Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – October 20 2024

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

MASTER PLAN, Ep 10: The Master Planners’ Heist Of The Century

[The Lever, October 15, 2024]

By 2010, the master planners had firmly gained the upper hand. Their victory in Citizens United allowed corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections, giving business interests unprecedented power in politics. But the master planners’ onslaught wasn’t quite over. In this episode, we show how they embarked on a bold heist to crack the vault protecting democracy itself. It’s the heist story of the century, in three acts.

First, the schemers needed to take out the security cameras: The disclosure laws that in some instances still required the names of big-money donors to be reported. In a perverse act of mental gymnastics, petrochemical tycoon Charles Koch’s Americans for Prosperity sought to eliminate these laws by weaponizing a 1950s ruling that had protected civil rights activists in the Jim Crow South.

In the second part of the heist, the schemers went after the last remaining cops on the beat. They manufactured a scandal at the IRS, the country’s last remaining campaign finance regulators, over the targeting of so-called “social welfare” nonprofits — many of which were fronts for dark money groups.

Finally, the master planners needed a getaway plan, a way to prevent prosecutors from coming after them as they made off with the loot. They found their opportunity with the appointments of Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court.

As high-profile bribery and corruption convictions fell, the message was clear: The system is rigged, and political officials are ready to play for pay.

Key findings referenced in this episode include:

• See the evidence from the case in which a Virginia jury convicted former Gov. Bob McDonnell and his wife Maureen for accepting $175,000 in gifts and loans from a businessman — including a $10,000 white leather coat, shopping sprees, use of a Ferrari, and a $6,500 Rolex.
• In the 2016 case McDonnell v. United States, a wave of amicus briefs flooded the Supreme Court attacking the legality of the anti-bribery laws used to convict the former Virginia governor. Chief Justice John Roberts cited these briefs as evidence of “bipartisanship,” but they mostly came from influential figures in the money and politics sphere, including corporate lobbyists and Federalist Society members like John Ashcroft and Ted Olson. Other notable supporters filing briefs included Christian Right attorney Jay Sekulow and Citizens United mastermind James Bopp Jr. Even Justice Lewis F. Powell’s former corporate law firm joined in, representing a coalition of elite business owners.
• Indicted New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ lawyers recently filed their first motion to dismiss the bribery and fraud charges lodged against him, heavily relying on Supreme Court rulings that have weakened anti-corruption laws. The motion points to overturned convictions in corruption cases discussed in this episode, including those of McDonnell, former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling, small-town mayor James Snyder, and New York power broker Sheldon Silver.
• Read law professor Zephyr Teachout’s article on how both liberal and conservative justices on the Supreme Court have expressed skepticism about anti-corruption law, narrowing the definition of corruption and limiting public power.

Over half of African nations spend more on interest rates to creditors than public health: Report 

[Down to Earth, via Naked Capitalism 10-19-2024]

Mehrsa Baradaran, The Quiet Coup: Neoliberalism and the Looting of America (New York, W.W. Norton, 2024)

p50

In 1970, the G-77 unveiled its plan for a “New International Economic Order,” which advocated for self-determination for each country and the fair distribution of world resources. Among other things, the G-77, OPEC, and other coalitions of the Global South demanded autonomy to sell—or not to sell—to transnational corporations that had become permanent fixtures in their nations and in their politics. The proposals included imposing trade barriers to keep foreign investors out, a practice that was routine among most of the Western nations, including the United States during the era of Bretton Woods. Small nations could not build their economies without atriffs and capital controls, which allowed native industries to grow without having to compete with better resourced nations. Their main area of concern was with the power of transnational corporations including the multinational coal, copper, and diamond miners, and their political influence.

The dilemma for Western nations after the age of formal empire was ideological and material. They could not maintain economic dominance if former colonies became sovereign democratic nations, and they couldn’t use brute force to maintain that dominance without abandoning their democratic principles. It was this challenge, not Keynesianism or communism, whose ideal solution was neoliberalism.

Controlling the resources of former colonies in the absence of political domination was a delicate diplomatic maneuver—one that the members of the [Mont Pelerin Society] were well equipped to handle. In the 1950s and 1960s, MPS debates started focusing on such issues as the uneasy relationship between national sovereignty and international trade and the growing threat that revolt represented….

P 52
While the Global South imagined a future different from the past, the noeliberals worked painstakingly toward a future that was similar to the past—or as close as possible The basic feature of that plan was to counteract rising national power of the former colonies by undercutting the power of all states to regulate corporations. Neo- liberal intellectuals began fighting against the very idea of sovereignty itself. Speaking at The Hague about the future of international in 1955, founding MPS member Wilhelm Röpke noted that “to diminish national sovereignty is most emphatically one of the urgent needs of our time.”” The neoliberals sought a new international economic order, one very different from the G-77’s bid for a flattening of the trade hierarchy among nations; this néoliberal world order would instead seek to augment the power of corporations and capital over that of national governments….

