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mostlysignssomeportents · 10 months

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Why they're smearing Lina Khan

My god, they sure hate Lina Khan. This once-in-a-generation, groundbreaking, brilliant legal scholar and fighter for the public interest, the slayer of Reaganomics, has attracted more vitriol, mockery, and dismissal than any of her predecessors in living memory.

She sure must be doing something right, huh?

A quick refresher. In 2017, Khan — then a law student — published Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox in the Yale Law Journal. It was a brilliant, blistering analysis showing how the Reagan-era theory of antitrust (which celebrates monopolies as “efficient”) had failed on its own terms, using Amazon as Exhibit A of the ways in which post-Reagan antitrust had left Americans vulnerable to corporate abuse:

https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox

The paper sent seismic shocks through both legal and economic circles, and goosed the neo-Brandeisian movement (sneeringly dismissed as “hipster antitrust”). This movement is a rebuke to Reaganomics, with its celebration of monopolies, trickle-down, offshoring, corporate dark money, revolving-door regulatory capture, and companies that are simultaneously too big to fail and too big to jail.

This movement has many proponents, of course — not just Khan — but Khan’s careful scholarship, combined with her encyclopedic knowledge of the long-dormant statutory powers that federal agencies had to make change, and a strategy for reviving those powers to protect Americans from corporate predators made her a powerful, inspirational figure.

When Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election, he surprised everyone by appointing Khan to the FTC. It wasn’t just that she had such a radical vision — it was also that she lacked the usual corporate law experience that such an appointee would normally require (experience that would ensure that the FTC was helmed by people whose default view of the world is that it should be structured and regulated by powerful, wealthy people in corporate boardrooms).

Even more surprising was that Khan was made chair of the FTC, something that was only possible because a few Republican Senators broke with their party to support her candidacy:

https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1171/vote_117_1_00233.htm

These Republicans saw in Khan an ally in their fight against “woke” Big Tech. For these senators, the problem wasn’t that tech had got too big and powerful — it was that there were a few limited instances in which tech leaders failed to wield that power in the ways they preferred.

The Republican project is a matter of getting turkeys to vote for Christmas by doing a lot of culture war bullshit, cruelly abusing disfavored sexual and racial minorities. This wins support from low-information voters who’ll vote against their class interests and support more monopolies, more tax cuts for the rich, and more cuts to the services they rely on.

But while tech leaders are 100% committed to the project of permanent oligarchic takeover of every sphere of American life, they are less full-throated in their support for hateful, cruel discrimination against disfavored minorities (in this regard, tech leaders resemble the corporate wing of the Democrats, which is where we get the “Silicon Valley is a Democratic Party stronghold” narrative).

This failure to unquestioningly and unstintingly back culture war bullshit put tech leaders in the GOP’s crosshairs. Some GOP politicians actually believe in the culture war bullshit, and are grossly offended that tech is “woke.” Others are smart enough not to get high on their own supply, but worry that any tech obstruction in the bullshit culture wars will make it harder to get sufficient turkey votes for a big fat Christmas surprise.

Biden’s ceding of antitrust policy to the left wing of the party, combined with disaffected GOP senators viewing Khan as their enemy’s enemy, led to Khan’s historic appointment as FTC Chair. In that position, she was joined by a slate of Biden trustbusters, including Jonathan Kanter at the DoJ Antitrust Division, Tim Wu at the White House, and other important, skilled and principled fighters like Alvaro Bedoya (FTC), Rebecca Slaughter (FTC), Rohit Chopra (CFPB), and many others.

Crucially, these new appointees weren’t just principled, they were good at their jobs. In 2021, Tim Wu wrote an executive order for Biden that laid out 72 concrete ways in which the administration could act — with no further Congressional authorization — to blunt corporate power and insulate the American people from oligarchs’ abusive and extractive practices:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down

Since then, the antitrust arm of the Biden administration have been fuckin’ ninjas, Getting Shit Done in ways large and small, working — for the first time since Reagan — to protect Americans from predatory businesses:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

This is in marked contrast to the corporate Dems’ champions in the administration. People like Pete Buttigieg are heralded as competent technocrats, “realists” who are too principled to peddle hopium to the base, writing checks they can’t cash. All this is cover for a King Log performance, in which Buttigieg’s far-reaching regulatory authority sits unused on a shelf while a million Americans are stranded over Christmas and whole towns are endangered by greedy, reckless rail barons straight out of the Gilded Age:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

The contrast between the Biden trustbusters and their counterparts from the corporate wing is stark. While the corporate wing insists that every pitch is outside of the zone, Khan and her allies are swinging for the stands. They’re trying to make life better for you and me, by declaring commercial surveillance to be an unfair business practice and thus illegal:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/12/regulatory-uncapture/#conscious-uncoupling

And by declaring noncompete “agreements” that shackle good workers to shitty jobs to be illegal:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/02/its-the-economy-stupid/#neofeudal

And naturally, this has really pissed off all the right people: America’s billionaires and their cheerleaders in the press, government, and the hive of scum and villainy that is the Big Law/thinktank industrial-complex.

