Joe Biden, December 16, 2024 [The American Prospect]
…When I took office, the economy wasn’t working for most Americans…. economic policy was in the grip of a failed approach called trickle-down economics. Trickle-down tried to grow the economy from the top down. It slashed taxes for the wealthy and large corporations and tried to get government “out of the way,” instead of delivering for working people, investing in infrastructure, and ensuring America stays at the leading edge of innovation.
But this approach failed. Too many Americans saw an economy that was stacked against them with failing infrastructure, communities that had been hollowed out, manufacturing jobs that were offshored to China, prescription drugs that cost more than in any other developed country, and workers who had been left behind.
[TW: I was surprised BIden’s writing in The American Prospect did not attract much interest. Probably because after the electoral victory by Trump, everything Democrats do seems anticlimactic. There were many more articles on why Bidenomics failed, such as James Galbraith’s article in The Nation on December 9, Why Bidenomics Was Such a Bust. But I think even these pulled back from fully exploring the anger and rage most working people have towards elites, which was fully revealed by the murder of a health insurance CEO in Manhattan. It is exactly that anger and rage that Trump is able to manipulate — “I am your retribution” — but which Democrats are too cowardly to acknowledge and condone. As I posted in April 2008, Euthanize Wall Street to save the economy.
[LORD, how long shall the wicked, how long shall the wicked triumph?
[Phenomenal World, via [Institute for New Economic Thinking 12-17-2024]
As the nation prepares for a second Trump administration, the mood among many Democratic Party officials has been one of bafflement and astonishment. How could voters have failed to rise to the defense of the democracy and “institutions” that Democrats spent eight years lionizing as bulwarks against an incipient Republican Party fascism?
Among the electorate, however, disappointment is just as likely to be at the choices on offer as at the outcome itself. The Pew Research Center in exit polling found 64 percent of respondents thought the campaign “was not focused on important policy debates.” In pre-election polling, it found 63 percent of Trump supporters and 62 percent of Harris supporters sharing such sentiments.1 Given how diminished the scope for change appeared to most voters, it is perhaps unsurprising that turnout fell by 2.6 million voters below the level of 2020—while the voting-eligible population increased by 3.5 million….
What explains the American party system’s continued rightward drift? On this question few analysts have offered insights as trenchant and consistently significant as Thomas Ferguson, currently Director of Research at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. For the past four decades, he has argued that American politics is best explained by an “investment theory of politics.” According to that theory, electoral outcomes are shaped by competition between the parties not over the preferences of voters—as argued by the “median voter theorem” popularized by postwar social science—but rather by a different set of preferences altogether: that of donors….
Thomas Ferguson…. I like to start the discussion of recent American politics with the 2014 midterm elections, which I analyzed in a piece with Walter Dean Burnham. The big story in 2014 was the stupendous decline in voting turnout compared to the presidential election in 2012. The turnout drop off was the second largest ever in percentage terms. Only the 1942 decline was greater, because millions of voters were shipping out across the globe to serve in World War II. But in many states turnout in 2014 collapsed to astonishingly low levels… Burnham and I concluded that this signaled voters were sick of the establishments of both parties—that real upheaval impended….
What we got were challenges from outside the normal political spectrum. Trump challenged from the right, Sanders from the left. The dramatic entrance of candidates who did not stand for business as usual started a process in which turnouts rose sharply with these outsiders pulling in lots of people on both sides.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party leadership would not deal with Sanders. They famously cut the Sanders movement out of everything. In 2020, with Trump in the White House, Sanders ran again and lost, but he did quite well and the rest of the party consolidated around Biden. Sanders was undeniably a major force in the party and his movement could not be ignored. Elizabeth Warren represented a somewhat similar force….
Tf: The inflation was principally a supply-side story. Covid-19 happens. You can’t get anything or go anywhere. There’s nobody able to work in many places. You’ve got hundreds of ships sitting off ports that can’t land. Almost everything grinds to a halt. It has nothing whatsoever to do with any government spending. When Servaas Storm and I worked through the spending statistics very carefully in the first of three papers we wrote on this, we showed that, in fact, the federal spending had trickled off to almost nothing by October 2021, while inflation went higher and higher, surging principally in response to the Ukraine war, but also to problems related to climate: droughts, wildfires, and intense storms hitting crop patterns and infrastructure. These interact with oil prices which also drive up food prices. That last point is shown beautifully in a separate paper by Carlotta Bremen and Servaas Storm.
