So far as I’ve been able to determine, this story has been entirely ignored by almost the entire US press corps. Nothing at the Neocon York Times or the Warmongering Post, nor any other major Big Name place I recognized. In fact, the only US site I could find mentioning it at all had a single piece in a Seattle newspaper. Are the neocon papers too busy trying to incite a new foreign war to bother with trivia like this?
Despite being an amateur history buff, I had no idea the National Review was this blatantly racist in the past. The internal link to Buckley’s mini editorial about “Why The South Must Prevail” was stunning to me. As the link headline says, the NR is trying very hard to rewrite its history. Small wonder!
“Colorado Passes Landmark Law Against Qualified Immunity, Creates New Way To Protect Civil Rights”
A bit of good news. The Supreme Court of the US is a rogue institution, and has been for a rather long time. “Corporations Are People”. Vote Counting Must Be Halted Because Continuing Would Make Albert Gore President.
China ‘happy to’ join arms control talks with US and Russia — if US cuts its nuclear arsenal down to China’s level:
* China has declined to join talks between the US and Russia to extend the New START nuclear-arms control treaty.
* A Chinese Foreign Ministry official said Beijing would “be happy to” join those talks if the US, which has about 20 times as many nuclear weapons as China, cuts its arsenal down to Beijing’s level.
* “But actually, we know that’s not going to happen,” the official said, adding that the US request was just a ploy to justify it exiting the treaty.
I have been expecting pop-up farmers’ markets to start reappearing around the city, but now halfway through the summer, it looks like that isn’t going to happen. I thought those little open-air weekly markets would thrive because of the pandemic, but instead, they seem to have vanished.
I guess even in an open-air setting if a significant percentage of shoppers don’t wear masks there is a risk to everyone. Maybe these days people who have fresh garden produce share it with their neighbors instead of trekking into the city to sell it to strangers without masks in crowded little markets.
@someofparts, that’s too bad. It seems to me that there are ways to do an open air market that would be perfectly reasonable. Ask people to wear masks, space the tents/stalls decently far apart, and mark the sidewalk with tape so people can queue a meter apart, etc. As long as things are spaced so the wind can get through, that could totally work.
I’ve been rather interested in the Harper’s letter and the reactions to it. My reaction was “What universe have these people lived in? They’re distressed that we’re getting away from wide-ranging discussions of issues and ideas?” Even if the signers are totally ignorant of HUAC, blacklisting, and anti-communist oath requirements for employment, you know, back before their dreaded cancel culture, have they really lived in a world not ruled by gatekeepers of various sorts? You want conformity and full out efforts to please your superiors, look at the hiring and tenure process in academia. I guess they so thoroughly self-censored through the years, that they think they were independent thinkers. Having spent some time in academia, I doubt it.
And I would hazard that at least half of them would just as willingly sign on to a letter arguing for the need for “standards”. Maybe if the irony was pointed out to them, they’d see it. But I doubt it.
I suppose the National Review editorial from 1957 will excite more than a few idpol-addled psyches. I had seen that Buckley screed before, courtesy Brad DeLong I think, but it still shocks.
I also read part of a Matt Taibbi essay today, that part recalling fondly the cultural thought liberation that accompanied the Sexual Revolution, though he did not call it by name, and contrasting that liberating spirit with the censorious, even puritanical impulse behind so-called cancel culture.
Taibbi did not have insight to say it, but I could not help but think, because I lived thru it, that the Apollonian idealism of the 1960’s hid a Dionysian reservoir of selfishness, reaction and resentment that served to eventually ruin so much of what followed.
Buckley did not represent much of the Republican Party in 1957. His was a marginalized though prominent voice. He was famous and respected as a far-right voice, who drew a line between himself and the farther-right of the John Birch Society. 1957 was a high-water mark for the rising tide of post-war Liberal Consensus, which readily dismissed the argument Buckley forwarded, even within the Republican Party The two Parties in the equally-divided Senate were competing to gain credit for passing the Civil Rights Act Buckley was opposing. It was pretty toothless legislation, in retrospect, but symbolically important in the emerging self-consciousness of a Liberal Consensus ready to overcome decades of reactionary resistance to implementing the country’s ideals, so recently fought for in world war. A seemingly inexorable process of implementing that consensus in law and policy was underway: bourgeois liberal progress on the march, if you will.
But, we now know something else festered beneath the surface, something that would elevate movement conservatism to power, pulling weasely third-way progressives behind them.
We live in an age of self-delusion, shocked to look back at a time when someone like Buckley would scorn lying hypocritically about his sympathy with a political agenda of domination. When we live with a politics that secures the pathological domination of the whole political economy of the U.S. to serve an incompetent professional-managerial class and their ultra-wealthy patrons.
nihil obstet, I didn’t recognize most of the names at The Letter, but the few I’d heard of were all neocon nuts. So my initial conclusion is that there was some kind of not-good Agenda involved, and somebody enlisted a whole lot of “useful idiots” to sign on to make it look nice and well-rounded.
I, too, was unimpressed by the names I recognized on the Harper’s letter.
If the idea is to make democracy work, then there have to be “places to stand” — niches — for people representing opposed interests and points-of-view, and some engine of discrimination to promote good judgement and common or shared principles amidst necessarily conflicting ambitions.
For elite journalists and pundits, the ecology of political discourse has become exclusively one of billionaire patronage and/or corporate domination. And, it is in this emerging monoculture that the epidemics of cancel culture are taking their toll.
There is a structural issue in other words, embedded in the general context of The Structural Issue of Oligarchy. Do not expect this lot to commit professional suicide by publicly recognizing either the underlying problem or the need for a radical solution. Instead, they will call for revised norms of polite exchange that protect themselves as made members of a privileged club.
Over the Fourth of July weekend, President Donald Trump said the U.S. was testing too much and falsely asserted that \”by so doing, we show cases, 99% of which are totally harmless.\”
Reuters news reports 133,955 (known) US deaths from the 3,203,138 (known) cases here. Making the division shows over 4% of the afflicted people died. Obviously both the death and infection numbers are fuzzy, but the fact remains Trump is – as usual – full of crap.
The man claims to have \”aced\” his dementia test, but that doesn\’t change the fact he remains an ignorant nincompoop with a severely under-exercised brain. The doofus doesn\’t have a clue there is more to this disease than dying vs \”living happily ever after\”.
Disney World is open, but they aren’t bothering to test employees … in the middle of Florida … during a pandemic … while posting daily record numbers of new cases because the state opened too early.