P60
…To Hayek, all state action, especially toward “international cooperation,” was indistinguishable from serfdom. He favored the total privatization of industry, removing Bretton Woods barriers, and—although MPS members disagreed vehemently on this last part—a new monetary order, which would be based on either purely private money or a, floating exchange rate of currencies. Hayek’s system would free capital to be invested worldwide, weakening state social safety-net spending but maintaining the economic strength of the Global North, given its vast capital advantage. If the new “sovereign” nations wished to build their native industries, they could apply for a “development loan” from the IMF and World Bank. Experts from these NGOs would then offer “technical assistance” to the new governments to help them tighten their budgets and promote trade.

Just as politicians in the United States adopted neoliberal ideas to perpetuate the domestic racial order, the Western powers overall adopted neoliberal ideas to tame independence movements and launder their own efforts to continue subjugating the Global South….

Poorest countries in worst financial shape since 2006, World Bank says 

[Al Jazeera, via Naked Capitalism 10-16-2024]

Burn the Planet and Lock Up the Dissidents

Chris Hedges, October 17, 2024

The fossil fuel industry, and the politician class they own, have no intention of halting the ecocide. As the climate crisis worsens, so do the laws and security measures to keep us in bondage.

Can We Rein In the Excesses of Financialization Without Crashing the Economy?  

Charles Hugh Smith [Of Two Minds, via Naked Capitalism 10-16-2024]

This excerpt from a post on promarket.org illuminates the reality that financialization isn’t cost-free to the economy:

“Epstein and Montecino argue that the total cost of the financial system is comprised of rents, misallocation costs, and the costs of the 2008 crisis. Such costs can be divided into two types: transfers and inefficiencies. When combined together, Epstein and Montecino estimate that they total to $688bn a year, or 4 percent of GDP. Cumulatively, from 1990 to 2023, this number would add up to $22.7 trillion.”

Adjusted for inflation, this sum totals $30.2 trillion in today’s dollars–larger than America’s entire GDP of $27 trillion….

That the suffering caused by the implosion of the Everything Bubble will reach every level of society is self-evident and should concern us all. But we must also place all finance-economic questions in the context that we inhabit a moral universe, not a purely mechanical or digital system like a clock or a computer.

In the moral universe, the question is: “what is the right thing to do now for future generations?” The self-evident answer is to deflate the financialization bubble, defang its predatory tools, and take the lumps now rather than dump the ever-expanding destructive consequences on the next generation. This can be viewed as our civic / moral duty….

Global power shift

Who Are the Terrorists? 

Craig Murray [via Naked Capitalism 10-19-2024]

Somewhere in the UK, among the papers of a dead loved one which nobody has the heart to throw out, in cardboard boxes in dusty attics or deep in the filing cabinets of Jeremy Corbyn, exist still a few copies of thousands of letters bearing my authentic signature.

These letters, on expensive paper with an impressive Foreign and Commonwealth Office crested header, state that the British Government will not deal with the African National Congress because it is a terrorist organisation.

Many of them go on to state that Nelson Mandela is a terrorist who was rightly convicted of terrorism by a South African court after a free and fair trial.

I really did write those thousands of letters, not just sign them. I did not believe a single word of it, and was only “doing my job” as a civil servant, but in a sense that makes it worse.

Gaza / Palestine / Israel

Netanyahu’s Likud Party Issues Invitation to Event Titled ‘Preparing to Settle Gaza’ 

[Haaretz, via Naked Capitalism 10-17-2024]

Israel does what it does; it was always planned this way 

Alastair Crooke [via Naked Capitalism 10-15-2024]

Oligarchy

Billionaires think we can’t tax them

[Cory Doctorow, via Thomas Neuburger, October 18, 2024

Billionaires are pretty confident that they can’t be taxed – not just that they shouldn’t be taxed, but rather, that it is technically impossible to tax the ultra-rich. They’re not shy about explaining why, either – and neither is their army of lickspittles.…

[Neuburger: Doctorow says no to all that. There are lots of ways to tax billionaires out of existence, including ways to deal with the “race to the bottom” effect.]

Okay, but what if all those billionaires flee your state? Good riddance, and don’t let the door hit you on the way out. All we need is an exit tax, like the one in California, which levies a one-time 0.4% tax on net worth over $30m for any individual who leaves the state [emphasis mine].

Will Working Class Trump Voters Feel Badly When The Country Officially Becomes A Plutocracy?

Howie Klein, October 19, 2024  [downwithtyranny.com]

Yesterday Susan Glasser at the New Yorker (How Republican Billionaires Learned To Love Trump Again) and Jonathan Mahler, Ryan Mac and Theodore Schleifer at the NY Times (How Tech Billionaires Became The GOP’s New Donor Class) brought up an old truism about politics. All through history, the wealthiest members of societies across the world have aligned themselves with conservative or reactionary movements, largely to preserve their wealth and privilege within the established order. Their interests— their assets, privileges and place in the social hierarchy— generally align with the maintenance of the status quo or a return to previous systems that favored them economically and socially, the status quo ante. Conservatism, with its emphasis on tradition and law and order (at least for the working class), has been appealing to the rich because it ensures that the structures enabling wealth accumulation (property rights, capitalism, inheritance laws, etc.) remain intact….

