Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – September 29 2024

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

The Quiet Coup: Neoliberalism and the Looting of America — EXCERPTS

Mehrsa Baradaran (New York, W.W. Norton, 2024)

Introduction

Ideologies that have developed memelike qualities, like race and religion, have been some of the most potent forces shaping human history, especially when they have fused with the law. Racial hierarchy began as ideology to justify plunder and slaughter—those who murdered unjustly, like the Spanish conquistadors or British slave traders, blamed their crimes on their victims’ “inherent” inferiority and a meme was born in the world. Before the wholesale theft of indigenous land, the law justified it. In the early nineteenth century, Chief Justice John Marshall deemed that the indigenous tribes in America could not own or sell their land on account of their inherent “savagery.” The law thereafter demarcated property rights as the exclusive domain of white men, paving the way for manifest destiny, the seizure of 1.5 billion acres of land for private ownership, and the genocide of millions of indigenous people. Marshall built his legal opinion on precedent and theory provided by the British philosopher John Locke, whose theory of property law was popular in Great Britain in the late 1600s at the height of the British slave trade. It was “natural” and just, noted Locke, that “the creator” had endowed only “the industrious and rational” white men with the right to own land and people. It was also expedient. Ideologies persist through replication exactly because they evade detection, and through the process of replication, they evolve. For example, the ideology of patriarchy once reinforced itself through property laws like coverture and primogeniture that prohibited women from owning property. Once an ideology is embedded in legal code, its silent perpetuation is guaranteed.

Patently immoral practices like colonial subjugation, slavery, land theft, Jim Crow, segregation, and forced labor lasted so long that the theories that once justified them—like divine decree—no longer did the job. Instead of addressing the injustices that racist ideologies had created, often, those with the most to lose went looking for new ideologies Ito justify their unfair position at the top: first, Christianity; then Darwinian science; then the pseudo-scientific babble of “human IQ” testing; then, as was the case at the end of the 1960s, economics.

xxx
As John Adams once wrote to Thomas Jefferson (20 June 1815), ‘Power always sincerely, conscientiously… believes itself Right. Power always thinks it has a great Soul, and vast Views, beyond the Comprehension of the Weak; and that it is doing God’s Service, when it is violating all his laws.” 19 Such was the object of the neoliberal revolution in legal theory: to infuse raw power with a soul—and snuff out the discretion that is law’s dynamic living heart.

The law is the most powerful engine through which ideologies can become self-replicating engines. John Locke’s theory of property as the endowed right of white men to use and to produce worked like witchcraft—the natural world, which had sustained societies for thousands of years, could suddenly be taken by force, enclosed, and tilled for the sole profit of one man, with trespassers punished. The conversion of land into one person’s permanent property was not permissible under the indigenous populations who had long occupied it, nor was such a thing permissible anywhere in the world except Europe—and even there, only after the enclosure movements of the 1600s. The brilliant and prolific philosopher Locke happened to be under the patronage of Anthony Ashley Cooper, one of the richest men in England (who later became the First Earl of Shaftesbury); he was first hired as Cooper’s personal doctor, but as the earl entered politics to advocate for more property rights, Locke’s star rose alongside his. And property laws were passed in legislatures and handed down over time, carrying memes from men long dead with ideas long denounced.

Law codified land into assets and has been extending the market into new frontiers ever since—from corporate shares and derivatives to NFTs—transforming abstract ideas into tradable assets. A similar alchemy transformed gold into money by smelting an image onto a coin, then transformed gold coins into bank notes emblazoned with the image of a king, queen, or president. Initially, it was gold’s malleability that made it ideal for coinage. But with the rise of empire and Great Britain’s dominance of the global trade in gold, the gold standard became yet another ideology to preserve power. Locke’s theories about gold being the highest source of value on account of its scarcity have been as impossible to dislodge from monetary theories as his ideas about race have been from property laws. But Locke was wrong—gold was not valuable. Then, as now, money’s value derived from the image on the coin. Money is a symbol of people’s trust in the government that issued it. Gold’s scarcity was not the source of its value, but it was one of the causes of hundreds of years of wars in Europe over the scarce metal. While empire based on the gold standard and justified by white supremacy fell to the global horror of World War II, the underlying logic of both lingered. Unaddressed and unexamined, these bad ideas continue to breed distrust in our societies and scarcity in our economies. The greatest villains of our modern times are rarely human beings but the zombie ideas of dead men that continue to shape our societies.

FAR FROM BEING a battle between capitalism and communism, as so many historians have painted the era’s conflict, the global revolutions of the 1960s were the only world wars that involved the entire world. Truly, the world had turned upside down as a globe dominated by a handful of empires became a world with over a hundred independent nations—each demanding equal sovereignty on the world stage. The possibilities were breathtaking and the 1960s saw the first worldwide conversation between and among peoples speaking to one another. Neoliberalism was the successor ideology of empire. Gone were the gunboats, colonial governments, and talk of civilizing savages. Instead, development loans, sovereign debt markets, and transnational corporations became the face of power in the Global South. The guns did not disappear of course, but were traded on global markets from distributors to trade-friendly governments.

After decades of relentless activism by Black Americans across every legal domain, the American South’s chokehold on the law finally broke and the Constitution’s promise of equality was secured for all Americans. The last stages of the civil rights movement forced the quiet oppression of southern law to show its teeth and claws

[TW: I am greatly encouraged that Baradaran identifies John Locke as one of the major causes of bad political economy. As I have noted a number of times, it was Locke’s ideas of private property that made liberalism so insidiously destructive of the founding philosophy of civic republicanism, leading us to our present megacrises.

[Baradaran’s book is an excellent accompaniment to The Lever’s epic and important series on The Master Plan (see below). She discusses some people who The Lever series has not mentioned yet, such as Ayn Rand acolyte and neoliberal enforcer Alan Greenspan, who played a central role in Richard Nixon’s 1968 campaign, and the development of conservative economics as a cloak for outright racism.]

The Secret Plot To Buy American Democracy (podcast)

[The Lever, September 20, 2024]

In 1971, Lewis Powell, a tobacco industry lawyer and future Supreme Court justice, penned a memo calling on conservatives and business interests to make the nation’s legal system far more friendly to corporate power. A few years later, a lawyer named Michael Horowitz penned a follow-up memo calling for conservatives to indoctrinate generations of lawyers as the right’s foot soldiers on the ground.