The NBA has decided to finish their interrupted 2019-2020 season in Orlando, at Disney World. Of course. We were told this is because of “existing TV contractual obligations”. No, it’s not. It’s because Disney’s profits are down significantly, Disney World needs guests and ESPN needs live content. Other attempts to restart professional sports have failed, and those were outdoor sports (baseball, soccer). The NBA is played indoors with tons of up close and personal contact while breathing heavily after running non-stop for the last 10 minutes straight.
it is hard to narrate the choices “we” make as a society either thru or despite the state.
choices seem to be made by people half-asleep. this is true of supposedly deliberate choices of official experts as well as the sometimes inexplicable fashionable enthusiasms that sweep thru societies. and these choices constrain and determine subsequent responses and attitudes and interpretations, in a curious almost-random walk round and round.
i think the U.S. has “chosen” to let the COVID-19 epidemic run its course. Pretty much everyone who can contract the disease will over the next year or two, with a good chance of it becoming globally endemically, and recurring like the flu.
it might have been stopped by quick action, but it was not because the minor officials in charge were incompetent tools and the high officials in the White House were ideologically committed to react slowly and inadequately.
like most collective choice, that is a story of an overdetermined course.
the scale of the epidemic and the prolonged economic crisis make it impossible to contain or “crush” the epidemic in the U.S. ain’t gonna happen
at best, “we” will stumble and bumble our way to economic catastrophe on top of the health catastrophe on the long march toward the on-rushing ecological catastrophe.
the high officials in the White House were ideologically committed to react slowly and inadequately
Seriously? It’s an ideology? They were theoretically committed to reacting (in actuality) slowly and inadequately? They were committed, in theory? Or better, they were committed, but only in terms of a theoretical parallel universe?
Is this one of those Trumpsplaining moments?
Or mayhap it had something to do with the more practical reality/fact that this is an election year, and the incumbent wants to make his base and his donors happy. Which is exactly what he has done (in this reality, in this universe) with all the rascist signaling, bible posing, masklessness, antifascist scapegoating, Juneteenth signaling, posing in the “redecorated” Native sacred space (Black Hills), more race baiting, protesting to force states to reopen because … freedom signaling, ignoring George Floyds family signaling, installation of the “right” judges signaling, suppressed testing signaling, saber rattling signaling, threatening civilians with a military response signaling, and finally: making sure your friends don’t serve any jail time signaling …
His base is eating this shit up.
Gawd, even when finally there is no ideology involved, someone wants to make it an ideology.
Thanks for the information about Disney and the NBA. I don’t follow sports and wouldn’t have learned of the connection without having read your post. Perhaps it’s such common knowledge as to be not worth mentioning, but a lookup found Disney owns 80% of ESPN. Years ago I had no choice but to spend a day at the Florida Disney World. It was a really expensive way to be bored. Never Again.
It is easy to agree with the letter’s generalised argument for tolerance and free and fair debate. But the reality is that many of those who signed are utter hypocrites, who have shown precisely zero commitment to free speech, either in their words or in their deeds.
Further, the intent of many them in signing the letter is the very reverse of their professed goal: they want to stifle free speech, not protect it.
To understand what is really going on with this letter, we first need to scrutinise the motives, rather than the substance, of the letter.
I’d expected the explanation to be something like this. BTW, there are many worse sites to bookmark and read than Jonathan Cook’s blog.
Trump is his pathology. As we drift aimlessly down to November, this remains the one constant. A ham sandwich could beat Trump in November. Biden acts like one, he wins.
Here is the real deal with the US trying to reopen schools and pressure Canada to open its borders to Americans:
President Trump and his Republican death cult have botched the COVID 19 response so badly that they are pretty much FUCKED in the November elections. So, now their desperate “Hail Mary” play is to… PRETEND. They are going to just pretend that everything is great, that the pandemic is no more, that the coronavirus has magically disappeared, that Trump has done such a great job at dealing with COVID 19 that Americans are ready to go back to normal — and be thankful to Trump and Republicans for doing such a great job at dealing with COVID 19.
In the US, a lot of stupid people/sheeps in the Trump/Republican death cult are brainwashed and willing to go along with the “let’s all put our heads in the hole in the ground and pretend.” They make up about 1/3 of all US population. The Republican death cult is willing to sacrifice American lives so that they will be able to win elections in November. That is the reason they want to reopen all the schools, so everyone can live in their make-belief narrative that everything is doing just great.
The problem for Trump and Republicans is: their reality-bending make-belief won’t work unless everyone else play along and pretend together. When Canada, Mexico and EU so publicly ban Americans from entering and carrying/spreading COVID 19 into their countries, their “let’s pretend and make believe” ain’t gonna completely work. So, now the Republican death cult wants to pressure Canada (and Mexico and EU) to play along with their make-belief, just so everyone will believe the US has successful dealt with the pandemic. So, not only they want to sacrifice American lives and the lives of children so that they can win elections in November; now they are demanding to sacrifice CANADIAN lives (as well as Mexican and European lives) just so their reality-bending would work, just so they can win elections in November. That’s Americans for ya. (More specifically: that’s Republicans for ya.)
Ah Wayfair. At the very least they are blatantly price gouging or money laundering. Either way this deserves an investigation to find out why single item unique stuff is selling for large bucks when the exact same product sells at a fraction of the cost under its product name.
ZS- Thanks for the link to Jonathan Cook’s comments on that controversial letter in Harpers. It is hands down the best explanation of the politics of the thing that I have seen. I had no idea how deplorable Weiss is, or that Rowling had helped propagate the anti-semitic smear campaign against Corbyn.
This is an old technology. A simple technology. There is a rather good chance it could give vital workers a couple of months of vaccine-grade immunity. Yet the Feds are rejecting it. Why? These days I’m paranoid enough to suspect it has a LOT to do with The Benjamins. My already low opinion of Fauci has taken another hit.
Delicate phrasing here – it dances around the fact that half the population has a 2-digit IQ, and 16% of the people you encounter can’t quite muster “85” on an IQ Test.
Consider our Orange POTUS – the man doesn’t drink or smoke, and despite his age likely has a genetic/inborn capability to hit 120 on The Test. But as they say, a person who *can’t* read is in the same boat as one who *won’t* read. <b<Both come across as dumb as a post. In functional terms, that’s exactly the way it is. Worst of all is the bad example the White House Doofus has been for the “challenged” parts of his Base.
While I have been reading Ian’s posts, haven’t had the time to dig through let alone respond to the comments.