How Tech Billionaires Became the G.O.P.’s New Donor Class (NYT Magazine)

[via democraticunderground 10-18-2024]

As these new donors started gravitating toward Trump, he began making new promises on the campaign trail. He would make America “the crypto capital of the planet”; he would fire Biden’s Securities and Exchange Commission chair, Gary Gensler; he would steer more military contracts to the booming private defense-tech sector; he would repeal an executive order intended to provide some checks on the development of A.I. “In the matrix of people supporting Trump — a 2-by-2 matrix of ‘Are they purchasable?’ and ‘Can I purchase them?’ — Biden and Harris are not purchasable, and Trump is the most purchasable president in our lifetime,” says Reid Hoffman, one of PayPal’s early employees and a prominent Democratic donor.

-snip-

The new donor class had made their bet, though in the end it was a pretty modest one, given their collective wealth. As of the end of September, Sacks and his wife had given a total of $550,000 to Trump’s election effort, less than the price of a couple of tickets to Sacks’s own fund-raiser back in June. Musk had given $75 million to America PAC, a huge sum for anyone else, but not so much for a man now worth roughly $250 billion. “The hilarious aspect is that they are feeding Trump crumbs,” says Michael Moritz, a veteran Silicon Valley V.C. and one of the earliest investors in the company that would become PayPal. “It’s a fantastic return on investment.”

-snip-

…[T]he Silicon Valley MAGA cohort were finished with Democrats, regulators, stability, all of it. They were opting instead for the freewheeling, fortune-generating chaos that they knew from the startup world. They had big dreams and had made the calculus that Trump would create a more hospitable environment in which to realize them. They were going to plant devices in people’s brains, replace national currencies with unregulated digital tokens, replace generals with artificial intelligence systems and much more. “Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress and the realization of our potential,” Andreessen wrote in his manifesto. “We are not victims, we are conquerors.”

How US Taxpayers Helped Elon Musk Become the Richest Man on Earth 

Sam Pizzigati, October 19, 2024 [CommonDreams]

The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics

The Numbers Don’t Lie: the Carbon Tax Isn’t Behind Surging Prices and Inflation. Price Fixing Is – Including the Price of Oil. 

[Dougald Lamont’s Substack, via Naked Capitalism 10-13-2024]

Why has your Big Mac become so much more expensive? 

[Financial Times, via Naked Capitalism 10-16-2024]

It’s being billed as a clash of the corporate titans. Last week McDonald’s filed suit against the four biggest US meatpacking companies, alleging that they had conspired to push up the cost of ground beef. But the issue at stake is one that is near and dear to the hearts of ordinary Americans. If inflation is finally slowing, why is everything from eggs and burgers to luxury hotel rooms still so expensive, and who is to blame? ….

​​​​​​​McDonald’s alleges that Cargill, JBS, National Beef and Tyson Food together control up to 85 per cent of market-ready cattle and are working together to hold down both their input prices and the total supply to increase their profits. Dozens of other restaurant chains, supermarkets and food distributors have also sued the big four over beef prices in recent years. The meatpackers generally deny wrongdoing, although JBS has settled with some of the plaintiffs.

The Biden administration is trying to tackle meat prices from a different angle, in a very modern take that could apply to a much wider range of industries. The Department of Justice is suing data company Agri Stats, claiming that it suppresses competition among pork, turkey and chicken processors by collecting and sharing confidential information about prices, costs and output. Agri Stats has denied wrongdoing and the case is heading to a 2025 trial.

New report shows child care workers struggle to pay bills on poverty-level wages 

[NC Newsline, via Naked Capitalism 10-13-2024]

The Bail Bond Industry Fights To Keep You In Jail

Katya Schwenk, October 17, 2024 [The Lever]

Bounty hunters and Wall Street insurers are pushing legislation that would criminalize charitable efforts that help people who can’t afford bail.

The shadowy for-profit bail industry is behind a first-of-its-kind federal effort to criminalize charitable efforts designed to help people who can’t afford to post bail.

The legislation, which civil rights groups warn is part of an ongoing wave of attacks on bail reforms, would be a win for the for-profit bail industry: Bounty hunters and the Wall Street insurers that back them all profit from the United States’ unique bail bonds system, in which poor people facing criminal charges pay bail agents to post their bail and get out of jail as they await trial.

The new bill, which just passed the House of Representatives, uses federal insurance law to target bail funds, charitable groups that collect donations to help bail people out of jail who can’t otherwise afford it. In the name of being tough on crime and fraud, the bill would subject these groups to potentially severe criminal penalties if they fail to comply with the regulations — mirroring state-level attempts to restrict bail funds, like a Georgia law this year that, in practice, outlawed the funds entirely….

