#lucas kunce | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

dontmeantobepoliticalbut · 11 months

Text

Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley has nothing on Don Draper.

Hawley’s Democratic challenger Lucas Kunce mocked the Republican’s fixation on “manliness” in a new ad featuring actor Jon Hamm, a Missouri native.

youtube

In the ad released Monday, the “Mad Men” lead questions Hawley’s convictions while negative headlines about the politician flash by.

“Manhood. You’d hope that means courage. Courage isn’t something you can give speeches or write a book about,” Hamm says, alluding to Hawley’s new book “Manhood.”

“It’s not sitting on the sidelines while others sacrifice, or denying help to those who did,” the actor says. “It isn’t putting people down or trying to control them or using your own power for profit or ambition.”

The ad also points to Hawley’s actions on Jan. 6, 2021, when he egged on pro-Trump rioters but ran when they invaded the Capitol.

“In Missouri, you can’t fake courage,” Hamm says. “We’re the Show Me state. Courage is something you have to show us.”

Hamm finishes with one more dig at the conservative author, saying, “If you want to be told about manhood, some guy wrote a book about it. But if you want someone to show you courage, send Lucas Kunce to the Senate.”

Hawley has made defending masculinity part of his mission since getting elected in 2018.

While promoting his book on Fox News last week, he told Mark Levin, “We need [men] to go out there and work. We need them to start a family. We need them to provide. If you want to change America for the better, get men to be strong again, to take on their responsibilities and to be leaders.”

Kunce, a Marine veteran who lost in a previous Democratic Senate primary, told HuffPost earlier this year that he thinks Hawley can be defeated in part because of his fixation on gender roles.

“He’s just done creepy things, like write books telling everybody how to be a man, and if you don’t do what he says then you’re not a man. So we’re going to hold him to task for all of that,” Kunce said. “He’s obsessed with what everybody else is doing in their bedroom, at work, on the internet, in the doctor’s office.”

#us politics #news #republicans #conservatives #sen. josh hawley #Missouri #celebs #celebrities #Jon Hamm #Lucas Kunce #Democrats #political ads #2023 #2024 elections #huffington post #Youtube #videos

14 notes · View notes

gwydionmisha · 1 year

Link

#Josh Hawley #Lucas Kunce #Missouri #Election 2024 #News

5 notes · View notes

to-form-a-more-perfect-union · 1 year

Text

#lucas kunce #josh hawley

0 notes

knarsisus · 1 year

Link

I voted for Lucas in the primary, and will gladly do it again!

#u.s. senate #missouri #josh hawley #2024 elections #lucas kunce

0 notes

burritosandpeppermint · 1 year

Text

youtube

This is Lucas Kunce and he's running to unseat Josh Hawley, who is known for running away from the Capitol Hill riots. You bet Kunce used that in his ad. Let's get behind this guy and unseat fascist Hawley.

#Lucas Kunce #josh hawley #missouri #politics #Youtube

0 notes

theculturedmarxist · 6 months

Text

Welcome to BIG, a newsletter on the politics of monopoly power. If you’re already signed up, great! If you’d like to sign up and receive issues over email, you can do so here.

Today, as the U.S. is drawn into wars in Israel and Ukraine, as well as the defense of now-peaceful Taiwan, I’m writing about war. Not the policy choices, or whether U.S. military power is a net force for good or ill, but the actual practical machinery behind the American defense base that produces the weaponry necessary to sustain the military.

As stockpiles dwindle, there is now widespread agreement among policymakers that America must rebuild its capacity to arm itself and its allies. But according to a new scorching government report released this week, that’s mostly just talk. The Pentagon doesn’t bother tracking the guts of defense contracting, which is who owns the mighty firms that build weaponry.

But first, I have a personal announcement. I am going on leave this week, and I’ve hired a colleague named Lee Hepner to take over for BIG while I am out. You are in for a treat. Hepner works with me at the American Economic Liberties Project. He’s a lawyer with over a decade's worth of policy and political experience at the state and local level, and when I have a question on the law or procedure, Hepner’s one of my go-to people. He’s drafted important legislation, and has recently been focusing on the airline industry, labor issues, and a lot of the major antitrust litigation I've written about here, including the trials of the Meta-Within merger, the Microsoft-Activision acquisition and the Google monopolization case. You're in good hands.