Take the WSJ: since Khan took office, they have published 67 vicious editorials attacking her and her policies. Khan is living rent-free in Rupert Murdoch’s head. Not only that, he’s given her the presidential suite! You love to see it.

These attacks are worth reading, if only to see how flimsy and frivolous they are. One major subgenre is that Khan shouldn’t be bringing any action against Amazon, because her groundbreaking scholarship about the company means she has a conflict of interest. Holy moly is this a stupid thing to say. The idea that the chair of an expert agency should recuse herself because she is an expert is what the physicists call not even wrong.

But these attacks are even more laughable due to who they’re coming from: people who have the most outrageous conflicts of interest imaginable, and who were conspicuously silent for years as the FTC’s revolving door admitted the a bestiary of swamp-creatures so conflicted it’s a wonder they managed to dress themselves in the morning.

Writing in The American Prospect, David Dayen runs the numbers:

Since the late 1990s, 31 out of 41 top FTC officials worked directly for a company that has business before the agency, with 26 of them related to the technology industry.

https://prospect.org/economy/2023-06-23-attacks-lina-khans-ethics-reveal-projection/

Take Christine Wilson, a GOP-appointed FTC Commissioner who quit the agency in a huff because Khan wanted to do things for the American people, and not their self-appointed oligarchic princelings. Wilson wrote an angry break-up letter to Khan that the WSJ published, presaging their concierge service for Samuel Alito:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-im-resigning-from-the-ftc-commissioner-ftc-lina-khan-regulation-rule-violation-antitrust-339f115d

For Wilson to question Khan’s ethics took galactic-scale chutzpah. Wilson, after all, is a commissioner who took cash money from Bristol-Myers Squibb, then voted to approve their merger with Celgene:

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4365601-Wilson-Christine-Smith-final278.html

Or take Wilson’s GOP FTC predecessor Josh Wright, whose incestuous relationship with the companies he oversaw at the Commission are so intimate he’s practically got a Habsburg jaw. Wright went from Google to the US government and back again four times. He also lobbied the FTC on behalf of Qualcomm (a major donor to Wright’s employer, George Mason’s Antonin Scalia Law School) after working “personally and substantially” while serving at the FTC.

George Mason’s Scalia center practically owns the revolving door, counting fourteen FTC officials among its affliates:

https://campaignforaccountability.org/ttp-investigation-big-techs-backdoor-to-the-ftc/

Since the 1990s, 31 out of 41 top FTC officials — both GOP appointed and appointees backed by corporate Dems — “worked directly for a company that has business before the agency”:

https://www.citizen.org/article/ftc-big-tech-revolving-door-problem-report/

The majority of FTC and DoJ antitrust lawyers who served between 2014–21 left government service and went straight to work for a Big Law firm, serving the companies they’d regulated just a few months before:

https://therevolvingdoorproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/The-Revolving-Door-In-Federal-Antitrust-Enforcement.pdf

Take Deborah Feinstein, formerly the head of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition, now a partner at Arnold & Porter, where she’s represented General Electric, NBCUniversal, Unilever, and Pepsi and a whole medicine chest’s worth of pharma giants before her former subordinates at the FTC. Michael Moiseyev who was assistant manager of FTC Competition is now in charge of mergers at Weil Gotshal & Manges, working for Microsoft, Meta, and Eli Lilly.

There’s a whole bunch more, but Dayen reserves special notice for Andrew Smith, Trump’s FTC Consumer Protection boss. Before he was put on the public payroll, Smith represented 120 clients that had business before the Commission, including “nearly every major bank in America, drug industry lobbyist PhRMA, Uber, Equifax, Amazon, Facebook, Verizon, and a variety of payday lenders”:

https://www.citizen.org/sites/default/files/andrew_smith_foia_appeal_response_11_30.pdf

Before Khan, in other words, the FTC was a “conflict-of-interest assembly line, moving through corporate lawyers and industry hangers-on without resistance for decades.”