In my opinion, the Biden people should have moved to quickly choke off general financial speculation in commodities…
Ae: Can you say more about how the regulation of commodity futures contributed to inflation?
Tf: In the old, pre-deregulation days, you couldn’t get into those markets on the financial side, except with very severe limits. You had to be somebody who actually used the commodities in their products, or you had to be a primary producer trying to hedge. The Bush-era regulatory changes made a huge difference.
…The administration’s slow response to inflation turned into an ostrich policy. In 2024, this was politically disastrous. They just kept proclaiming themselves as the most labor friendly administration….
What was happening to people’s wages and incomes would have been much clearer if analysts would have stopped confusing people with statistics about hourly wages and simply focused on household median real income, where the numbers have been obviously disastrous….
[TW: There is much, much more worth reading in this interview of Thomas Ferguson]
[TW: This is true for most measures of real economic physical production. If these numbers were routinely posted and discussed in per capita terms, it would be crystal clear and undeniable just how badly Wall Street and financialization have damaged the economy.]
For the better part of the last thirty years, telecom giants and “free market” libertarian think tanks have told anybody who’d listen that gutting regulatory oversight of the U.S. wireless and broadband markets would result in near-Utopian outcomes across innovation and competition.
Instead, the reduction in both competition and real oversight resulted in regional telecom giants like AT&T and Comcast doubling down on all their worst behaviors. Americans now pay some of the highest prices in the world for spotty, sluggish broadband access and abysmal customer service.
But this mindless deregulatory mindset also harms public safety, national security, and consumer privacy. Case in point: the Congressional and regulatory failure to hold telecoms accountable for lax security and lax privacy standards keeps resulting in ugly hacking and privacy scandals that only seem to get worse.
Case in point, eight major U.S. telecoms were recently the victim of a massive intrusion by Chinese hackers who managed to spy on public U.S. officials. The “Salt Typhoon” hack was so severe, the intruders (as of last week) were still rooting around the ISP networks. AT&T and Verizon, two of the compromised companies, apparently didn’t think it was worth informing subscribers:
The Israeli Defense Forces are preparing to place dozens of weapons systems across the West Bank that can be operated automatically or remotely. According to a report from Israeli Army Radio, the Samson Remote Controlled Weapon Station will be deployed to dozens of checkpoints, settlement entrances, and key control points. It will be the first deployment of the system that is capable of firing lethal rounds without human intervention. The IDF previously used the Samson system, which can fire 5.56 mm, 7.62 mm, and 12.7 mm rounds, .50 BMG machine guns, 40 mm automatic grenade launchers, and anti-tank missiles on the Israeli border with Gaza.
Of all the horrible things Israel and its western backers do to Palestinians, among the most evil is the way it uses them as lab rats to field test new weapons systems so the rest of the empire can learn how effective they are.
[The New Republic, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-18-2024]
“It’s unclear how exactly Mangione’s alleged crime was intended to ‘influence the policy of a unit of government,’ which companies such as UnitedHealthcare are not, or ‘intimidate’ the civilian population. Rather, Mangione’s alleged act appeared to have been planned to target a specific class of individuals who profit exorbitantly off the suffering of the civilian population. ‘The ruling class is treating killing one of their own, with the motive being related to the evils of our health care system, as a fundamentally different act than if you or I were to be murdered,’ wrote journalist J.P. Hill on X Tuesday.”
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-16-2024]
[1] Is a health insurance company a “civilian population”? If not, who or what is the civilian population intimidated or coerced? The class of all health insurance CEOs? The class of all CEOs? The ruling class? (NOTE: I do not know the meaning of the word “population” in law, and suspect it’s different from the concept of “class” as a political economist would be it.)
[2], [3] Or is a health insurance company a “unit of government”? Surely not, unless “unit” is a term of art. But if not, what is? Congress, in passing health insurance reform? More ingeniously, the organs of state security, who will now be “intimidated” into devising measures to deal with the menance?