Restoring balance to the economy

‘Strikes Work!’ Boeing Union Workers Win Tentative Contract With 35% Wage Increase

Jon Queally, October 06, 2024 [CommonDreams]

The International Association of Machinists (IAM) and Aerospace Workers District 751, which has been on strike since September 13, announced the breakthrough in a statement and Boeing also confirmed that a deal had been reached.

The tentative agreement—which will have to receive a majority from union members before finalized—includes a 35% wage increase over four years of the contract, a larger signing bonus of $7,000, guaranteed minimum payouts in a new annual bonus program, and increased contributions to worker 401(k) retirement plans.

“With the help of Acting U.S. Secretary of Labor Julie Su, we have received a negotiated proposal and resolution to end the strike, and it warrants presenting to the members and is worthy of your consideration,” IAM’s negotiating committee said in a message to members on Saturday.

Lina Khan vs Planet Fitness  

Matt Stoller [BIG, via Naked Capitalism 10-19-2024]

On Wednesday, the Federal Trade Commission put out a regulation to make it easier to cancel subscriptions, what is called the “Click to Cancel” rule. In this piece, I’ll go over the rule, why it matters, but also, the quiet and nasty campaign against it. Because while it would seem obvious that companies like Planet Fitness, the notorious gym franchisor that allegedly scams customers by making it excruciatingly difficult to cancel a membership, shouldn’t be able to do what they do, there is a reason they can.

Harris’s Chance on Trade 

Zephyr Teachout, The New York Review

Why the American Labor Movement Matters

Kim Kelly [Literary Hub, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 10-18-2024]

Disrupting mainstream economics

The Boy Who Cried Wolf About Government Debt (PDF)

Yeva Nersisyan, L. Randall Wray [Levy Economics Institute, via Mike Norman Economics, 10-17-2024]

In a New York Times editorial, David Leonhardt recounts Aesop’s apocryphal story about the boy and the wolf, warning that while deficit hawks have so far been wrong, the growing government debt will eventually bite. He reports the economic plans of both presidential candidates would add to the debt that will soon exceed GDP and grow to 130 percent of annual output under a President Harris, or 140 percent with a Trump presidency.

He rightly points his finger at high interest payments on the outstanding debt—that already exceed spending on Medicare—as a major cause of the rising debt. He concludes by arguing that austerity is the only longterm solution, targeting Social Security and Medicare to bear the brunt of budget cuts, along with tax increases to rein-in deficits. Leonhardt dismisses what he claims to be MMT’s solution—“that the Treasury can simply print enough money to repay the debt”—because it would cause inflation….

It is interesting that Leonhardt is not able to point to any downside of budget deficits except that the debt is growing faster than GDP. But it has been doing that since the founding of the nation—the growth rate of the Federal debt ratio has averaged nearly 2 percent since 1789….

Information age dystopia / surveillance state

GT Exclusive: Latest report shows US cyber weapon can ‘frame other countries’ for its own espionage operations 

[Global Times, via Naked Capitalism 10-14-2024]

Musk Sneaks in X AI Training Clause…and No, You Can’t Opt Out 

[Tech.co, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 10-17-2024]

“X has updated its T&Cs and eagle-eyed users have spotted a now sweeping rights grab that means all content can be used for training AI models. The new license includes the statement that users who post, submit, or display content on the social media platform now automatically grant the platform a ‘worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license.’… It also includes the right for X to sublicense content, which means it can offer it up to other parties… The sublicensing element means that AI developers could buy your content from X; and you’ll be completely unaware of who is using it and how.” • Reader query: I don’t want to allow Elon’s new Terms to steal my photographs and turn them into AI slop. Does anybody know of a really fast (in seconds) AI poisoner for images? I’ve tried Nightshade and it’s too slow, like half and hour per image (and the UI/UX is awful).

The Pentagon Wants to Use AI to Create Deepfake Internet Users 

[The Intercept, via Naked Capitalism 10-19-2024]

The Israeli Spies Writing America’s News 

[Mint Press, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 10-18-2024]

Climate and environmental crises

Mountain Town Confronts an Unexpected Public Health Catastrophe

Kim Dinan [KFF Health News, reposted on Naked Capitalism 10-18-2024]

[TW: The aftermath of Hurrican Helene in Ashville, North Carolina proves many of the points made in Ian Welsh’s 9-30-2024 post How Many

Americans Will Die From Civilization Collapse?]

…A physical therapist at Asheville Specialty Hospital, who asked not to be identified out of concern for losing their job, told me that in the first days after the storm, crews hauled trash cans full of water into the facility so that staff could flush toilets with buckets.

“The water got shut off and we managed. We took care of people the best we could,” the therapist said. “But the amount of water that it takes to run a hospital is unsustainable for the length of time they think we’ll be out of water.”….