Today on Lever Time, senior podcast producer Arjun Singh talks to David Sirota and Jared Jacang Maher about their deep-dive investigation into this 50-year plan in the hit new Lever podcast Master Plan. Then, Arjun sits down with journalist David Daley to discuss his latest book, Antidemocratic: Inside the Far Right’s 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections.

Daley’s book centers on Chief Justice John Roberts, whose ascent to the high court — and the conservative rulings he’s handed down — were the culmination of decades of work that began with Powell and Horowitz’s memos.

Master Plan, Ep 5: How Corporations Became People (podcast)

Corporations Are People, My Friend (YouTube video)

[The Lever, September 10, 2024]

In Master Plan’s fifth episode, we explore how an unlikely catalyst — Robert Kennedy’s 1968 assassination — created an opportunity for his Senate replacement to manufacture the first and perhaps most important blow against America’s new campaign finance laws: Buckley v. Valeo. With a supporting cast including James Buckley, John Bolton, Charles Koch, and Robert Bork, this U.S. Supreme Court case was the first to frame the fight against campaign finance regulations as a crusade for free speech and third-party rights.

MASTER PLAN, Ep 6: The Maverick Vs. The Corruption Machine (podcast)

[The Lever, September 17, 2024]

In the 1980s, the U.S. government was anything but clean. After the landmark Supreme Court cases we told you about in Episode 5 turned money into “speech” in the 1970s, cash began flowing into elections unchecked. Big donors also expected big favors.

It wasn’t such a surprise, then, when five U.S. senators got caught in 1989 for allegedly trying to pressure a federal bank regulator to go easy on savings and loan magnate Charles Keating. But what no one expected was that one of the so-called “Keating Five,” a relative newcomer named John McCain, would do far more than apologize for his mistakes; he’d transform into the staunchest campaign finance reformer since Watergate.

McCain would need his unpredictable “maverick” energy for the fights ahead. Because once he set his sights on wrangling the dark money out of politics, he’d find himself butting heads with two powerful members of his own party — a senator who’d been called the “Darth Vader of campaign finance reform,” and a governor-turned-president backed by big donors.

MASTER PLAN, Ep 7: The Federalist Society Strikes Back (podcast)

[The Lever, September 24, 2024]

 Key findings referenced in this episode include:

• Brett Kavanaugh’s never-before-reported emails. Read correspondence showing how Federalist Society poster boy Brett Kavanaugh was a pivotal player within the White House working to nominate Federalist Society-approved judges. As a Bush Administration staffer, Kavanaugh constantly referenced the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo, showing just how embedded the conservative legal movement was within the executive branch.
• A Secret Judicial Appointment Workgroup. Read the agenda for a 2002 conference the Bush White House hosted at a luxury resort in Maryland to discuss how to get their conservative nominees into federal judgeships. The retreat produced a heavily redacted document called the Judicial Confirmation Action Plan that displays striking similarities to the Powell Memo. (Courtesy of American Oversight.)
• John Roberts Dog Whistles His Ideology Before Becoming A Judge. Watch a 2000 video of then-corporate lawyer John Roberts joining a local television program and lamenting the Supreme Court’s liberal drift.

The Master Plan Behind MASTER PLAN 

Brendan Joel Kelley, September 26, 2024 [The Lever]

The inside story of how we uncovered smoking-gun audio exposing the secret roots of Project 2025….

Sirota started with an outline of Supreme Court cases that traced major legal moments when elements of corruption were enshrined, but as Maher worked to unravel the threads, an obscure document authored by a future Supreme Court justice just two months before his nomination to the court by Nixon seemed central to this story….

But amid their frustration, writer and producer Jared Jacang Maher, a former Westword staff writer, has a nugget of good news. A Bay Area reporter for The Lever, Freddy Brewster, was driving to the Hoover Institution at Stanford University the next morning to procure a 1996 audio recording of an interview of Joseph Coors by historian Lee Edwards, chronicler of the “new right” in the late twentieth century.

Snippets of this interview — just phrases, really — in which Coors credited the Powell Memorandum, the focus of Master Plan, with his conservative political awakening, are referenced in an official Heritage Foundation history by Edwards published in 1997. But to the best of Maher’s knowledge, the full recording was left ignored in Edwards’s archive.

Until now….

“It’s this blueprint for what [Powell] thinks needs to be done for the business elites to take back power,” Sirota says of the Powell Memorandum. “Basically, the government has become too democratically responsive to the population. We, the business elite, don’t have an advantage in lots of votes, or people, but we do have an advantage in lots of resources. So we should spend our resources in a big way on all the things needed to take political power back, including a focus on the judiciary.

“Out of that comes a series of these secret meetings that had never been reported on before that we uncovered. There’d been kind of a debate: Was the Powell Memo real? Was it really important? Clearly it was, as evidenced by the documents we uncovered.”

Master Plan reveals a series of meetings held by America’s political and business elite in the wake of the Powell Memorandum, where strategy sessions were held to discuss implementation of the blueprint’s recommendations: pushing conservative thought to Americans via policy institutes and think tanks, countering liberal academics with neoliberal scholars and speakers on campuses, using television and media to change opinions, and forwarding its agenda via politicians and the courts….

A copy of the Powell Memorandum made its way to Joseph Coors in early 1972, and he was soon reaching out to other powerful people to see where his money could best be spent in pursuit of this corporate-centric American makeover.

Amid Coors’s outreach, a letter to Republican Colorado Senator Gordon Allott ended up in the hands of Paul Weyrich, an aide to Allott who’d been plotting his own foray into policy manipulation.

“Weyrich had this whole thing ready: I want to start this conservative think tank, here’s what it’s going to do. So when he reads Coors’s letter, this is like a blank check from a wealthy businessman who’s basically going to fund the project,” Maher explains.

With Coors’s generous backing, Weyrich created what would shortly become the Heritage Foundation, the ultra-conservative policy think tank that published Project 2025. Coors’s money supported Heritage for years, and even today the Adolph Coors Foundation brags of being a longtime funder of Heritage, which it describes as “mobilizing the conservative movement.”….