[Lambert Strether: “America, being a gun-humpingloving country, has a rich tradition and body of law centering on self-defense via firearms. Without lining up my speculation with the facts of the case (for example, it’s hard to see how shooting someone in the back fits in to “stand your ground), what would self-defense against social murder look like, if it were to be reduced to legal doctrine? Let me propose a thought experiment. Case A: Suppose (legal) person HI (for health insurance) has a machine gun, and (natural person) p has a handgun. If HI fires its machine gun at p, is p justified in firing back in self-defense? Surely so. (I assume the analogy between denying care and firing a machine gun is clear.) Case B: Let us suppose we interpose a sheet of paper between HI and p. HI again fires their machine gun at p but through the paper. Is p justified in firing back? Surely so. Case C: Suppose that we leave the paper in place, and introduce a complex Rube Goldberg device between HI’s trigger finger, and the trigger of the machine gun. HI’s finger twitches, the Rube Goldberg device pulls the trigger, the machine gun fires, and again the bullets go through the paper. Again, is p justified in firing back? This case seems not so clear, but why exactly? (I assume the analogy between the health insurance industry’s claims denial process and a Rube Goldberg device is clear.) What is it about the level of indirection in Case C that separates it from Cases A and B? Comments from lawyers welcome!” ]
Failure to block the insurance giant’s market consolidation, including by a judge with a potential conflict of interest, has led to worse care, higher prices, and a mounting human toll.
The state’s most powerful figure, Tim Dunn, isn’t an elected official. But behind the scenes, the West Texas oilman is lavishly financing what he regards as a holy war against public education, renewable energy, and non-Christians.
Michael Conahan took $2,800,000 in bribes from a private prison in exchange for locking up 2300 kids, one of whom committed suicide. Biden commuted his sentence. Steven Donziger won a $9 bn lawsuit against Chevron & got locked up for 3.5 in retaliation. He was not pardoned.
[Lambert Strether: “Important. If you are pressed for time, read the Table of Contents. On top of refusing to remedy harmful workplace conditions, Amazon discourages injured workers from getting more medical care than first aid even when they clearly need it, and makes it exceedingly difficult for them to obtain required accommodations when recovering.”]
Workers are warned that union dues will go to “old white guys,” a native land acknowledgement before an anti-union lecture, and much more….
In the new environment, businesses facing worker uprisings are attempting to co-opt the language of social justice movements and embrace trends around self-growth and positive lifestyles to counter demands for unionization — a far cry from the old days of union prevention, a history that featured employers routinely threatening workers with private guards and violent clashes on the picket lines
Leny Riebli, the vice president of human resources at Ross Stores, noted that given “what’s happening at Amazon and Starbucks,” her company had retooled its training to remain union-free. “We really had to redouble our efforts,” said Riebli. The company, said Riebli, closely monitors employee concerns that might spill over into support for unionization, so managers have been trained not only to spot potential “card check” organizing, but also listen for issues around safety, scheduling, and respect in the workplace….
In an interview set to be released by labor advocacy group A More Perfect Union, Biden reportedly said, “Nobody in Congress should be able to make money in the stock market while they’re serving the United States.”
This marks one of the clearest public stances Biden has taken on an issue that has simmered in Washington for years. While proposed stock trading bans have enjoyed bipartisan support across several congressional sessions, the president has largely remained silent on the topic—until now.
Pressure to address stock trading in Congress has gained traction since the 2020 pandemic, when unusual trading activity among lawmakers sparked public outcry. In July, both House and Senate lawmakers endorsed a proposal prohibiting the president, vice president, and members of Congress from trading or selling “securities, commodities, futures, options, trusts, and other comparable holdings.”
While stocks have been the central focus, the proposed restrictions could also cover cryptocurrencies. Under the 2012 Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act, members of Congress are already required to disclose their financial holdings, including crypto assets. Some legislators, such as Senator Cynthia Lummis and Representative Mike Collins, have previously reported Bitcoin and Ethereum investments, raising questions about impartiality when shaping financial regulations.
Mark Glick, Gabriel Lozada, and Darren Bush, December 16, 2024 [Institute for New Economic Thinking]
Industrial organization economists play multiple roles in antitrust law enforcement, from economic consultants and providers of expert testimony to policy advocates. In each instance, economists rely on both positive and normative economic theory. Economists in these roles might believe their theories are exclusively positive. But positive economic models implicitly incorporate normative theory. For example, an economist might study the impact of vertical integration on output. Implicit is the assumption that output is the variable that best captures welfare. The latter is an assumption based on normative economics. In this INET Working Paper paper, we detail the flaws of antitrust’s current normative theory, which is known as the Consumer Welfare Standard (“CWS”). We explain how welfare economics has long ago abandoned such measurement of welfare for good reasons: the theory is flawed, inconsistent, and ethically unsustainable. It is regrettable that this old normative theory survives in some sub-fields of economics such as industrial organization. New Brandeisians, seeking a replacement for CWS, have advanced an alternative, the competitive process standard, which is an improvement but is not flawless. We argue the way forward for antitrust is to follow the way of modern welfare economics, which in telling coincidence, adopts matters of import consistent with Congressional goals behind the antitrust laws.
