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Category: Uncategorized Page 15 of 106
by Tony Wikrent
Global power shift
Biden ‘rushing’ billions in aid to Ukraine as Trump win fuels uncertainty
[Al Jazeera, via Naked Capitalism 11-07-2024]
India
Through Their Strike, the Samsung Workers Brought the Question of Industrial Democracy to the Fore
[The Wire, via Naked Capitalism 11-06-2024]
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
We are witnessing the final stage of genocide in Gaza
[Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 11-07-2024]
Israel, Blackmail & the Presidents
[Consortium News, via Naked Capitalism 11-07-2024]
From Iron Dome to F-15s: US provides 70% of Israel’s war costs
[CTech, via Naked Capitalism 10-29-2024]
The World According To Trump (by Col. Wilkerson)
Chris Hedges
[TW: At 34:40 Wilkerson begins an explanation that, because of modern battlefield surgery, killed in action is no longer as important a metric of combat as is wounded in action, and by the metric of wounded, the IDF is clearly losing against Hezbollah in Lebanon.]
Oligarchy
Trump Win Fulfills Oligarchy’s 50-Year Plan for Right-Wing Takeover
Thom Hartmann, November 06, 2024 [Common Dreams]
The billionaires have won. They have successfully killed the American Dream. And now we have to fight back.
Two Plutocrats Shifted Harris’ Earned Media Message. It Didn’t End Well.
The Revolving Door Project, November 07 2024 [Common Dreams]
“In October, billionaire Mark Cuban bragged about his role in exiling a Harris surrogate and former Elizabeth Warren staffer for the sin of supporting a wealth tax during a television appearance. This claim was bolstered this month by reporting in The Atlantic that suggests that Uber General Counsel (and VP Harris’ brother-in-law) Tony West convinced Vice President Harris to ratchet down her populist messaging lest it upset the Silicon Valley and Wall Street elites he was courting on her behalf.
Fiona Hill on America’s Emerging Oligarchy
[Politico, via The Big Picture 11-03-2024]
The longtime Russia expert explains why Elon Musk, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump are all talking to each other.
[The Atlantic, via The Big Picture 09-27-2024]
The Tesla and X mogul has long dreamed of redesigning the world in his own extreme image. Trump may be his Trojan horse.
[Sludge, via Naked Capitalism 10-29-2024]
Monopoly Round-Up: Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post Teach Democrats About Billionaires
Matt Stoller [BIG, via Naked Capitalism 10-28-2024]
What It’s Like Being a Billionaire’s Personal Assistant
[The Cut, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 10-30-2024]
“Another reason these people get stingy is that there’s some kind of psychological distortion that happens when everyone fawns over you all the time. The VIP’s mentality is, “Hey, this person should be paying me, because they get to be around greatness.” They’re used to having people want a piece of them. So they think that the job is such an amazing opportunity that they shouldn’t have to pay the person what they’re actually worth. They live in a bubble and their reality is warped.” And: “You have to have thick skin. You’re like a rhinoceros or an armadillo. And you have to have incredible patience. The way you word things is so important. Your intonation and speed of delivery — I mean, it’s an art. You’re working for people who are not used to hearing no.” And: “The Hollywood publicity machine creates a certain image, and it’s very rare to meet a celebrity who is genuinely an amazing, brilliant, kind, humane person to everyone all the time. Once you’ve been around it enough, those butterflies start to go away.”
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
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There won’t be any introspection.
Empires, like fortunes, are lost slowly and then all at once.
I’m afraid what is coming is going to fall on every American fairly equally like the snow on the graveyard at the end of James Joyce’s “The Dead”
Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, further westwards, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling too upon every part of the lonely churchyard where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
Democrats who have themselves not yet fallen into precarity or the economic abyss can not and will not accept that our system is completely rotten and we need to change course and leadership.
It took the GOP from 2008 to 2016 to admit that the Reagan/Bush playbook and leadership class was bankrupt and had to go.
It will likely take multiple election cycles before some figure or movement arises that can win a Democratic primary. And given that the Democrats have a long and proud history of sabotaging the most popular and most likely to win the general election candidates it might require a whole new party emerging.
Democrats had their chance at a new direction and likely multiple administrations and an even longer dominance of the Congress with Bernie Sanders but rejected the clear will of the overwhelming majority of the young voters of their party.