And now, let’s talk the defense base. Here’s an exceptionally boring chart that involves all the money in the world. Welcome to the Pentagon.

One of the more important side stories to the recent wars in Ukraine and Israel, and competition with China over Taiwan, is that the U.S. defense industrial base, composed of 200k plus corporations, is being forced to actually build weapons again. Defense is big business, and since the end of the Cold War, the government has allowed Wall Street to determine who owns, builds, and profits from defense spending.

The consequences, as with much of our economic machinery, are predictable. Higher prices, worse quality, lower output. Wall Street and private equity firms prioritize cash out first, and that means a once functioning and nimble industrial base now produces more grift than anything else. As Lucas Kunce and I wrote for the American Conservative in 2019, the U.S. simply can’t build or get the equipment it needs. There are at this point a bevy of interesting reports coming out of the Pentagon. The last one I wrote up earlier this year showed that unlike the mid-20th century defense-industrial base, today government cash goes increasingly to stock buybacks rather than actual armaments. And now, with a dramatic upsurge in need for everything from missiles to artillery shells to bullets, we’re starting to see cracks in the vaunted U.S. military.

The signs are unmistakable. In Ukraine, fighters are rationing shells. Taiwan can’t get weapons it ordered years ago. The Pentagon has put together a secret team to scour stockpiles to find high-precision armaments in demand on every battlefield and potential battlefield. But the problem goes beyond national defense. In Lake City, Missouri, the largest small arms ammunition plant in the world has decided all ammo production is going to the military, meaning that there is going to be a domestic shortage for hunters, sportsmen, and maybe even police. This shortage may look like a story of a sudden surge in demand, but it’s actually, as Elle Ekman wrote in the Prospect in 2021, a story of consolidation and de-industrialization.

Surges due to wars aren’t new, and there’s always some time lag between the build-up and the delivery. But today, the lengths of time are weirdly long. For instance, the Army is awarding contracts to RTX and Lockheed Martin to build new Stinger missiles, which makes sense. But the process will take.. five years. Why? What is new is Wall Street’s role in weaponry. We used to have slack, and productive capacity, but then came private equity and mergers. And now we don’t. The government can’t actually solicit bids from multiple players for most major weapons systems, because there’s just one or two possible bidders. So that means there’s little incentive for firms to expand output, even if there’s more spending. Why not just raise price?

But don’t take my word for it, take that of the Pentagon. In 2022, the DOD reported that “that consolidation of the industrial base reduces competition for DOD contracts and leads DOD to rely on a more limited number of suppliers. This lack of competition may in turn increase the risk of supply chain gaps, price increases, reduced innovation, and other adverse effects.” And that’s why, more than a year into the Ukraine conflict, the ramp-up is still not where it needs to be.

This week, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which is a Congressional office charged with investigating problems in government and business, explained why. The GAO came out with a report on how the Pentagon is doing essentially zero oversight of Wall Street’s acquisitions of defense contractors. The title is as boring as you’d expect, designed to have few people pay attention, but offering a red-alert to procurement officials.

The report is simply jaw-dropping. Despite all the chatter about consolidation at high levels within the Pentagon, and in Congress, the bureaucracy has made essentially no progress whatsoever. For instance, we have a trillion dollar defense budget, but there are just two people in the Department of Defense who look at mergers in the defense base. You couldn’t staff the morning shift of a small coffee shop with that, and yet two people are supposed to look at the estimated four hundred mergers plus going on every year among defense contractors and subcontractors.

Four hundred mergers every year is a lot, but of course, that’s just an estimate. Why don’t we know how many acquisitions happen in the defense base? As it turns out, it’s an estimate because the Pentagon isn’t tracking defense mergers anymore. To put it in boring GAO-speak, Pentagon“officials could not say with certainty how many defense-related M&A now occur annually because they no longer track or maintain data on all M&A in the defense industrial base.” So the DOD is almost totally blind to the corporate owners of contractors and subcontractors, which might be one reason that, say, Chinese alloys are being discovered in sensitive weapons systems like the state of the art F-35.