In February 1973, Coors launched TVN, Television News Inc., a syndicated news service. Coors installed an ideological aide, Jack Wilson, at the company to ensure a conservative bent, and Weyrich also exercised influence over news operations. A slate of journalists initially rebelled against the conservative mandate — until TVN hired a new vice president for news operations at the start of 1975, a political television adviser named Roger Ailes….

Corporate underminers of democracy

[International Trade Union Confederation, via Naked Capitalism 09-24-2024]

…But there is another force, one that is unelected and seeks to dominate global affairs. It pushes a competing vision for the world that maintains inequalities and impunity for bad-faith actors, finances far-right political operatives, and values private profit over public and planetary good. That force is corporate power.

In consultation with social allies, global union federations, and researchers, the ITUC is scrutinising publicly available research to identify key players in the corporate world that profit by undermining democracy at all levels.

Corporate underminers of democracy is the ITUC’s list of emblematic companies that benefit financially by continuing to violate trade union and human rights, monopolise media and technology, exacerbate climate catastrophe, and privatise public services. They represent a wider corporate world that protects and expands its own profits by undermining democracy.

These companies deploy complex lobbying operations to undermine popular will and disrupt existing or nascent global policy that could hold them accountable. They are invariably led by ultra-wealthy individuals that support and finance far-right politicians and parties to further their own interests. When the far-right wins power, it discredits and defunds democratic global institutions; reduces taxes on the wealthy and on corporations; undercuts living wages; favours bilateral aid financing over multilateralism; and cracks down on human, trade union, and democratic rights, as evidenced by the ITUC’s Global Rights Index….

•  To map the relationship between corporate power and far-right politicians, the ITUC partners with Reactionary International Research Consortium and The Autonomy Institute.

•  To track the cooperativeness of companies with workers’ organisations, the ITUC consults with partners in the Council of Global Unions.

•  To understand corporate violations and responses to requests for remedy, the ITUC reviews public information from the Committee on Workers Capital, the Good Jobs First Violations Tracker, and the company pages of the Business and Human Rights Resource Center.

•  To understand the lobbying influence deployed by companies, the ITUC uses research from the Transnational Institute and other resources.The list of corporate underminers of democracy for 2024 is:

1.  Amazon.com, Inc.
2.  Blackstone Group
3.  ExxonMobil
4.  Glencore
5.  Meta
6.  Tesla
7.  The Vanguard Group

The rise of solar power and China’s staggering EV growth may have pushed global emissions into decline 

[ABC Australia, via Naked Capitalism 09-22-2024]

Global power shift

The Wait is Over: Putin Unveils New Nuclear Doctrine in Final Warning to West 

[Simplicius the Thinker, via Naked Capitalism 09-27-2024]

Russia’s revised nuclear doctrine per latest speech by Vladimir Putin 

Gilbert Doctorow [via Naked Capitalism 09-27-2024]

Sri Lanka elects Marxist-leaning Dissanayake as president to fix economy 

[Aljazeera, via Naked Capitalism 09-23-2024]

Gaza / Palestine / Israel

Hezbollah Confirms Hassan Nasrallah’s Death as Israel Carpet-Bombs Lebanon

Jessica Corbett, September 28, 2024 [CommonDreams]

How Israel went after Hezbollah’s chain of command – and why it matters 

[Telegraph, via Naked Capitalism 09-28-2024]

…arguments that Hezbollah is no longer able to escalate even if it wished to are increasingly being advanced by experts.

The top-level assassinations aside, the pager and walkie-talkie attacks killed, maimed or otherwise incapacitated so many seasoned senior and mid-level operatives that Hezbollah has seen its military capability to conduct a war greatly reduced, according to some analysts. One Hezbollah source admitted some 1,500 fighters had lost eyesight or limbs.

“Those considered worthy of carrying a pager have mostly been eliminated, meaning that those people running many of Hezbollah’s operations right now are young and inexperienced,” said Mr Khashan, of the American University of Beirut….

…The death of Nasrallah allows Israel to claim a short-term tactical success. Yet, as in the war in Gaza, Israel has not defined a long-term strategy. It has provided no sense of an endgame or what it seeks after the Hezbollah campaign is over, Dan Kurtzer, the former U.S. Ambassador to Israel and Egypt, told me. “They don’t have a metric by which to measure when they’ve accomplished enough,” Kurtzer said….

Zohar Palti, the former chief of Mossad’s intelligence directorate, told me that Israel was not responsible for what happens next in Lebanon. “The Lebanese have to decide,” he said. “And I think that right now, since yesterday, we gave them a golden slot in order to regather themselves and to build something from the ashes.” Lebanon’s Army will have to try to wrest power from, and replace, Hezbollah. “Let’s see if they have the ability to do it,” Palti said. “And, if not, we will understand that Lebanon is not a state anymore, and we’ll have to, I don’t know, recalculate what we’re doing.” But the Lebanese state has been barely functional for decades and is still ruled by the same politicians that fought a civil war against one another between 1975 and 1990; it has also suffered from a devastating economic crisis. Hezbollah became so powerful in part because the state was so weak, and riven by sectarian divisions.

Europeans, Arab and Muslim nations launch a new initiative for an independent Palestinian state 

[AP, via Naked Capitalism 09-28-2024]

A plan to liquidate northern Gaza is gaining steam 

[+972Mag, via Naked Capitalism 09-24-2024]

… a program that the “Forum of Reserve Commanders and Fighters,” spearheaded by Maj. Gen. (res.) Giora Eiland, proposed just a few weeks ago: ordering all residents of northern Gaza to leave within a week, before imposing a full siege on the area, including shutting off all supplies of water, food, and fuel, until those who remain surrender or die of starvation.

Other prominent Israelis, in recent months, have also called on the military to carry out mass extermination in northern Gaza. “Remove the entire civilian population from the north, and whoever remains there will be lawfully sentenced as a terrorist and subjected to a process of starvation or extermination,” Prof. Uzi Rabi, a senior researcher at Tel Aviv University, elaborated in a radio interview on Sept. 15. And in August, according to a report in Ynet, government ministers had already started pressuring Netanyahu to “cleanse” northern Gaza of its inhabitants….

Despite all the leniency the U.S. administration has shown for Israel’s genocidal actions in Gaza — starving and annihilating tens of thousands of Palestinians — the next stage may be too much even for the self-professed “Zionist” President Joe Biden and presidential nominee Kamala Harris, who speaks of “Palestinian suffering.” This may well be the move that will force the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to declare that Israel is committing genocide, and expedite the International Criminal Court (ICC) to issue arrest warrants, and not only for Netanyahu and Gallant….

