of shadowy institution has that much wealth and that little public information? It’s basically just a bank account — a huge one. Some of the other core Leo groups, like Rule of Law Trust and the BH Group/BH Fund, have the same indicia: no real operating address even before the pandemic, no website and no independent phone number (or one that just goes to Corkery), but millions and millions of dollars.
That’s not all.
The Marble Freedom Trust tax filing for 2020 reveals that there are two other men close to Leo involved. One is Tyler Green, whose home in Utah is listed as Marble’s address. He’s the “administrative” trustee, who ostensibly holds the paperwork for the dark money behemoth. Green previously clerked for Thomas and is another Federalist Society brethren appointed previously to a high post in Utah legal circles. The other is Jonathan Bunch, a “successor” trustee in case anything were to happen to Leo. Bunch has a business with Leo and has been helping him with court-packing since before Leo helped launch the Judicial Crisis Network at a dinner with Scalia held just after the 2004 election.
A new book by David Enrich reveals how Bunch reached out to the Trump campaign to help pack the Supreme Court with Leo after Scalia’s death in 2016. According to Enrich, Bunch called Trump adviser McGahn who deadpanned that he had already tapped John Sununu for judicial selection because he had played such an instrumental role in choosing David Souter for the Supreme Court during George H.W. Bush’s presidency. Bunch was apparently taken aback because right-wing operatives had vowed “No More Souters,” which was shorthand for no more independent justices whom the right-wing could not count on to do its bidding in destroying Roe and other legal precedents they dislike.
But it was a joke. McGahn was joking and Bunch was reportedly relieved that Trump would not make the same “mistake” in appointing justices like Souter to the nation’s highest court.
And the joke is on us, except it’s not funny at all.
Instead, the U.S. now faces a Supreme Court packed with right-wing extremists like Barrett. Not only did she vote for overturning Roe, she also refused to recuse herself from a climate liability case involving Shell even though she was raised on Shell money through her father’s work expanding drilling for oil.
And she has refused to reveal her husband’s clients and whether they have any business before the Court. In this Barrett is taking a page from Clarence Thomas, who has not revealed Ginni Thomas’s revenue or clients even though Jane Mayer uncovered that Ginni has been paid by those filing briefs to the court where her husband sits in judgment. (He has also refused to recuse himself from cases implicating his wife, who was demonstrably involved in efforts to stop the counting of the 2020 presidential vote.) Barrett refused to step back from rulings like Dobbs despite her personal agenda to overturn Roe, as evidenced by her signature on a 2006 anti-abortion ad. With Barrett and the other Trump judicial appointees, the U.S. now has five Supreme Court justices who appear to have no concerns with imposing their personal views as law, such as ruling that the government can regulate the most intimate personal health choices about if and when to start a family but that the EPA cannot regulate corporations to require more alternative energy to mitigate climate change.
The anniversary of Barrett’s confirmation is a travesty. And her tenure will continue to do damage to our rights and our democracy until we have a Congress willing to rein in the right-wing conservative justices arrogantly imposing their religious beliefs and partisan political agenda as binding law on the rest of us.
In an op-ed published Tuesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) pointed out the sharp contrasts between Republicans’ economic policies and progressive Democrats’ ambitions, laying out a variety of policies that have popular support among the public but that are opposed by the GOP.
Writing in The Hill, Sanders acknowledged that the Democratic Party is “far from perfect,” while urging voters to consider Republicans’ stances on key economic issues like Social Security and Medicare — two crucial anti-povertyprograms that members of the party have plausibly threatened to cut if the GOP takes the House in the midterm election.
“Too many Democratic members of Congress have been unwilling to stand up to the big money interests that dominate Washington and fight for working families,” Sanders wrote. At the same time, he said, “here is the simple reality: the Republicans in Congress are far worse when it comes to addressing the needs of the working class.”
He then listed a variety of policies that Republicans nearly uniformly oppose, like cutting the prices of a wide variety of prescription drugs; raising the minimum wage; implementing universal health care; cutting child poverty through the expanded child tax credit; expanding workers’ unionization rights; and closing loopholes that allow corporations and the wealthy to avoid paying federal income taxes.
The GOP also opposes taking on corporate greed through a corporate windfall tax, which Sanders proposed in a bill earlier this year amid soaring worldwide inflation that has been coupled with soaring corporate profits.
“Not a single Republican in Washington agrees” with these policies, he wrote multiple times.
In fact, many Republicans support policies that only worsen these problems. Rather than closing tax loopholes for the wealthy, for instance, they have slashed tax rates for corporations and the 1 percent. And, instead of supporting the union movement and boosting workers’ wages and rights in the workplace, as the progressive movement has done, Republicans have vowed to go after the labor movement and top labor regulators if they take the House.
Sanders has spent this month emphasizing that the Democratic Party should be focusing more on economic issues if they want to win over voters and keep control of Congress this year. In interviews, op-eds and on social media, the senator has said that Democrats must tout their economic platform — and have the “guts” to follow through and lead on bold measures taking on corporate power.
Indeed, as Sanders has pointed out, multiplepollshave shown that voters trust Republicans more than Democrats on economic issues. This is likely the result of years of misleading messaging from the party branding themselves as deficit hawks (but only when Democrats are in power) or blaming Democrats for issues like gas prices that are often out of their control.
At the same time, the economy and inflation are top of mind for voters this election. Polls have found thatinflation consistently ranks as a top concern for voters casting a midterm ballot, suggesting that Sanders is right in his hypothesis that focusing on the economy would be a winning strategy for the Democratic Party.
Reps. Pramila Jayapal and other members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus at a recent news conference outside the U.S. Capitol. (Credit: The Washington Post)
In a dramatic break with the Biden administration on the eve of the midterm elections, 30 House Democrats sent a letter to President Biden urging him to engage in direct talks with Russian President Vladmir Putin to end the war in Ukraine. In addition to bilateral talks, signatories to the letter, initiated by Progressive Caucus Chair Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, urge the White House to support a mutual ceasefire and diplomatic efforts to avoid a protracted war that threatens more human suffering and spiraling global inflation, as well as nuclear war through intention or miscalculation.
Despite President Biden’s recent acknowledgement that we have never been closer to nuclear Armageddon since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, Biden has not met with Putin since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, and he recently told the press he will refuse to meet with Putin next month when the two attend the G-20 Summit in Bali.
In addition to Congresswoman Jayapal (D-WA), the Democratic signers of the letter are Representatives Adams (NC), Blumenauer (OR), Bowman (NY, Bush (MO), Carson (IN), Clarke (D-NY), De Fazio (D-OR), DeSaulnier (CA), Garcia (IL), Grijalva (AZ), Jackson Lee (TX), Jacobs (CA), Johnson (GA), Jones (NY), Khanna (CA), Lee (CA), Moore (WI), Newman (IL), Ocasio-Cortez (NY), Omar (MN), Paine (NJ), Pingree (ME), Pocan (WI), Pressley(MA), Raskin (MD), Takano (CA), Tlaib (MI), Velazquez (NY) and Watson Coleman (NJ).
Expressing praise for Biden’s “commitment to Ukraine’s legitimate struggle against Russia’s war of aggression,” the letter dodges the question of whether the United States should continue to arm Ukraine with medium-range rockets, ammunition, drones, tanks and other weapons.
The letter reads “…. we urge you to pair the military and economic support the United States has provided to Ukraine with a proactive diplomatic push, redoubling efforts to seek a realistic framework for a ceasefire.” The key words here are “has provided” as opposed to “will provide,” leaving open the possibility that some Democrats will oppose future weapons transfers.
Back in May, not a single Democrat voted against the eye-popping $40 billion Ukraine package, much of it earmarked for weapons, intelligence, and combat training. On September 30, Congress passed the “Ukraine Supplemental Appropriations Act,” giving another $12.35 billion of our tax dollars for training, equipment, weapons, and direct financial aid for Ukraine–without so much as a whisper of dissent from Democrats.
So far, the only congressional opposition to arming Ukraine has come from far right Republicans. Despite Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s enthusiastic support for the $40 billion package, 57 House Republicans and 11 GOP Senators voted against it. Some objected because they thought the U.S. military should focus on China or on the U.S.-Mexico border, but others cited concerns over the lack of oversight, unmet domestic needs and runaway spending.
One of the most prominent critics of Biden’s handling of the war is former President Donald Trump. Never mind that Trump reversed his predecessor President Barack Obama’s decision to refrain from sending offensive weapons to Ukraine and failed to negotiate the continuation of two vital arms control treaties with Russia—the Open Skies Treaty and the Intermediate Nuclear-Range Forces Treaty (INF). Trump is now using his public appearances and the media, including his social media platform Truth Social, to call for peace talks.
“Be strategic, be smart (brilliant!), get a negotiated deal done NOW,” he wrote online. At an Arizona rally, Trump boomed, “With potentially hundreds of thousands of people dying, we must demand the immediate negotiation of the peaceful end to the war in Ukraine, or we will end up in World War III and there will be nothing left of our planet.”
Trump has also insisted that if he were president, the war in Ukraine would not have happened because unlike Biden, he would have met with Putin: “I’d talk to him; I’d meet with him. There is no communication between him and Biden.” Trump volunteered himself as a possible negotiator. “I will head up group???” he wrote on TruthSocial.
Also calling for negotiations is far right Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson. Carlson says that the nuclear threat “is enough for any responsible person to say, ‘now we stop,’ especially if that person is the leader of the United States, the country which is funding this war and that could end this war tonight by calling Ukraine to the table.”
Tesla’s Elon Musk, now backing Republicans, told his 107 million Twitter followers that “the probability of nuclear war is rising rapidly” and suggested a very rational peace deal in which Russia keeps Crimea, Ukraine affirms neutrality from NATO and the UN oversees referendums in the Donbass.
Another newly minted Republican now condemning U.S. support for the war is former 2020 Presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard, once a supporter of Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders and a vice chair of the Democratic National Committee. Gabbard announced that she is quitting the party in power, saying: “I can no longer remain in today’s Democratic Party that is now under complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers.”
Political observers might surmise that Gabbard is positioning herself for another presidential run, but whether or not that’s the case, her sharp criticism of Democrats is finding an audience among millions of Fox viewers.
If Republicans take over the House in November, House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy warns they may turn off the money spigot for Ukraine. “I think people are gonna be sitting in a recession and they’re not going to write a blank check to Ukraine.”
McCarthy’s comment caused such panic on Capitol Hill that according to NBC News, leaders in both parties are considering passing legislation in the lame duck session to send Ukraine $50 billion more in weapons, military training and economic aid, bringing the total U.S. tab since the Russian invasion to over $100 billion, which exceeds the budget of the entire U.S. State Department.
It will be telling to see if any Democrats, including those who signed the Jayapal letter, will vote against more weapons. As inflation worsens and voters seek leaders to address their economic needs instead of endless war in Ukraine, Democrats, especially those who call themselves progressives, should not cede the peace position to Donald Trump and Tea Party Republicans bent on repealing voting rights, deregulating environmental protections and banning abortion.
The future of their Democratic Party is at stake – and the human race, too.
Campaign spending from outside groups has hit a new high this election cycle, and a new analysis shows that Republicans running for key Senate seats have been a major beneficiary of this dark money infusion.
According to NPR, dark money groups have spent $1 billion on supporting Republican candidates this election cycle, with outside groups and campaigns spending over $1.6 billion overall on Senate candidates in a dozen races analyzed by the publication. The vast majority of this money is being spent on battleground races in states like Georgia, Pennsylvania and Ohio.
This has been a huge boon to Republicans. The report finds that outside money has made up a staggering 86 percent of the GOP’s TV ad budget so far, compared to 55 percent for Democrats. This is an indication that Republican candidates desperately need this dark money cache to be competitive, the analysis says, since outside groups are charged more to run ads than campaigns are.
“Put simply: If it weren’t for these outside groups, Republican candidates would be swamped on the airwaves,” the report reads. “[T]he inability for Republican campaigns to keep pace with Democrats has meant these GOP outside groups have had to make up a lot of ground, spending more for less.”
This spending comes as outside spending on elections is on the rise. According to OpenSecrets, as of mid-October, outside spending hit $1.3 billion in this election cycle — a record high for a midterm election.
Republican groups are the biggest spenders, with the GOP’s two largest congressional funds spending a collective $315 million with weeks to go until the election. By contrast, the Democrats’ corresponding congressional funds have spent about $168 million so far — only a little over half of the Republican PACs’ spending.
Progressives and government watchdog groups have long maintained that dark money spending is a danger to U.S. democracy. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission in 2010, dark money groups are able to spend unlimited amounts of money on elections, essentially only bound by the amount of money that billionaires and corporations are willing to spend on influencing politics.
Dark money groups aren’t required to disclose their donors, meaning that this political spending is often completely anonymous — thanks in part to Republicans, who voted against a bill last month that would have required dark money groups to disclose the identities of those who give $10,000 or more.
The battle over the Senate is key for both major parties this election. In order to win control of the Senate, Republicans will need to pick up two more seats over the 50 seats they control, which they are not favored to do.
Polls have found that Democrats are slightly favored to win control of the Senate. Democrats have been aiming to add two seats to their Senate majority in order to circumvent filibuster holdouts Senators Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona) to protect abortion and voting rights, among other things.
Imagine Donald Trump dining with two of his supposed political advisers. Being an advisor to Donald means you soak up Donald’s political comments and feed them back to him. At this dinner, Donald was spouting off about the Democratic Party.
“Hey guys, know why the GOP is ahead in the polls?” “Why?” the two advisors replied in unison. Donald responded, “Because the Democrats are busy losing all by themselves, backtracking out of fear. Fearing a Party they are supposed to be fighting is what I call ‘beating themselves.’”
“Tell us more,” urged the two advisers.
“The Democrats are beyond stupid. They’ve contracted out their campaigns to consultants who, with their loyalties to their other corporate clients, have sold the Dems a strategy of caution – otherwise known as cutting off your cajones. Candidates without balls can’t think for themselves and just follow the script. Lots of Dems don’t want to appear with Bernie Sanders – the one guy I didn’t want to debate – who gets huge votes in conservative Vermont. What chickens!”
“This is all so beautiful, so gorgeous for us. Dems without balls means they campaign every day with their political antennae flailing, afraid they’ll say the politically incorrect phrase and upset the word police or deviate from their consultant’s finger-waving “no-no’s” if they want to rake in big money.”