But I want to point out what I’ve not seen discussed here, is that Trump–obviously facing prison time if he loses presidential immunity—will have to stay:
This spring, HBO aired The Plot Against America, based on the Philip Roth novel of how an authoritarian president could grab control of the United States government using emergency powers that no one could foresee. Recent press reports have revealed the compilation by the Brennan Center at New York University of an extensive list of presidential emergency powers that might be inappropriately invoked in a national security crisis. Attorney General William Barr, known for his extremist view of the expanse of presidential power, is widely believed to be developing a Justice Department opinion arguing that the president can exercise emergency powers in certain national security situations, while stating that the courts, being extremely reluctant to intervene in the sphere of a national security emergency, would allow the president to proceed unchecked.
[…]
With this, Trump has begun to lay the groundwork for the step-by-step process by which he holds on to the presidency after he has clearly lost the election:
1. Biden wins the popular vote, and carries the key swing states of Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania by decent but not overwhelming margins.
2. Trump immediately declares that the voting was rigged, that there was mail-in ballot fraud and that the Chinese were behind a plan to provide fraudulent mail-in ballots and other “election hacking” throughout the four key swing states that gave Biden his victory.
3. Having railed against the Chinese throughout the campaign, calling Biden “soft on China,” Trump delivers his narrative claiming the Chinese have interfered in the U.S. election.
4. Trump indicates this is a major national security issue, and he invokes emergency powers, directing the Justice Department to investigate the alleged activity in the swing states. The legal justification for the presidential powers he invokes has already been developed and issued by Barr.
5. The investigation is intended to tick down the clock toward December 14, the deadline when each state’s Electoral College electors must be appointed. This is the very issue that the Supreme Court harped on in Bush v. Gore in ruling that the election process had to be brought to a close, thus forbidding the further counting of Florida ballots.
6. All four swing states have Republican control of both their upper and lower houses of their state legislatures. Those state legislatures refuse to allow any Electoral College slate to be certified until the “national security” investigation is complete.
7. The Democrats will have begun a legal action to certify the results in those four states, and the appointment of the Biden slate of electors, arguing that Trump has manufactured a national security emergency in order to create the ensuing chaos.
8. The issue goes up to the Supreme Court, which unlike the 2000 election does not decide the election in favor of the Republicans. However, it indicates again that the December 14 Electoral College deadline must be met; that the president’s national security powers legally authorize him to investigate potential foreign country intrusion into the national election; and if no Electoral College slate can be certified by any state by December 14, the Electoral College must meet anyway and cast its votes.
9. The Electoral College meets, and without the electors from those four states being represented, neither Biden nor Trump has sufficient votes to get an Electoral College majority.
10. The election is thrown into the House of Representatives, pursuant to the Constitution. Under the relevant constitutional process, the vote in the House is by state delegation, where each delegation casts one vote, which is determined by the majority of the representatives in that state.
11. Currently, there are 26 states that have a majority Republican House delegation. 23 states have a majority Democratic delegation. There is one state, Pennsylvania, that has an evenly split delegation. Even if the Democrats were to pick up seats in Pennsylvania and hold all their 2018 House gains, the Republicans would have a 26 to 24 delegation majority.
12. This vote would enable Trump to retain the presidency.
Recall that Trump does not like being president. Recall also that many Republican officeholders don’t like having him as president. Meanwhile, stealing an election would, at very least, utterly undermine the legitimacy of the Trump presidency and the Republican Party. At worst, it would be the beginning of the end for the Party, and perhaps for the American democracy. We just don’t see how all of the players that would have to get on the same page to make this happen would believe that the cost-benefit analysis adds up. Maybe Bill Barr would. Maybe even Trump. But a sizable number of senators, representatives, state legislators, etc.? Dubious.
Seeing how Repugs have been in lockstep with him from Day One, AND the votemaster ignores (in ignorance?) that the real basis for conservative ideology, from Burke onwards, *IS* a hostility to democratic governance and instead favoring a rule by elites (Gary Willis once wrote, how the best feature of American democracy was it provided a facade and justification behind which the reality of elite rule could exist–what you guys here complain of as a bug is actually to them a highly desirable *feature*). So would the same people who engineer massive vote suppression and the highly unequal representation of the votes that are cast be truly loathe to do away with entire pretense of having to maintain the facade? I’m not at all sure they would object.
That, and ‘the Dems would take the case to the US Supreme Court, and Roberts is concerned about th court’s ‘legacy”–is a laughable objection. In the same mailbag, the votemaster touchingly also says that Trump (failing to overtone losing the election) would not likely order Air Force One to fly him to Russia so he can ask Putin for asylum—because, doing this would ‘wreck the Republican Party’ and I suppose Trump values the future electoral prospects of the Republican Party above spending years in an orange jumpsuit (which I fully expect to happen, when we find out what’s been going on in his life both before and during his presidency).
In short–I find the “Trump will try to stay in power despite losing whatever way he can” very plausible. Micheal Cohen said the same, I and figure he knows Trump as good as anyone.
I only read the occasional guardian articles people link to. Usually about us politics or climate change. So I really never saw what Ian complains about them and their anti Corbyn claims of antisemitism. But man, this article has it all, in spades. Also antipopulist and pro inequality slants. Just dripping with contempt. I will never see them the same again.
Guest: “I only read the occasional guardian articles people link to … So I really never saw what Ian complains about them ….”
Even decades ago, the GUARDIAN was never all that Left, except to liberals (or Liberals, since its default UK reader was someone who voted for the Liberal party in the UK, in its time the party of Gladstone, Asquith, and Lloyd George).
Any last vestiges of that GUARDIAN departed in 2015 with editor Alan Rusbridger who had — among other things — published the Wikileaks and E. Snowden material.
With Rusbridger gone, the GUARDIAN entirely mirrored the transformation of the UK Liberal party, whose membership — at least in London and the southern UK — had over the last three decades entirely followed the neoliberal turn of the Thatcher-Blair years and become in large measure members of the PMC.
Indeed, the paper became deeply committed to Blairism and Clintonism , with the latter tendency even more vomit-making and moronic than you’d find the NEW YORK TIMES trying to pull off.
That’s because many British middle-class and upper-class people, precisely because they’ve little actual lived experience of the US, look across the Atlantic and follow mainstream media propaganda about goings-on in Washington DC, the presumed imperial capital, with slavish credulity, believing absolutely in the legendary goodness of the Dem, the DNC, and the Clintons in a way that’s impossible for anyone who actually lives in this collapsing kleptocratic empire.
Only at the DAILY KOS can you find anything as stupid as most of the GUARDIAN these days with the added bonus that the GUARDIAN has absolutely bought into and purveys the stupidest line in identity politics. With a few exceptions — Aditya Chakrabortty, Larry Elliott, Gary Younge (sometimes) — it now reads like a paper written for morons by morons.