Ed Zitron [via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-16-2024]
Every app we use is intentionally built to “growth hack” — a term that means “moving things around in such a way that a user does things that we want them to do” so they spend more money or time on the platform — which is why dating apps gate your best matches behind $1.99 microtransactions, or why Uber puts “suggestions” and massive banners throughout their apps to try and convince you to use one of its other apps (or accidentally hit them, which gives Uber a chance to get you to try them), or whyOutlook puts advertisements in your email inbox that are near-indistinguishable from new emails (they’re at the top of your inbox too), or why Meta’s video carousels intentionally only play the first few seconds of a clip as a means of making you click.
Our digital lives are actively abusive and hostile, riddled with subtle and overt cons. Our apps are ever-changing, adapting not to our needs or conditions, but to the demands of investors and internal stakeholders that have reduced who we are and what we do to an ever-growing selection of manipulatable metrics.
It isn’t that you don’t “get” tech, it’s that the tech you use every day is no longer built for you, and as a result feels a very specific kind of insane….
In plain terms, everybody is being fucked with constantly in tiny little ways by most apps and services, and I believe that billions of people being fucked with at once in all of these ways has profound psychological and social consequences that we’re not meaningfully discussing.
The average person’s experience with technology is one so aggressive and violative that I believe it leaves billions of people with a consistent low-grade trauma. We seem, as a society, capable of understanding that social media can hurt us, unsettle us, or make us feel crazed and angry, but I think it’s time to accept that the rest of the tech ecosystem undermines our wellbeing in an equally-insidious way. And most people don’t know it’s happening, because everybody has accepted deeply shitty conditions for the last ten years….
Why wouldn’t people feel insane? Why wouldn’t the internet, where we’re mostly forced to live, drive most people crazy? How are we not discussing the fact that so much of the internet is riddled with poison? How are we not treating the current state of the tech industry like an industrial chemical accident? Is it because there are too many people at fault? Is it because fixing it would require us to truly interrogate the fabric of a capitalist death cult?….
Again, this is how most people are experiencing modern computing, and it isn’t because this is big business — it’s because laptop sales have been falling for over a decade, and manufacturers (and Microsoft) need as many ways to grow revenue as possible, even if the choices they make are actively harmful to consumers.…
I, however, believe the wider problem is bigger, and the costs are far greater. It isn’t that “everything is enshittified.” It’s that everybody’s pursuit of growth has changed the incentive behind how we generate value in the world, and software enables a specific kind of growth-lust by creating virtual nation states with their own digital despots. While laws may stop Meta from tearing up people’s houses surrounding its offices on 1 Hacker Way, it can happily reroute traffic and engagement on Facebook and Instagram to make things an iota more profitable….
I believe billions of people are in active combat with their devices every day, swiping away notifications, dodging around intrusive apps, agreeing to privacy policies that they don’t understand, desperately trying to find where an option they used to use has been moved to because a product manager has decided that it needed to be somewhere else. I realize it’s tough to conceptualize because it’s so ubiquitous, but how much do you fight with your computer or smartphone every day? How many times does something break? How many times have you downloaded an app and found it didn’t really do the thing you wanted it to? How many times have you wanted to do something simple and found that it’s actually really annoying?
How much of your life is dodging digital debris, avoiding scams, ads, apps that demand permissions, and endless menu options that bury the simple things that you’re actually trying to do?
You are the victim of a con. You have spent years of your life explaining to yourself and others that “this is just how things are,” accepting conditions that are inherently exploitative and abusive. You are more than likely not deficient, stupid, or “behind the times,” and even if you are, there shouldn’t be multi-billion dollar enterprises that monetize your ignorance.
Today Drop Site News is publishing a landmark investigation about the BBC’s coverage of Israel’s unrelenting assault on Gaza by British journalist Owen Jones. His report is based on interviews with 13 journalists and other BBC staffers who offer remarkable insights into how senior figures within the BBC’s news operation skewed stories in favor of Israel’s narratives and repeatedly dismissed objections registered by scores of staffers who, throughout the past 14 months, demanded that the network uphold its commitment to impartiality and fairness. Jones’s investigation of the BBC has three main components: a deeply reported look into the internal complaints from BBC journalists, a quantitative assessment of how the BBC characterizes the year-long siege on Gaza, and a review of the histories of the people behind the coverage—and, in particular, one editor, Raffi Berg.