It gets worse. There’s no policy or guidance on mergers, and DOD doesn’t even require contractors or subcontractors to tell them that there is new ownership when an acquisition occurs. In fact, the Pentagon relies on public news to learn of mergers. They often do not know that the mergers are going on, or that the Federal Trade Commission is reviewing them. When big mergers happen, even if the Pentagon is concerned, no one tracks what happens after it closes. They do no analysis of industry sectors, as their “M&A office is not collecting robust data or conducting recurring trend analyses that could help them identify M&A in risky areas of consolidation among defense suppliers.”

The Pentagon’s head-in-the-sand approach is why Lockheed now has a chokehold on nuclear missile modernization, since it bought the key supplier of rocket engines and denies those engines to rivals bidding for the contract to upgrade what is known as the nuclear triad.

So how does the U.S. government manage defense base mergers? Well, the Pentagon defers to the antitrust agencies to look solely at competition. “While DOD policy directs Industrial Base Policy and DOD stakeholders to assess other types of risks, such as national security and innovation risks,” wrote the GAO, “they have not routinely done so.” Basically, dealing with their own defense base is someone else’s job.

What I found most useful about the GAO report is the Pentagon’s response, a classic bureaucratic hand wave. The DOD agreed with all the conclusions of the GAO. It should track mergers and what happens afterwards, it should have more personnel doing so, it should consider national security aspects of corporate combinations, and it should have clear policy on mergers. But it doesn’t. The DOD says it will have a better strategy to deal with mergers… by 2024. Basically, you’re right, but it’s not our problem.

Every day, it seems like political leaders and consultants are saying it’s time to really get that arsenal of democracy going, and to re-industrialize for real. It’s quite possible to get a lot done. The FTC and DOJ now have significant amounts of national security-related information on mergers due to a Congressional change in pre-merger notification laws in 2022, so the DOD could easily do a better job of tracking what’s happening in the defense base.

More to the point, the Pentagon is very powerful. The Deputy Secretary of Defense, Kathleen Hicks could simply start smashing heads on competition and begin telling contractors that if they don’t shape up, she will start an internal war against them. Or the head of the Armed Services Committees could threaten the cushy cash flow that leads to record stock buybacks among contractors, if the ramp-up doesn’t start. Or they could grant antitrust authority for the DOD straight-up, which would rely on a national security standard that allows widespread corporate restructuring without the long slog of a court case. There are many paths.

But if you actually look at the guts of the bureaucracy, nothing is happening, because doing something about our industrial base means thwarting Wall Street, and that’s generally not something that’s considered on the table among normie policymakers. Giant bureaucracies are hard to change, but they are not immovable. One of the ways that you know a previously non-functional bureaucracy is on the right track is, ironically, if there is bitter infighting and anger among staff, who are being tasked to do things differently. But as the GAO showed this week, that’s just not happening in the Pentagon, or at least, not happening nearly fast enough.

And that’s why America is increasingly out of ammunition.

#military industrial complex #us military #nato #ukraine #israel #capitalism #economics #wall street #finance capitalism #finance capital #lockheed martin

7 notes · View notes

mostlysignssomeportents · 2 years

Text

The high cost of "self-funded" Democrats

It costs a lot to win a US election — even if it’s just a race for (formerly) low-stakes offices that have emerged as culture-war battlegrounds (like school and election boards). In the 12 years since Citizens United, the dark money firehose has turned many races into plute-on-plute economic warfare, where cash from the 1% matters far more than votes from the 99%.

Republicans have a structural advantage when it comes to moneyball elections, because they are the party of rich people (or, more specifically, the party of rich farmers who convince poor turkeys to vote for Christmas by appealing to racism, xenophobia, transphobia, homophobia, misogyny and other forms of bigotry).

It’s easy to make good on a campaign consisting of: “i) I will punish the people you hate and fear; ii) I will cut taxes for me and my rich pals; and iii) If governments were ever capable of doing good, that wisdom is lost to the ages, a forgotten art of a fallen civilization, like the secrets of pyramid-building. Today, the evil of governments is matched only by their incompetence.”