“Imagine me contracting out my run to a consultant. ‘Donald, say this, don’t do that, do this, don’t say that.’ And paying them big bucks. Never! My people want the unfiltered Donald. That’s why they turn out in standing-room-only droves compared to the empty-seat Dems.”
Adviser #1 pipes up: “And the NY Times reports that the Dems are so afraid of our blaming them for inflation that they’ve shut up on their most popular ‘bread and butter’ positions, like freedom for women, health and safety for kids, good jobs and pay for more workers, increasing Social Security benefits. You know ‘bleeding heart stuff.’”
“Stupido Fabuloso!” Trump sneered, almost choking on his sirloin steak. “They don’t know who they are or worse who they WERE! FDR clobbered the Republicans with Social Security, minimum wage, and unemployment compensation, and he pushed for unions, taxed the rich and went after business crooks. He taunted the GOP. They called him a ‘traitor to his class,’ and he said he welcomed their hatred.”
“These issues are still very popular today, but the Dems aren’t pulling their base. The idiots even let me take the word ‘populist’ from their shaky hands – me the very core of Big Business.”
“They’ve mostly gagged themselves, leaving poor little Joe Biden alone talking about his infrastructure/jobs projects. Some Dems are so cowardly they don’t want to be seen campaigning with Delaware Joe.”
Adviser #2: “The Dems don’t learn from The Trumper. In politics, you got to boast. Politics is fatal for wimps.”
Trump cupped his mouth adding – “Jeez, I boast about things that aren’t even true, just like my casino ads. The Dems aren’t puffing about what is true. On paper, they support FDR’s New Deal updated to give everyone health insurance and voting rights for everyone, even felons. But where it counts – on the road, they’re in a driverless car. Ha, ha, ha – see? They’re beating themselves.”
“Because we are with the Winners, we’re against all the ‘communist’ things the masses drool over. And we are still winning. Why? Because we are masters at controlling what the media wants to cover – outrageous charges, flagrant behavior and all kinds of red meat the profit-obsessed media barons can’t resist. I told them as much in 2016. Still, they bit. Hilarious.”
“The GOP has got the offensive down to a science. Driving Dems nuts with ‘critical race theory’ (what’s that anyway?), ‘defunding the police’ (hah, we’ve defunded the federal regulator cops big time), ‘open borders,’ ‘radical judges,’ ‘over-regulation,’ ‘high taxes,’ ‘socialism’ – these are short enraging words that stick with our people. Like deer in the headlights, the Dems freeze, mumble and fret. Remember our old mentor Lee Atwater who said ‘When you’re explaining, you’re losing.’”
Adviser #1: “The big hole the Dems dug came long ago when they wrote off half the country as being too conservative and stopped spending money on their candidates in red districts. They don’t have the energy we have – look at how we’ve beaten them in the gerrymandering fights. It’s the energy gap. Remember 2009-2010?”
Trump broke in: “David, don’t get carried away. The biggest thing was their stupidity. Dems would spend more on a single Pennsylvania Senate seat than on six Senate seats combined in the Mountain states. Those states used to have Democratic Senators. Now GOP dominates there. Year after year, they don’t listen. I don’t listen either, to be frank. But I’m a very stable genius, while they are, as New Yorkers say, ‘Tone deaf.’”
Adviser #2: “Also the Republicans listen to their outside allies. Like Heritage, Cato, and Norquist. The Dems lean on their control-freak consultants and give progressive groups the cold shoulder. I have a progressive friend who tells me horror stories. She just gave me a copy of a blockbuster collection of very practical ways – down to the rebuttals and slogans – the Dems can use to landslide us in November. I started sweating until she told me most of the Dems are not rushing to use it. Most don’t even know about the two dozen citizen leaders who put it together, edited down to fiercely powerful persuasions by wordsmith Mark Green – a long-time Dem from New York City. It’s available to the world on winningamerica.net, but Green is confident that we will never pick it up.”
Trump: “Hmm, Winning America? – Nice ring to it. This fellow Green. I remember meeting him at a fundraiser when he was running for Mayor twenty years ago. He was all business, no small talk. He scared me then.”
With Republicans threatening to use an impending fight over the debt ceiling to force cuts to Social Security and Medicare, Democratic leaders are facing growing pressure from progressives and rank-and-file lawmakers to head off the GOP ploy by significantly raising or eliminating the arbitrary federal borrowing limit.
A group of House Democrats led by Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.) is collecting signatures for a letter urging House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) to use the dwindling months of the current Congress to “take legislative action that will permanently undo the threat posed by the debt limit.”
“If the counterintuitive nature of the current debt ceiling process is not reason enough to drive change, then the prospect of Republicans sending our economy into default for political gain should be,” reads the letter, which has thus far been signed by Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.), Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y), John Yarmuth (D-Ky.), and several others.
“It is no secret that Republicans will weaponize the debt ceiling the first chance they get,” the letter adds. “In our view, the state of the U.S. economy is simply far too important for us to allow a scenario in which Republicans are able to even have the option to put our standing on the global stage in jeopardy for some perceived political gain.”
The Democrats’ call, first reported Friday by Punchbowl News, is backed by the progressive advocacy groups Indivisible and Social Security Works.
Potential solutions mentioned in the letter include authorizing the U.S. Treasury Department to unilaterally raise the debt limit — which dictates how much money the federal government can borrow to meet its obligations — and permanently eliminating the ceiling, a step progressives have long supported.
As Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute wrote in a blog post amid last year’s debt ceiling clash — which Democrats ultimately ended without GOP support by suspending the filibuster to raise the ceiling — the limit “serves no good economic purpose and plenty of malign ones.”
Bivens argued that the “leverage the debt ceiling provides to those looking to enforce austerity is its greatest — and often most-overlooked — danger,” pointing to the GOP’s past success in securing passage of economically damaging legislation during debt limit fights.
“It is obvious that the U.S. should join the vast majority of rich countries around the world who don’t have a debt ceiling,” Bivens wrote. “It would be most straightforward if Congress would abolish it straightaway.”
Fresh calls for Democrats to put a stop to the annual fights over the debt ceiling come as Republicans are vocally threatening to oppose raising the current borrowing limit of around $31.4 trillion — which the government is set to hit sometime next year — in order to force spending cuts, specifically targeting Social Security and Medicare.
“I think Republicans are uniformly in support of using that moment as an opportunity to do something about spending,” Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) toldCBS News on Thursday, just two days after House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) made similar comments in an interview with Punchbowl.
Time is running out for Democrats to diffuse the GOP threat to Social Security, Medicare, and the entire U.S. economy.
The Boyle letter stresses that with the November midterms less than three weeks away, the makeup of the next Congress is “not yet known.” If Democrats lose the House or the Senate, the post-election lame-duck session will be the last chance they get to act without needing GOP support.
Whether Democrats will seize the opportunity to prevent Republican hostage-taking is far from clear. Two Democratic aides toldSemafor’s Joseph Zeballos-Roig on Thursday that it is “unlikely the party will act in the lame-duck.”
“It’s within their power to pass a party-line bill before the next Congress that would effectively eliminate the debt ceiling by raising it to an astronomically high number, but members fear being attacked for the vote,” Zeballos-Roig reported.
In a column on Thursday, The New Republic’s Matt Ford lamented that “Democrats could end this farce at any time and have not yet done so.”
“I don’t mean to deny culpability on the Republicans’ part in this state of affairs,” Ford wrote. “It is absolutely the case that they can quite simply vote not to plunge the country into an economic depression when given the chance.”
“But if January rolls around, a Republican-led Congress sweeps into power, and Democrats effectively hand over the hostage, the rope to tie them up with, and the gun to press to their left temple,” he added, “they are the ones who will be truly responsible for what happens next.”
If Republicans take control of the House this fall, they plan on using debt limit talks — and the possibility of throwing the U.S. into default — if they don’t get their way on slashing government programs.
According to a new interview with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-California), the party is planning on using must-pass debt ceiling legislation to force through the GOP’s agenda.
“You can’t just continue down the path to keep spending and adding to the debt,” McCarthy said in an interview with Punchbowl News, ignoring the fact that economists view national debt obligations as often signaling the health of the economy. “We’re not just going to keep lifting your credit card limit, right,” he continued. “And we should seriously sit together and [figure out] where can we eliminate some waste? Where can we make the economy grow stronger?”
When McCarthy refers to eliminating so-called waste, it is likely that he is referring to, among other things, the GOP’s plans to cut Medicare and Social Security, two of the most popular and vital anti-poverty government programs in the U.S.
Republicans have been attacking the programs over the past months. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) has threatened to put budgets up to congressional debate every year, which would almost definitely lead to cuts. Alarmingly, earlier this year, the Republican Study Committee, the largest Republican caucus in the House, put out a plan to raise the age at which people receive full benefits from both programs to 70, while implementing a rule that would raise the eligibility age over time.
The debt ceiling is an effective bludgeon for Republicans to use for this purpose. The debt ceiling accounts for government funding to provide promised payments for programs like Medicare and Social Security, as well as military salaries and other “existing legal obligations,” according to the Treasury Department.
Republicans had threatened to put the U.S. in default last September, after former President Donald Trump urged the party to do so. They appeared to be posing as deficit hawks — something they only do when a Democrat is in charge — while Democrats were debating the Build Back Better Act.
If the debt ceiling isn’t raised by fall of 2023, when the government is slated to run out of funding, the U.S. could find itself in a situation similar to last year, when it was at risk of defaulting on its loans. This could have triggered a global recession and would have disastrous short- and long-term consequences for the U.S., as the creditworthiness of the country would be ruined.
In other words, Republicans appear to be willing to hold the U.S. and global economy on the brink of disaster in order to force Democrats to capitulate to their demands.
This way, too, Republicans can blame whatever economic fallout will come with either a default, government shutdown or cuts to Medicare and Social Security on Democrats. By pursuing these cuts during a Democratic presidency, they can point fingers at President Joe Biden if they are pushed through — potentially providing the GOP with a weapon come the 2024 election.
Republicans are laying out other plans for if they take the House, which polls say they are likely to do. GOP members of the House Education and Labor Committee have made a list of prominent labor officials like Labor Secretary Marty Walsh and National Labor Relations Board General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo as well as Biden’s pro-worker task force to target with hearings and attacks if they take control of the House.
President Joe Biden plans to vow that, if Democrats win big in the midterms, the first bill he will send to the next session of Congress will codify abortion rights afforded under Roe v. Wade, according toa Democratic official.
Biden is scheduled Tuesday to speak before the Democratic National Committee, and plans to emphasize abortion rights as a top priority for the party. If Democrats keep control of the House and add two seats to Senate, then he will aim to sign the abortion rights bill into law around the 50th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court ruling in late January, according to the source familiar with his anticipated speech.
The president is also expected to criticize Republicans in his speech, warning about their efforts to pass a nationwide abortion ban if they take control of Congress.
A GOP takeover would have disastrous consequences for reproductive rights, potentially criminalizing huge swaths of abortion providers or patients and likely raising the maternal death rate.
The speech is aimed at motivating voters passionate about abortion rights to cast a ballot in this year’s elections. Abortion bans are unpopular among the public, and polls have shown that voters rank abortion as a top issue in the election and say that it is a key issue driving them to vote.
Democrats have honed in on campaigning around abortion rights in this election, promising voters to protect abortion rights federally and overrule states’ dangerous abortion bans if they win.
Abortion advocates have criticized Democrats and Biden for campaigning on abortion rights, however, saying that they have not done enough with the power that they currently have to protect abortion seekers and other people impacted by bans. Some lawmakers have suggested, for instance, that Biden could declare a public health emergency over the abortion bans to free up resources and highlight the importance of the issue.
Democrats have tried to pass legislation in recent months to create similar federal protections for abortion as Roe had previously afforded. In July, shortly after far right Supreme Court justices overturned Roe, the House passed a bill that would have protected abortion rights federally, known as the Women’s Health Protection Act.
Without support from Congress, Biden has signed executive actions aimed at protecting people who travel across state lines to obtain an abortion and protect access to medications and potentially increasing access for those who need to travel out of state to get an abortion.
So far, over a dozen states have banned or restricted abortions, with other bans pending court challenges or being considered by state legislatures.
These bans have led tohorrifying experiences for many people. Child incest victims have been forced to travel out of state for abortions. Other people have been denied necessary medications because they may cause birth defects or may contain abortifacients. Cancer patients, for instance, have been denied chemotherapy at least one state with an abortion ban, forcing pregnant patients to travel to a different state to obtain an abortion before starting cancer treatments.
The linear political spectrum is bankrupt! How does it explain why socialist China is making alliances with capitalist Russia and even with fundamentalist Saudi Arabia? Why is it that so-called socialist Social Democrats support imperialist United States rather than socialist China? Why is it that right-wing fundamentalist states like India and Brazil are supporting Russia and socialist China instead of being rabid anti-communists? The linear political spectrum is not just simplistic. It serves the interests of neoliberals and New Deal liberals as we shall see.
All over the world, centrist parties are losing elections. People are either not voting at all or they are voting for fascists. In some countries, people are voting for Social Democrats. The traditional choices between liberals and conservatives do not speak to world problems today. Additionally, just as centrist parties are collapsing (as depicted in the image above) so is the linear political spectrum model that serves as its visual description. The purpose of this article is to show how the linear political spectrum model fails to conform to actual world politics as they are practiced today. We need a whole new spectrum model to do justice to the political and economic realities of today.
Linear Version of the Political Spectrum
In his textbook on Political Ideologies Andrew Heywood presents a linear perspective that looks like this:
There are many problems with this model. Let’s start with the more quantitative ones and then we will move to qualitative problems. Then I will provide lots of examples of how the linear political spectrum fails when applied to real-world politics of today. Lastly, I will show how this linear political spectrum really serves two points on the political spectrum: neoliberal libertarians and new deal liberals.
Quantitation problems
For one thing, to the left of communism should be anarchism. Anarchism has been a serious ideological movement for at least 200 years, beginning with William Godwin, and millions of people have fought and died for it. Secondly, within communism there should be delineated the different kinds of Leninism, including Trotskyism, Stalinism and Maoism. Third, it is unfathomable to have only one kind of liberalism on this spectrum. There is FDR liberalism but there is also centrist liberalism. But more importantly there is libertarianism that has no representation at all on the spectrum. Yet libertarianism has been predominant for over 40 years as an economic doctrine over most of the world. As we shall see later, it benefits libertarians to present themselves as more or less the same as New Deal liberals. Lastly, conservatism should also be divided into old paleoconservatives and new right-wing conservatives.