Netanyahu Shows Map of ‘New Middle East’—Without Palestine—to UN General Assembly

Brett Wilkins, September 22, 2024 [CommonDreams]

“Netanyahu made clear with his little map today what normalization really seeks: eliminating Palestine… from the region and legitimizing greater Israel, all with the blessing of Arab regimes,” one critic said.

[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 09-22-2024]

Arnaud Bertrand

@RnaudBertrand

The genocidal rhetoric by Israeli officials towards Lebanon is starting, with here Yoav Kisch (Minister of Education) saying: “there is no difference between Hezbollah and Lebanon, Lebanon will be annihilated.”

Oligarchy

Dems Name and Shame Companies Paying Executives More Than They Pay in Federal Taxes

Jake Johnson, September 27, 2024 [CommonDreams]

A group of congressional Democrats and Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders on Friday highlighted dozens of profitable U.S. corporations that have paid their executives more than they’ve paid in federal income taxes in recent years, a problem that the lawmakers attributed in large part to former President Donald Trump’s massive tax-cut package that Republicans are working to extend.

“In the first five years following the 2017 giveaway, 35 companies raked in $277 billion in domestic profits and paid their executives $9.5 billion—more than they paid in federal income taxes,” the lawmakers noted in letters to each of the companies, pointing to recent research by the Institute for Policy Studies and Americans for Tax Fairness.

“Next year, Congress will decide what to do with these corporate giveaways. Republicans have promised to go even further if elected and cut the corporate income tax rate from 21% to 15%,” the lawmakers continued. “This additional tax giveaway would provide Fortune 100 corporations as a whole with another $50 billion each year, more than all current K-12 federal education spending.”

Inside the island fortress of America’s mega-billionaires 

[Business Insider, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 09-24-2024]

“As my boat cruises toward the private island city of Indian Creek Village — better known as the Billionaire Bunker — I’m hoping my trip doesn’t end in an arrest… As we get closer to the shore, I start to notice the cameras. Their beady eyes are everywhere. Some are mounted on poles along the seawall. Others peek out from hedges. Many are connected to an inconspicuous white box — an Israeli-designed radar system capable of detecting passersby, in low visibility, from half a mile away. There is no way for a person to set foot on Indian Creek without the express permission of one of its 89 residents or a member of its ultra exclusive country club, which reportedly costs $500,000 to join. Because the town’s government serves such an ultra wealthy subset of the population, things like public parks and social programs are practically nonexistent. Instead, the lion’s share of Indian Creek’s budget goes to its police department — which keeps watch on the island’s sole entrance and patrols the perimeter 24/7. Through federal funds, the town has also amassed a panoply of other security measures that would make Bezos’ Ring cameras blush. ‘The wealthier you become, the more you want perfect security,’ says Setha Low, the director of the Public Space Research Group, a center at the City University of New York that focuses on the access and control of everything from city parks to gated communities.”

People hugely underestimate the carbon footprints of the 1 per cent 

[The New Scientist, via Naked Capitalism 09-26-2024]

Predatory finance

Wall Street Has Moved Vast Sums of Its Trading to Its Federally-Insured Banks

Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 23, 2024 [Wall Street on Parade]

For decades, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) has published its “Quarterly Report on Bank Trading and Derivatives Activities.” The reports have shown that the Wall Street megabanks are increasingly moving their trading casinos to operate out of the federally-insured bank they own – which is holding mom and pop deposits for unsuspecting American families.

According to the most recent report from the OCC, for the quarter ending March 31, 2024, federally-insured banks in the U.S. reported $4.8 billion in revenues from trading stock (equity). That $4.8 billion represented 37 percent of all stock trading at the bank holding company level, which came in at $13.059 billion for the quarter.

Even more eyepopping, federally-insured banks reported revenues of $7.551 billion from foreign exchange trading, which represented 87 percent of all foreign exchange trading at the bank holding company level, which registered a total of $8.638 billion for the first quarter.

Why should a federally-insured bank be engaged in trading activities? How is it even legally allowed to do that? According to the Wall Street self-regulator, FINRA, only broker-dealers are allowed to have licensed traders and only licensed supervisors are allowed to oversee this trading. (For background, see our report: Jamie Dimon’s Top Women and Their Missing Licenses.)

They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals

What Did Madoff, Jeffrey Epstein and Sanctioned Russian Mercenary Group, Wagner, Have in Common? They All Banked at JPMorgan Chase

Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 26, 2024 [Wall Street on Parade]

 On Tuesday, the Financial Times broke the story that JPMorgan Chase and HSBC had been named in a new report by the U.S.-based think tank, the Center for Advanced Defense Studies (C4ADS), for their role in laundering payments for the notorious mercenary group, Wagner, that has supported Russian military operations in Ukraine, the Middle East, Latin America and Africa. The think tank wrote that the involvement of the banks with Wagner had been done “unwittingly.” That’s also how JPMorgan Chase explained its money laundering for Ponzi kingpin Bernie Madoff for decades and for the international sex trafficker of children, Jeffrey Epstein, for at least 15 years. Curiously, neither the Wall Street Journal nor the New York Times found the information in the think tank’s report worthy of sharing with their readers….

Restoring balance to the economy

Failed Deals Climb as Antitrust Enforcers Push Aggressive Agenda 

[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 09-24-2024]

“Firms attracting antitrust scrutiny are abandoning deals at their highest clip in years, as the Biden administration’s enforcers appear to make good on a policy pushing for more lawsuits and fewer settlements.

Six significant merger inquiries during the first half of 2024 ended with the Federal Trade Commission or Department of Justice saying the parties nixed a proposed transaction, a figure that exceeds yearly totals from the previous decade, according to a report from the law firm Dechert LLP.

The surge in abandonments coincides with a decline in settlements and negotiated fixes, once a hallmark of antitrust enforcement. While the number of deals facing investigations and challenges remains a tiny fraction of overall M&A, certain transactions are facing increased stakes.”

Section 230 Catches Up to AI: An appellate court holds companies liable for the actions of their algorithms.

[Wall Street Journal, via Naked Capitalism 09-24-2024] Important.