.
StewartM, I’m cynical enough to believe Trump isn’t in any trouble at all regarding his many crimes and sins committed while in office. From all accounts Biden’s ‘team’ is mostly Obama retreads, and BHO let Bush get away with his torture and much more because of the need for the nation to “move on”.
There is some positive news. Laura Ingraham has used the phrase “Medical Mafia”, which I first thought of 30 years ago, or so, and urged Gary Null to adopt. I see Mike Adams has adopted this language. See his article “How the corrupt US justice system benefits the Medical Mafia by punishing competitors”
Also, there are reports the White House is leaning on the FDA to re-approve Hydroxychloroquine for “emergency use”. I’m no longer following this too closely, but my guess is it’s weak tea. Trump should go on a full-out offensive against covid-19, especially since the US is a laggard in terms of bending down the curve. I’m no lawyer, but I don’t see why he can’t ORDER the military to dispense it (on a voluntary basis) from military bases, the FDA, local medical pooh-bahs, and Democratic governors be damned.
Enough positive evidence for hcq has now accumulated that the Swiss Policy Report (formerly Swiss Propaganda Report) speaks well of it. https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/
Furthermore, there are reports that the Trump campaign has reached out to Steve Bannon, who has firmer populist instincts than Trump. (In fact, I agree with Krystal Ball’s description of Trump as a “fake populist”.) I don’t know how enlightened Steve Bannon is on the doings of the Medical Mafia (I’m afraid he’ll mostly push his somewhat extreme anti-China efforts), but if it’s significant, he may help Trump find the courage to take on the Mafiosi in the FDA, CDC, and NIAID; and furthermore, not look like an incompetent dilettante, who can’t even properly communicate his strategy and reasoning, while doing so.
If Trump were conducting a war against covid-19, he’d push the whole country towards vitamin D sufficiency, also immune system co-factors like selenium, zinc, and . He’d also push hydroxychloroquine + zinc as a prophylactic; and at least awareness of anti-inflammatories and blood thinners for people requiring hospitalization. (I believe this may be widely adopted, now, so the point of pushing awareness is so that people know that hospitalization is not the likely death sentence it was back in March.)
And foithermore, if I was president, I’d facilitate the installation of ubiquitous personal filters in schools and restaurants, for starters. I mean filters to remove water droplets from air.
So Bannon is coming back on board? Well, maybe losing to Trump twice will finally destroy the credibility of the corporate sellout branch of the Democrats.
those kinds of screeds make me think a plot among Democratic Party operatives is underway to engineer a government takeover by illiberal liberals.
in the 2016 election campaign, the Clintonistas pressed Trump on whether he would “accept” the outcome of the election and when they lost, they were quickly enough appealing to faithless electors and then cooking up the Russiagate hoax.
@zack, “Trump isn’t in any trouble at all regarding his many crimes and sins committed while in office.” thepowerofnarrative. what’s not said is as important as what’s. just substitute Biden for Trump in that sentence. while saying nothing about clinical dementia as a dis qualifier. what a dirty joke the single party system is.
I believe that it has maybe, perhaps, two or three months left before shutdown and bankruptcy.
Thus has been the goal of Republicans and Democrats for years; break it, bankrupt it, sell the pieces to their cronies.
And of course Trump is all for it, as it kills two birds with one stone – screw Amazon and put an end to the perceived threat of mail in ballots.
Of course the fact that this will cause the complete collapse of the economy is missed by all concerned.
It would be bad enough under normal economic circumstances. But right now, a lot of companies are clinging to solvency only through mail order sales with affordable shipping costs.
USPS handles 120 billion mailings a year. FedEx and UPS and Amazon handle maybe 30 billion, and that is with USPS handling many of the “last mile” shipments, especially outside if major metro areas.
The loss of the USPS may be the final nail in the coffin for the US economy…
Remember, Michael Cohen, who worked for Trump for twelve years, says he won’t accept an electoral defeat without a fight, and I dare say he knows Trump better than either of us. And moreover, Barr is reported investigating the very possibilities outline above.
I also think you’re ignoring the likelihood of the legal jeopardy facing Trump if he loses. My own suspicion is that Trump has been using the Paycheck protection program as a political slush fund (which is Munchkin refuses oversight), if not diverting to his businesses directly; that he took kickbacks or other favors PPE distributors (which is why he refused to invoke the Defense Production Act, that he sided with Erdogan vs the Kurds because of his properties in Istanbul, and of course we’ll find out he and his family have been massively cheating on taxes. Remember Rex Tillerman said to the effect that ‘nearly every time we talked, he was asking me to do something illegal’, and I suspect that the real reasons behind the all the continuous firings in the Trump White House was Trump’s search to find people who WOULD do those illegal things.
After all, he’s gotten away with it all this life. Why stop now?
Zachary Smith
“Andrew Buncombe” is the name of a UK newsman who got swooped up by some Seattle police who were making up the rules of lawful behavior on the fly.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/journalist-arrest-seattle-chaz-protest-police-prison-black-lives-matter-a9606846.html
So far as I’ve been able to determine, this story has been entirely ignored by almost the entire US press corps. Nothing at the Neocon York Times or the Warmongering Post, nor any other major Big Name place I recognized. In fact, the only US site I could find mentioning it at all had a single piece in a Seattle newspaper. Are the neocon papers too busy trying to incite a new foreign war to bother with trivia like this?
https://theintercept.com/2020/07/05/national-review-william-buckley-racism/
Despite being an amateur history buff, I had no idea the National Review was this blatantly racist in the past. The internal link to Buckley’s mini editorial about “Why The South Must Prevail” was stunning to me. As the link headline says, the NR is trying very hard to rewrite its history. Small wonder!
Zachary Smith
“Colorado Passes Landmark Law Against Qualified Immunity, Creates New Way To Protect Civil Rights”
A bit of good news. The Supreme Court of the US is a rogue institution, and has been for a rather long time. “Corporations Are People”. Vote Counting Must Be Halted Because Continuing Would Make Albert Gore President.
https://blogs.findlaw.com/supreme_court/2015/10/13-worst-supreme-court-decisions-of-all-time.html
I can see from the link I forgot “Citizens United”.
KT Chong
China ‘happy to’ join arms control talks with US and Russia — if US cuts its nuclear arsenal down to China’s level:
* China has declined to join talks between the US and Russia to extend the New START nuclear-arms control treaty.