Qualitative problems
In contemporary Mordor politics, even this five-fold division of the spectrum is too much. The political spectrum consists of only liberals (Democratic Party) and the conservatives (Republican Party). Both socialism and communism is conveniently ignored even though thousands of people in Yankeedom claim to be socialists. The last time I checked, the Democratic Socialists of America had 90,000 people. Fascism was mostly ignored until the presence of Trump supporters brought fascism out of the closet of political scientists.
But are liberals (Democrats) and conservatives (Republicans) truly opposite from each other? Political sociologist William Domhoff says that in practice there are differences between the two when it comes to culture and politics (gun control) religion, race and gender politics.
But where the two parties are the same is far more significant. These similarities have at least to do with:
Support of capitalism as an economic system domestically;
Agreeing never to discuss socioeconomic class in the way sociologists would;
Unwillingness to engage third parties in political debate;
Support of imperialism around the world;
Support of the installation of right-wing dictators;
Support of Israel elites despite 50 years of Zionist fundamentalism; and,
Opposition against socialism around the world whether it be Leninism or social democracy.
Furthermore, are the differences between political tendencies just matters of quantitative gradation (as in the linear model) or are there qualitative leaps which are not represented? Under the linear political spectrum, the difference between Social Democrats and New Deal liberals is presented as being quantitative or even identical when it is not. For example, Bernie Sanders whose policies are clearly New Deal liberal, could get away with saying he was a social democrat. A real social democrat historically is Eugene Debs. Debs clearly talked about class warfare and abolishing capitalism. This is not something New Deal liberals, including Bernie Sanders, ever talk about.
The part of the political spectrum that is socialist is a qualitatively different form of economic system.There is a qualitative leap. Social Democrats, the different kinds of Leninists and anarchists are bitterly divided among themselves over the place of state, market relations and the role of workers. Yet they agree that basic resources, tools and means of harnessing energy should be collectively owned and that capitalism cannot be reformed. All socialists believe that whether in the short-run or the long run, workers are capable of running society without bureaucrats, or managers.
Once the separation is made between those advocating socialism and those hoping to preserve capitalism, a chasm exists that is not represented on the political linear political spectrum.
What this means is that:
There are far more commonalties between liberals and conservatives than there are between liberals and socialists because capitalism divides them; and,
There are far more commonalities between liberals and fascists than between liberals and socialists because both liberals and fascists support capitalism.
The Linear Political Spectrum is too Simple for Today’s Complex Politics
China forming alliances with non-socialist countries
These days there are some very complex political configurations that defy the linear political spectrum. For example, China, which claims to be socialist, is forming alliances with countries that are clearly not socialist such as Russia, and a theocracy such as Saudi Arabia. According to the linear political spectrum model, China should only form alliances with other socialist countries like Venezuela and North Korea.
Social Democrats (socialists) forming alliances with imperialists
Secondly, the supposedly left-wing German Social Democrats and Greens and the Swedish Social Democrats have not lined up with China. If the linear political spectrum was accurate, Social Democrats would support Communist countries because they were fellow socialists. Instead, these Social Democrats have aligned themselves with right-wing Democrats of imperialist Yankeedom.
Right-wing governments support a socialist country
Thirdly, the countries that have supported Russia, and indirectly China, (moving towards a multipolar world against the imperialists) have been right-wing rulers such as Modi in India, Bolsonaro in Brazil and to a lesser extent, Viktor Orban in Hungary. The linear political spectrum would predict that right-wing states with fundamentalist fascists in power would be rabid anti-communists, but they are not – at least internationally. My claim is that the linear way of framing political life cannot do justice to the complexity of current political life
The Linear Political Spectrum Serves as an Ideological Tool to Support Two Points on the Spectrum – Either Neoliberals or New Deal liberals
The Recent elections in France
As many of you know, there was a recent election in France that was very close between Macron, Le Pen and the left wing candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Macron got 27% of the vote. Le Pen got 23% and the Mélenchon got about 21 ½%. The left-wing candidate failed by one point short of qualifying for the second round. So the French had to decide between the neoliberal Macron and the more conservative (or supposed fascist) Le Pen. Suddenly the neoliberal Macron discovers the linear political spectrum and presents himself, not as the center right candidate that he is, but closer to the Enlightenment values of New Deal liberalism. This is a prime minister who has presided over cuts to the French welfare system, tried to raise the retirement age and brutalized the Yellow Vests protesters for two years. Now he sings liberty, equality, fraternity. “Behold” this choir boy of Brussels, says “we have to watch out for the fascists.” It is true that Le Pen’s father was a fascist, but that doesn’t make her one. Is Le Pen’s stance against immigrants and refugees? Yes. But how does that compare with Macron in practice. Has he treated immigrants and refuges well? Hardly! Further, a comrade of mine who has lived in France for many years said that Le Pen’s program was considerably to the left of Macron. In addition, Le Pen was more likely to be pro-Russian. Sadly, the French people were tricked by Macron’s claim to define what fascism is and re-elected him. This is one case of letting a neoliberal define for socialists what a fascist is.
The Democratic Party defining what is and isn’t fascism
The Democratic Party has nothing to do with New Deal liberalism
In the 2016 election, the Democratic Party had a candidate who claimed to be a socialist. Every real socialist knew that Bernie Sanders was not a socialist and at best was a New Deal liberal. Since Lyndon Johnson the Democratic Party has slid from moderate left to center-right neoliberals. In 1985 Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council moved consciously away from anything like the FDR program (see Century of the Self Part IV by Adam Curtis) and that includes the eight years of Chicago boy, Baraka Obama. In 2016, the party gave a resounding “no” to New Deal liberal Bernie Sanders as they have done for 50 years. However, the public was 50 years behind the times. When most people voted for a Democrat, they thought they were getting a New Deal liberal. For sixteen years (Clinton and Obama) the party kept disappointing them. The Democratic Party has used the public’s out of date picture of the linear political spectrum to shove austerity programs down the throats of people in the name of liberalism. The public still does not know the difference between a New Deal liberal and a neoliberal, but it knows that the Democratic Party gives them nothing and I predict they will vote them out next month and in 2024.
Not such strange bedfellows: neoliberalism is right next to fascism on the political spectrum
Many people do not understand how fascism occurs. It’s as if suddenly a charismatic leader arises politically without rhyme or reason and this provokes a mass hysteria with people temporarily losing their minds and swooning over the dictator. The truth of the matter is that fascism is a product of a crisis of capitalism. There has been no fascism before the 20th century. Fascism began in the 1920s in response to a crisis in capitalism after World War I and throughout the twenties and into the 1930s. During such a crisis both liberal and conservative centrist parties lost credibility and withered, and the choices were either socialism or fascism. In fact, in the early thirties both the Democrats and Republicans wrote about how much they admired Hitler.
If the ruling party is a right-wing party, it is possible that a new deal liberal party might be a substitute for fascism, at least for a time. In Yankeedom, both Clinton and Obama provided nothing but wars and finance capital accumulation austerity for 16 years. Yet the public did not turn to fascism. But by 2016 the lower middle class and some working-class people had had enough and elected a fascist. Why? Because Trump promised to bring back American jobs and appealed to working class people who were pushed to the margins. Small businesses were even more difficult to start up and those that existed were struggling against the large corporations. Trump’s appeal was to economic issues. Meanwhile Democratic neoliberal Hillary Clinton haughtily called these lower middle class and working-class people “deplorables”. The party embraced identity politics and lost.
But fascism would not have won if the Democratic Party did not propose a New Deal liberal like Bernie Sanders. I’m convinced that had the Democratic Party gave Sanders their candidacy, he could have easily beaten Trump. What am I saying? The Democratic Party co-creates fascism by not running New Deal liberal candidates. My prediction is that with Uncle Mortimer as president almost two years in, by 2024 if Mordor is still standing, we will have a fascist president, whether it is Trump or someone else and the Democratic Party will be to blame. This is an example of a neoliberal party (Democrats) taking advantage of the public’s association of liberals with FDR to use that association to get themselves elected by carrying out a right wing-libertarian program.
Neoliberals support right-wing dictators and fascists internationally
Neoliberals in Mordor have supported right-wing dictators all over the world for 70 years. See William Blum’s book Killing Hope. In fact, the CIA is considered a liberal part of the Deep State. This doesn’t change whether Mordor’s regime is liberal or conservative. The most recent example is the Democratic administration’s support of Ukrainian fascists on and off for the past 70 years.
If the linear political spectrum were accurate neoliberalism would be right next to fascism on the political spectrum. So, I am saying that the linear political spectrum supports the ideology of Neoliberalism by:
Denying its existence in the political spectrum by not including it as a category;
Implementing right-wing neoliberal policies while pretending its legacy is New Deal liberalism.
Centrism is Bankrupt in Extreme Capitalist Crises
The linear political spectrum also makes it appear that the middle of the political spectrum is politically superior because it is not extremist. It is moderate, not hysterical like the fascism or communism. What this ignores is that when there are extreme economic, political or ecological conditions, the centrist political solutions don’t work. The center doesn’t hold, it caves in. In certain periods of history to be a moderate is unrealistic. Gradualist trial and error won’t cut the mustard because a storm is brewing. In the conditions of our time, extremes are the only answer because capitalism has brought us to this point and neither liberal nor conservative solutions have worked. The linear political spectrum arose during naïve political times when economics was thought to be separate from politics and political scientists papered over these extreme conditions which they couldn’t or wouldn’t explain. We need a new non-linear political spectrum which:
Is inclusive of many more political ideologies than the five at the front of this article;
Is economic as well as political;
Accounts for qualitative leaps – which is the difference between socialism and capitalism;
Decenters the spectrum so that both moderate and extreme solutions would seem reasonable. This means that all political tendencies would have be seen as having pros and cons. The way it stands now, liberals and conservatives are seen as virtuous and communism and fascism are seen as having vices.
Flexible enough to make room for alliances between the extremes on the political spectrum such as China and Saudi Arabia, or between India (fundamentalist) and China. The spectrum should not be limited to ideologies that are next to each other on the political spectrum.
The vast majority of Republicans running for Congress or in major statewide races believe — at least to some extent — former President Donald Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him, representing an alarming “new normal” for the party, a New York Times report finds.
Out of more than 550 candidates analyzed, more than 370 GOP candidates for Congress, governor, secretary of state or state attorney general doubt or outright deny the results of the 2020 election, according to the report. This represents about two-thirds of these Republican candidates and about 70 percent of those running for Congress specifically — people who could soon be put in positions of great influence over the way elections are conducted and results are tallied.
According to The New York Times, voters in every state will see at least one candidate who has questioned the results of the 2020 election on the ballot. Hundreds of these candidates are projected to win their races, the report finds.
That this sentiment is so widespread across the party — despite and perhaps because of the fact that there is a mountain of evidence disproving Trump’s election lies — is an alarming indication that the baseline of truth has shifted among the GOP. It could also shape elections to come, as the Republican Party has waged a nationwide effort to destabilize elections and make it easier for their candidates to win or outright steal them.
Such candidates “are the new normal of the Republican Party,” the New York Times wrote. “These candidates represent a sentiment that is spreading in the Republican Party, rupturing a bedrock principle of democracy: that voters decide elections and candidates accept results.”
This is a more dire outlook on the proportion of election deniers in the GOP than has previously been found. Similar analyses from The Washington Post and FiveThirtyEight have also found that there is a large proportion of GOP candidates who question or deny the election results. But those analyses didn’t find as large a number of election deniers, nor did they appear to have done as comprehensive an analysis of candidates’ speeches, social media posts, fundraising emails, interviews, and other campaign materials to find evidence of their denial.
The number of GOP candidates who have questioned the 2020 election results has grown over time, the publication found. Of the candidates who were public figures on or before January 6, 2021, when the election results were certified by Congress and Trump militants broke into the Capitol, only 74 publicly agreed with Trump’s Big Lie. Over the past couple of years, however, more and more candidates have embraced the conspiracy.
This indicates that many of these candidates likely view fealty to Trump as a winning strategy — or perhaps that they fear being isolated by the party if they choose to stand in line with reality.
Republicans have coordinated effective campaigns to shun those who denounce Trump; they successfully primaried Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming), one of Trump’s loudest Republican detractors in Congress, for instance, and are seeking to replace her with Trump-backed, anti-environmentalist candidate Harriet Hageman this fall.
As a federal court in her home state of Missouri heard arguments Wednesday in a case that could determine the fate of federal student debt cancellation, Democratic Rep. Cori Bush condemned GOP attorneys general for attempting to tank much-needed economic relief for tens of millions of borrowers.
“Efforts to undermine the Biden administration’s student loan cancellation program are the latest example of Republicans and student loan servicers prioritizing profits over people and corporations over constituencies,” Bush said in a statement as a group of GOP attorneys general — including Missouri AG Eric Schmitt — made their case for an injunction against student debt forgiveness.
The Republican plaintiffs claim in their lawsuit that the Biden administration’s student debt cancellation plan would harm the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority (MOHELA) by depriving it of “the ongoing revenue it earns from servicing” privately held Federal Family Education Loan Program (FFELP) loans.
In an effort to undercut such legal claims of harm, the Biden administration decided last month to scale back its debt forgiveness program to exclude many student borrowers with FFELP loans, denying relief to hundreds of thousands of people.
In her statement Wednesday, Bush noted that MOHELA “has remained silent” about the GOP lawsuit, “seemingly complicit in Republican efforts to prevent over 40 million borrowers from receiving the debt relief they have been promised.”
“Actions to delay or prevent this economic program from moving forward will disproportionately harm Black and brown borrowers,” Bush continued. “I urge MOHELA and these six Republican attorneys general to stop putting profits over the interests of student loan borrowers and halt all activities that interfere with the president’s student loan debt cancellation plan.”
“The American people overwhelmingly support student debt cancellation,” the Missouri Democrat added, “and neither partisan nor corporate interests should prevent borrowers from receiving the life-changing relief they need and deserve.”
In recent weeks, Republican officials and right-wing advocacy organizations have filed a number of lawsuits against the Biden administration’s limited student debt cancellation program, which has yet to fully launch as the Department of Education builds out the application website — a costly undertaking that could also create additional barriers to relief for the most vulnerable borrowers.
At least one of the lawsuits against the debt relief program has already been struck down.