Khan is the first FTC head with no conflicts. This leaves her opponents in the sweaty, desperate position of inventing conflicts out of thin air.

For these corporate lickspittles, Khan’s “conflict” is that she has a point of view. Specifically, she thinks that the FTC should do its job.

This makes grifters like Jim Jordan furious. Yesterday, Jordan grilled Khan in a hearing where he accused her of violating an ethics official’s advice that she should recuse herself from Big Tech cases. This is a talking point that was created and promoted by Bloomberg:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-16/ftc-rejected-ethics-advice-for-khan-recusal-on-meta-case

That ethics official, Lorielle Pankey, did not, in fact, make this recommendation. It’s simply untrue (she did say that Khan presiding over cases that she has made public statements about could be used as ammo against her, but did not say that it violated any ethical standard).

But there’s more to this story. Pankey herself has a gigantic conflict of interest in this case, including a stock portfolio with $15,001 and $50,000 in Meta stock (Meta is another company that has whined in print and in its briefs that it is a poor defenseless lamb being picked on by big, mean ole Lina Khan):

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ethics-official-owned-meta-stock-while-recommending-ftc-chair-recuse-herself-from-meta-case-8582a83b

Jordan called his hearing on the back of this fake scandal, and then proceeded to show his whole damned ass, even as his GOP colleagues got into a substantive and even informative dialog with Khan:

https://prospect.org/power/2023-07-14-jim-jordan-misfires-attacks-lina-khan/

Mostly what came out of that hearing was news about how Khan is doing her job, working on behalf of the American people. For example, she confirmed that she’s investigating OpenAI for nonconsensually harvesting a mountain of Americans’ personal information:

https://www.ft.com/content/8ce04d67-069b-4c9d-91bf-11649f5adc74

Other Republicans, including confirmed swamp creatures like Matt Gaetz, ended up agreeing with Khan that Amazon Ring is a privacy dumpster-fire. Nobodies like Rep TomM assie gave Khan an opening to discuss how her agency is protecting mom-and-pop grocers from giant, price-gouging, greedflation-drunk national chains. Jeff Van Drew gave her a chance to talk about the FTC’s war on robocalls. Lance Gooden let her talk about her fight against horse doping.

But Khan’s opponents did manage to repeat a lot of the smears against her, and not just the bogus conflict-of-interest story. They also accused her of being 0–4 in her actions to block mergers, ignoring the huge number of mergers that have been called off or not initiated because M&A professionals now understand they can no longer expect these mergers to be waved through. Indeed, just last night I spoke with a friend who owns a medium-sized tech company that Meta tried to buy out, only to withdraw from the deal because their lawyers told them it would get challenged at the FTC, with an uncertain outcome.

These talking points got picked up by people commenting on Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley’s ruling against the FTC in the Microsoft-Activision merger. The FTC was seeking an injunction against the merger, and Corley turned them down flat. The ruling was objectively very bad. Start with the fact that Corley’s son is a Microsoft employee who stands reap massive gains in his stock options if the merger goes through.

But beyond this (real, non-imaginary, not manufactured conflict of interest), Corley’s judgment and her remarks in court were inexcusably bad, as Matt Stoller writes:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/judge-rules-for-microsoft-mergers

In her ruling, Corley explained that she didn’t think Microsoft would abuse the market dominance they’d gain by merging their giant videogame platform and studio with one of its largest competitors. Why not? Because Microsoft’s execs pinky-swore that they wouldn’t abuse that power.

Corely’s deference to Microsoft’s corporate priorities goes deeper than trusting its execs, though. In denying the FTC’s motion, she stated that it would be unfair to put the merger on hold in order to have a full investigation into its competition implications because Microsoft and Activision had set a deadline of July 18 to conclude things, and Microsoft would have to pay a penalty if that deadline passed.

This is surreal: a judge ruled that a corporation’s radical, massive merger shouldn’t be subject to full investigation because that corporation itself set an arbitrary deadline to conclude the deal before such an investigation could be concluded. That’s pretty convenient for future mega-mergers — just set a short deadline and Judge Corely will tell regulators that the merger can’t be investigated because the deadline is looming.

And this is all about the future. As Stoller writes, Microsoft isn’t exactly subtle about why it wants this merger. Its own execs said that the reason they were spending “dump trucks” of money buying games studios was to “spend Sony out of business.”