Those young voters are drifting away in multiple directions.
Of my comfortably retired upper-middle classic acquaintances none are even willing to admit publicly (some will in private) that the Democrats make poor tactical choices, much less admit that the whole party and every individual needs to really re-evaluate their approach and even core beliefs.
Trump is at least a wild card which presents some chance of positive change, but the odds of radically negative change are much higher.
Regardless, the status-quo has been thoroughly rejected by the majority of the American public.
That is a fact people need to accept in order to try and steer that majority in the least self-destructive direction possible.
It’s unfortunate that the members of professional-managerial class (and those of us who have pretensions to it) have never truly accepted the idea of majority rule.
We’re going to lose a war in humiliating fashion — with an outside chance that it will be over quickly — which will trigger economic collapse (and that’s if we don’t start nuking people).
Then and only then will our ruling elites turn on each other in something that will be like a post-modern parody of the first American Civil War.
Hopefully it’ll be over in 5-7 years and some of us will be alive to adjust to the new normal and enjoy a few decades of relative peace as we adjust to penury, plagues, and rapidly worsening climate change.
Jonathan Cook had some good observations:
Kamala Harris didn’t lose because she’s a woman or because she’s black.
She lost because, if your political and media system – rigged by donors – limits the choice to two hardline neoliberal candidates, with anything else denounced as “communism”, the most hardline, neoliberal candidate has an edge.
Over time, the system keeps moving further to the hardline, neoliberal right. You can’t stop that relentless shift by voting for one of the two symptoms of your diseased political system.
You have to rise up against the diseased system itself.
As did Freddie de Boer:
You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Jill Stein.
You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Putin and the Russians.
You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Bernie Sanders and his supporters.
You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Joe Rogan.
You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Glenn Greenwald and The Young Turks.
You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on the decision to run with Tim Walz.
You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on the New York Times and its occasional Democrat-skeptical opinion pieces.
You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Joe Biden for getting out of the race too late.
You can’t pull all the usual Democrat tricks. You have to actually figure out what’s wrong with your party, root and branch. Because you called the guy a fascist, again, and he walked right through that insult to the Oval Office, again. And the eternal question presents itself: what are you going to do about it?
Use to discuss the election and its aftermath.
by Tony Wikrent
Strategic Political Economy
The Right Believes It Has the Supreme Court Votes to Overturn Labor Law
[In These Times, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 10-22-2024]
“The foundational 1935 labor law protecting workers is unconstitutional, according to major corporations and right-wing zealots who believe they have enough votes on the Supreme Court to overturn it. In the latest sign that anti-union forces will doggedly press the matter, a federal judge for the Northern District of Texas enjoined the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) from processing any allegations of employer violations of workers’ rights. The National Review hailed the decision as ’A Welcome Blow to the NLRB.’ This is after Elon Musk’s SpaceX won a similar injunction against the NLRB before the Western District of Texas in July. Both cases will work their way up to the Fifth Circuit Court, which has served as an expressway to steer anti-regulatory legal appeals to the Supreme Court ever since Trump packed it with right-wing ideologues. ‘I don’t think a lot of labor folks are focused on this right now,’ says Stephen Lerner, a fellow at Georgetown University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor. … ‘This is the culmination of a 50-year anti-union agenda.’… But, in trying to repeal all the rights and protections workers gained during the New Deal, including the limited protections that workers currently enjoy for organizing and engaging in collective bargaining, killing the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (also known as the Wagner Act) would also mean the lifting of a host of restrictions on unions’ ability to carry out solidarity activism and effective economic sanctions. Are unions prepared for a return to ’the law of the jungle?’”
MASTER PLAN Bonus: How Democrats Lost The Courts
[The Lever, October 22, 2024]
In this exclusive Master Plan bonus episode, David Sirota interviews former Senate Leader Tom Daschle, who led Democrats’ fight against George W. Bush’s plan to pack the federal courts with conservative judges — and paid the ultimate political price.
Daschle’s success stalling Republicans’ judicial picks in the Senate made him a prime target of the master planners — so they had him ousted from Congress and filled his South Dakota Senate seat with their own corporate candidate.
Sirota and Daschle discuss the Federalist Society’s influence in transforming the judicial nomination process into an ideological purity test. They also weigh in on the last major campaign finance legislation — the McCain-Feingold Act of 2002 — and whether similar reforms could even be possible in post-Citizens United America.