The Politics of Kamala-nomics

Harold Meyerson, September 26, 2024 [The American Prospect]

My colleague David Dayen has provided us with a deep and thorough unpacking of Kamala Harris’s economic platform, which she unveiled yesterday in a speech in Pittsburgh, in a fact sheet, and in an 82-page booklet. The paradox here is that the progressive populist red meat, as David noted, was much more apparent in the fact sheet and booklet than in the speech itself.

Those progressive particulars include such “worker-centered industrial policies,” as David termed them, as extending tax credits not just to domestic manufacturing but to manufacturing in Rust Belt factory towns and to manufacturing companies that actually empower workers. Her proposed tax credits would be “linked to the treatment of workers, ensuring the right to organize, and supporting investments in longstanding manufacturing, energy, and agricultural communities.”….

The linkage of support for industrial revitalization to support for workers’ right to join a union would be groundbreaking. A less explicit form of that linkage was initially part of President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, but it didn’t pass muster with Joe Manchin. Should Harris not only win but be blessed with a Democratic Congress, minus Manchin (and Kyrsten Sinema), she could well be able to enact such tax credit criteria in a reconciliation bill. (As long as we’re talking pro-worker tax policy, there’s always my personal hobbyhorse, linking corporate tax rates to the ratio between CEO pay and median worker pay: the higher the ratio, the higher the tax.)….

Harris Has a Manufacturing Agenda—in a Fact Sheet

David Dayen, September 11, 2024 [The American Prospect]

One of the moments that stood out in Kamala Harris’s big speech at the Economic Club of Pittsburgh on Wednesday was when she offered tax credits to manufacturing firms that protect American jobs. And when she called for increasing investment in public-sector research and development agencies. And when she vowed to stockpile critical minerals key to the energy transition and national security. And when she said she would take on China’s forced technology transfer and intellectual-property theft. And when she endorsed Buy America requirements in procurement and contracting. And when she said that investments in manufacturing would be offset by preventing operatic accounting strategies big corporations use to hide money overseas.

Or rather, those moments stood out from the fact sheet the Harris campaign sent around after the speech. None of them actually appeared in the speech itself. But like many a corporate retreat, the deliverables looked a little better than what the CEO had to say….

The fact sheet doesn’t have to make such somersaults and splits. It can just string together what the Harris-Walz administration wants to do to reach its goals. The fact sheet can just say that they will build on industrial success in a country where real manufacturing construction investment is at the highest level in American history. It can cite the vice president’s tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act. It doesn’t have to tap-dance.

And the vision is actually coherent when shorn of the constant hedging and playing to multiple audiences. For starters, the fact sheet revives what has been an absent manufacturing pitch to the Rust Belt by highlighting new “America Forward” investments, an extension of the policies of the Biden administration. Tax credits under this banner would be “linked to the treatment of workers, ensuring the right to organize, and supporting investments in longstanding manufacturing, energy, and agricultural communities.” That surpasses what Biden was able to fully get in some provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act and other industrial policies….

Earlier in the week, Donald Trump threatened a 200 percent tariff on John Deere if they followed through on plans to move to Mexico. The problem is that Trump signed an updated free-trade agreement with Mexico that prohibits retaliatory tariffs of that kind, making the threat empty. Trump, who has promised big corporate tax cuts for manufacturing and protectionist across-the-board tariffs, was actually pretty bad on outsourcing while president, since his tax law encouraged it. This is a testament to his inattention and laziness; in 2016, Trump used the bully pulpit to prevent some jobs at Carrier from moving to Mexico, but lost interest as Carrier jobs, along with those at the plant down the street, were eventually outsourced….

Should Billionaires Be Taxed Out Of Existence? Are You Willing To Vote For Candidates Who Agree? Democracy Doesn’t Function With Billionaires

Howie Klein, September 23, 2024  [downwithtyranny.com]

…Yesterday, Fortune ran a report by Eleanor Pringle about Bernie, who like myself, says billionaires should be taxed out of existence, and a relatively reasonable billionaire, Bill Gates, who, according the Forbes, is worth 136.6 billion and is the 7th wealthiest person in the world. Like the candidates we’ve been interviewing, they both agree the super-rich should pay “more.” How much more? That’s where it gets tricky.

In 2019 Bernie tweeted a tax on extreme wealth plan. It only applies to the top 0.1% of households— people with a net worth of over $32 million. Over 15 years, the plan would cut the net worth of billionaires in half to “substantially break up the concentration of wealth and power of this small privileged class. It would start with a 1 percent tax on net worth above $32 million for a married couple. That means a married couple with $32.5 million would pay a wealth tax of just $5,000. The tax rate would increase to 2 percent on net worth from $50 to $250 million, 3 percent from $250 to $500 million, 4 percent from $500 million to $1 billion, 5 percent from $1 to $2.5 billion, 6 percent from $2.5 to $5 billion, 7 percent from $5 to $10 billion, and 8 percent on wealth over $10 billion. These brackets are halved for singles.”

Bernie’s proposal seem extremely modest… and there’s not much taxing billionaires out of existence as far as I can tell. At best, it seems like a decent step in the right direction.

It’s no longer glorious to get rich in China — it’s dangerous 

[Financial Times, via Naked Capitalism 09-23-2024]

…With China’s economy slowing, the regime seemed reluctant to scare the one private-sector goose still laying golden eggs: big tech companies. Over the years, many Chinese would build fortunes bigger than $10bn. The first three to breach that threshold, and keep rising, were tech industry founders led by Jack Ma of Alibaba.

This quiet tolerance would turn in 2020, during the stimulus-driven market boom. China added nearly 240 billionaires — twice as many as the US — but late that same year Ma made a speech that helped bring this party to a halt. In a guarded but unmistakable critique, Ma questioned the direction of Communist party rule, warning that overregulation threatened to slow tech innovation, and that Chinese banks suffered from “pawnshop thinking”.

State retaliation was swift. Alibaba’s share price collapsed. Ma tumbled down the rich lists and dropped out of public view. Early the next year, Xi launched his common prosperity campaign and the crackdown spread to any company deemed out of step with its egalitarian values.

In this new era, it’s dangerous to get too rich….

The private sector is in retreat. Since 2021, the stock market has been sliding, but state companies have grown their share of total market cap by more than a third to nearly 50 per cent. China now has the world’s only major stock market in which state-owned companies are valued on par with those in the private sector. Individual fortunes have shrunk dramatically over the past three years; the number of billionaires has fallen 35 per cent in China, even as it rose 12 per cent in the rest of the world.