It’s really easy to govern incompetently, especially if you’re committed to defunding all the agencies that protect regular people so that you can save enough on your taxes to send your failsons to The Citadel at $35k/year.

For Democrats, this poses a problem. Decades of declining union membership (abetted, it must be noted, by Democratic leadership) has all but eliminated unions as a source of campaign funding and volunteers. But for the Democratic faction that wants the party to stand for the interest of the professional/managerial class, there is a solution: “decent” rich people who can self-fund their own campaigns.

This is a terrible idea, even by the standards of the Democrats’ neoliberal technocrat wing. The self-funded candidates who enter primary races are, at best, idiot dilletantes whose inherited wealth is derived from their having won a lottery by emerging from an extremely lucky orifice.

As Alexander Sammon writes for The American Prospect, party bosses love these fools because they are seen as bargains, candidates who won’t tax the party’s fundraising apparatus.

https://prospect.org/politics/democrats-self-funder-problem/

But there is a critical flaw in this logic: rich dilettantes make terrible candidates who lose elections to Republicans. Worse: because hereditary princelings can stay in primary races where they have no popular support, they can exhaust the fundraising resources of good candidates who can take must-win seats in the midterms.

Take Trudy Busch Valentine, the $215m scion of the Busch family, whose bid for the Dems’ Missouri senate nomination has been almost entirely funded out of her own pocket (85% of the $3m she’s spent came from her own bank account). She’s a really, really bad candidate. She can’t answer basic questions about a don’t-say-gay law:

https://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article263832082.html

She can’t answer questions about a ban on health-care for trans kids:

https://www.advocate.com/politics/2022/7/27/dem-missouri-senate-candidate-flubs-trans-rights-position

And she literally didn’t know what Citizens United was (you can’t make this shit up):

https://twitter.com/BoldProgressive/status/1553838749062135809

If she becomes the nominee, she will lose.

But worse, if she becomes the nominee, it will be because she’s her primary opponent, an anti-monopoly crusader Lucas Kunce, who actually could win, because he will campaign on issues that make a material difference to the lives of Missouri voters. Hell, even if Kunce beats her in the primary, he’ll go into the senate race with a supporter base whose modest funds have been depleted fighting off this disastrous “self-funder.”

The thing is, this Missouri Senate race is Democrats’ to lose. The GOP candidates are a clown car: there’s the Trump-endorsed (accused) wife-beater Eric Greitens, and the stunting Eric Schmitt (who wasted public money suing China over covid while serving as the state’s AG). A good Democratic candidate could deliver a badly needed Senate seat.

In Wisconsin, meanwhile, there’s another chaotic Democratic primary, spoiled by failson Alex Lasry (who inherited his wealth from his billionaire hedge-fund looter daddy) and Sarah Godlewski, another plute who has poured millions of her own money into her campaign, staying in the race despite the fact that nearly all of her support came from her.

Both Lasry and Godlewski dropped out of the primary after spending a combined $18.5m of their own money to attack and drain the coffers of Mandela Barnes, who never debated a real candidate and effectively ran unopposed by any serious contenders. As Sammon writes, “their effectively infinite cash kept them in the race much longer than they otherwise would have been, without ever building a meaningful constituency.”

In New York City, millionaire Carolyn Maloney is bidding for the 12th District House seat, presumably on the popular appeal of her heavy stake in an “eviction happy rental apartment complex” — surely a big vote-getter for the Democratic base:

https://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/nyc-pol-income-firm-evicts-struggling-tenants-article-1.3909463

In Michigan’s 5th District, Shri Thanedar has disgorged $5m from his own vast fortune despite his manifest weakness as a candidate; that money flushed out more Super PACs, including right-wing PACs (like United Democracy Project, a front for AIPAC) who’ve chummed the waters by dumping $5m more into the race.