* A Chinese Foreign Ministry official said Beijing would “be happy to” join those talks if the US, which has about 20 times as many nuclear weapons as China, cuts its arsenal down to Beijing’s level.
* “But actually, we know that’s not going to happen,” the official said, adding that the US request was just a ploy to justify it exiting the treaty.
Savage. 🤣
Link: https://www.businessinsider.com/china-join-new-start-talks-if-us-cuts-nuclear-arsenal-2020-7
someofparts
I have been expecting pop-up farmers’ markets to start reappearing around the city, but now halfway through the summer, it looks like that isn’t going to happen. I thought those little open-air weekly markets would thrive because of the pandemic, but instead, they seem to have vanished.
I guess even in an open-air setting if a significant percentage of shoppers don’t wear masks there is a risk to everyone. Maybe these days people who have fresh garden produce share it with their neighbors instead of trekking into the city to sell it to strangers without masks in crowded little markets.
Zachary Smith
For years, the NFL owner in Washington has claimed to serve and support Native Americans. Public records tell a far less flattering story
The Sports Illustrated site describes how the super-rich NFL owner created an “astroturf” charity so he could pretend to “care”. Disgusting.
Joan
@someofparts, that’s too bad. It seems to me that there are ways to do an open air market that would be perfectly reasonable. Ask people to wear masks, space the tents/stalls decently far apart, and mark the sidewalk with tape so people can queue a meter apart, etc. As long as things are spaced so the wind can get through, that could totally work.
nihil obstet
I’ve been rather interested in the Harper’s letter and the reactions to it. My reaction was “What universe have these people lived in? They’re distressed that we’re getting away from wide-ranging discussions of issues and ideas?” Even if the signers are totally ignorant of HUAC, blacklisting, and anti-communist oath requirements for employment, you know, back before their dreaded cancel culture, have they really lived in a world not ruled by gatekeepers of various sorts? You want conformity and full out efforts to please your superiors, look at the hiring and tenure process in academia. I guess they so thoroughly self-censored through the years, that they think they were independent thinkers. Having spent some time in academia, I doubt it.
And I would hazard that at least half of them would just as willingly sign on to a letter arguing for the need for “standards”. Maybe if the irony was pointed out to them, they’d see it. But I doubt it.
bruce wilder
I suppose the National Review editorial from 1957 will excite more than a few idpol-addled psyches. I had seen that Buckley screed before, courtesy Brad DeLong I think, but it still shocks.
I also read part of a Matt Taibbi essay today, that part recalling fondly the cultural thought liberation that accompanied the Sexual Revolution, though he did not call it by name, and contrasting that liberating spirit with the censorious, even puritanical impulse behind so-called cancel culture.
Taibbi did not have insight to say it, but I could not help but think, because I lived thru it, that the Apollonian idealism of the 1960’s hid a Dionysian reservoir of selfishness, reaction and resentment that served to eventually ruin so much of what followed.
Buckley did not represent much of the Republican Party in 1957. His was a marginalized though prominent voice. He was famous and respected as a far-right voice, who drew a line between himself and the farther-right of the John Birch Society. 1957 was a high-water mark for the rising tide of post-war Liberal Consensus, which readily dismissed the argument Buckley forwarded, even within the Republican Party The two Parties in the equally-divided Senate were competing to gain credit for passing the Civil Rights Act Buckley was opposing. It was pretty toothless legislation, in retrospect, but symbolically important in the emerging self-consciousness of a Liberal Consensus ready to overcome decades of reactionary resistance to implementing the country’s ideals, so recently fought for in world war. A seemingly inexorable process of implementing that consensus in law and policy was underway: bourgeois liberal progress on the march, if you will.
But, we now know something else festered beneath the surface, something that would elevate movement conservatism to power, pulling weasely third-way progressives behind them.
We live in an age of self-delusion, shocked to look back at a time when someone like Buckley would scorn lying hypocritically about his sympathy with a political agenda of domination. When we live with a politics that secures the pathological domination of the whole political economy of the U.S. to serve an incompetent professional-managerial class and their ultra-wealthy patrons.
Zachary Smith
https://www.ianwelsh.net/open-thread-63/#comment-115500
nihil obstet, I didn’t recognize most of the names at The Letter, but the few I’d heard of were all neocon nuts. So my initial conclusion is that there was some kind of not-good Agenda involved, and somebody enlisted a whole lot of “useful idiots” to sign on to make it look nice and well-rounded.
bruce wilder
I, too, was unimpressed by the names I recognized on the Harper’s letter.
If the idea is to make democracy work, then there have to be “places to stand” — niches — for people representing opposed interests and points-of-view, and some engine of discrimination to promote good judgement and common or shared principles amidst necessarily conflicting ambitions.
For elite journalists and pundits, the ecology of political discourse has become exclusively one of billionaire patronage and/or corporate domination. And, it is in this emerging monoculture that the epidemics of cancel culture are taking their toll.
There is a structural issue in other words, embedded in the general context of The Structural Issue of Oligarchy. Do not expect this lot to commit professional suicide by publicly recognizing either the underlying problem or the need for a radical solution. Instead, they will call for revised norms of polite exchange that protect themselves as made members of a privileged club.
Zachary Smith
Covid 19
Reuters news reports 133,955 (known) US deaths from the 3,203,138 (known) cases here. Making the division shows over 4% of the afflicted people died. Obviously both the death and infection numbers are fuzzy, but the fact remains Trump is – as usual – full of crap.
The man claims to have \”aced\” his dementia test, but that doesn\’t change the fact he remains an ignorant nincompoop with a severely under-exercised brain. The doofus doesn\’t have a clue there is more to this disease than dying vs \”living happily ever after\”.
Official Covid-19 Statistics Are Missing Something Critical
Even if you recover from Covid-19, you may not escape unscathed
*********
Pontifications: Why I won’t be flying any time soon
That flying these days involves interactions with suicidal morons seems to be his primary objection.
Zachary Smith
WTH?
Trinity
Disney World is open, but they aren’t bothering to test employees … in the middle of Florida … during a pandemic … while posting daily record numbers of new cases because the state opened too early.
Hopefully this isn’t paywalled:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/business/coronavirus-disney-world-reopening.html
The NBA has decided to finish their interrupted 2019-2020 season in Orlando, at Disney World. Of course. We were told this is because of “existing TV contractual obligations”. No, it’s not. It’s because Disney’s profits are down significantly, Disney World needs guests and ESPN needs live content. Other attempts to restart professional sports have failed, and those were outdoor sports (baseball, soccer). The NBA is played indoors with tons of up close and personal contact while breathing heavily after running non-stop for the last 10 minutes straight.