Throw the Book at Visa

Timothy Noah, September 27, 2024 [The New Republic]

Transaction fees on debit card purchases are out of control. The Biden administration’s antitrust cops are on the case.

The Justice Department’s antitrust case against Visa, which was announced Tuesday, is best understood as an important (and, in my view, overdue) new stage in the history of money, which is basically a sad tale of tangible currency becoming ever less tangible and therefore ever easier for a private third party (typically banks; in this case, Visa) to siphon away a portion of without attracting notice from nice people like you and me….

The Justice Department Challenges Visa’s Predatory Power

Robert Kuttner, September 25, 2024 [The American Prospect]

Disrupting mainstream economics

Britain Can’t Afford Rachel Reeves (2): Banks aren’t “financial intermediaries”, and government spending creates money, rather than borrowing it

Steve Keen, September 28, 2024 [Building a New Economics]

In the first post in this series, I asserted that cutting government spending won’t lead to increased investment, as Rachel Reeves believes, because her argument is based on a false theory of money. She was taught it when she learnt economics at University, and not only Reeves, but the vast majority of economists, believe this theory, called “Loanable Funds”. But it is demonstrably false.

This might seem crazy—and frankly, it is crazy that economics textbooks teach a false model of money. But that’s the reality, as Reeves’ one-time employer, the Bank of England, stated in 2014:

“The reality of how money is created today differs from the description found in some economics textbooks” (McLeay, Radia, and Thomas 2014).

The Bank then explained how money is created by banks, and it’s outrageously simple:

Rather than banks receiving deposits when households save and then lending them out, bank lending creates deposits.

I’ll explain why economists teach and believe a fallacy in a later post. Here, I’ll show why the Bank of England is right, using the same tool that banks use to create money: double-entry bookkeeping. Banks don’t have a “Magic Money Tree”, but they do have accountants, who apply the rules of double-entry bookkeeping. Combined with the fact that Banks, and only Banks, can offer Deposit accounts, the rules of double-entry bookkeeping give them the power to create money….

Creating money out of thin air

Tony Wikrent, January 13, 2015 [DailyKos]

“…it can now be said with confidence for the first time – possibly in the 5000 years’ history of banking – that it has been empirically demonstrated that each individual bank creates credit and money out of nothing, when it extends what is called a ‘bank loan’. The bank does not loan any existing money, but instead creates new money. The money supply is created as ‘fairy dust’ produced by the banks out of thin air. The implications are far-reaching.”

That’s the conclusion of a December 2014 article, by Richard A. Werner, in the scholarly journal International Review of Financial Analysis, entitled Can banks individually create money out of nothing? — The theories and the empirical evidence….

Can the Machinists Save Boeing from Its Management?

[Labor Notes, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 09-26-2024]

“While Boeing wailed that the strike may cause mortal wounds to the company, the Machinists union has for decades been fighting against the company’s self-wounding practices: rampant outsourcing, undermining of quality inspections, moving work to non-union shops, and hollowing out what used to be a coveted family-sustaining job. Company policies have resulted in the loss of experienced workers, production delays, mismatched and shoddy parts, and the disastrous quality lapses that led to an Alaska Airlines door plug blowout in January. It was the union that was originally responsible for pushing the separation of quality inspection from production pressures, said Steve Cabana, a quality assurance inspector for 13 years. ‘Having quality separate in the supervisory chain is the only way quality can have any teeth,’ he said. ‘I can look at a process and stop it.’ This is not true at vendors the company buys parts from, Cabana said, where they have ‘the same management system for manufacturing and quality.’ ‘That’s how the company figured it could save money by outsourcing, because other people didn’t have the same rigorous standards,’ Cabana said. ‘It’s a fragile network of suppliers who honestly aren’t compensated all that well for the work that they do,’ said Mylo Lang, an apprentice machinist at Auburn with six years at the company. ‘They’ve really been squeezing them, in fact, over the years.’ In Boeing’s own plants, the company has tried to slash inspections, too. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) requires in-person inspections by qualified workers, but in 2017 Boeing tried to speed up production by having mechanics sign off on their own work. At the company’s assembly plant in North Charleston, South Carolina, which currently has no union, the lack of worker power and input meant the company tested out cuts to quality inspections there first, around 2017, then expanded into the Puget Sound plants, where union members rallied to stop the cuts, flooding meetings and making the question a shop floor issue.”

Where do neoliberal economists think money comes from? 

[Funding the Future, via Naked Capitalism 09-28-2024]

Health care crisis

What Repeat COVID Infections Do to Your Body, According to Science

[Self, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 09-24-2024]

“These days, it’s tempting to compare COVID-19 with the common cold or flu. It can similarly leave you with a nasty cough, fever, sore throat—the full works of respiratory symptoms. And it’s also become a part of the societal fabric, perhaps something you’ve resigned yourself to catching at least a few times in your life (even if you haven’t already)…. It turns out, SARS-CoV-2 is more nefarious than these other contagious bugs, and our immune response to it, often larger and longer-lasting. COVID has a better ability to camouflage itself in the body, “and it has the keys to the kingdom in the sense that it can unlock any cell and get in,” says Esther Melamed, PhD, an assistant professor in the department of neurology at Dell Medical School, University of Texas Austin, and the research director of the Post-COVID-19 program at UT Health Austin. That’s because SARS-CoV-2 binds to ACE2 receptors, which exist in cells all over your body, from your heart to your gut to your brain. (By contrast, cold and flu viruses replicate mostly in your respiratory tract.)” And: ‘A 2022 study led by Dr. Al-Aly found that COVID reinfections also increase your risk of complications across the board, regardless of whether you recovered just fine in the past or got vaccinated. In particular, it showed that reinfection raises the likelihood that you’ll need hospitalization; have heart or lung problems; or experience, among other possible issues, GI, neurological, mental health, or musculoskeletal symptoms. ‘We use the term ‘cumulative effects,” Dr. Al-Aly says, ‘so, multiple hits accrue and then leave the body more vulnerable to all the potential long-term health effects of COVID.’” • Perhaps a real expert can review this article, but I’m impressed, partly by Al-Aly getting quoted, and also by a link to a study in Nature (!). It’s a little stunning to see a dense, well-researched article on Covid in a popular magazine like Self (putting mainstream sources like the Atlantic or Vox to shame, not to mention our moribund public health establishment). Well worth a read.