During Wednesday’s hearing on the GOP attorneys general lawsuit, the George W. Bush-appointed federal judge appeared to voice skepticism that the Republican officials have standing to sue over the debt forgiveness program.
As Matt Bruenig of the People’s Policy Project noted last week, “Finding a person, business, or government that will suffer a concrete and particularized injury as a result of the student debt forgiveness and that is willing to be a plaintiff in a lawsuit over it is not easy to do.”
“The core legal argument against the student debt forgiveness is that the HEROES Act that the Biden administration relies upon does not actually give them the authority to do it,” Bruenig explained. “But the procedural challenge is how exactly to get that legal argument in front of a judge without having your lawsuit dismissed for lack of standing.
“The fact that the Biden administration made two swift changes to the program in response to these lawsuits — including a very substantial change in cutting FFELP debtors out of relief — suggests that they are not very confident that the courts would side with them on the question of whether the HEROES Act actually allows the executive to do a student debt forgiveness of this sort,” he added. “So they are trying to avoid litigating that question by changing the program to undercut theories of standing that get presented in the courts.”
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” That famous phrase from Charles Dickens sums up the double-edged sword hanging over the roughly 63 million Americans now getting monthly retirement payouts from Social Security.
Their 2022 COLA (cost-of-living adjustment) rose by 5.9%, the biggest jump in nearly 40 years. The 2023 increase is set to come in at an even-higher 8.7%. That’s the best of times. The worst of times, getting ever closer, is the date when the Social Security trust fund runs out of money—and those higher benefits this year and next will likely wipe out the fund earlier than the current estimate of 2034.
Adding to the problem, the nation’s demographics have created their own double-edged sword. For years, a combination of higher life expectancies and lower birth rates has been lowering the ratio of workers who pay in to beneficiaries who take out.
Putting everything together, Congress will be forced to act to keep benefits from shrinking to only 78% of the currently scheduled amounts. There’s little doubt that lawmakers won’t let that happen, but plenty of doubt over the direction their fixes will take.
Even though Social Security is hugely popular, only the most optimistic expect a bipartisan solution. Everything will likely hinge on which party is in charge, and the ideas backed by the two parties differ sharply. Democrats want more generous benefits; the GOP, under the guise of saving Social Security, would effectively cut them.
Let’s review the major ideas. Then let’s consider two further reforms—both aimed at high-income Americans—to help prevent any shortfall and put the system on a sound fiscal basis.
Two pieces of legislation have already been introduced that rival each other at doing right by seniors. The Social Security Expansion Act, co-created by Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT), would raise benefits by $2,400 per year. A proposal from Democrats in the House, Social Security 2100: A Sacred Trust, would raise all benefits by 2%—an average monthly increase of $159. Additional provisions in both bills, including a more generous way to calculate COLAs, would put even more money in the pockets of retirees.
The bills differ in how they’re funded, how much revenue they raise, and what it all means for the program’s future. The Warren-Sanders bill is both more progressive and more effective: it would fund Social Security through 2096, and do it by raising more revenue from America’s well-off.
There are currently no payroll taxes on incomes above $147,000. The House proposal would be funded by re-instituting those taxes on incomes above $400,000. The Warren/Sanders bill would go further, lowering the threshold to $250,000. It also calls for a new tax on the investment and business income of the top 7 percent.
The GOP strongly opposes the Democratic proposals but offers little in the way of alternatives. Most House Republicans have endorsed a new benefit-cutting idea, raising the retirement age to 70 for those born in 1975 or later—in other words, for everyone 47 or younger. An old favorite, back for another try, is to privatize Social Security. Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) wants to hand the whole issue over to a commission. That suggestion was quickly derided by one commentator as “getting big-money Republicans and big-money Democrats to secretly make decisions that go against the will of the people.”
So much for hopes of bipartisanship; now for the two additional reforms.
“Today, absurdly and unfairly, there is a cap on income subject to Social Security taxes.” Those words came from Senator Sanders when he introduced the bill removing the cap on incomes over $250,000.
It’s just as absurd and unfair to exempt income between $147,000 and $250,000. The payroll tax should apply to all work income, period. That makes the most sense, raises the most revenue, and helps Social Security the most.
Lastly, the starting age for required minimum distributions from retirement accounts has already been pushed back once, and House Democrats have voted unanimously to push it back again. It’s a huge giveaway to those at the high end and a takeaway from all those below. The age should be reset at the original 70½ (or better yet, even lower). All the resulting extra revenues should be dedicated to the Social Security trust fund.
Summing up, there’s no lack of ways to make Social Security more secure. It’s up to Congress to find the will.
A majority of Republican midterm candidates running for major state or federal office don’t fully accept the results of the 2020 presidential election, a new analysis finds.
According to The Washington Post, 299 candidates running for House, Senate, or key state offices of the governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state or attorney general have either denied or publicly questioned the results of the election that unequivocally saw Joe Biden elected as president. This represents a majority of all candidates running for such positions, all of which oversee some portion of election administration.
Such candidates are on the ballot in almost every state in the country. All but two states, Rhode Island and North Dakota, have candidates who fully or partially deny the election result. In four states, Republican voters have nominated an election denier for every race examined by the publication.
The majority — 174 — of these candidates are running in safe elections, while 51 are running in tight races. This means that it’s possible they view election denial as a strategy that could win them votes — or, potentially, that they’re planning to deny the results of their own elections if voters reject them.
When surveyed for a separate Washington Postanalysis last month, 12 of 19 Republican candidates in close gubernatorial or U.S. Senate races refused to say if they would accept the outcome of their election. All 19 Democrats running against them, on the other hand, said they would accept the results whether or not they won.
The report lines up with an ongoing analysis by FiveThirtyEight, which finds that there are 263 GOP candidates for the same offices, excluding the lieutenant governor, who either fully or partially deny the election result. This means that election deniers or doubters are on the ballot for 60 percent of Americans this fall, according to the analysis.
FiveThirtyEight also found that election deniers and doubters outnumber the candidates who don’t lie about the result of the election; there are 256 candidates who refuse to accept the result and only 158 who do.
That election deniers make up such a large proportion of the Republican Party and its candidates is an alarming show of the right’s open embrace of fascism and anti-democratic principles, experts say.
“Election denialism is a form of corruption,” Ruth Ben-Ghiat, New York University historian and fascism expert, told The Washington Post. “The party has now institutionalized this form of lying, this form of rejection of results. So it’s institutionalized illegal activity. These politicians are essentially conspiring to make party dogma the idea that it’s possible to reject certified results.”
If these election deniers take office, it could have dire consequences.
Electing such people into office could accelerate the U.S.’s path into fascism, putting the power of election administration into the hands of people who may use it to install whichever political leaders they prefer; an election-denying secretary of state, for instance, could refuse to certify election results they don’t favor. An influx of election deniers in Congress, meanwhile, means that there could be more lawmakers who vote to overturn the result of the 2024 presidential election if Donald Trump or another far right Republican doesn’t win.
Once a swing state, Ohio has turned solidly red. Extreme gerrymandering of legislative and congressional districts could keep it that way for a long time.
Although Republicans control statewide offices such as governor, secretary of state and attorney general, the state is pretty evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. Because of gerrymandering, Republicans boast supermajorities in the Ohio House and Senate.
They’ve also brazenly ignored a series of 4-3 rulings from the Ohio Supreme Court that their legislative and congressional redistricting maps this year are unconstitutional. The court’s chief justice, a Republican who has sided with Democrats on the court in ruling against the maps, has vowed to campaign against gerrymandering in the state after stepping down from the bench at the end of this year.
The court ruled multiple times this year that proposed state legislative maps and U.S. congressional maps were unconstitutional. By coming back with new variations that didn’t fix the issue, Republican legislators waited out the calendar to be able to move forward with gerrymandered maps for this November’s election.
Ohio has one of the most restrictive deadlines for registering to vote in the country — 30 days before an election, unless that falls on a weekend or holiday, as it does this year. That’s the minimum time for registration allowed under federal law.
But voters can cast their ballots in three ways: absentee voting by mail, early in-person voting or in-person voting on Election Day. The state has a nearly month-long period for early voting.
Voters are currently allowed to use utility bills, paychecks, a military ID or several other types of documentation to confirm their identity when voting at the polls. But a state Senate bill proposed in April would require in-person voters to show a photo ID.
Ohio purged nearly 98,000 voters from its registration list in 2021. People who don’t vote for six consecutive years, or fail to take one of a few other actions, such as responding to notices requesting they update their registration, can be struck from the rolls under Ohio law.
Those citizens would have to register again to vote.
An appeals court ruled in 2016 that Ohio’s purges violate federal law, but the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the state in 2018.
Threats Follow False Voter Fraud Allegations
Amid former President Donald Trump’s false allegations of widespread voter fraud after he lost re-election in 2020, Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose determined that of the 5.9 million registered voters who cast ballots during the 2020 elections, 0.0005 percent of the ballots were fraudulent.
Yet LaRose issued Directive 2022-38 in June 2022, asking the state’s 88 county boards of elections to increase security requirements. LaRose’s office created a website link for people to submit anonymous tips about election fraud.
Ohio residents are stripped of their voting rights while incarcerated on a felony conviction but can re-register to vote upon release, except for individuals convicted of two or more election-related crimes — including misdemeanors. They lose their rights to vote permanently, barring a pardon.
Ohioans who are in jail awaiting trial or serving a misdemeanor sentence retain the right to vote, but voting rights advocates have decried what can amount to “de facto disenfranchisement,” as detailed in a recent Public Integrity report.
“Each year, at least 150,000 different people are booked into local jails in Ohio,” the Prison Policy Initiative contends, but many are not given the information or assistance needed to vote.
In December 2021, the voting rights groups Northeast Ohio Voter Advocates and All Voting is Local issued a report which found that Ohio has no formal policy for all its jails to follow: “Formal policies provide a written affirmation that most people who are in jail have the right to vote and that the staff at the boards of elections and jail facilities are held accountable to protect that right. Formal policies also ensure that a change in the sheriff’s office or jail staff will not lead to an infringement on the right to vote for people in jail. Without codified policies and practices, counties risk inconsistent and unfair approaches, as well as constitutional violations.”
Outside Funding Banned
As part of a state budget bill last year, Ohio became one of 24 states to ban local officials from accepting grants from private foundations to supplement the cost of running elections.
Right-wing organizations pushed copycat legislation on this issue, fueled by conspiracy theories about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. He donated $350 million to the nonprofit Center for Technology and Civic Life to offer grants that helped under-resourced communities expand early voting and recruit poll workers amid obstacles associated with the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
Student debt forgiveness advocate Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) criticized Republicans on Monday for the party’s lawsuit to stop millions of debtors from receiving what they say is direly needed student loan forgiveness.
Even if it fails, the lawsuit exposes the loyalties of the Republican Party, the senator said. “Republican officials are so angry about [President Joe Biden] helping working people that they’re suing to stop student debt cancellation,” Warren wrote on Twitter. “It won’t work, but it shows their priorities: putting the profits of corporate loan servicers over relief for working-class & middle-class Americans.”
On Thursday, six Republican-led states filed a lawsuit in a Missouri federal court seeking to stop Biden’s plan to cancel up to $20,000 of publicly-held student debt for Pell Grant recipients and $10,000 for others making less than $125,000 a year. The Republicans argue, among other things, that loan servicers like MOHELA — Missouri’s student loan servicer and one of the largest student loan servicers in the U.S. — would be hurt by the plan.
Another lawsuit, filed by a lawyer for libertarian law firm Pacific Legal Foundation, argued that the plan trampled on the lawyer’s freedoms because it would force him to pay state taxes on the cancellation amount. This lawsuit was swiftly denied by a federal judge after the Biden administration said that officials will simply add an option to opt out of forgiveness if one chooses to do so.
There has been much scrutiny from conservatives and corporate media over the debt cancellation plan’s cost and its effect on things like luring low-income people into the military, along with spurious concerns about its fairness and its potential effects on the economy and inflation. Nearly all of these arguments have been repeatedly debunked or rebuffed by student debt cancellation advocates over the past years, but Republicans insist on making them anyway.
In response to such arguments, progressive lawmakers like Warren and debt activists have leveraged conservatives’ hypocrisy on economic issues against them. Donald Trump and Republicans’ 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, for instance, cost the government $2 trillion in lost tax revenue after the party slashed tax rates for corporations and the rich. This amount of money, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) pointed out in August, could have paid for not only Biden’s plan but also the entirety of student loan debt in the U.S., which the Federal Reserve estimates to be about $1.7 trillion.
The fact that conservatives complain about the cost of the cancellation but don’t complain about moves like the tax cuts, which have only further concentrated wealth at the very top of U.S. society, perhaps exposes Republicans’ real motivations: to maintain their ability to use debt as a form of political and social control.
That would explain why Republicans complained after the conservative-led Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated the debt forgiveness plan would cost $400 billion — while conveniently not mentioning that that estimate would play out over the next 30 years — but stay mum about things like the military budget, which costs nearly twice as much yearly.
By fighting against student debt forgiveness, Republicans can also garner the favor of corporate lobbyists. Student loan servicers have spent millions on lobbying efforts over the past two years, pushing politicians to oppose the student loan payment pause and likely also arguing against cancellation. Servicers are contracted by the federal government to manage student loans, and are then allowed to collect a fee on the loans they administer.
This lobbying appears to pay off in spades for servicers, which make hundreds of millions of dollars in profits each year with student loans and other services.
David Barsamian: What we are facing is often described as unprecedented — a pandemic, climate catastrophe and, always lurking off center stage, nuclear annihilation. Three of the four horsemen of the apocalypse.
Noam Chomsky: I can add a fourth: the impending destruction of what remains of American democracy and the shift of the United States toward a deeply authoritarian, also proto-fascist, state, when the Republicans come back into office, which looks likely. So, that’s four horses.
And remember that the Republicans are the denialist party, committed to racing to climate destruction with abandon in the hands of the chief wrecker they now worship like a demigod. It’s bad news for the United States and for the world, given the power of this country.
The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance just issued the Global State of Democracy Report 2021. It says that the United States is a country where democracy is “backsliding.”
Very severely. The Republican Party is openly dedicated — it’s not even concealed — to undermining what remains of American democracy. They’re working very hard on it. Since the days of Richard Nixon, the Republicans have long understood that they’re fundamentally a minority party and not going to get votes by advertising their increasingly open commitment to the welfare of the ultrarich and the corporate sector. So, they’ve been long diverting attention to so-called cultural issues.