The Coming Financial Hurricane: How Hurricane Milton and other climate chaos could trigger the next economic crisis.

Lois Parshley, October 16, 2024 [The Lever]

…As the climate crisis intensifies, stronger storms are killing more people and costing far more in damage. Just two weeks after the last major hurricane, search crews were still digging into mud to find the bodies of missing family members in North Carolina when scientists reported that cyclones are up to 50 percent wetter than they used to be. Along with Hurricane Helene, there have been 20 other billion-dollar disasters that have hit the United States this year….

Across the country, everyone will be paying for the recent hurricanes through their utility bills and insurance premiums and stalled consumer supply chains, while their retirement accounts are threatened and regional banks falter and bond markets fall. This daunting collection of national liabilities makes it more expensive to rebuild after disasters and harder to make necessary adaptations. Like the 2008 subprime crisis, these overlooked risks could set the stage for the next financial disaster….

Less than 1 percent of Asheville’s Buncombe County had flood insurance, which is typically sold separately from homeowners’ policies. Many weren’t considered high risk by the federal flood program, which mortgage lenders use to decide where to require flood coverage. Despite recent efforts to update government flooding maps, many are badly outdated; in recent years, the National Flood Insurance Program has paid out far more in damage claims outside of its designated high-risk zones than in them. As a result, the vast majority of Helene’s potentially $250 billion in damages won’t be covered by insurance.

Probability Estimates of a 21st Century AMOC Collapse 

[Department of Physics, Utrecht University, via Thomas Neuburger 10-18-2024]

An MIT economist said environmentalism is elite concern. India ‘too poor to be green’ 

[The Print, via Naked Capitalism 10-16-2024]

Less than 40% of Europe’s surface waters are healthy: Report 

[Down to Earth, via Naked Capitalism 10-17-2024]

Creating new economic potential – science and technology

Scientists create plastic that degrades 15 times faster than paper in the sea 

[Interesting Engineering, via Naked Capitalism 10-19-2024]

Biotech Breakthrough: Trees Engineered to Replace Fossil Fuels 

[SciTech Daily, via Naked Capitalism 10-19-2024]

Euclid ‘dark universe’ telescope reveals 1st breathtaking images from massive ‘cosmic atlas’ map 

[Space.com, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 10-18-2024]

The Euclid Space Telescope has revealed the “first page” of the cosmic atlas it is building. The section of the map of the cosmos being built by Euclid was released on Monday (Oct. 15), and it features tens of millions of stars within the Milky Way and around 14 million distant galaxies beyond our own.

The vast cosmic mosaic was constructed from 260 Euclid observations collected between March 25 and April 8, 2024 and contains 208 gigapixels of data. The region charted is around 500 times as wide as the full moon appears in the sky over Earth….

Democrats’ political malpractice

Why has recent inflation been so unnerving? 

Kevin Drum [via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 10-18-2024]

[TW: I include this not because it is useful information, but because it is typical of liberal elites who simply are unable to empathize with working class people being destroyed by an economic system that rewards speculation, fraud, rent, and connections rather than useful work. Here, Drum argues that the price inflation people are experiencing is not so much food as gas.

[There are three reason I have identified for the continued popular discontent over the economy:

[1. Prices. Contrary to Drum’s assertions, food prices have been savagely inflationary at the bottom of the economic scale. “The buck has been broken.” It used to be you could go into any grocery store, convenience store, or fast food place, and get a snack or a soda for one dollar or less each. Now, to buy a snack or a drink is two dollars or more: at least a doubling in price in the past few years. And that price increase is there, slapping you repeatedly in the face, as you stand in line waiting to pay looking at the shelves full of impulse items next to the cash register/

[2. Crappification or enshittification — which ever word you want to use. I prefer crappification, which was used by Yves Smith and Lambert Strether at Naked Capitalism a few years before Corey Doctorow began popularizing the word enshittification. Having to deal with customer service now is an unneeded reminder at how skewed the power blanace between corporations and consumers has become. This has become a service economy without the service.

[3. Boeing. This company used to be the pride of the American industrial order. Now it is the leading example of what happens when financiers and bankers have control of a company. Almost every working person today is intimately familiar with how management has pillaged and ruined where they work. ]

Is Harris Choosing Wall Street Over the Working Class? That could cost be fatal for the Democrats.

Les Leopold, October 18, 2024

The Harris team clearly believes that we live in a win-win economy – that when Wall Street does well, we all do well. They seem oblivious to the ways in which Wall Street’s leveraged buyouts and stock buybacks have robbed millions of working people of their livelihoods.

These workers are not stupid.  When a private equity company buys up the facility where they work, they know layoffs are coming to service the new debt load.  When a company pours corporate funds into buying back their own stock to artificially boost the stock price, they know that layoffs will be used to pay for shoveling all this money to the richest stock owners and executives.