Now, maybe you hate Sony. Maybe you hate Activision. There’s plenty of good reason to hate both — they’re run by creeps who do shitty things to gamers and to their employees. But if you think that Microsoft will be better once it eliminates its competition, then you have the attention span of a goldfish on Adderall.

Microsoft made exactly the same promises it made on Activision when it bought out another games studio, Zenimax — and it broke every one of those promises.

Microsoft has a long, long, long history of being a brutal, abusive monopolist. It is a convicted monopolist. And its bad conduct didn’t end with the browser wars. You remember how the lockdown turned all our homes into rent-free branch offices for our employers? Microsoft seized on that moment to offer our bosses keystroke-and-click level surveillance of our use of our own computers in our own homes, via its Office365 bossware product:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/25/the-peoples-amazon/#clippys-revenge

If you think a company that gave your boss a tool to spy on their employees and rank them by “productivity” as a prelude to firing them or cutting their pay is going to treat gamers or game makers well once they have “spent the competition out of business,” you’re a credulous sucker and you are gonna be so disappointed.

The enshittification play is obvious: use investor cash to make things temporarily nice for customers and suppliers, lock both of them in — in this case, it’s with a subscription-based service similar to Netflix’s — and then claw all that value back until all that’s left is a big pile of shit.

The Microsoft case is about the future. Judge Corely doesn’t take the future seriously: as she said during the trial, “All of this is for a shooter videogame.” The reason Corely greenlit this merger isn’t because it won’t be harmful — it’s because she doesn’t think those harms matter.

But it does, and not just because games are an art form that generate billions of dollars, employ a vast workforce, and bring pleasure to millions. It also matters because this is yet another one of the Reaganomic precedents that tacitly endorses monopolies as efficient forces for good. As Stoller writes, Corley’s ruling means that “deal bankers are sharpening pencils and saying ‘Great, the government lost! We can get mergers through everywhere else.’ Basically, if you like your high medical prices, you should be cheering on Microsoft’s win today.”

Ronald Reagan’s antitrust has colonized our brains so thoroughly that commentators were surprised when, immediately after the ruling, the FTC filed an appeal. Don’t they know they’ve lost? the commentators said:

https://gizmodo.com/ftc-files-appeal-of-microsoft-activision-deal-ruling-1850640159

They echoed the smug words of insufferable Activision boss Mike Ybarra: “Your tax dollars at work.”

https://twitter.com/Qwik/status/1679277251337277440

But of course Khan is appealing. The only reason that’s surprising is that Khan is working for us, the American people, not the giant corporations the FTC is supposed to be defending us from. Sure, I get that this is a major change! But she needs our backing, not our cheap cynicism.

The business lobby and their pathetic Renfields have hoarded all the nice things and they don’t want us to have any. Khan and her trustbuster colleagues want the opposite. There is no measure so small that the corporate world won’t have a conniption over it. Take click to cancel, the FTC’s perfectly reasonable proposal that if you sign up for a recurring payment subscription with a single click, you should be able to cancel it with a single click.

The tooth-gnashing and garment-rending and scenery-chewing over this is wild. America’s biggest companies have wheeled out their biggest guns, claiming that if they make it too easy to unsubscribe, they will lose money. In other words, they are currently making money not because people want their products, but because it’s too hard to stop paying for them!

https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/12/ftc_cancel_subscriptions/

We shouldn’t have to tolerate this sleaze. And if we back Khan and her team, they’ll protect us from these scams. Don’t let them convince you to give up hope. This is the start of the fight, not the end. We’re trying to reverse 40 years’ worth of Reagonmics here. It won’t happen overnight. There will be setbacks. But keep your eyes on the prize — this is the most exciting moment for countering corporate power and giving it back to the people in my lifetime. We owe it to ourselves, our kids and our planet to fight one.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/14/making-good-trouble/#the-peoples-champion

[Image ID: A line drawing of pilgrims ducking a witch tied to a ducking stool. The pilgrims' clothes have been emblazoned with the logos for the WSJ, Microsoft, Activision and Blizzard. The witch's face has been replaced with that of FTC chair Lina M Khan.]

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republicansaredomesticterrorists · 1 year

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Without a mandated vaccine the military will be incapacitated by a massive number of Covid cases. That is what Russian oligarchs want, that is why they buy Republikkkan politicians.

When you join the military you are required to literally every vaccine known to humankind and then even more if you deploy out of the country. George Washington began the practice during the War for Independence.