It began with Nixon’s Southern strategy. He realized that Democratic Party support for civil rights legislation, however limited, would lose them the southern Democrats, who were openly and overtly extreme racists. The Nixon administration capitalized on that with their Southern strategy, hinting, not so subtly, that the Republicans would become the party of white supremacy.
In subsequent years, they picked up other issues. It’s now the virtual definition of the party: so, let’s run on attacking Critical Race Theory — whatever that means! It’s a cover term, as their leading spokesmen have explained, for everything they can rally the public on: white supremacy, racism, misogyny, Christianity, anti-abortion rights.
Meanwhile, the leadership, with the aid of the right-wing Federalist Society, has been developing legal means — if you want to call it that — for the Republicans to ensure that, even as a minority party, they will be able to control the voting apparatus and the outcome of elections. They are exploiting radically undemocratic features built into the constitutional system and the structural advantages Republicans have as a party representing more scattered rural populations and the traditionally Christian, white nationalist population. Using such advantages, even with a minority of the vote, they should be able to maintain something like near-permanent power.
Actually, that permanence might not last long if Donald Trump, or a Trump clone, takes the presidency in 2024. It’s not likely then that the United States, not to speak of the world, will be able to escape the impact of the climate and environmental destruction they’re committed to accelerating.
We all saw what happened in Washington on January 6th. Do you see the possibility of civil unrest spreading? There are multiple militias across the country. Representative Paul Gosar of the great state of Arizona and Representative Lauren Boebert, of the great state of Colorado, among others, have made threatening statements inciting violence and hatred. The Internet is rife with conspiracy theories. What must we do?
It is very serious. In fact, maybe a third or so of Republicans think it may be necessary to use force to “save our country,” as they put it. “Save our country” has a clear meaning. If anyone didn’t understand it, Trump issued a call to people to mobilize to prevent the Democrats from swamping this country with criminals being let out of jails in other lands, lest they “replace” white Americans and carry out the destruction of America. The “great replacement” theory — that’s what “take away our country” means and it’s being used effectively by proto-fascist elements, Trump being the most extreme and most successful.
What can we do about it? The only tools available, like it or not, are education and organization. There’s no other way. It means trying to revive an authentic labor movement of the kind that, in the past, was in the forefront of moves toward social justice. It also means organizing other popular movements, carrying out educational efforts to combat the murderous anti-vaccine campaigns now going on, making sure that there are serious efforts to deal with the climate crisis, mobilizing against the bipartisan commitment to increase dangerous military spending and provocative actions against China, which could lead to a conflict nobody wants and end up in a terminal war.
You just have to keep working on this. There is no other way.
In the background is extreme inequality, which is off the charts. Why is the United States so unequal?
A lot of this has happened in the last 40 years as part of the neoliberal assault on America in which the Democrats, too, have participated, though not to the extent of the Republicans.
There is a fairly careful estimate of what’s called the transfer of wealth from the lower 90% of the population to the top 1% (actually, a fraction of them) during the four decades of this assault. A RAND Corporation study estimated it as close to $50 trillion. That’s not pennies — and it’s ongoing.
During the pandemic, the measures that were taken to save the economy from collapse led to the further enrichment of the very few. They also sort of maintained life for so many others, but the Republicans are busy trying to dismantle that part of the deal, leaving only the part that enriches the very few. That’s what they’re dedicated to.
Take ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council. This goes back years. It’s an organization funded by almost the entire corporate sector, dedicated to hitting at the weak point in the constitutional system, the states. It’s very easy. It doesn’t take much to buy or impel legislative representatives at the state level, so ALEC has worked there to impose legislation that will foster the long-term efforts of those seeking to destroy democracy, increase radical inequality, and destroy the environment.
And one of the most important of those efforts is to get the states to legislate that they can’t even investigate — and certainly not punish — wage theft, which steals billions of dollars from workers every year by refusing to pay overtime as well as through other devices. There have been efforts to investigate it, but the business sector wants to stop them.
An analog at the national level is the attempt to ensure that the IRS not go after wealthy corporate tax cheats. At every level you can think of, this class war on the part of the masters, the corporate sector, the super-rich is raging with intensity. And they’re going to use every means they can to ensure that it goes on until they’ve succeeded in destroying not only American democracy, but the very possibility of survival as an organized society.
Corporate power seems unstoppable. The uber class of gazillionaires — Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and Elon Musk — are now flying into outer space. But I’m reminded of something that the novelist Ursula K. Le Guin said some years ago: “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable.” And then she added, “So did the divine right of kings.”
So did slavery. So did the principle that women are property, which lasted in the United States until the 1970s. So did laws against miscegenation so extreme that even the Nazis wouldn’t accept them, which lasted in the United States until the 1960s.
All kinds of horrors have existed. Over time, their power has been eroded but never completely eliminated. Slavery was abolished, but its remnants remain in new and vicious forms. It’s not slavery, but it’s horrifying enough. The idea that women are not persons has not only been formally overcome, but to a substantial extent in practice, too. Still, there’s plenty to do. The constitutional system was a step forward in the eighteenth century. Even the phrase “We the people” terrified the autocratic rulers of Europe, deeply concerned that the evils of democracy (what was then called republicanism) could spread and undermine civilized life. Well, it did spread — and civilized life continued, even improved.
So, yes, there are periods of regression and of progress, but the class war never ends, the masters never relent. They’re always looking for every opportunity and, if they’re the only participants in class struggle, we will indeed have regression. But they don’t have to be, any more than in the past.
In your Masters of Mankind book, you have an essay, “Can Civilization Survive Really Existing Capitalism?” You write, “Really existing capitalist democracy — RECD for short (pronounced ‘wrecked’)” is “radically incompatible” with democracy and add that “it seems to me unlikely that civilization can survive really existing capitalism and the sharply attenuated democracy that goes along with it. Could functioning democracy make a difference? Consideration of nonexistent systems can only be speculative, but I think there’s some reason to think so.” Tell me your reasons.
First of all, we live in this world, not in some world we would like to imagine. And in this world, if you simply think about the timescale for dealing with environmental destruction, it’s far shorter than the time that would be necessary to carry out the significant reshaping of our basic institutions. That doesn’t mean you have to abandon the attempt to do so. You should be doing that all the time — working on ways to raise consciousness, raise understanding, and build the rudiments of future institutions in the present society.
At the same time, the measures to save us from self-destruction will have to take place within the basic framework of existing institutions — some modification of them without fundamental change. And it can be done. We know how it can be done.
Meanwhile, work should continue on overcoming the problem of RECD, really existing capitalist democracy, which in its basic nature is a death sentence and also deeply inhuman in its fundamental properties. So, let’s work on that, and at the same time, ensure that we save the possibility of achieving it by overcoming the immediate and urgent crisis we face.
What else is going to counter it? They are the ones holding up the hope that we’ll be able to find ways to counter these highly harmful, destructive developments we’re discussing.
The core method is, of course, education. People have to come to understand what’s happening in the world. That requires the means to disseminate information and analysis, opening up opportunities for discussion, which you’re not going to find, for the most part, in the mainstream. Maybe occasionally at the margins. A lot of what we’ve been talking about is not discussed at all, or only marginally within the major media. So, these conversations have to be brought to the public through such channels. There is no other way.
Actually, there is another way: organization. It is possible and, in fact, easy to conduct educational and cultural programs inside organizations. That was one of the major contributions of the labor movement when it was a vibrant, lively institution, and one of the main reasons why President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher were so determined to destroy labor, as they both did. Their first moves were attacks on the labor movement.
There were educational and cultural programs that brought people together to think about the world, to understand it, and develop ideas. It takes organization to do that. Doing that alone, as an isolated person, is extremely difficult.
Despite the corporate effort to beat back the unions, there was a lively, independent labor press in the United States as late as the 1950s, reaching lots of people, condemning the “bought priesthood,” as they called it, of the mainstream press. It took a long time to destroy that.
There’s a history in the United States of a vibrant, progressive labor press that goes back to the nineteenth century, when it was a major phenomenon. That can and should be revived as part of the revival of a militant, functioning labor movement at the forefront of progress toward social justice. It happened before and it can happen again. And independent media are a critical element of this.
When I was a kid in the 1930s and early 1940s, I could read Izzy Stone in the Philadelphia Record. It wasn’t the major journal in Philadelphia, but it was there. In the late 1940s, I could read him in the New York newspaper PM, which was an independent journal. It made a huge difference.
Later, the only way to read Stone was to subscribe to his newsletter. That was the independent media in the 1950s. In the 1960s, it began to pick up a little bit with the magazine Ramparts, radio programs like Danny Schechter’s on WBCN in Boston, and others like it.
And today, this continues around the country. The ones you mentioned are forces for independence, for thinking.
There are multiple mentions of Antonio Gramsci in two of your most recent books, Consequences of Capitalismand Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal — specifically, of his comment, “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Right now, though, the quote of his I’d like you to address is: “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” Talk about his relevance today and the meaning of that quote.
Chomsky: Gramsci was a leading left labor activist in Italy around the late teens, early 1920s. He was very active in organizing left worker collectives. In Italy, the fascist government took over in the early 1920s. One of its first acts was to send Gramsci to prison. During his trial, the prosecutor stated: we have to silence this voice. (This gets us back to the importance of independent media, of course.) So, he was sent to prison.
While there, he wrote his Prison Notebooks. He wasn’t silenced, though the public couldn’t read him. He continued the work he had begun and in that writing were the quotes you cited.
In the early 1930s, he wrote that the old world was collapsing, while the new world had not yet risen and that, in the interim, they were facing morbid symptoms. Mussolini was one, Hitler another. Nazi Germany almost conquered large parts of the world. We came very close to that. The Russians defeated Hitler. Otherwise, half the world would probably have been run by Nazi Germany. But it was very close. Morbid symptoms were visible everywhere.
The adage you quoted, “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will,” which became famous, came from the period when he was still able to publish. In his spirit, we must look at the world reasonably, without illusions, understand it, decide how to act, and recognize that there are grim portents. There are very dangerous things happening. That’s pessimism of the intellect. At the same time, we need to recognize that there are ways out, real opportunities. So, we have optimism of the will, meaning, we dedicate ourselves to using all the opportunities available — and they do exist — while working to overcome the morbid symptoms and move toward a more just and decent world.
In these dark times, it’s difficult for many to feel that there’s a bright future ahead. You’re always asked, what gives you hope? And I have to ask you the same question.
One thing that gives me hope is that people are struggling hard under very severe circumstances, much more severe than we can imagine, all over the world to achieve rights and justice. They don’t give up hope, so we certainly can’t.
The other is that there’s simply no option. The alternative is to say, okay, I’ll help the worst to happen. That’s one choice. The other is to say, I’ll try to do the best I can, what the farmers in India are doing, what poor and miserable peasants in Honduras are doing, and many others like them around the world. I’ll do that as best I can. And maybe we can get to a decent world in which people can feel that they can live without shame. A better world.
That’s not much of a choice, so we should be able to easily make it.
On Thursday, the House passed a bill aimed at expanding access to mental health services in schools that garnered only one Republican vote, despite the party’s ceaseless scapegoating of mental illness for issues in the U.S.
The Mental Health Matters Act passed 220 to 205 on a largely party line vote, with all 205 “no” votes coming from Republicans. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (Pennsylvania) cast the sole Republican “yes” vote.
The bill, introduced by Rep. Mark DeSaulnier (D-California) and supported by the White House, would provide grants for schools to hire more mental health experts and grow their mental health services, especially schools in areas with high need. It would also provide mental health protections to adults with private health insurance and children and staff in Head Start programs, which are aimed at serving low-income children from birth to age 5.
“Educators have been forced to play an outsized role in supporting and responding to students’ mental health needs, leading to increased depression and trauma among educators, their students, and the families and the community,” DeSaulnier said on the need for his bill, per The Hill. “However, our schools do not have the specialized staff necessary to respond to the increased prevalence and complexity of students’ mental health needs.”
Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-North Carolina) took issue with a portion of the bill that punishes employers when employees are denied mental health and substance use benefits and said that the “country would be better off without” the bill.
Experts have said that children’s mental health is in crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic has taken a toll on children’s mental health, whether through trauma, loss, or otherwise, leading to a corresponding rise in mental health crises among children, research finds. Pediatric mental health professionals say that legislation aimed at permanently increasing resources for children’s mental health is sorely needed.
Democrats condemned Republicans for voting against the bill. “This afternoon we voted to create more mental health services in schools and 99.5 percent of republicans voted no and told kids to go to hell,” Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr (D-New Jersey) wrote on Twitter.
Others pointed out that Republicans have spent months, if not years, scapegoating mental health issues as a catch-all for problems like mass shootings — which, in reality, are often spurred by far right radicalization and white supremacist ideology. Indeed, Republicans often dig up supposed concerns about mental health in order to distract from other issues.
After the elementary school massacre in Uvalde, Texas, Republicans and the far right scrambled to spread disinformation online about the shooter, pinning the problem on groups they wished to demonize — including trans people, those with mental illnesses and the Democratic Party.
“Well, it’s just tragic what happened down there. We learn something new every day about how can we improve,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-California) said on Fox News after the shooting. He said that there should be a funding influx for “focusing on mental health” in response to the shooting. McCarthy voted against the bill on Thursday.
In reality, Republicans who speak out in favor of mental health funding in response to horrifying mass shootings are likely readying for coming attempts to curtail gun ownership, curb the power of the gun lobby, and, in the case of Uvalde, scrutinize the police for their failure to prevent or act on the shooting.
In other words, political commentators have noted, mental health issues act as a shiny object for Republicans to wave around, a political convenience that allows the party to continue expanding and perpetuating the roots of violence and antipathy.
Fentanyl is a painkiller legally administered in emergency rooms every day. “Fentanyl” is also a catch-all term for synthetic opioids fueling panic and misinformation about the overdose crisis — and a central theme of the GOP’s fearmongering midterm election strategy.
In a recent appeal to voters that was panned by critics as “substance-free” in terms of concrete policy ideas, House Republicans decried an “out of control border” and claimed every state is now a “border state” under assault by fentanyl. Ahead of an expected reelection bid, former president Trump is once again railing about an “invasion” of “drug dealers” claiming “innocent victims,” a redux of the racist messaging on immigration that defined his first campaign.