Google’s Guardians Donate to the Harris Campaign

David Dayen, Luke Goldstein October 17, 2024 [The American Prospect]

Multiple Harris donors at an upcoming fundraiser are representing Google in its case against the Justice Department over monopolizing digital advertising….

The D.C. reception is officially hosted by Harris adviser Tony West, general counsel of Uber, and his former colleagues at the Obama Department of Justice, then-Attorney General Eric Holder and top deputy Sally Yates.

Tickets to be a co-chair for the event go for $50,000, and co-host for $25,000.

One co-chair is law firm Paul, Weiss’s lead attorney Karen Dunn, who ran debate prep for Harris ahead of her contest against Donald Trump last month. That same week, she also delivered the opening arguments in the Eastern District of Virginia on behalf of Google against the Department of Justice’s antitrust lawsuit for monopolizing digital advertising.

Another member of Google’s defense team at Paul, Weiss, Bill Isaacson, is listed at the co-host level. Isaacson is at the center of a legal ethics dispute in the case for previously representing competitors to Google like Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, before Paul, Weiss switched sides. Despite a judge’s order, Google submitted evidence into the record obtained while Isaacson worked on the News Corp account. He appeared in court while Google grilled News Corp’s witness on the stand to make its case.

The Consultants Who Lost Democrats the Working Class

Ben Metznerf, October 15, 2024 [The New Republic]

Left Adrift: What Happened to Liberal Politics, by Timothy Shenk
Columbia Global Reports, 264 pp., $18.00

…But once in the White House, Greenberg fought an uphill battle to translate class politics into class-based policy. As president, Clinton, facing pushback from congressional Republicans and Cabinet members like Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, sacrificed the populist offerings that Greenberg had made the keystone of the campaign: Middle-class tax cuts and national health care were out; welfare reform and Nafta were in. All the while, Clinton remained “happy to pay” the price of cultural moderation Greenberg associated with tacking left on economics, with such disastrous results as the 1994 crime bill and 1996’s Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, which won plaudits from the Chamber of Commerce. But with few economic wins for the middle class, Clinton’s rhetoric on welfare and crime appeared less as lamentable trade-offs for resurrecting working-class politics and more as proof of concept for Schoen’s theory that America had moved irreversibly to the right. When the administration’s approval rating plummeted and Republicans trounced Democrats in the 1994 midterms shortly after, it had become clear that there was a void at the heart of Clintonian politics as conceived by Greenberg.

Into it stepped Schoen and Penn, whom Clinton hired as pollsters. Greenberg was unceremoniously eased out of Clinton’s inner circle to make room for the computer-savvy Schoen and Penn; his weekly meetings with Clinton, Shenk notes, were dropped from the president’s schedule. With the president’s ear, Schoen and Penn advised the president to craft policy that would appeal to “soccer moms,” moderate voters who bristled at the GOP’s puritanical social policies, and Ross Perot voters, an ideologically jumbled mass of disaffected (mostly conservative) political free agents. Electorally, it was a reasonable strategy; Clinton had limped to victory in 1992, winning only a plurality of voters against unpopular incumbent George H.W. Bush and benefiting greatly from Perot’s nearly 19 percent vote share. Ideologically, it meant acquiescing to Schoen’s fatalistic view of the electorate, irretrievably trending right, forcing Democrats to demonstrate consensus on economic issues with Republicans and “pivot to local issues and personality differences.” If you pointed out that David Duke’s 1988 presidential campaign “was managed by a former commander in the American Nazi Party,” many white voters would “shrug it off,” Schoen and Penn told Louisiana Democratic Governor Edwin Edwards, facing a challenge by Duke and his barely rebranded right-populism. “Say that he was a tax cheat who lied about serving in the military, and they might start to pay attention.”

With Schoen and Penn calling the shots, Clinton won reelection in 1996 but couldn’t stop the downballot bleeding that began under Greenberg; Republicans won back the House and Senate….

Schoen and Penn’s strategy triumphed over Greenberg’s, but their one simple trick for winning elections faltered too. In Israel, advising Labor candidate Shimon Peres after the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, they suggested that Peres drop his predecessor’s pursuit of the peace process with the PLO and instead campaign on security and anti-terrorism; Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu beat him. Back in the United States, Penn and Schoen advised Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primary, where she improbably lost to Barack Obama’s insurgent hope-and-change campaign. In South Africa, Schoen’s campaign strategy for the white-dominated Democratic Party against the African National Congress included the barely concealed revanchist slogan “Fight Back.” The change that Bill Clinton, Blair, and Peres each made, with Schoen’s prodding, was certainly not “both” and “different.” It was plainly conservative, and voters tended to prefer the real thing to a liberal knock-off.