Information age dystopia / surveillance state

Cognitive warfare in the West 

[Voltaire.net, via Naked Capitalism 09-24-2024]

Youtube Has Censored “The Real Politick with Mark Sleboda” and other channels critical of US foreign policy of Hegemony 

Mark Sleboda [via Naked Capitalism 09-24-2024]

Climate and environmental crises

How climate change is intensifying storms like Hurricane Helene 

[The Hill, via Naked Capitalism 09-28-2024]

U.S. Climate Policy Explained: What Americans Need to Know 

[RAND, via Naked Capitalism 09-28-2024]

100% humidity heatwaves are spreading across the Earth. That’s a deadly problem for us. 

[BBC, via Naked Capitalism 09-24-2024]

Climate Change Is So Bad, Even the Arctic Is On Fire 

[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 09-27-2024]

Rise Of The Insurance Apocalypse

Lois Parshley, September 23, 2024 [The Lever]

…as climate change intensifies extreme weather and claims pile up, this system has been thrown into disarray. Insured losses from natural disasters in the United States now routinely approach $100 billion a year, compared to $4.6 billion in 2000. As a result, the average homeowner has seen their premiums spike 21 percent since 2015. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the states most likely to have disasters — like Texas and Florida — have some of the most expensive insurance rates. That means ever more people are forgoing coverage, leaving them vulnerable and driving prices even higher as the number of people paying premiums and sharing risk shrinks.

This vicious cycle also increases reinsurers’ rates. Reinsurers globally raised prices for property insurers by 37 percent in 2023, contributing to insurance companies pulling back from risky states like California and Florida.

Ecuador cuts power in half of its provinces amid historic drought 

[Reuters, via Naked Capitalism 09-24-2024]

[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 09-27-2024]

Is recycling beyond fixing? Here’s why California thinks so. 

[Washington Post, via Naked Capitalism 09-24-2024]

California governor signs law banning all plastic shopping bags at grocery stores 

[CNN, via Naked Capitalism 09-24-2024]

Democrats’ political malpractice

Not Enjoying the Mark Cuban for President Campaign

David Dayen, September 27, 2024 [The American Prospect]

Earlier this week, I jumped on a Harris campaign call featuring Mark Cuban, the entrepreneur and minority owner of the Dallas Mavericks. James Curbeam, the Teamsters National Black Caucus chair, was on there as well, but Cuban dominated the call. The idea was to push back on Donald Trump’s economic ideas in advance of Harris’s broader rollout. Cuban brought up two examples.

First, he objected to Trump’s call to slap a 200 percent tariff on John Deere if the company moved to Mexico. It wasn’t because that would be impossible given the U.S.-Mexico-Canada free-trade agreement that Trump signed into law; Cuban briefly alluded to that while saying, “I’m not the expert in this space.” The worst part of it, Cuban insisted, is that putting a bigger tariff on Mexican-made John Deere products than on Chinese farm equipment manufacturers would “[make] it cheaper for Chinese manufacturers to compete with John Deere … You literally face the destruction of one of the most historic companies in the United States of America.” That historic American company Cuban is celebrating, in this telling, should not face disapproval or sanctions for outsourcing American jobs, because it might harm the business.

First, he objected to Trump’s call to slap a 200 percent tariff on John Deere if the company moved to Mexico. It wasn’t because that would be impossible given the U.S.-Mexico-Canada free-trade agreement that Trump signed into law; Cuban briefly alluded to that while saying, “I’m not the expert in this space.” The worst part of it, Cuban insisted, is that putting a bigger tariff on Mexican-made John Deere products than on Chinese farm equipment manufacturers would “[make] it cheaper for Chinese manufacturers to compete with John Deere … You literally face the destruction of one of the most historic companies in the United States of America.” That historic American company Cuban is celebrating, in this telling, should not face disapproval or sanctions for outsourcing American jobs, because it might harm the business.

Later on in the call, responding to a question about crypto, Cuban said: “The open sore is what happens at the SEC, and she hasn’t said anything in support of the SEC head, so I take that as a positive. In my conversations with people on the campaign, they’re very clear that they are not fans of regulation through litigation … so I think that’s a huge positive.” Cuban’s comment is generally aligned with that of every major crypto mogul who wants Gary Gensler fired and crypto unencumbered by federal rules….

The Basics: Deference Politics 

Freddie deBoer [via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 09-24-2024]

“When I talk about deference politics, I’m referring to the tendency of left-leaning people to substitute interpersonal obsequiousness towards “marginalized groups” for the actual material change those groups demand.” Example: The famous photographs of Democrats kneeling in kente cloth after the murder of George Floyd: “[T]he contrast between its failure and the theatrics that attended its announcement is deference politics in its essential form: at a moment of mass discontent over the state of race and policing, Black Americans got the absurd performance from Congressional leaders but not the substance of better policy. And this is core to the critique of deference politics; the point is not that the good intentions of the people who practice them are worthless but that the people who practice deference politics never seem to recognize that all of the deferring never makes positive action more likely. Like many great political crimes, deference politics privileges the communicative and the emotional over the material and the actual.”

[Lambert Strether: “It’s interesting to speculate that the institutional advantages of the Democrat party (see above) are canceled out by the actual politics of its PMC base. Also worth reading in full.”]

Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War

Donald Trump Still Wants to Dismantle Critical Hurricane Agency 

Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling, September 06, 2024 [The New Republic]

NOAA’s Crossfire Hurricane

Gabrielle Gurley, September 26, 2024 [The American Prospect]

Anyone in Mexico or Florida or elsewhere around the world could study pages of warnings, data, and tools like radar and satellite images, and two storms that very quickly turned into major threats. Why have such storms grown more powerful and frequent in recent decades? Climate scientists say that warming oceans could be leading to the rapid intensification of hurricanes. For its part, the federal agency hedges its bets: The NOAA scientists who have looked at climate change and the rapid intensification of hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean over the past 40 years admit the research is “unsettled.”