By wrongly conflating asylum seekers and President Joe Biden’s border policies with overdose deaths, Republicans hope to continue hammering Democrats as “soft” on “crime” and immigration (if only!) while whipping up fear among voters and anger in their nativist base. The GOP’s major attack lines ahead of the midterms are “open borders,” “fentanyl,” and “invasion,” and they are grounding those attacks in lies and disinformation, according to a national analysis of digital ads and campaigns published by America’s Voice, an immigration reform group.
The GOP’s rhetoric fits neatly into the grooves of the so-called “Great Replacement,” a deeply racist and anti-Semitic conspiracy theory about liberal elites aiming to replace white, Christian Americans with people of color, Jews, Muslims and non-European immigrants. According to this distorted logic, which is trumpeted by right-wing commentators such as Tucker Carlson on Fox News, President Joe Biden and the Democrats are allowing drugs produced in China and Mexico to cross the border and kill Americans while they are “replaced” by a non-white electorate.
In reality, most migrants attempting to cross border are seeking asylum after fleeing violence and poverty, and certainly aren’t smuggling fentanyl in their backpacks. Plenty of statements and data from federal law enforcement show that fentanyl most commonly enters the U.S. in trucks and passenger vehicles at legal ports of entry, and a majority of those transporting fentanylare U.S. citizens, who are less likely to draw the attention of border police. By scapegoating migrants as a source of drugs, demagogues obscure the facts with a cloud of xenophobia.
Thousands of travelers, workers and truck drivers cross the U.S.-Mexico border through legal ports of entry each day, and federal border authorities are reportedly undertaking a $480 million effort to update scanner equipment to identify vehicles carrying fentanyl and other drugs. On top of billions of dollars spent annually to enforce drugs laws, the Biden administration announced an additional $275 million in anti-drug trafficking funding in April. Facing baseless attacksfrom the right, Biden has also issued a dangerous call for an additional 100,000 local cops on the streets.
If Republicans had proposals beyond building Trump’s border wall and further restricting immigration — which would not stop fentanyl at legal ports of entry — they would probably look a lot like Biden’s: more policing. Stopping drugs at the border is bedrock U.S. policy, but if saving lives is any metric, this decades-old drug war approach is clearly failing. The sharp increase in fentanyl seizures under both Trump and Biden has not prevented a record number of drug overdose deaths in the U.S. (Meanwhile, it’s worth noting that fentanyl is far from the only drug behind the crisis; fatal overdoses involving stimulants are also on the rise, and overdoses often include alcohol or a combination of drugs.)
Experts warn there is no way to stop all drugs crossing the border, where traffickers and police have played a lucrative “cat and mouse game” for decades. Law enforcement efforts over to disrupt the traditional heroin supply and crackdown on painkiller prescribing increased demand for fentanyl, which is easier to smuggle in smaller packages due to its potency. Unlike prescription painkillers with known dosages, counterfeit pills and other products containing fentanyl can vary in strength, putting users at increased risk of overdose.
The U.S. has averaged more than 100,000 overdose deaths in a 12-month period for over a year now, according to preliminary estimates by the Centers for Disease Control. In July, the CDC confirmed massive racial disparities in the data from 2019 and 2020, when rates of fatal drug overdose skyrocketed by about 30 percent as COVID-19 roiled Trump’s final year in office. The CDC’s report does not mention the southern border. Instead, the CDC cites unequal access to health care and addiction treatment fueled by stigma and bias against drug users, especially if they are poor, Black or Brown.
Such inequalities were entrenched when the pandemic isolated drug users from friends, family and health supports, and the estimated number of annual overdose deaths surpassed 100,000 for the first time. The CDC’s findings echo years of research showing that poverty, incarceration, racist policing and the criminalization of drug users are all major factors behind the overdose crisis, but the response from policymakers and health care providers has been anything but equal.
For example, Black patients are far less likely than white people to access the most effective treatments for opioid addiction, one reason why rates of fatal overdoses among Black men were seven times higher compared to white men, according to the CDC. Among all Black and Hispanic people, overdose death rates grew fastest in local counties with the most income inequality — including in areas where addiction treatment has expanded. The findings echo a 2020 National Institutes of Health study showing that Black people and other people of color are not benefiting equally from investments in health care and addiction treatment meant to quell the overdose crisis.
In a call with reporters in late July, CDC officials called for increasing access to addiction treatments and harm reduction services such as syringe exchange programs that are medically proven to prevent overdose deaths and the spread of disease. Don’t expect to hear about this from Republicans, who have demonized lifesaving harm reduction services to score political points for years. Most recently, Republicans attacked the Biden administration’s extremely modest efforts to reduce overdose deaths by fund harm reduction services with memes falsely accusing the president of handing out “free crack pipes.”
The overdose crisis is a difficult and emotional issue for millions of people, and viral drug panics are perfect fodder for demagogues. The GOP’s timing for putting “fentanyl” and “invasion” at the center of a midterm strategy appears intentional. Look no further than the viral misinformation about so-called “rainbow fentanyl,” which showed up in law enforcement press releases just in time for the annual panic about drugs in Halloween candy, a misinformed media traditiondating back to the height of the drug war in the 1980s.
As Kastalia Medrano writes at Filter, drug sellers are adding colors such as blue (aka “blues”) to the fentanyl pills that have replaced prescription painkillers and traditional heroin in many illicit markets, but not in order to lure “young Americans” as law enforcement claims (police are a persistent source of misinformation about fentanyl in the media). If anything, Medrano writes, the added colors will help keep people safe:
People who don’t use drugs really hate this idea, but drug sellers have done more to keep people safe during the drug war than pretty much anyone else. The emergence of different colors of pressed pills alongside the blues won’t lure in younger buyers. If anything, it’ll help keep new buyers safe.
“For pain patients being cut off from access to pain medications because of deprescribing initiatives, they’re increasingly turning to street pills,” Dr. Nabarun Dasgupta, a harm reduction-based researcher at the University of Carolina at Chapel Hill, told Filter. “Fake pills that are clearly fake are helpful for them to know that what they’re getting is not the OxyCodone they’re used to, but something more potent.” [End Block]
Attempting to stop opioids and other drugs that people depend on at the border will not bring down overdose deaths. Instead, we must look to other strategies for saving lives during a deadly drug war and public health crisis. These strategies often appear among drug users and sellers themselves. For example, harm reduction providers circulate fentanyl test strips so people involved with drugs they can identify pills and powders containing fentanyl and avoid accidental overdoses.
Trump, on the other hand, is once again calling for “drug dealers” to face the death penalty, even after pardoning people convicted of drug trafficking while in office. Like other Republicans — and even some Democrats — Trump hopes voters arrive at the ballot box with fear, not facts.
Six Republican-led states filed a lawsuit on Thursday aiming to stop tens of millions of student loan borrowers from receiving relief from President Joe Biden’s debt forgiveness plan in one of Republicans’ first legal challenges to the plan.
Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and South Carolina are suing the Education Department, saying that the plan is too broad and “inherently unfair.” The lawsuit, filed in a Missouri federal court, argues that the plan is not “tailored to address the effects of the pandemic” on borrowers. They argue that loan servicers would also be hurt by the plan, especially MOHELA, Missouri’s student loan servicer and one of the largest student loan servicers in the U.S.
If successful, the suit could halt the plan that would grant up to $20,000 of debt relief to Pell Grant recipients and $10,000 for others making less than $125,000 a year.
This lawsuit was expected. Republicans have been warning of their plans to challenge the student debt relief plan, saying that it’s too expensive or that it overreaches the president’s power.
Proponents of student debt forgiveness say, however, that Republicans’ true motives are to keep the middle and lower classes poor or in debt; after all, Republican lawmakers have openly admitted that they oppose the debt forgiveness plan because it would reduce the military’s ability to recruit poor people who couldn’t otherwise afford higher education.
Advocates say that the GOP’s complaints over the cost of the plan are frivolous. Right-wingers have been citing the conservative-led Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimate released earlier this week that the plan would cost $400 billion. But they often neglect to mention that the cost would be spread out over the next 30 years and is barely over half of what the U.S. spends on the Pentagon yearly — a cost that Republicans almost never complain about.
The calculation for what revenue student loans may provide for the government may also be overblown; a July report from the Government Accountability Office found that, despite previous estimates, federal student loan borrowing actually costs the government billions of dollars, in part because many borrowers simply can’t afford to pay their loans back.
“Corrupt politicians are doing the student loan industry’s dirty work. A judge will quickly dispose of this sham lawsuit, but we won’t forget,” the Student Borrower Protection Center said on Thursday. “Banks and student lenders — especially MOHELA — want to profit by trapping families in debt. We will hold them accountable.”
“Republicans want to keep you in debt for the rest of your life and take away student debt cancellation,” wrote the Debt Collective on Thursday, in response to the lawsuit. “It is an interesting strategy to adopt before the midterms.”
This is at least the second lawsuit filed over the plan. Earlier this week, a lawyer for a libertarian law firm, the Pacific Legal Foundation, filed a suit arguing that it would cause him harm because he would be forced to pay state taxes on the cancellation. In a legal filing in response to the lawsuit, Biden administration officials simply said that the lawsuit’s argument is moot because the forgiveness plan gives borrowers an option to opt out of the relief.
In an op-ed published Wednesday, The Washington Post’s Paul Waldman wrote that the attempt to stop student debt forgiveness is “upside-down class war” — a war waged by upper class and elite Republicans against middle- and low-income, Black and Latinx and young people to take away a rare bit of relief given to them by a political system that is designed to sap wealth away from everyday people to fund the 1 percent.
Though the legal challenges to the plan are only in their beginning phrases, the Biden administration already appears to be caving to them.
Reports noted on Thursday that the Department of Education has covertly changed the terms of the forgiveness plan to exclude the roughly 4 million borrowers who have privately held student loans, including those with Perkins loans and Federal Family Education Loans (FFEL), despite the fact that earlier iterations of the plan included such borrowers. Legal experts say that the Education Department appears to have made this change in bracing for legal challenges to the plan.
“FFEL lenders have shown their true colors,” the Student Borrower Protection Center wrote on Thursday. “Instead of working in the interest of student loan borrowers — their customers — these lenders are holding hostage relief from millions in order to keep making a buck off of suffering.”
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the world’s largest corporate lobbying organization, endorsed federal permitting reforms on Monday as Sen. Joe Manchin made his last-ditch push to salvage a proposed overhaul that has drawn fierce opposition from grassroots climate groups, frontline communities, and Democratic lawmakers.
Ahead of an expected procedural vote on Tuesday, the Chamber’s Executive Vice President and Chief Policy Officer Neil Bradley said in a statement that Manchin (D-W.Va.) “has crafted thoughtful legislation that makes material improvements to the permitting process and can pass Congress right now.”
Bradley added that the Chamber, which has a long history of lobbying on behalf of fossil fuel interests, doesn’t think Manchin’s bill is “perfect,” criticizing proposed transmission siting reforms that some analysts say would actually help accelerate renewable energy development in the United States—in contrast to the legislation’s major oil and gas handouts.
Despite the Chamber’s quibbles with the bill, Bradley went on to echo Manchin’s call for senators to attach permitting reforms to a government funding bill that must pass before the end of the week to avert a shutdown.
With the clock ticking, Manchin is reportedly scrambling behind the scenes to cobble together enough Republican and Democratic votes to secure passage of his proposed permitting overhaul, which would deliver a major victory for the fossil fuel industry donors that bankroll the West Virginia Democrat’s campaigns.
If passed, the Energy Independence and Security Act would clear the way for final approval of the Mountain Valley fracked gas pipeline, a project that has been stalled for years amid legal challenges. The legislation would also sharply constrain environmental reviews of energy projects, a change that would fast-track fossil fuel projects even as scientists say oil and gas production must be rapidly phased out to prevent climate catastrophe.
Manchin on Sunday toldThe Washington Post — whose editorial board has endorsed the West Virginia senator’s bill — that he has secured 40 Democratic votes for the permitting measure in the Senate, meaning he will need Republican support to get the measure over the finish line.
Over the past week, Manchin has held a press conference, delivered a floor speech, and appeared on Fox News as part of his campaign to win GOP backing for permitting reforms that the party has long supported.
But Politicoreported Monday that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is “urging Senate Republicans to vote no on advancing Manchin’s permitting reform legislation as part of a government funding package.”
Politico noted that McConnell “sees no need to help Manchin” after the West Virginia Democrat helped his party pass the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes major renewable energy investments and was unanimously opposed by congressional Republicans. McConnell has said Manchin should support Sen. Shelley Moore Capito’s (R-W.Va.) permitting reform bill, which is even more friendly to the oil and gas industry.
Dozens of Democratic caucus members, meanwhile, have spoken out against Manchin’s permitting reforms, which Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) agreed to pursue as a side deal in exchange for the West Virginia senator’s support for the Inflation Reduction Act.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who has pledged to vote against any government funding bill that includes Manchin’s permitting reforms, wrote on social media Monday that “it may be a radical idea to some of my Senate colleagues and in the editorial rooms of newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch and Jeff Bezos, but I do believe the future of the planet is more important than the short term profits of the fossil fuel industry.”
A bill aimed at exposing deep-pocketed dark money political donors and increasing campaign transparency failed in the Senate on Thursday after zero Republicans voted for the bill, allowing billionaires and special interest groups to continue to exercise huge influence over elections with little accountability.
The DISCLOSE Act, introduced by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island), failed 49 to 49, falling short of the 60-vote threshold to advance the bill. Nearly every Republican in the Senate, except for one who didn’t cast a vote, voted against the legislation that campaign transparency advocates and government watchdogs say is crucial to combating the flood of cash from wealthy dark money donors that was unleashed by Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (FEC) 12 years ago.
Endorsed by President Joe Biden, the DISCLOSE Act requires dark money groups — trade associations, shell corporations that give to Super PACs, tax exempt so-called “social welfare” groups, and more — to disclose donors who give $10,000 or more during an election cycle. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Koch Industries are some of the largest dark money groups in politics today.
Democrats lamented the failure of the bill, saying that it exposes Republicans’ motivation to keep the flow of dark money running.
“Today, Senate Republicans stood in lockstep with their megadonors and secretive special interests to protect the most corrupting force in American politics — dark money,” Whitehouse said in a statement after the vote. “The American people are fed up with dark money influence campaigns that rig their government against them and stymie their priorities.”
Government watchdogs say that passing the bill would be an important step toward combating billionaires’ and corporations’ influence in politics.