Stoller reams Eric Levitz on hidden agenda of Dems opposed to anti-trust enforcement 

[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 10-18-2024]

[Levitz writes for New York magazine]

Thank you for finally being honest that this dispute is personal for you.  In all sincerity, your idealism, and that’s where I think you’re coming from, is laudable. You genuinely want a better world, and you sincerely think my ideas make things worse. I respect that, even if I don’t agree. And thank you for admitting that you are a supporter of the conservative Republican Bork defined pro-monopoly consumer welfare side, and that you are writing a hit piece on antitrust. I know it’s hard for you to be that honest about your agenda, so kudos….

The most important one that you don’t engage with, however, is about Harris’s campaign strategy. Kamala Harris is right now in Milwaukee with Mark Cuban mocking tariffs, running a strategy to prioritize upper class voters over working class ones. Why does that matter? Well your claim is that Biden policy didn’t bring union votes to Democrats. And yet you ignore that Harris is specifically focused on a strategy that will sacrifice those votes for a different voting bloc. I mean, Harris isn’t hiding what she’s doing, but if you were to acknowledge that Harris is running a certain kind of campaign, it would undercut key parts of your argument, and your larger ideological project. And this is a longterm tactic for Democrats. Schumer in 2016 said, “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia.” You can’t not take this into account if you’re wondering why the working class isn’t into Democrats. Maybe it’s because Democrats are explicitly running messaging to build a coalition excluding them! Well, I mean I guess you can not take this very obvious point into account, that’s sort of my point about your work….

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

Yes, Trump and the GOP Have a Plan to Steal This Election If Defeated

Thom Hartmann, October 15, 2024 [Common Dreams]

 ActBlue lobbies up amid GOP probes 

[Politico, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 10-15-2024]

“ActBlue, the left’s favored online donation platform, is turning to K Street as it looks to beat back accusations of lax security and donor fraud brought forward by state and federal Republican officials. Covington & Burling’s Matthew Shapanka, a former Senate Rules aide who helped craft the updated bipartisan Electoral Count Act reform bill in 2022, began lobbying for ActBlue on Sept. 9 on the Secure Handling of Internet Electronic Donations — or SHIELD — Act, according to a disclosure filing. The SHIELD Act had been introduced days earlier by House Administration Chair Bryan Steil (R-Wis.). It stemmed from an investigation into concerns that ActBlue wasn’t verifying its donors properly because it did not require them to provide the three-digit CVV codes on the back of their cards. Among other things, Steil’s bill would bar political committees from accepting contributions if a CVV code was not provided and would also bar donations made using gift cards, pre-paid credit or debit cards or gift certificates.”

In Texas’ Third-Largest County, the Far Right’s Vision for Local Governing Has Come to Life 

[ProPublica, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 10-18-2024]

UNDELIVERED: Drug-Sniffing Police Dogs Are Intercepting Abortion Pills in the Mail 

[The Intercept, via Naked Capitalism 10-19-2024]

…What will happen to abortion-pills-by-mail and the people who use them if Donald Trump is elected in November? As the accounts of the regional USPIS head and FOIA documents show, a piecemeal crackdown is already underway during a Democratic administration. Under a Trump regime, things might go much further.

Whoever is in power, the incident in Jackson provides a potential window into the future — one in which freelancing local Postal Service employees and officials can call on local cops to halt women from accessing reproductive care and potentially charge and arrest those providing or using abortion medication.

My FOIA request asked for records from past years of investigations of people who’d used the mail to send pills. The documents I got back show how a willing administration might go after distributors. The feds could even lend support to police in states that have criminalized abortion care as they pursue cases under local laws. Pregnant people who order the medications could get caught in the dragnet….

‘He’s Not Kidding,’ Advocates Warn as Trump Threatens to Defund Schools for Teaching US History

Julia Conley, October 18, 2024 [CommonDreams]

Education advocates implored voters to take Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s latest comments on public schools on Friday after his appearance on the Fox News morning show “Fox & Friends,” where he explained how he would punish schools that teach students accurate U.S. history, including about slavery and racism in the country.

Trump was asked by a viewer who called into the show how he would help students who don’t want to attend their local public schools, and said he plans to “let the states run the schools” to allow for more “school choice.”

“We’re gonna take the Department of Education, we’re gonna close it,” said the former president, explaining that each state would govern educational policy without federal input—a promise of the right-wing policy agenda, Project 2025, that was co-authored by hundreds of former Trump administration staffers.

“Fox & Friends” co-host Brian Kilmeade said the plan was concerning only because it could allow a “liberal city” or state to decide that schools would teach that the country was “built off the backs of slaves on stolen land, and that curriculum comes in.”

“Then we don’t send them money,” replied Trump.

How Trump Could Sabotage America’s Food Supply 

Heather Souvaine Horn, October 18, 2024 [The New Republic]

From deporting agricultural workers to cutting back SNAP and free school meals, the policies Trump or his advisers have espoused could wreak havoc on households’ food budgets.