But unsettled research and a site full of free data and other public education tools adds up to climate alarmism for the authors of Project 2025, the road map for a possible second Trump administration. The Project’s Chapter 21, which looks at Commerce Department agencies including NOAA and the National Weather Service (NWS), finds that NOAA is “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry,” as if its data and reports were a repository of monopolistic malfeasance. Project 2025’s solution is to get rid of these troublesome agencies.

When Project 2025 looks at them, it sees only misspent public dollars. The big problem with NOAA appears to be that it consumes slightly more than half of the Commerce Department’s $12 billion budget. The chapter intones that NOAA’s “mission emphasis on prediction and management seems designed around the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable.” It’s a remarkable admission that might surprise the insurers of homes and human lives, as if engaging in any planning and preparation for, say, a Category 5 hurricane or extreme heat waves or climate change is somehow more lethal than doing nothing.

US Fascism Has Arrived Thanks to 30 Years of Right-Wing Talk Radio Dominance

Thom Hartmann, September 28, 2024 [CommonDreams]

War On Terror, Redux

[Talking Points Memo 09-28-2024]

…Trump and those around him have been promising, if elected, to strip the citizenship of people who attend pro-Palestine rallies, painting them all with the extremely broad brush of supporting Hamas, the terrorist organization. Trump tried to effect a wave of denaturalizations during his first term; it was extremely costly, and very ineffective. But even then, that push toward denaturalizations focused on people who had lied to the government in the process of receiving citizenship.

What Trump is now proposing is different, and hearkens back to Bush-era proposals: stripping the citizenship of people deemed “terrorists” or terrorist supporters. In the Bush era, there were cases in which reviews of recently naturalized citizens who contributed money to Islamic charities that had later been found to support terrorist organizations led to their denaturalizations. These peoples’ citizenships were revoked because they were found to have misled the government while receiving a passport, but the initial review began because of what was regarded as a sinister ideological affiliation.

You see it in greater resolution with Trumpian legal planning around the domestic use of the military. For that, Trump allies have turned to work from Bush DOJ official John Yoo in 2001, in which he laid the legal groundwork for deploying the military domestically against terrorists. Trump allies have resurrected this work in the context of border enforcement, but the precedent they’re seeking to will into being would be incredibly broad.

The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution

A Supreme Court Justice Warned That a Ruling Would Cause “Large-Scale Disruption.” The Effects Are Already Being Felt

Eli Sanders, September 27, 2024 [ProPublica]

…a decision in the seemingly humdrum realm of administrative law could end up having far broader consequences, affecting vast areas of American life by slashing the power of federal regulatory agencies that police pollution, food safety, health care and countless other aspects of modern society.

Lower court judges have already cited the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision, in a case known as Loper Bright, to halt implementation of Biden administration rules on overtime pay and health care discrimination. In the past three months, Loper Bright also has been invoked to challenge regulations on everything from hidden airline fees to gun sales to abortion referrals.

Justice Neil Gorsuch, who was part of the conservative majority in Loper Bright, described it as placing “a tombstone” on a doctrine that had existed for 40 years. That doctrine, known as Chevron deference, was named after the 1984 Supreme Court case in which it emerged, and it offered an answer to a recurring question: What happens when Congress passes a law granting power to a federal agency but fails to precisely define the boundaries of that power? ….

Dan Weiner, director for elections and government at the Brennan Center for Justice, sees Loper Bright as the capstone of a series of recent Supreme Court rulings that limit agency power. Weiner called it the “culmination of a broader project to just cut the legs out from under government as we’ve known it since the New Deal.”….

It took only hours for the decision to ripple into a lower court. On June 28, the day Loper Bright was announced, a federal judge in Texas issued a preliminary injunction against a new Department of Labor rule expanding eligibility for overtime pay.…

On July 3, three federal judges in different states, all citing Loper Bright, issued orders blocking implementation of a new rule from the Department of Health and Human Services that would prohibit discrimination in health care based on gender identity….

In April, after six years of study, the Federal Trade Commission issued a rule banning noncompete agreements, which restrict workers from accepting employment with competitors for a period of time after leaving their current jobs. The FTC determined the rule was needed because such contracts impair “the fundamental freedom of workers to change jobs,” harm innovation and are “often exploitative.” Of the more than 26,000 comments the agency had received about the proposed ban, over 25,000 were supportive, the FTC said. A group of plaintiffs that includes the U.S. Chamber of Commerce filed suit in federal court in Texas, arguing the FTC had exceeded its authority.

On Aug. 20, citing Loper Bright, the judge in this case agreed with the plaintiffs and issued a final order that set aside the ban on noncompetes, declaring that the FTC had “promulgated the Non-Compete Rule in excess of its statutory authority.” ….

US supreme court rulings will affect response to threats like bird flu – experts 

[Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 09-23-2024]

Civic republicanism

One-on-one with Heather Cox Richardson | Cap Times Idea Fest 2024 (YouTube Video)

[The Capital Times, via YouTube, 09-24, 2024]

39:33

… one of the reasons that I take what’s happened to the Republican party so personally is that … I probably know the Republican Party better than anybody else in this country… when I see people embracing the Confederate with an R by their name, when I looked at what happened on January 6^th, I felt personally that attack on the US capital.

Because during the Civil War… the Battle Hymn of the Republic is written by Julia Ward Howe. She’s from Massachusetts and she comes to Washington in 1861 with her husband and [and her] friends keep saying, “you know write something big” – she’s a poet – and  she’s like I can’t, I can’t think. And they go out and they look around the city and they see the fires of all the soldiers who have been encamped around the city to protect it from the Confederates. Because remember that Washington is very vulnerable to the Confederates…

And she gets up the next morning and she writes that poem that says “mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord” and then the next stanza “I have seen him in the watchfires of a hundred circling camps” – from what she’d seen the day before – “they have builded him an altar in the evening dues and damps.” And I thought of that line, and in all the years of that war, all those people dead, [but the Confederates] had never breached the capital. And on January 6, 2021, those people breached the US capital, and they took a Confederate flag inside. And for somebody like me, whose entire life has been about making that distinction between democracy and those people who try to destroy democracy, to have a president whip up those people to take that flag inside that Capital was such a profound affront to me….

[TW: Richardson also shares some important observations about Kamala Harris’s skill in handling Trump; the importance of the 14th Amendment and the current conservative campaign to empty it of any meaning; and the 1850s creation of the Republican Party as a response to the political dominance of Southern oligarchs.]