Thanks to Citizens United, corporations and billionaires can give unlimited amounts of money to influence elections, while giving to dark money groups allows them to stay anonymous. The decision unleashed a barrage of dark money into politics; an analysis earlier this year found that billionaires are spending nearly $1 billion more per election cycle than they were before the decision. Their influence is so large that, as of this summer, nearly half of the funding — $89.4 million — raised by Republicans’ two largest super PACs at that point in the 2022 election cycle came from just 27 billionaires.
The DISCLOSE Act wouldn’t put restrictions on large donations — which advocates say is also needed — but would rather increase transparency around them. This could discourage donors from giving in large amounts and would give the public a better idea of who is pulling the levers in U.S. politics. Proposals to tighten campaign transparency laws are also widely popular among the public.
A recent example of a major dark money political donation was that of Barre Seid, who gave over $1.6 billion to a little-known dark money group headed by Leonard Leo, who was instrumental in nominating every right-wing Supreme Court justice who sits on the bench today.
This is likely one of the largest single political donations ever made — and it was entirely legal thanks to Citizens United. It’s likely the donation was only made public because of a tip to journalists about the donation.
Biden cited that donation in a speech calling for the passage of the DISCLOSE Act on Tuesday. “Dark money has become so common in our politics, I believe sunlight is the best disinfectant. And I acknowledge it’s an issue for both parties,” he said. “But here’s the key difference: Democrats in the Congress support more openness and accountability. Republicans in Congress so far don’t.”
An alarming new poll finds that a comfortable majority of Republicans think that the U.S. should be declared a Christian nation in a show that GOP leaders’ propaganda campaign to normalize and advance fascism has caught hold among the party electorate.
The poll, conducted by the University of Maryland in May and published by Politico on Wednesday, finds that 61 percent of Republicans favor declaring the U.S. a Christian nation, while 39 percent oppose. Among Democrats, only 17 percent favor the idea, while only 38 percent of respondents expressed support for the idea overall.
This is despite the fact that declaring Christianity the national religion is blatantly unconstitutional; the First Amendment states that U.S. lawmakers “shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”
Most of the poll’s nearly 2,100 respondents acknowledged this, though Republicans did so at a much lower rate than others, at 57 percent compared to 70 percent of all respondents. Still, it is striking that so many Republicans say that they favor such a move despite its unconstitutionality, especially for a party that, before Donald Trump, largely viewed itself as the primary supporter of the Constitution (even if that has neverreally been true, either).
That there is such a large amount of support on the right for Christian nationalism is disquieting. Christian nationalism is a dangerous ideology closely associated with — or even identical to — white supremacy, corporate oligarchy and fascism; a modern example of religious nationalism is Zionism and Israel’s quest to violently suppress Palestinians and strip them of their humanity.
The ideology has been pushed by Trump and his allies in recent years and has even been openly embraced by the party’s most extremist members, including white nationalist Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia). Modern Christian nationalists position people of color and LGBTQ people as enemies of civil society, variously asserting that social justice movements are attempts to end Christian “heritage” and the white race.
Indeed, the poll found that those who support Christian nationalism are highly likely to harbor “white grievance” over their status in the U.S. About 59 percent of those who say that white people are facing increased levels of discrimination — nottruebynearlyanymetric — say that the U.S. should be a Christian nation.
Research has found that identifying with Christian nationalism is highly correlated with support for political violence — and, indeed, horrific recent events demonstrate the rise of the Christian nationalist movement on the right.
The racist mass shooter who opened fire in a grocery store in a majority-Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, in May, killing ten people and injuring three others, had links to Christian nationalism, experts say. Christian nationalists also showed up in droves to the anti-democratic attack on the Capitol on January 6, citing God and Christianity as reasons for their attempt to violently overturn the 2020 election.
The ideology is also at least partially responsible for recent attacks on peoples’ rights. Anti-LGBTQ laws and sentiments have frequently been pushed in the name of Christianity, like in a recent lawsuit by Christian plaintiffs to allow employers to deny coverage of medication for HIV, which disproportionately affects gay and bisexual men, in their health insurance plans.
And, of course, the overturn of abortion protections under Roe v. Wade was a major triumph of Christian nationalism this summer, stripping hundreds of millions of people of the guarantee that they can choose whether or not to be pregnant and putting millions of lives in danger.
For those alarmed by the rise of Christian nationalism, there is a small bit of solace, however. The poll finds that it is much more common for older Republicans to want the U.S. to be declared a Christian nation, at 71 and 72 percent among the silent generation and baby boomers, respectively. Among Generation X, millennials and Generation Z, about 50 percent of respondents say they favor Christian nationalism.
Republicans are facing criticism for complaining that President Joe Biden’s student debt cancellation program will hurt the Pentagon’s ability to recruit poor people into the military.
Last week, a group of 19 Republican representatives sent a letter saying that Biden’s recent plan to cancel up to $10,000 for borrowers or $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients making under $75,000 a year is “removing any leverage the Department of Defense” to recruit people wishing to access higher education but who can’t afford it.
Rep. Don Bacon (R-Nebraska) tweeted a link to a news report on the letter, saying that he is “very concerned that the deeply flawed and unfair policy of blanket student loan forgiveness will also weaken our most powerful recruiting tool at the precise moment we are experiencing a crisis in military recruiting.”
Bacon faced ridicule for his tweet by progressives like former Ohio state senator Nina Turner, who are saying that GOP lawmakers are openly admitting that they have an interest in keeping higher education expensive as a tool for military recruitment.
“Read between the lines: these folks want poor people to be put in a corner so they will go fight endless wars that benefit the rich just to receive an education,” Turner wrote.
Republicans have faced criticism for similar statements. Last month, Rep. Jim Banks (R-Indiana) similarly complained that student debt forgiveness “undermines one of our military’s greatest recruitment tools.”
Critics of the Pentagon have long condemned what is known as the “poverty draft.” The military’s offers of financial incentives like student loan repayment, free college, and other cash incentives are a draw for young people experiencing debt or poverty.
And, knowing this, the military often actively travels to schools in poor and nonwhite neighborhoods in order to recruit; then, once they join, Black, Latinx, Indigenous and low-income people are disproportionately placed in the most dangerous situations compared to other enlistees.
This predatory practice is unethical for many reasons, critics of the practice argue. People in active military service are at high risk of mental health issues like suicide, and critics say that poor people shouldn’t have to put their bodies and lives on the line just in order to afford higher education.
With that in mind, critics said on social media that it is alarming that Republicans would not only acknowledge this fact but also openly advocate for it, saying that Republicans were saying “the quiet part out loud.”
Activist group the Debt Collective wrote that if canceling student debt actually does decrease military recruitment, that would, in fact, be a good thing.
“One of the best parts about canceling student debt is thinking of all the people who no longer feel compelled to enlist in the military to pay off their loans,” the group wrote on Twitter. “It is not a stretch to say that canceling student debt — and making college free — would hamper U.S. imperial/colonial efforts.”
Facing mounting opposition from environmentalists, frontline communities, and fellow Democratic lawmakers, Sen. Joe Manchin is reportedly asking oil and gas executives to help him build Republican support for permitting legislation that aims to weaken bedrock environmental laws and ease the review process for dirty energy projects.
Bloombergreported Monday that Manchin’s outreach “has included companies in the mining, utilities, and oil and gas industry,” all of which stand to benefit from a federal permitting overhaul — and all of which donate to the West Virginia Democrat’s political campaigns.
“Passing the legislation would mark a big win for the industry and its long-sought efforts to accelerate permitting and scale back environmental reviews that can take years,” Bloomberg noted. “Among projects that could benefit is a stalled $6.6 billion Mountain Valley natural gas pipeline — which would help to unlock more supplies of the fuel from the Marcellus shale.”
“Manchin is set to address chief executive officers at the Washington-based Business Roundtable’s quarterly meeting later this week,” the outlet added, citing a person familiar with the senator’s plans.
While changes to federal permitting laws could also help expedite clean energy projects, environmentalists and the dozens of members of the Democratic caucus say the acceleration of pipeline approvals and other fossil fuel infrastructure would undermine U.S. climate goals and harm local communities, negating the potential benefits.
“A leaked draft of a side deal to weaken and truncate environmental reviews is nothing more than the wishlist for all extractive industries,” reads a letter that more than 160 advocacy groups sent to Democratic leaders Monday. “There is no way to mitigate the damage that would be done by this side deal, it must be unequivocally rejected.”
As part of a deal to secure Manchin’s support for the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act, Democratic leaders agreed to hold a vote on permitting reforms that the senator and his industry allies have long demanded.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) are expected to attach a permitting reform bill to a government funding measure that must pass by the end of the month to avoid a shutdown. The White House said Monday that President Joe Biden is committed to advancing permitting reforms.
Depending on how many Senate Democrats oppose the permitting deal, Manchin may need to win more than 10 Republican votes. Thus far, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is the only member of the Senate Democratic caucus to vow to vote against a government funding package that includes permitting reforms.
As Manchin enlists fossil fuel executives to get the GOP on board with his yet-to-be-released bill amid growing pushback from members of his own party, dozens of Republicans led by Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) are pursuing their own permitting legislation that climate groups warn would be even more damaging to the environment.
According to a summary released by Capito’s office Monday, the GOP bill would codify former President Donald Trump’s attacks on the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the Clean Water Act and bar the adoption of the Biden administration’s “social cost of greenhouse gases” estimate.
“This so-called ‘permitting reform’ bill is nothing more than a shameless attempt to make it easier for fossil fuel companies to steamroll communities and fast-track their polluting projects,” said Mahyar Sorour, Sierra Club’s deputy legislative director. “Efforts to weaken NEPA and limit the public’s ability to weigh in on pipelines and other infrastructure that would affect them would be devastating for our communities, especially in places like Appalachia and the Gulf South that have already been treated as fossil fuel sacrifice zones for far too long.”
While Manchin didn’t explicitly endorse Capito’s bill, he told reporters Monday that it is “wonderful that we’re all on the same page — we all know that we need to have permitting reform.”
Many of Manchin’s Democratic colleagues disagree. On Friday, 72 House Democrats released a letter expressing opposition to the proposed federal permitting overhaul and denounced plans to attach it to must-pass government funding legislation.
Since Friday, five additional House Democrats have signed the letter.
“I don’t know how a [continuing resolution] vote will go if it includes the permitting rider, but the opposition is loud and only getting louder,” Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.), the letter’s chief organizer, said Monday.
“I encourage leadership to listen to its caucus and keep us out of a shutdown standoff that nobody wants,” he added. “Give us a clean CR and let these dirty permitting provisions stand up to congressional scrutiny on their own. Now is not the time to roll the dice on a government shutdown.”
Global, personal, individual. The reactions to the death of Queen Elizabeth II seemed to catch even unsuspecting republicans off guard. In Australia, former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who had led the Australian Republic Movement, was a mess of reflection on the passing. The old enemy France glowed with a distant familial warmth. In the United States, monarchical fetishism reasserted itself.
Not all the reflections were rosy. In South Africa, the Economic Freedom Fighters party admitted no mourning for the passing of the monarch of seven decades, “because to us her death is a reminder of a very tragic period in this country and Africa’s history. Britain, under the leadership of the royal family, took over control of this territory that would become South Africa in 1795 from Batavian control, and took permanent control of the territory in 1806.” From then, the native populace knew no peace, nor “enjoyed the fruits of the riches of this land, riches were and still are utilized for the enrichment of the British royal family and those who look like them.”
Negative commentary, notably of the brisk too-soon mould, caused sparks and retributive anger. When news of Elizabeth II’s deteriorating condition reached critical race theorist and Carnegie Mellon academic Uju Anya on September 8, she jumped on Twitter with menacing enthusiasm. “I heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating.” In the room next door, grant applications for future funding were probably being written.
The comment, even if academically toothless, was enough to stir empire building types such as the amoral Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos. In confounded fashion, he asked whether this was “someone supposedly working to make the world better […] I don’t think so.” Anya, unrepented, suggested that the Queen had “supervised a government that sponsored the genocide that massacred and displaced half my family”. As for Bezos, the bilious academic hoped that those who had suffered harm from his “merciless greed” would “remember you as fondly as I remember my colonizers.” On that score, many would agree.
In India, the historical site of controversial debates about the British monarchy, responses varied between lukewarm recognition to tangy irritation. The government of Narendra Modi declared a day of mourning on Sunday, with flags to fly at half-staff. But on closer inspection of social media chatter, Sucheta Mahajan of Jawaharlal Nehru University could detect little by way of effusive tear-filled adoration. There was “a lot of discussion but not much concern”. The passing was not treated as one of “an important world leader. After all, she did not call the shots.”
In 1997, when the late Queen made her third and last visit to India, much debate was provoked by the visit to Jallianwala Bagh. In April 1919, this site in the northern city of Amritsar was bloodied by the actions of the British Brigadier General Reginald Dyer, who ordered troops to fire upon a gathering of thousands of Indians that resulted in the deaths of, according to an official report, 379 men, women and children.
Did such a visit amount to an apology for the past sins of empire? Hardly, if we are going by the remarks she made at a New Delhi state banquet held just prior to the visit. “It is no secret that there have been some difficult episodes in our pasts – Jallianwala Bagh, which I shall visit tomorrow, is a distressing example. But history cannot be rewritten, however much we might sometimes wish otherwise. It has its moments of sadness, as well as gladness. We must learn from the sadness and build on the gladness.”
The statement is strikingly bereft of sorrow and filled with understatement. Build on gladness; forget the sadness. British rule over India offered more than just “distressing” examples. And “sadness” is certainly one numbing way of looking at an atrocity, not to mention various decisions made with telling consequences.
Indian historian and politician Shashi Tharoor is one who has elaborated an extensive laundry list of British sins, noting how the empire imposed a system of rule and economy on a pre-existing, rich society of agrarian sophistication largely for self-enriching goals. Far from civilising native subjects, British rule was marked by impoverishment, its trains decidedly governed by military self-interest, its governing policy one of constipated, selective inclusion.
Distinctions, however, are drawn between the occupant of a constitutional monarchy, and the government that used her name to prosecute a policy. Specific to Elizabeth II, Tharoor noted a “largely ceremonial” reign executed with “uncommon grace, her conduct on the throne marked by a selfless serenity, a total self-abnegation and devotion to the public trappings of her position.” In her rule, she seemed to be a consummate expression of Walter Bagehot’s formulation of a constitutional monarch’s three rights: the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, the right to warn.