New Abortion Pill Suit Wants to Force More Teenagers to Get Pregnant 

Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling, October 18, 2024 [The New Republic]

The suit was filed by the attorneys general of Kansas, Missouri, and Idaho, who argued that the medication should be illegal for minors entirely (misoprostol is fully legal as it is used for other treatments). The suit also accuses the Food and Drug Administration of having “unlawfully removed its prohibition against mailing abortion drugs,” allowing what the attorneys general describe as “a 50-state abortion drug mailing economy” to undermine their states’ abortion laws.

But their moral ground for pushing the ban was seemingly less focused on protecting children’s health than it was on actually creating more children, with the suit detailing the (apparently) unfortunate ramifications that abortion access has on an (apparently) desirable conundrum: teenage pregnancy.

“This study thus suggests that remote dispensing of abortion drugs by mail, common carrier, and interactive computer service is depressing expected birth rates for teenaged mothers in Plaintiff States, even if other overall birth rates may have been lower than otherwise was projected,” the suit reads on page 190.

And that could lead to cataclysmic losses for the Republican states, whose legal counselors quietly noted that a diminished population could cost them as much as a seat in Congress.

“A loss of potential population causes further injuries as well: the States subsequent ‘diminishment of political representation’ and ‘loss of federal funds,’ such as potentially ‘losing a seat in Congress or qualifying for less federal funding if their populations are’ reduced or their increase diminished,” the suit continued.

The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution

[48 Hills, via Naked Capitalism 10-19-2024]

When San Francisco officials have defended their lawsuit against the EPA, one joined by some of the nation’s biggest polluters, they have argued that the Supreme Court could decide the case on very narrow grounds and not threaten the entire Clean Water Act.

But I listened to the oral arguments at the high court yesterday, and it’s clear that some of the conservative justices are, indeed, looking for a broad interpretation that could undermine the ability of the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate toxic discharges into federal waterways….

Civic republicanism

The nightmare facing Democrats, even if Harris wins

Ian Millhiser, October 16, 2024 [Vox, via Naked Capitalism 10-17-2024]

…Even if Harris wins by a large enough margin to overcome the Electoral College’s Republican bias, she still may not get to have much of an impact on the judiciary. Her presidency — and specifically her ability to name judges — is likely to be restricted by a Republican Senate….

…Along the way, the Court has pulled new legal rules out of thin air, then used these newly invented rules to nullify many of Biden’s most ambitious programs.

If the American people had voted for this agenda then it would be difficult to criticize the Republican Party for pushing it. But the electorate did nothing of the sort….

“If Harris wins, the Republican Party will almost certainly be able to veto anything she does, thanks to our broken Constitution.

[TW: No, the Constitution is not broken. The Democrats have allowed the (anti)Republicans to impose a revanchist neoconfederate interpretation of the Constitution. A key event in this process was the Democrats’ spineless acceptance of Mitch McConnell and the (anti)Republicans truculent refusal to hold a hearing on the nomination of Merrick Garland to replace the deceased Scalia on the Supreme Court in 2016. The Lever’s podcast series on The Master Plan and books such as The Quiet Coup: Neoliberalism and the Looting of America by Mehrsa Baradaran (New York, W.W. Norton, 2024) provide excruciating detail on how laws were changed, legal traditions overturned and regulators stymied, and by who. If the Electoral College is somehow eliminated, there would still remain the problem of a new oligarchy hoarding wealth and exercising power to defend “the free enterprise system” and label any corrective actions “communism,”

[Or, consider this part of Millhiser’s article:

Playing Hardball: Rebalancing conflicts over state policy will require that blue states wield power differently.

by Arkadi Gerney and Sarah Knight, October 18, 2024 [The American Prospect]

No matter who wins the presidential election a few weeks from today, the great divides between Red and Blue America will likely persist. The centers of gravity for resistance to President Biden’s administration—and more broadly to the culture, worldview, and power centers of Blue America—are not found under the golden chandeliers of Mar-a-Lago, or behind the door of the ever-rotating House Speaker’s office in Washington. Rather, the beating heart of that resistance can be found inside the state capitols that are unilaterally controlled by Republicans. And those state government leaders, the engines that propel policy division and political conflict, aren’t going anywhere.

As political scientist Jacob Grumbach describes, concentrated partisan power, which has built up over the past 30 years and is approaching an apex, means that the states, once hailed by Justice Louis Brandeis as laboratories of democracy, are increasingly turning into laboratories for partisan advantage. And this has stirred the latent potential for rising interstate aggression and conflict, with states governed by Republicans in particular adopting policies and practices expressly designed to impose their power and policy preferences on unwilling citizens, officials, businesses, and states beyond their borders….

Finally, the federal government’s structure is beholden to the biases of large, low-population states, even as the U.S. population becomes more concentrated in blue urban areas. This could be the reason that the Senate flips to Republicans this year, even as more voters support Democratic Senate candidates, and Democratic senators represent a considerably higher percentage of the population. As the redistricting and Electoral College allocation fights portend, there is no path to durable federal power without the creative, ambitious exercise of state power.