MASTER PLAN Bonus: The Federalist Society’s “Pipeline For Power”
[The Lever, October 22, 2024]
DAVID SIROTA: …To understand the roots of the Federalist Society, we spoke with Lisa Graves. She worked in the Department of Justice and on the Senate Judiciary committee and is now the founder of True North Research, a dark money watchdog organization. We heard from Graves briefly in Episode 7, but wanted to share the extended interview she did with producer Laura Krantz. Their conversation began with an overview of the four men who have been integral to the success of the Federalist Society: Ed Meese, C. Boyden Gray, Jay Sekulow, and Leonard Leo.
LISA GRAVES: Ed Meese was there near the beginning of the Federalist Society when it was created in 1981 as I mentioned, and Meese had served as Attorney General under Ronald Reagan. And he is certainly considered one of the fathers, or, you know, godfathers, in essence, of The Federalist Society from that period, and has been active in it throughout this, you know, these past 40 years, in a variety of ways. C. Boyden Gray, the highest role that he had in government was as White House Counsel for George Herbert Walker Bush. He helped select Clarence Thomas for the Supreme Court to replace the great civil rights leader, Thurgood Marshall — he was someone who had an active opposition to civil rights or, you know, core civil rights laws.
Thomas had served in the Reagan administration in the EEOC in a way that many people in civil rights community consider to be destructive, not supportive of that institution. And C. Boyden Gray had a had a key role in that as White House Counsel, but he also had a role in the selection of David Souter to go to the U.S. Supreme Court, and that is the nomination and confirmation of a judge who, you know, is considered to be a Republican or having Republican roots, but he was not sufficiently doctrinaire.
When George W. Bush became president, C. Boyden Gray was not White House Counsel during that period, but he was operating on the outside, and he was seemingly determined to help make sure that, you know, ideologues were put on the bench. And so from the outside of the administration, he launched a thing called the Committee for Justice, CFJ, which was an attack machine to attack the Democrats for opposing any of these Bush nominees who were at the circuit court level, largely drawn from the ranks of The Federalist Society….
… in many ways, this so-called movement that The Federalist Society has been at the helm of was in part in reaction to Brown v. Board of Education, and whether they were going to try to justify it or not, along with opposition to the Roe v. Wade decision, which was built on a really important case called Griswold v. Connecticut, which recognized a right to autonomy in reproductive decisions that states could not limit, for example, women from accessing contraception. And so there’s a whole host of decisions by the court in the 20th century, including decisions affirming major public policies like social security and programs to, you know, protect labor rights and more, and the Federalist Society and Leo and these men have you know worked for years to try to undo those precedents by, in part, by this appointment process of personnel being policy….
LISA GRAVES: The Powell Memo expressly targets the courts as a lever of power… Lewis Powell [was] a lawyer for the tobacco industry, he had been instrumental in trying to prevent the federal government from regulating tobacco, despite the fact that the tobacco industry knew full well that its products caused cancer… He also had been a lawyer advising the city of Richmond, as it was contending with Brown v. Board of Education. And though he wasn’t the most outspoken of the white segregationists at that time, he helped put forward policies to pave the way for white kids to attend, you know, private institutions in order to not be subject to racial integration.
And in Powell’s memo, of the things he wrote was that businesses needed to play a more active role in influencing Congress, in influencing universities and influencing the courts. And he singled out the courts as a particularly important lever of power. And then just 10 years later, The Federalist Society was created. A number of institutions or entities were created in the aftermath of the Powell Memo — the Pacific Legal Foundation, the Heritage Foundation, ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council … there was a concerted effort over the next 10 years to implement the Powell Memo through creating these entities … and infusing them with cash from sort of proto-billionaires … to advance an alternate vision for our constitution….
… one of the things that happened was that Leonard Leo became actively involved in trying to destroy the role of the American Bar Association in evaluating potential judicial nominees for the federal bench….
…the Bush administration basically outsourced the pre-selection process to the Federalist Society to Leonard Leo, and they were involved. I know for a fact that they were involved in 2001 in contacting potential circuit court nominees and asking them how they voted. Did they vote for George W. Bush or not? As a precondition, for the Federalist Society recommending them for circuit judgeship….
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.
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