Historic hearings at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague have drawn to a close after more than 100 countries and international organisations presented arguments over two weeks on who should bear legal responsibility for the worsening climate crisis.
Spearheading the effort was Vanuatu which, alongside other Pacific island nations, says the climate crisis poses a threat to its very existence….
Kate Aronoff, December 17, 2024 [The New Republic]
In sabotaging Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s bid for leadership of the Oversight Committee, party elders have doubled down on a failed strategy….
House Democrats on Tuesday afternoon decided that 74-year-old Gerry Connolly—who announced his throat cancer diagnosis in November—will serve as ranking member on the House Oversight Committee, besting 35-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a closed-door caucus vote….
Connolly will join fellow septuagenarians in top committee spots next year. Richard Neal, 75, will lead Democrats on Ways and Means while Frank Pallone, 73, will be the party’s top representative on Energy and Commerce. Eighty-six-year-old Maxine Waters will be the ranking member on the Financial Services Committee, and Rose DeLauro, 81, will helm the Democrats’ presence in Appropriations….
In other democracies, the leaderships of parties that have endured humiliating defeats like the one Democrats saw in November—or even just regular defeats—resign. That kicks off a process by which members determine a new, ideally more successful direction, represented by different people. But the Democratic Party isn’t really a “party” of the sort that exists in other democracies, with memberships and official constituencies, like unions, who have some say over how it’s governed. Members mostly make decisions based on their own interests rather than to drive some shared, democratically decided agenda forward….
these elections are just a sad reflection on how committed the party’s top brass are to maintaining their cozy patronage system. If the Democrats have a future, its inspiration will come from outside the bounds of its own fiefdoms and sclerotic internal processes. It will come, for example, from unions that cultivate leaders who can genuinely speak to working-class voters. It will come from social movements that build momentum for populist ideas that haven’t been poll-tested into bland, business-friendly mush. At the very least, those things can outlive Pelosi and the old guard. Ideally, it can build an electoral force that aspires to more than meaningless loyalties and bigger checks from donors.
Malcolm Ferguson, December 20, 2024 [The New Republic]
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has a simple fix for the current government shutdown battle.
“How about the House add campaign finance reform to the CR so Republicans and Democrats alike can stop being so scared about what a billionaire man-child thinks before they vote on anything around here,” AOC wrote on X Friday.
[The Nation, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-18-2024]
Dislodging the consultant class—and draining the cesspool of dark money that guarantees its continuing influence over Democratic politics—isn’t going to be easy. But it is essential if there is ever going to be an effective opposition to the plutocracy-disguised-as-populism on offer from the Republicans. At the same time, as Tarence Ray argues in this issue, it is just as important to resist the fatalist temptation to simply cede large portions of the electoral map to Republican reaction.
David Dayen, December 18, 2024 [The American Prospect]
…And from behind the throne, while convalescing in Luxembourg, Nancy Pelosi thought this was an opportune time, amid bedlam in the Democratic ranks, to engage in a bitter factional fight over who should be the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee.
There’s a lot to say here about Democrats’ adherence to internal institutional power over the fate of the nation, their inability to carry a consistent message, and more. But I think the biggest thing is this: This is what happens when a political party doesn’t have any leaders who command anything approaching respect.
It breeds freelancing among backbenchers, a run for cover where they revert to relying on their political instincts, ensuring that the overall approach is incoherent. It breeds opportunism from party factions seeking to pull things in their direction, ignoring the near-term stakes of the early days of Trump’s second term.
“Despite appearances, this at times bruising argument isn’t really about the past at all. What it’s really about is the future, and whether the Democratic Party needs the kind of root-and-branch reform that would allow it to ignore the siren song of the consultant class, which has now led the party to two disastrous defeats. Or whether, to borrow a term from British politics, all that is required for victory is ‘one more heave’—running the same campaign, but with a bit more vigor than last time. That, in essence, was the message a shockingly unrepentant David Plouffe and his colleagues offered as guests on Pod Save America: Give us the chance to do it all over again in 2028 and we will. Anyone even tempted to credit these grifters should listen to Plouffe’s October episode, ‘Why You Shouldn’t Panic About the Polls.’”
…While he never embraced the full suite of “Green New Deal” initiatives urged by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders, and the Left, his three major pieces of legislation — the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) of 2021, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of 2022, and the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 — all aimed to use public power to spur private investment and manufacturing that would not only support the green energy transition but also stimulate good jobs for working people.