We know how this turns out. The presidential bids of Michael Bloomberg, Howard Schultz and Tom Steyer demonstrate what should be obvious: dead-eyed billionaire wreckers and their fumbling, bumbling offspring are not popular with Democratic voters and will not win elections for Democrats. Bloomberg spent one billion dollars on his campaign and the only place he won was American Samoa, whose residents are denied votes in presidential elections.

And yet, self-funding continues to grow inside the Democratic party. Follow the Money’s report shows that between 2016 and 2018, the spending by self-funders in Democratic races rose from 4% of Democratic spending to 12% — $547.5m! It’s a sure thing that figure’s only gone up since:

https://www.followthemoney.org/research/institute-reports/self-funders-continue-to-falter

This will get worse. SCOTUS’s decision in FEC v Ted Cruz removed all limits from candidates ability to pocket their donors’ money to pay themselves back for the loans they make to their campaign, which allows billionaires to put millions into a campaign, then get other billionaires to bail them out with tax-free campaign donations.

This means that each member of America’s ruling class can serve as a one-person Citizens United, a dark money pool of their own making. It is another step on the road to government entirely run by centimillionaires and their orifice-lotto-winning larvae.

It’s not just that these are terrible candidates who will lose elections. It’s also that they will crowd out small-dollar-supported progressives like AOC, who campaign (and win) on popular issues that matter to and materially improve working peoples’ lives.

But of course, that’s the point.

#pluralistic

75 notes · View notes

sjerzgirl · 11 months

Text

Take the fist pumper down!

5 notes · View notes

ms-cellanies · 1 year

Link

Excellent article. Lucas Kunce sounds like the perfect person to challenge Hawley. Here’s a link to another article worth reading: https://www.advocate.com/politics/2023/1/06/dem-challenger-calls-sen-hawleys-obsession-masculinity-creepy

And you don’t want to miss this. Hawley has a new book coming out in May: Hawley’s book, “Manhood: The Masculine Virtues Americans Need.”

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/josh-hawley-book-manhood_n_62e2ca4ee4b006483a9b886a

And if you really need to upchuck here’s a link to the Hawley’s Podcast: https://joshhawley.com/podcast/.

#Josh Hawley #Hawleys podcast #truly creepy

3 notes · View notes

dontmeantobepoliticalbut · 2 years

Text

Mark McCloskey, the pro-Trump candidate who gained notoriety after he and his wife pointed guns at Black Lives Matter protesters outside their home, was trounced Tuesday in Missouri's Republican primary for the Senate.

Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt easily won the race. With most of the results in, he had more votes than his nearest two competitors—U.S. Representative Vicky Hartzler and scandal-ridden former Missouri Governor Eric Greitens—combined.

McCloskey, meanwhile, trailed in fifth place with just 3% of the vote.

In November, Schmitt will be opposed by beer heiress Trudy Busch Valentine, who defeated Marine veteran Lucas Kunce and nine others in the Democratic primary.

McCloskey had joined the crowded field of 21 Republicans running for GOP Senator Roy Blunt's seat after Blunt announced last year that he would not seek a third term.

All the candidates were Donald Trump supporters and 2020 election deniers. But in a final push for votes ahead of Tuesday's primary, McCloskey touted himself as the only "genuine MAGA" candidate after the former-President endorsed "Eric" in the race, despite three candidates in the race having that name.

"Apparently Donald Trump's endorsed all three of them," McCloskey said in a video posted on Twitter. "Well, my name is Mark McCloskey, and I can tell you one thing, there's one genuine MAGA, America first, strong border, law and order, real American patriot in this race, and that's me."

Newsweek contacted McCloskey's campaign for comment about the primary's results.

McCloskey and his wife, Patricia, gained national attention after they waved guns at protesters near their St. Louis home on June 28, 2020.

McCloskey emerged from his house with an AR-15-style rifle, while his wife waved a semi-automatic pistol, when demonstrators walked on their private street during protests prompted by the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. No shots were fired, and no one was hurt.

The couple were praised by Trump and other conservatives, and they spoke during the opening night speech at the 2020 Republican Convention.

The pair, both lawyers, have said they had felt threatened by the protesters, who were passing their home on their way to demonstrate in front of the mayor's house nearby. But special prosecutor Richard Callahan said his investigation determined the protesters were peaceful.