Indians had tried to learn and forgive, for the most part, the “cruelties of colonialism”, with some even valuing the British connection. But the Queen could be faulted for never once acknowledging, let alone apologising, for “those centuries of colonial plunder and cruelty that made her position and wealth possible.”
Where, then, did she figure in the Bagehot scheme of consulting, encouragement and warning regarding British actions in Kenya in the use of concentration camps to break the Mau Mau rebellion, or the suppression of Communists in the Malaysian Emergency? The Westminster shroud, in this regard, is thick indeed, a layer of forced exculpation.
In that curious sense, the constitutional monarch could derive the profits of plunder yet disclaim responsibility. Monarchs, Tharoor noted, “did not actually order any of these things”. It followed that the Queen did not have to apologise for them, though a sovereign’s good sense might have demanded it.
As to what’s left of any republican sentiment, the Irish politician Clare Daly, Member of the European Parliament, put it well in expressing her “deepest sympathies and solidarity with republicans living under British rule.” The forthcoming weeks would prove hard, “but it will pass.” Maybe a bit wistfully, she suggested that the “day will come.” Those days always do, but Queen Liz has made it that much more difficult.
Recent years have marked a period of deep uncertainty and danger for the health of American democracy, and a new report reveals one major reason why attempts to protect democracy could be failing: the Senate filibuster.
According to a new report from Common Cause, the Senate filibuster has been at least partially responsible for blocking the passage of 17 out of 18 pro-democracy legislative texts that have come to a vote in Congress before the House or the Senate in 2021 and 2022, according to the group’s analysis of votes for each piece of legislation. The analysis was first reported by Insider.
The 117th Congress has considered a number of pro-democracy bills and resolutions, ranging from the For the People Act, which tackles dark money in campaigns and expands voting access, to the impeachment of Donald Trump, for his attempt to stoke a violent overturn of the 2020 election.
None of these bills have passed Congress, likely because they were either blocked by the filibuster’s 60-vote threshold or never came to a vote because of their likelihood of being blocked by the filibuster.
Many of these bills, like the For the People Act, have been hailed by voting rights advocates as crucial to bat off Republican attempts to suppress voters. Since 2021, and as of May, lawmakers in 18 states have passed 34 laws aimed at suppressing voters — many of which disproportionately affect voters of color.
Only one of the measures that Common Cause analyzed passed Congress: the Courthouse Ethics and Transparency Act, which passed unanimously in the Senate and strengthens requirements for Supreme Court and other federal judges to disclose their financial holdings and stock trades.
“In the end, with high levels of support in Congress and an overwhelming outpouring of public support, Congress ran into one of the reasons our democracy needs to be modernized: the filibuster,” Common Cause wrote of Democrats’ attempt to pass the For the People Act last year.
Even if conservative Democrats Senators Kyrsten Sinema (Arizona) and Joe Manchin (West Virginia) had been on board with the bill and given it a majority of 51 votes, “the arcane Senate procedure known as the filibuster requiring super majorities just to debate an issue, prevented the Democrats from passing major democracy reform and voting rights legislation or the Republicans from considering negotiating in good faith to get to 60 votes,” the group wrote.
The report lends evidence to the argument that progressives and some Democrats have been making for years now: the Senate filibuster is an arcane and dangerous procedure that prevents lawmakers from effectively legislating against attacks on democracy, which currently largely come from the right. Opponents of the filibuster also saythat it is used to block climate action that is crucial to keeping a livable planet, action to stave off white supremacy, moves to workers’ rights, advance protections for abortion rights, and more.
In their analysis, Common Cause also tracked votes for various pro-democracy measures for each individual member of Congress. Of the 535 voting members of Congress, only 101 members earned a perfect score, voting for each measure. All 101 of those members were Democrats or progressives.
Republicans are up in arms over remarks from the White House depicting the Trump-aligned faction of their party as “extremist”, which Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre defended Thursday by saying that MAGA Republicans are extremist because they disagree with the majority of Americans.
“When you are not with what majority of Americans are, then you know, that is extreme; that is an extreme way of thinking,” Jean-Pierre said.
Every part of this controversy is hilarious, from Republicans thinking they are not extremists, to anyone thinking that MAGA Republicans are meaningfully different from generic brand Republicans, to Democrats thinking they are any less extremist than MAGA Republicans, to Jean-Pierre claiming that you are extremist if you don’t agree with mainstream political consensus in the United States.
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NOW – White House: "When you are not with what majority of Americans are, then you know, that is extreme. That is an extreme way of thinking." pic.twitter.com/MpiwE9bRlx
If you look at who is inflicting the most violence, terrorism and tyranny upon the largest number of people in our world, it’s clear from the numbers that the worst offender by far is not fringe neo-Nazi groups, nor violent jihadists, nor communists nor anarchists nor environmentalists nor incels, but the bipartisan political consensus of the US-centralized empire.
The only reason the mainstream views espoused by Democrats and Republicans are mainstream is because massive amounts of narrative management have gone into creating that consensus. The fact that the social engineers of the oligarchic empire have poured vast fortunes into making sure Americans consent to capitalism, corruption, militarism and murder is the only reason those perspectives are so mainstream that they can be labeled “moderate” or “centrist”.
When people hear the word “extremist” they tend to think of groups like ISIS or the Ku Klux Klan, but per definition an extremist is just someone whose political or religious beliefs can lead them to do violent or illegal things. The US empire would crumble if it didn’t do violent and illegal things continuously, which is why its body count dwarfs those of any of the extremist ideologies the news media tell us to worry about. And it is fully supported by both Republicans and Democrats.
To pick a recent illustration of essentially limitless possible examples, imagine what the response would have been if a prominent MAGA pundit had given an award to neo-Nazis at an event hosted by the US military during the Trump administration. Imagine how Democrats and their aligned media would have responded to such an event.
Can you picture it? Can you hear the shrieking in your mind’s ear? Good. Because that’s exactly what happened at the Pentagon’s annual Warrior Games at Disney World a few days ago, only it was a liberal pundit and Ukrainian Nazis during the Biden administration.
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SCOOP: Multiple Ukrainian Nazis were invited to Disney World by the Pentagon to participate in the 2022 DoD Warrior Games. Liberal comedian Jon Stewart even honored a former hardcore Azov militant for his "personal example." New from me in @TheGrayzoneNewshttps://t.co/NWiqV4GkZS
In a new report titled “Jon Stewart and the Pentagon honor Ukrainian Nazi at Disney World,” The Grayzone’s Alex Rubinstein shows the former Daily Show star presenting an award to a member of Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov Battalion who is wearing a t-shirt and a suspicious-looking red sleeve on one of his arms, with another photo showing the same Azov member a tattoo of a Nazi symbol on that same arm. Rubinstein presents evidence that this wasn’t the only Nazi-affiliated Ukrainian at the event, which was also attended by musician Darius Rucker.
I keep thinking I’ve seen the most liberal thing that could possibly happen, but 2022 keeps proving me wrong. I have a hard time imagining how you beat a liberal comedian honoring a Ukrainian Nazi with an award at a Pentagon event in Disney World, but I’m sure they’ll find a way before long.
Biden is advancing the interests of the murderous US empire by waging a world-threatening proxy war in Ukraine whose combatants can’t seem to get photographed without Nazi insignia on their person. Trump advanced the interests of the US empire by inflicting death and starvation in nations like Yemen, Venezuela, Iran and Syria, as well as ramping up the brinkmanship with Russia which led to the current proxy war in Ukraine. The Biden administration is the Trump administration with a different soundtrack. The Trump administration was the Obama administration with a different soundtrack. They are all violent extremists. None are superior to the other. They all serve the interests of the most murderous and depraved institution on earth, as does anyone who supports any of them.
Democrats calling Republicans extremists is like ISIS calling Al Qaeda extremists, only Democrats and Republicans have a much higher body count.
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Chris Butters warns: “A specter is haunting America, the specter of middle-class leftists turning to the right.” Writing on the official website of the Communist Party USA, he attacks certain social media personalities for not being sufficiently fearful of the “Trumpist Republican power grab” and by implication for their failure to embrace the succor of the Democratic Party.
My intention is not to defend the people that Butters regards as “disembodied spirits” or to criticize the CPUSA. Rather, Butters is used to illustrate a broader phenomenon in the left-of-center blogosphere. Specifically, his narrow focus on the binary choice (“lesser evilism”) of Republican versus Democrat obscures the larger functioning of the two-party system beyond the merits of the individual parties.
Further, while I agree that a reactionary nationalist tendency with fascistic undertones is haunting not only the “land of the free” but is also threatening contemporary Brazil, some former Soviet republics, India, South Africa, and elsewhere, I differ on both the causes and potential remedies.
The failure of neoliberalism
Butters is scandalized that a “fringe” of the Bernie Sanders movement failed to vote for Biden; some even choosing Trump. While Bernie’s “Our Revolution” ended up herding the hopeful into the Democratic Party by giving that party a false patina of progressivism, the initial movement led by Sanders was broader than just liberal Democrats.
The Sanders movement reflected a mass disenchantment with the neoliberal model. Indeed, Trump’s parallel insurgency cynically seized on that same failure of neoliberalism to meet people’s basic needs via a dishonest faux-populist campaign that portrayed Trump as some kind of man of the people. That failure of neoliberalism partly explains why “make America great again” resonated with some 70 million US voters.
While the super-rich take recreational flights into outer space, neoliberalism – the contemporary form of capitalism – is not meeting working people’s needs. And the two parties of capital collude to shovel tax-payers’ dollars into endless foreign wars…enough, it should be noted, to alleviate hunger and homelessness at home.
Granted, the Trump phenomena is symptomatic of a mounting right-wing faux populism, but it wouldn’t be popular without the disease of a declining standard of living for the working class.
“The struggle against racism, sexism, and gender equality” is equated by Butters with “the broader fight for democracy.” Omitted in his article are class-based economic issues.
While flailing at the symptoms, the Democrats feed the disease. They enthusiastically join their supposed sworn enemies on the other side of the aisle engorging the military and security apparatus of the state with more funds than the White House even requests. In practice, both parties agree that anything like Medicare for All is to be deferred.
It is indicative that, despite Butters’ criticism of the “middle-class leftists,” only twice does the term “working class” appear in his article. That is as often as the litany of “multiculturalism, gender equality, LGBTQ+ rights, environmentalism, anti-colonialism, anti-racism” is cited.
Although I believe that these cultural, identity, and life-style issues are important, they cannot be substituted for providing an adequate material basis for daily life for the working class.
The Democrats’ abandonment of the material interests of their traditional constituency makes them complicitous in the rise of a popular rightist blowback. Resentment by the dispossessed of the use of identify politics as a cover for the neoliberal agenda fuels – but in no way justifies – a white supremist, anti-immigrant, and sexist reaction, delivering them into the open arms of Trump.
With little else to offer, Trump is the Democrat’s greatest asset
WikiLeaks revealed that the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC were leading promoters of the dark-horse Trump candidacy in the crowded 17-contender Republican 2016 presidential primary race. The Democrats got what they wished for…and more, as it turned out.
The Democrats no longer pretend to have a social welfare agenda. Forget about Joe Biden being the new incarnation of FDR. The former party of the New Deal and now of neoliberalism only offers its faithful the cold comfort that Trump is not their standard bearer.
After the debacle of January 6, 2021, the disgraced 45th president of the US retreated to a golf course in Florida. He was vilified by the preponderance of corporate media – itself overwhelmingly neoliberal and imperialist – and abandoned by major figures in his own party.
Rather than allowing Trump to fade into the shadows, the Democrats have continued to fan the flames of fear of fascism for their partisan advantage with their liberal constituency. By the same token, though, their publicity helps to mobilize the very right populism that they oppose.
Hence, over a year and a half since the original incident on 1/6/21, the House select investigative committee continued to keep the media spotlight on the former chief executive. And with a professional TV producer for the primetime extravaganza.
Defending “our democracy”
What has happened since that infamous day? The angry Republican mob took some selfies in the Capitol and went home. They never returned.
Meanwhile the Democrats had hundreds of the perpetrators pursued, causing some to be imprisoned. Under Democratic leadership, the US Army – not the civilian police – occupied the streets of the national capital. And new legislation was passed extending police powers to limit protests.
In the name of preserving “our democracy” and fighting fascism, measures that are in fact fascistic were enacted. What ensued under Democratic aegis is not what democracy looks like.
Butters, in another article, calls for a “mass anti-fascist front” against the Republican Party’s assault on voting rights in New York State. He fails to mention the Democrat’s own record of restricting voter choice through their initiative to greatly increase the votes needed for third parties to stay on the ballot in that state. The measure, in effect, denies ballot status to the Green Party.
The main danger
The Democrats’ championing of de-platforming dissenting voices from social media is for Butters counterposed by the cancel culture of the right. Butters argues that the “main danger” is “the increasingly fascistic power grab by Trump and the Republican Party” in contrast to what he characterizes as the concern with the “deep state.”
Butters dismisses the love affair of Democrats with the FBI and CIA. However, the “deep state” is the coercive apparatus of fascism.
With its uncomely embrace of foreign policy neo-conservatives (e.g., Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Under Secretary Victoria Nuland, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines), the Democrats have eclipsed the Republicans as the leading party of war. Now even accused war criminal Henry Kissinger stands to the left of the Democrats.
While 57 Republicans demurred, the Democrats – including the Squad – unanimously voted to appropriate tens of billions of dollars for the Ukraine War. Such hyper-aggressive nationalist partisans make untrustworthy bulwarks against fascism.
Prospects for fascism
A right populist insurgency could provide the shock troops for a future fascism. But it would be the ruling class or major elements of it that would opt to no longer maintain their class rule by liberal bourgeois democratic means.
If ruling elements imposed fascist rule, they would have to forego the convenient façade of legitimacy afforded by the current electoral regime, one where corporations are considered persons and buying politicians is an exercise of free speech. As long as popular discontent can be contained within the Republican-Democrat duopoly, the ruling powers are mollified to have fascistic measures already on the books, such as the Patriot and Espionage acts, used sparingly.
For now, then, the cabal of the two parties of capital is content with their theatre of bitter contention on cultural issues and fundamental collusion on matters of state. All the while, the system is lurching in an ever more authoritarian direction. Regardless of which party prevails electorally, the same class is in power.