Despite this embrace of industrial policy, the devil, particularly when it came to winning working-class support, was in the policy details. Rather than include public initiatives that could quickly put people to work or provide other immediate social benefits, the administration maintained the Democratic Party’s half-century commitment to highly technocratic, market-dependent approaches to governing. The result has been a series of important but narrow and complex policies whose immediate effects are removed from the lives of working-class people….
Simon Lazarus, December 16, 2024 [The New Republic]
Democrats should stop scapegoating the system for their shrunken popular clout, and instead make the hard strategic shifts necessary to win it back.
That Donald Trump managed to win both the electoral vote and the popular vote has finally provided Democrats and liberals with the chance to correct a deeply ingrained misconception: the reflexive meme that the Electoral College is a structural barrier that systematically stacks the national electoral playing field against them. Factually, that grievance may have seemed correct in 2016, but historically, it is very wrong. Functionally, the Electoral College bugaboo serves as a self-serving excuse for liberals to avoid facing up to their real problem—resistance by increasingly dominant, comparatively well-heeled, college-educated culture warriors to piercing their bubbles, empathetically recognizing flyover working- and middle-class constituencies’ concerns and interests, and accommodating them enough to win back a meaningful slice of those constituencies.
…Distinguished attorney and outspoken defender of democracy Marc Elias has spent years bringing the fight to Trump in the courts. He recently wrote an excellent piece on Democracy Docket arguing that resistance to Trump’s first administration was squandered when what was needed was an organized opposition.…
For a short time, The Indivisible Guide provided a grassroots way for people to organize but it never amounted to more than a PDF and a name. As their national HQ collected money and a very short-lived notoriety, the people, who wanted guidance and direction never received much more direction than the guide book which essentially said “Start an Indivisible group!” My Indivisible NY-19 group was very effective locally but it was self-starting and aimless. None of the effective tactics they developed locally was ever shared nationally….
MAGA focused on what they wanted; an embrace of an authoritarian, white supremacy, and economic favoritism oriented to MAGA. They wanted to rule over America and focused, laser-like, on that goal. Everything else was a distraction.
On the other side Democrats, progressives, and never-Trumpers focused on flipping out over the latest outrage or astonishment at Trump’s never-ending lies. Karl Rove once characterized their policy of Distract, Rule, and Rewrite History when he said:
Ed Kilgore [New York Magazine, via downwithtyranny.com 12-16-2024]
“The key to implementing Trump’s legislative agenda will be the budget-reconciliation process that enables Congress to bypass the Senate filibuster and enact a big package of new laws on an up-or-down party-line vote. This is how Trump got his tax cuts in 2017 and how he tried to repeal Obamacare. Items in a budget-reconciliation bill must be focused on fiscal matters, but it’s still a huge asset to a party that controls the White House and both chambers of Congress. It’s beginning to look like Team Trump wants two budget-reconciliation bills, one focused on authorizing the huge buildup in border-security resources necessary for Trump’s mass deportation of undocumented immigrants and another aimed at extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts. There’s increasing talk of a very quick start on the first bill. Since the 119th Congress will be sworn in on January 3, Congress could get moving on a budget resolution setting up this bill even before Trump takes office.” ….
On his first day in office there’s some stuff Trump can do unilaterally with executive orders. It’ll take over a month to get his cabinet and other appointments that need Senate confirmation in place. But he “can take action on a wide variety of promises without any help from Congress. This includes pardoning at least some of the January 6 insurrectionists, imposing “emergency tariffs,” and canceling or reversing executive orders issued by Biden. When Trump declared that he would be a dictator on day one, he said he’d prioritize reversing Biden’s policies on border security and fossil-fuel use… Several of Trump’s proposed day-one actions will undoubtedly face immediate legal challenges, as they raise major constitutional questions. These include his desire to revive the Nixonesque practices of presidential impoundment of appropriations and to eliminate birthright citizenship via executive order. You can expect the upcoming regime to churn out as many new policies as possible, then determine which to prioritize in the courts or by way of congressional authorizations.”
Howie Klein, December 16, 2024 [downwithtyranny.com]
I want to focus on Trump’s mass deportation plans— likely to get extremely gnarly very fast— and his jihad against birthright citizenship. Let me remind you that when Pete Wilson beat Dianne Feinstein for governor in 1990, California was a swing state. From 1968 until 1992, Republicans Nixon (both times), Ford, Reagan (both times) and George H.W. Bush beat their Democratic opponents in presidential elections. After that, it was all over for the GOP. What happened, you may wonder, to make Bill Clinton (both times), Gore, Kerry, Obama (both times), Hillary, Biden and Kamala win every race after that.