Both pleaded guilty to misdemeanors for the incident and were fined. Missouri's Republican Governor, Mike Parson, pardoned them last year.

In February, the Missouri Supreme Court put the couple on probation but allowed them to continue practicing law for another year. They must also provide 100 hours of free legal service.

#us politics #news #Newsweek #mark mccloskey #Mark and Patricia McCloskey #Missouri #2022 #2022 midterms #2022 elections #republican primary #gov. mike parson #2020 protests #conservatives #Republicans #gop

12 notes · View notes

gwydionmisha · 11 months

Link

#Josh Hawley #Construction of Masculinity #Jake Auchincloss #Lucas Kunce #News

2 notes · View notes

sataniccapitalist · 2 years

Link

2 notes · View notes

kp777 · 2 years

Text

By Kevin Robillard, Daniel Marans, Travis Waldron and Liz Skalka

Huffington Post

Aug 2, 2022

As midterm election season rolls on, primaries in Arizona, Missouri, Michigan and Washington state represent the latest chapter in the ideological battle among Democrats and yet another test of former President Donald Trump’s grip on the Republican Party.

Tuesday’s races include several that could have a major impact on the battle for Congress, including one in a swing House seat in Michigan and another to determine who will face Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) in a crucial Senate contest.

And two races in Arizona could eventually have a major impact on the 2024 presidential election, with devoted election deniers up for the GOP nominations for both governor and secretary of state.

Even by the outré standards of GOP primaries this cycle, the battle for the Republican nomination in Missouri has been chaotic, wacky and often disturbing. Every candidate with a chance has worked overtime to ingratiate themselves to Trump, hiring his former advisers and singing his praises relentlessly.

One candidate, Rep. Billy Long, laid out a plan to make Trump president again by convincing President Joe Biden to appoint him as vice president and has handed out fake $45 bills with Trump’s face on them. Another, gun-toting lawyer Mark McCloskey, falsely implied a Vanilla Ice performance at a county fair was in support of his campaign. Another, Rep. Vicky Hartzler, was apparently shunned by Trump for saying his behavior on Jan. 6, 2021, was “unpresidential,” even though she voted against certifying the election.

Ultimately, Trump’s endorsement came down to two men: former Gov. Eric Greitens and state Attorney General Eric Schmitt. Greitens, in a normal political era, would be persona non grata: He has been credibly accused of sexual and domestic abuse. He angled aggressively for Trump’s endorsement, hiring Kimberly Guilfoyle, who is Donald Trump Jr.’s girlfriend, as a top aide. Schmitt, by contrast, is a run-of-mill Republican ― something that, at this point, does mean embracing Trump’s lies about the 2020 election.

Republican donors in Missouri, fearing Greitens could cost them a seat, have funded a super PAC called Show Me Values PAC that has spent $6 million on ads attacking Greitens, including one in which a female narrator reads aloud from an affidavit filed by Greitens’ ex-wife.

youtube

That’s led to a turnaround in the polls: While Greitens has led for most of the race, most recent surveys show Schmitt pulling into the lead. The only remaining variable was Trump’s endorsement. And on Monday night, he delivered it.

“I trust the Great People of Missouri, on this one, to make up their own minds, much as they did when they gave me landslides victories in the 2016 and 2020 Elections, and I am therefore proud to announce that ERIC has my Complete and Total Endorsement!,” he wrote.

Both Erics claimed the endorsement.

While Missouri is solidly red at this point, Democrats do have a contested primary of their own. The race pits Lucas Kunce, a Marine veteran and antitrust expert who is running a class-focused progressive campaign, against Trudy Busch Valentine, an heiress to the beer fortune who has run as a more mainstream Democrat.

Kunce, with his broadsides against corporate consolidation, willingness to deploy salty language and some big-name endorsements ― including from Missouri native and Mad Men star Jon Hamm and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) ― has received far more media attention. But Busch Valentine has a familiar last name and loaned her campaign $3 million to deploy television ads. There’s been only sporadic polling in the race, but the campaigns expect a tight contest.