This is a Great Idea!
bruce wilder
it is hard to narrate the choices “we” make as a society either thru or despite the state.
choices seem to be made by people half-asleep. this is true of supposedly deliberate choices of official experts as well as the sometimes inexplicable fashionable enthusiasms that sweep thru societies. and these choices constrain and determine subsequent responses and attitudes and interpretations, in a curious almost-random walk round and round.
i think the U.S. has “chosen” to let the COVID-19 epidemic run its course. Pretty much everyone who can contract the disease will over the next year or two, with a good chance of it becoming globally endemically, and recurring like the flu.
it might have been stopped by quick action, but it was not because the minor officials in charge were incompetent tools and the high officials in the White House were ideologically committed to react slowly and inadequately.
like most collective choice, that is a story of an overdetermined course.
the scale of the epidemic and the prolonged economic crisis make it impossible to contain or “crush” the epidemic in the U.S. ain’t gonna happen
at best, “we” will stumble and bumble our way to economic catastrophe on top of the health catastrophe on the long march toward the on-rushing ecological catastrophe.
have you been following arctic sea ice extent?
Trinity
Seriously? It’s an ideology? They were theoretically committed to reacting (in actuality) slowly and inadequately? They were committed, in theory? Or better, they were committed, but only in terms of a theoretical parallel universe?
Is this one of those Trumpsplaining moments?
Or mayhap it had something to do with the more practical reality/fact that this is an election year, and the incumbent wants to make his base and his donors happy. Which is exactly what he has done (in this reality, in this universe) with all the rascist signaling, bible posing, masklessness, antifascist scapegoating, Juneteenth signaling, posing in the “redecorated” Native sacred space (Black Hills), more race baiting, protesting to force states to reopen because … freedom signaling, ignoring George Floyds family signaling, installation of the “right” judges signaling, suppressed testing signaling, saber rattling signaling, threatening civilians with a military response signaling, and finally: making sure your friends don’t serve any jail time signaling …
His base is eating this shit up.
Gawd, even when finally there is no ideology involved, someone wants to make it an ideology.
bruce wilder
@Trinity
whatever
Zachary Smith
https://www.ianwelsh.net/open-thread-63/#comment-115506
Thanks for the information about Disney and the NBA. I don’t follow sports and wouldn’t have learned of the connection without having read your post. Perhaps it’s such common knowledge as to be not worth mentioning, but a lookup found Disney owns 80% of ESPN. Years ago I had no choice but to spend a day at the Florida Disney World. It was a really expensive way to be bored. Never Again.
Chuck Mire
The hidden trackers in your phone, explained: How covert code enables your phone’s apps to spy on you.
https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/7/8/21311533/sdks-tracking-data-location
https://www.amazon.com/Age-Surveillance-Capitalism-Future-Frontier/dp/1541758005/
https://antipodeonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Book-review_Whitehead-on-Zuboff.pdf
Zachary Smith
While roaming around on the internet tubes I ran into a highly plausible set of comments about The Letter at the Jonathan Cook site.
Writers’ open letter against ‘cancel culture’ is about stifling free speech, not protecting it
I’d expected the explanation to be something like this. BTW, there are many worse sites to bookmark and read than Jonathan Cook’s blog.
Hugh
Trump is his pathology. As we drift aimlessly down to November, this remains the one constant. A ham sandwich could beat Trump in November. Biden acts like one, he wins.
KT Chong
Here is the real deal with the US trying to reopen schools and pressure Canada to open its borders to Americans:
President Trump and his Republican death cult have botched the COVID 19 response so badly that they are pretty much FUCKED in the November elections. So, now their desperate “Hail Mary” play is to… PRETEND. They are going to just pretend that everything is great, that the pandemic is no more, that the coronavirus has magically disappeared, that Trump has done such a great job at dealing with COVID 19 that Americans are ready to go back to normal — and be thankful to Trump and Republicans for doing such a great job at dealing with COVID 19.
In the US, a lot of stupid people/sheeps in the Trump/Republican death cult are brainwashed and willing to go along with the “let’s all put our heads in the hole in the ground and pretend.” They make up about 1/3 of all US population. The Republican death cult is willing to sacrifice American lives so that they will be able to win elections in November. That is the reason they want to reopen all the schools, so everyone can live in their make-belief narrative that everything is doing just great.
The problem for Trump and Republicans is: their reality-bending make-belief won’t work unless everyone else play along and pretend together. When Canada, Mexico and EU so publicly ban Americans from entering and carrying/spreading COVID 19 into their countries, their “let’s pretend and make believe” ain’t gonna completely work. So, now the Republican death cult wants to pressure Canada (and Mexico and EU) to play along with their make-belief, just so everyone will believe the US has successful dealt with the pandemic. So, not only they want to sacrifice American lives and the lives of children so that they can win elections in November; now they are demanding to sacrifice CANADIAN lives (as well as Mexican and European lives) just so their reality-bending would work, just so they can win elections in November. That’s Americans for ya. (More specifically: that’s Republicans for ya.)
So, your move, Canada.
Thomas B Golladay
Ah Wayfair. At the very least they are blatantly price gouging or money laundering. Either way this deserves an investigation to find out why single item unique stuff is selling for large bucks when the exact same product sells at a fraction of the cost under its product name.
And if they are child trafficking…
Time to send the IRS over to dig out the truth.
someofparts
ZS- Thanks for the link to Jonathan Cook’s comments on that controversial letter in Harpers. It is hands down the best explanation of the politics of the thing that I have seen. I had no idea how deplorable Weiss is, or that Rowling had helped propagate the anti-semitic smear campaign against Corbyn.
Zachary Smith
COVID:
A plasma shot could prevent coronavirus. But feds and makers won’t act, scientists say
This is an old technology. A simple technology. There is a rather good chance it could give vital workers a couple of months of vaccine-grade immunity. Yet the Feds are rejecting it. Why? These days I’m paranoid enough to suspect it has a LOT to do with The Benjamins. My already low opinion of Fauci has taken another hit.
********
Lower cognitive ability linked to non-compliance with social distancing guidelines during the coronavirus outbreak
Delicate phrasing here – it dances around the fact that half the population has a 2-digit IQ, and 16% of the people you encounter can’t quite muster “85” on an IQ Test.
Consider our Orange POTUS – the man doesn’t drink or smoke, and despite his age likely has a genetic/inborn capability to hit 120 on The Test. But as they say, a person who *can’t* read is in the same boat as one who *won’t* read. <b<Both come across as dumb as a post. In functional terms, that’s exactly the way it is. Worst of all is the bad example the White House Doofus has been for the “challenged” parts of his Base.