Republican Gov. Pete Wilson strongly supported something called Proposition 187 (1994), which alienated Latino voters and reshaped the state’s political landscape for— well so far 3 decades. It was a ballot initiative designed to deny undocumented immigrants access to public services, including education and healthcare. It also required state employees to report individuals suspected of being undocumented to immigration authorities. And the campaign was UGLY, using inflammatory rhetoric and imagery, portraying undocumented immigrants as a threat to California’s economy and public safety. It passed overwhelmingly but was blocked by federal courts. The damage to the Republican Party’s reputation among Latino voters was incalculable, galvanizing Latinos, who began registering and voting in higher numbers, against Republicans.
…Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), who is in charge of her chamber’s DOGE caucus, is finally having her moment after years of publishing a report about spending she considers unnecessary. The often-mentioned $2 trillion in potential savings is a figure that comes from that report.
Howie Klein, December 17, 2024 [downwithtyranny.com]
…for those who think getting rich people into government is a good idea because they are already rich and less likely to steal, I have some bad news: the rich are rich because they are the most greedy and avaricious people on earth. Lesson one: Their wealth isn’t a sign of virtue or wisdom (or even talent)— it’s proof that they’ve honed the art of taking more than they give, whether from their workers, their customers or the planet itself and the idea that wealth insulates someone from corruption is laughable; in reality, wealth is its own form of corruption. It skews priorities, consolidates power, and erodes the common good.
At the time, I was struck by how different their priorities were from the world I knew. They weren’t just driven by money— they were consumed by a sense of entitlement, a need to dominate and control. I remember the moment when I made the very conscious decision that would never be me. I wasn’t even rich yet; just doing well, but making more money than anyone in my working class family had ever dreamed of. My direct boss (a kind of supervisor) was one of them— exactly like Trump in fact; at one point, he had even hired Roy Cohn as an advisor. The company was paying me well and I was grateful and they also gave me a generous expense account. I went with my supervisor to a “trade show” in Europe. He tried to show me how I could buy expensive finely-tailored clothes for myself and disguise the expense as a client dinner; I was horrified. Someone else, another junior vice president like myself, couldn’t wait to try it. I felt sick to my stomach for not turning them in to the company’s CFO.
The increasingly rich people I began encountering as I rose through the corporate ranks were, for the most part (there were, thank God, exceptions) all about preserving and enhancing their status. That supervisor I met. He was worth tens of millions of dollars at the time but he was bitter and angry because other people were wealthier than he was. He could never enjoy his wealth because he was always pissed off that this guy or that guy had more than he did. He even regularly stole money. Not just from the company but even from the artists.
[TW: Klein is pounding on a central point of the political philosophy of civic republicanism. a point which was well and widely known but has been obscured by the rise of Lockean liberalism and its veneration of private property.
[Ecclesiastes 5:10
“He that loveth silver shall not be satisfied with silver; nor he that loveth abundance with increase…”
“For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.”
Another interesting aspect of Harington’s theory of mixed government is the moralistic elements in his thinking. The reason that monargchy, aristocracy, and democracy degenerate into tyranny, oligarchy, and anarchy, he tells us, is that they contain no counter-balance to the natural tendency in man for passion to usurp the rule of reason. Indeed, he goes so far as to say that when the one, the few, or the many rule by reason, we have the three simple pure forms of government, and that when passion creeps in we have their corruptions.47 From this position, it followed that the whole art of constitution making was so to contrive the state that the institutions of government would compensate for and overcome the natural evil in man.48 Harrington thought that this could be done by mixed government…
The citizen may be sinful, he wrote, “and yet the common-wealth bee perfect,” and “the Citizen, where the common Wealth is perfect can never commit any such crime, as can render it imperfect or bring it unto a natural dissolution.” 49 Harrington did not believe, as did Richard Baxter,50 that governments stood or fell because they were in the hands of good or evil men. He had no faith in the adequacy of the rectitude of even good men for the task of government. Hence we have his insistence on the Machiavellian principle that government is by law and not by men. “Give us good men and they will make us good Lawes,” he declared, “is the Maxime of a Demogogue. .. . But give us good orders, and they will make us good men, is the Maxime of a Legislator, and the most infallible in the Politickes.”51
[Harrington warns that “modern prudence” enables government that becomes] “an Art whereby some man, or some few men, subject a City or Nation, and rule it according unto his or their private interest.” 52 Law being the very basis of government, two consequences followed. The first of these was the importance of the state resting upon a fundamental law or constitution which could not be changed.53 The whole Oceana is in essence little more
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Than such a fundamental law….