Chipper
I think I’d rather have a ham sandwich as President than Biden. I mean it’s close, but I give the edge to the sandwich.
StewartM
While I have been reading Ian’s posts, haven’t had the time to dig through let alone respond to the comments.
But I want to point out what I’ve not seen discussed here, is that Trump–obviously facing prison time if he loses presidential immunity—will have to stay:
https://www.emptywheel.net/2020/07/03/maybe-trump-really-is-never-going-to-leave/
……
This spring, HBO aired The Plot Against America, based on the Philip Roth novel of how an authoritarian president could grab control of the United States government using emergency powers that no one could foresee. Recent press reports have revealed the compilation by the Brennan Center at New York University of an extensive list of presidential emergency powers that might be inappropriately invoked in a national security crisis. Attorney General William Barr, known for his extremist view of the expanse of presidential power, is widely believed to be developing a Justice Department opinion arguing that the president can exercise emergency powers in certain national security situations, while stating that the courts, being extremely reluctant to intervene in the sphere of a national security emergency, would allow the president to proceed unchecked.
[…]
With this, Trump has begun to lay the groundwork for the step-by-step process by which he holds on to the presidency after he has clearly lost the election:
1. Biden wins the popular vote, and carries the key swing states of Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania by decent but not overwhelming margins.
2. Trump immediately declares that the voting was rigged, that there was mail-in ballot fraud and that the Chinese were behind a plan to provide fraudulent mail-in ballots and other “election hacking” throughout the four key swing states that gave Biden his victory.
3. Having railed against the Chinese throughout the campaign, calling Biden “soft on China,” Trump delivers his narrative claiming the Chinese have interfered in the U.S. election.
4. Trump indicates this is a major national security issue, and he invokes emergency powers, directing the Justice Department to investigate the alleged activity in the swing states. The legal justification for the presidential powers he invokes has already been developed and issued by Barr.
5. The investigation is intended to tick down the clock toward December 14, the deadline when each state’s Electoral College electors must be appointed. This is the very issue that the Supreme Court harped on in Bush v. Gore in ruling that the election process had to be brought to a close, thus forbidding the further counting of Florida ballots.
6. All four swing states have Republican control of both their upper and lower houses of their state legislatures. Those state legislatures refuse to allow any Electoral College slate to be certified until the “national security” investigation is complete.
7. The Democrats will have begun a legal action to certify the results in those four states, and the appointment of the Biden slate of electors, arguing that Trump has manufactured a national security emergency in order to create the ensuing chaos.
8. The issue goes up to the Supreme Court, which unlike the 2000 election does not decide the election in favor of the Republicans. However, it indicates again that the December 14 Electoral College deadline must be met; that the president’s national security powers legally authorize him to investigate potential foreign country intrusion into the national election; and if no Electoral College slate can be certified by any state by December 14, the Electoral College must meet anyway and cast its votes.
9. The Electoral College meets, and without the electors from those four states being represented, neither Biden nor Trump has sufficient votes to get an Electoral College majority.
10. The election is thrown into the House of Representatives, pursuant to the Constitution. Under the relevant constitutional process, the vote in the House is by state delegation, where each delegation casts one vote, which is determined by the majority of the representatives in that state.
11. Currently, there are 26 states that have a majority Republican House delegation. 23 states have a majority Democratic delegation. There is one state, Pennsylvania, that has an evenly split delegation. Even if the Democrats were to pick up seats in Pennsylvania and hold all their 2018 House gains, the Republicans would have a 26 to 24 delegation majority.
12. This vote would enable Trump to retain the presidency.
Electoral-vote.com dissed this:
https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2020/Pres/Maps/Jul04.html
I found this dissing unconvincing like:
Recall that Trump does not like being president. Recall also that many Republican officeholders don’t like having him as president. Meanwhile, stealing an election would, at very least, utterly undermine the legitimacy of the Trump presidency and the Republican Party. At worst, it would be the beginning of the end for the Party, and perhaps for the American democracy. We just don’t see how all of the players that would have to get on the same page to make this happen would believe that the cost-benefit analysis adds up. Maybe Bill Barr would. Maybe even Trump. But a sizable number of senators, representatives, state legislators, etc.? Dubious.
Seeing how Repugs have been in lockstep with him from Day One, AND the votemaster ignores (in ignorance?) that the real basis for conservative ideology, from Burke onwards, *IS* a hostility to democratic governance and instead favoring a rule by elites (Gary Willis once wrote, how the best feature of American democracy was it provided a facade and justification behind which the reality of elite rule could exist–what you guys here complain of as a bug is actually to them a highly desirable *feature*). So would the same people who engineer massive vote suppression and the highly unequal representation of the votes that are cast be truly loathe to do away with entire pretense of having to maintain the facade? I’m not at all sure they would object.
That, and ‘the Dems would take the case to the US Supreme Court, and Roberts is concerned about th court’s ‘legacy”–is a laughable objection. In the same mailbag, the votemaster touchingly also says that Trump (failing to overtone losing the election) would not likely order Air Force One to fly him to Russia so he can ask Putin for asylum—because, doing this would ‘wreck the Republican Party’ and I suppose Trump values the future electoral prospects of the Republican Party above spending years in an orange jumpsuit (which I fully expect to happen, when we find out what’s been going on in his life both before and during his presidency).
In short–I find the “Trump will try to stay in power despite losing whatever way he can” very plausible. Micheal Cohen said the same, I and figure he knows Trump as good as anyone.
Guest
I only read the occasional guardian articles people link to. Usually about us politics or climate change. So I really never saw what Ian complains about them and their anti Corbyn claims of antisemitism. But man, this article has it all, in spades. Also antipopulist and pro inequality slants. Just dripping with contempt. I will never see them the same again.
https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/12/anne-applebaum-how-my-old-friends-paved-the-way-for-trump-and-brexit?__twitter_impression=true
Mark Pontin
Guest: “I only read the occasional guardian articles people link to … So I really never saw what Ian complains about them ….”
Even decades ago, the GUARDIAN was never all that Left, except to liberals (or Liberals, since its default UK reader was someone who voted for the Liberal party in the UK, in its time the party of Gladstone, Asquith, and Lloyd George).
Any last vestiges of that GUARDIAN departed in 2015 with editor Alan Rusbridger who had — among other things — published the Wikileaks and E. Snowden material.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Rusbridger
With Rusbridger gone, the GUARDIAN entirely mirrored the transformation of the UK Liberal party, whose membership — at least in London and the southern UK — had over the last three decades entirely followed the neoliberal turn of the Thatcher-Blair years and become in large measure members of the PMC.