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Harrington’s preoccupation with the perpetual state serves to call attention to another striking aspect of his thought—his contention that a commonwealth should not only be equal in its institution but should have certain devices to .keep it in balance once the equilibrium was established. He was not one of those who believed that the mere division of power between the three elements of a state was sufficient to provide stability, for “an equal! Commonwealth is such an one as is equall both in the balance or foundation, and in the superstructures.”59 Like the Venetians, he would supplement the basic division of power with other devices and an elaborate system of checks and balances. Of these the most important, suggested to him by Roman precedents, was an agrarian law, or what he called an “equal Agrarian,” established as a part of the fundamental law of the state. It is only when we see his agrarian proposals as a device for the maintenance of the balance of a mixed government that we are able to see their proper place in his thought. The necessity for an agrarian law he found, as he found most other fundamentals, in nature. Emerging as an exponent of the importance of economic factors in determining the course of history, he declared it to be a law of nature that wealth in the form of riches in a commercial state or of land in all extensive states is the source of power. Whoever holds the land will in the end hold the power.60 Hence, in the creation of a state the land must be so divided that the
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distribution will accord with the division of power. An “equal
Agrarian” he defined as “a perpetual Law establishing and preserving the ballance of dominion, by such a distribution, that no one man or number of men within the compasse of the Few or Aristocracy, can come to over-power the whole people by their posessions in Lands.”61 The Roman commonwealth fell through a neglect of its agrarian laws, as a result of which the nobility by stealth got into their own hands the conquered lands that should have been divided among the people. Power followed land, with the result that the Gracchi were unable to restore the situation, and the nobility overthrew both the people and the commonwealth. 62 It is, in short, fatal to a commonwealth for the ownership of land to shift predominantly into the hands of an aristocracy, or to any state for such ownership to pass into the hands of a class different From that which holds political power.
The second of the devices by which Harrington sought to maintain mixed government was the secret ballot… The necessity for secret voting he saw to arise from the fact that “the election or suffrage Df the people, is freest, where it is made or given in such a manner, that it can neither oblige (qui beneficium accepit libertatem vendidit) nor disoblige another; or through fear of an enemy, or bashfulnesse towards a friend, impair a mans liberty.” 64 Secret voting, then, is essential in the interest of a free suffrage…
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A second fundamental thing which makes no less clear Sydney’s rejection of monarchy is his remarks on the nature of man. “Man” he wrote, “is of an aspiring nature, and apt to put too high a value on himself. They who are raised above their brethren, though but a little, desire to go farther; and if they gain the name of king, they think themselves wronged and degraded, when they are not suffered to do what they please. In these things they never want masters; and the nearer they come to a power that is not easily restrained by law, the more passionately they desire to abolish all that opposes it.”25 Even when a prince was virtuous and began by desiring nothing more than the power allowed him by law, he was subject to greater temptations to invade the liberty of his subjects than human nature could be expected to withstand. “The strength of his own affections,” Sydney declared, “will ever be against him. Wives, children, and servants will always join with those enemies that arise in his own breast to pervert him; if he has any weak side, any lust unsubdued, they will gain the victory. He has not searched into the nature of man, who thinks that anyone can resist when he is thus on all sides assaulted.”26 Monarchy, in short, by the very constitution of human nature, tended always to degenerate into tyranny. It was a defective form of government because in the most important place of all it was lacking in those adequate restraints on the defects of human nature which all the classical republicans saw as an essential of any well-contrived government. ]
Rick Perlstein, December 18, 2024 [The American Prospect]
…Conrad Black would not have it. At my and Wilentz’s interpretation, he was livid.
Out of respect for the life peerage which he forfeited his Canadian citizenship to receive in 2001, I suppose I ought to refer to him by his formal title: the Right Honorable Lord Baron Black of Crossharbour. Born in 1944 to an industrial magnate and the granddaughter of the co-owner of the London Telegraph, after an academic career that included two expulsions (for selling stolen exams and for insubordination) and one flunking-out, Black took control of his father’s holding company in 1978, sold off all its non-newspaper holdings, and fashioned himself a press baron….
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