Indeed, the paper became deeply committed to Blairism and Clintonism , with the latter tendency even more vomit-making and moronic than you’d find the NEW YORK TIMES trying to pull off.
That’s because many British middle-class and upper-class people, precisely because they’ve little actual lived experience of the US, look across the Atlantic and follow mainstream media propaganda about goings-on in Washington DC, the presumed imperial capital, with slavish credulity, believing absolutely in the legendary goodness of the Dem, the DNC, and the Clintons in a way that’s impossible for anyone who actually lives in this collapsing kleptocratic empire.
Only at the DAILY KOS can you find anything as stupid as most of the GUARDIAN these days with the added bonus that the GUARDIAN has absolutely bought into and purveys the stupidest line in identity politics. With a few exceptions — Aditya Chakrabortty, Larry Elliott, Gary Younge (sometimes) — it now reads like a paper written for morons by morons.
.
someofparts
https://medium.com/@indica/the-plague-states-of-america-53b20678a80e
“American passports are worthless now”
If our ordinary citizens are not allowed into most countries, then what about our military bases?
Zachary Smith
https://www.ianwelsh.net/open-thread-63/#comment-115521
StewartM, I’m cynical enough to believe Trump isn’t in any trouble at all regarding his many crimes and sins committed while in office. From all accounts Biden’s ‘team’ is mostly Obama retreads, and BHO let Bush get away with his torture and much more because of the need for the nation to “move on”.
metamars
First they came for the intravenous vitamin C, and I said nothing, for I had hydroxychloroquine.
Then they came for the hydroxychloroquine, and I said nothing, for I had MMS.
Well, now they’ve come for the MMS. https://www.naturalnews.com/2020-07-08-us-marshals-raid-church-mark-grenon-genesis-2-church-mms.html
There is some positive news. Laura Ingraham has used the phrase “Medical Mafia”, which I first thought of 30 years ago, or so, and urged Gary Null to adopt. I see Mike Adams has adopted this language. See his article “How the corrupt US justice system benefits the Medical Mafia by punishing competitors”
Also, there are reports the White House is leaning on the FDA to re-approve Hydroxychloroquine for “emergency use”. I’m no longer following this too closely, but my guess is it’s weak tea. Trump should go on a full-out offensive against covid-19, especially since the US is a laggard in terms of bending down the curve. I’m no lawyer, but I don’t see why he can’t ORDER the military to dispense it (on a voluntary basis) from military bases, the FDA, local medical pooh-bahs, and Democratic governors be damned.
Enough positive evidence for hcq has now accumulated that the Swiss Policy Report (formerly Swiss Propaganda Report) speaks well of it. https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/
Furthermore, there are reports that the Trump campaign has reached out to Steve Bannon, who has firmer populist instincts than Trump. (In fact, I agree with Krystal Ball’s description of Trump as a “fake populist”.) I don’t know how enlightened Steve Bannon is on the doings of the Medical Mafia (I’m afraid he’ll mostly push his somewhat extreme anti-China efforts), but if it’s significant, he may help Trump find the courage to take on the Mafiosi in the FDA, CDC, and NIAID; and furthermore, not look like an incompetent dilettante, who can’t even properly communicate his strategy and reasoning, while doing so.
If Trump were conducting a war against covid-19, he’d push the whole country towards vitamin D sufficiency, also immune system co-factors like selenium, zinc, and . He’d also push hydroxychloroquine + zinc as a prophylactic; and at least awareness of anti-inflammatories and blood thinners for people requiring hospitalization. (I believe this may be widely adopted, now, so the point of pushing awareness is so that people know that hospitalization is not the likely death sentence it was back in March.)
And foithermore, if I was president, I’d facilitate the installation of ubiquitous personal filters in schools and restaurants, for starters. I mean filters to remove water droplets from air.
someofparts
So Bannon is coming back on board? Well, maybe losing to Trump twice will finally destroy the credibility of the corporate sellout branch of the Democrats.
bruce wilder
@ StewartM
those kinds of screeds make me think a plot among Democratic Party operatives is underway to engineer a government takeover by illiberal liberals.
in the 2016 election campaign, the Clintonistas pressed Trump on whether he would “accept” the outcome of the election and when they lost, they were quickly enough appealing to faithless electors and then cooking up the Russiagate hoax.
i wish i was joking.
highrpm
@zack, “Trump isn’t in any trouble at all regarding his many crimes and sins committed while in office.” thepowerofnarrative. what’s not said is as important as what’s. just substitute Biden for Trump in that sentence. while saying nothing about clinical dementia as a dis qualifier. what a dirty joke the single party system is.
GrimJim
I have not seen much about the USPS lately.
I believe that it has maybe, perhaps, two or three months left before shutdown and bankruptcy.
Thus has been the goal of Republicans and Democrats for years; break it, bankrupt it, sell the pieces to their cronies.
And of course Trump is all for it, as it kills two birds with one stone – screw Amazon and put an end to the perceived threat of mail in ballots.
Of course the fact that this will cause the complete collapse of the economy is missed by all concerned.
It would be bad enough under normal economic circumstances. But right now, a lot of companies are clinging to solvency only through mail order sales with affordable shipping costs.
USPS handles 120 billion mailings a year. FedEx and UPS and Amazon handle maybe 30 billion, and that is with USPS handling many of the “last mile” shipments, especially outside if major metro areas.
The loss of the USPS may be the final nail in the coffin for the US economy…
highrpm
amazon desperately wants ownership of the “last mile.” the last mile should stay part of the federal government.
StewartM
Bruce
Remember, Michael Cohen, who worked for Trump for twelve years, says he won’t accept an electoral defeat without a fight, and I dare say he knows Trump better than either of us. And moreover, Barr is reported investigating the very possibilities outline above.
I also think you’re ignoring the likelihood of the legal jeopardy facing Trump if he loses. My own suspicion is that Trump has been using the Paycheck protection program as a political slush fund (which is Munchkin refuses oversight), if not diverting to his businesses directly; that he took kickbacks or other favors PPE distributors (which is why he refused to invoke the Defense Production Act, that he sided with Erdogan vs the Kurds because of his properties in Istanbul, and of course we’ll find out he and his family have been massively cheating on taxes. Remember Rex Tillerman said to the effect that ‘nearly every time we talked, he was asking me to do something illegal’, and I suspect that the real reasons behind the all the continuous firings in the Trump White House was Trump’s search to find people who WOULD do those illegal things.
After all, he’s gotten away with it all this life. Why stop now?