Republikkkans are all about feeding red meat to the base and they don’t care how many suffer or die or what damage is done to the country by their reckless actions. Very few current Republikkkan politicians have ever served and with each passing generation fewer and fewer rural Confederates serve. Repubs and rednecks think they control the military but in fact it’s always been predominantly working class urban whites from the north until Vietnam in the 60’s and 70’s. Since Vietnam it’s been a mix of those blue collar urban whites and “minorities.” Non-whites serve in numbers far greater than their percentage of the population. Further it’s estimated that 75% of military members vote Democratic.

What we are seeing in regards to refusing Covid vaccinations isn’t going to end with just that disease. The deplorable MAGA’s are already refusing ALL vaccinations. There have been polio outbreaks and there currently is a large measles outbreak here in the US. Some of these may start with unvaccinated immigrants, as Repubs claim, but diseases are taking root with poor white southern and rural Republikkkan conspiracy theorists and ignorant MAGA’s. This all began in the UK in 1996 when that crackpot doctor started the vaccines create autism hoax. Even though it’s been debunked and he admitted he fabricated it, it has taken route with the poorly educated crowd. Again southern and rural communities have had their educational systems plundered for decades by Republikkkan politicians and billionaires with for profit charter schools (DeVos et al).

So many of us on the left never dig deeper than the surface, that is they choose politicians based on personality or identity politics, I’ll vote for the person who belongs to my group or is a strong ally of my group. When you scratch below the surface and begin doing opposition research you’ll find that the Republikkkans are running a highly effective and hierarchical political machine. The Republikkkan party or GOP is a tool of the top 2% and big multinational businesses. They have been running the most sophisticated and organized political organization since the late 70’s that the world has ever seen. Billionaires and corporations have a vast network of right-wing foundations that fund everything most of you are against. They panicked when Hillary try to exposed this “vast right-wing conspiracy” and labeled her nuts which eventually took root in the American psyche. Today there are articles, books, documentaries, and even college courses that examine this vast right-wing conspiracy.

Ted Cruz, MTG, BoBo, Graham, etc are secretly planning a campaign against you. They are literally given legislation to introduce into Congress by the Koch and Walton families to name a few. They are given daily talking points and daily targets. Their “celebrity personalities” and media outlets are telegraphing the exact same messages, often word for word, every single day. Koch, Walton, etc pay an army of conservative lawyers and scholars to write and disseminate things they want made into law or policy. For decades the NRA has been paying a small army of lawyers to create a base of litigation that can be called upon as case history in future cases in front of higher courts. Occasionally they give the base some culture war things like expanding access to guns or banning abortion but that is just to keep the masses voting for Republikkkans. Their ultimate goal is unrestrained capitalism with legislation that preserves, protects, and expands their ability to amass wealth and power. In a few decades they will remake America into a clone of Brazil where the wealthy live in luxury inside gated compounds while the rest of us are literal peasants living in poverty and disease in favelas on the outskirts of society.

Do your own research. You can begin by googling ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council), the Federalist Society, and the Heritage Foundation to name a few. It’s a non-stop 24/7/365 war against Dems, unions, the poor, the middle class, the working class, people of color, lgbt, the handicapped, intellectuals, urban dwellers, coastal elites, immigrants, Jews/Catholics/Muslims and any non-evangelical or Protestant religion and many more groups.

This last part is a hard truth. While the Nazism, racism, discrimination, dominionism, and general bigotry and hatred is very real-it is not their ultimate agenda. Their ultimate goal is the accumulation of wealth and power at any cost. The bigotry and culture war nonsense are just tools to create an army of Republikkkan voters, foot soldiers for the right-wing. The Republikkkan politicians, deplorable racists, rural deploranles, militias, conspiracy theorists, and garden variety red state hicks are just pawns, tools, a means to an end. Multimillionaires, billionaires, and corporations only care about the color green. Don’t let them divide us with their lies and propaganda. Follow the money.

This is a war. We must defeat their pawns in elections, battle their foot soldiers in the streets, and most importantly prevent the oligarchs from buying our government.

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 3 months

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Matt. Wuerker

* * * *

Trump's NATO comments reverberate across Europe.

February 13, 2024

ROBERT B. HUBBELL

Trump's anti-NATO comments over the weekend have focused attention on US foreign policy commitments. At a meeting of the EU on Monday, Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski reminded a reporter that the NATO treaty’s “mutual defense” provision has been invoked only once—to assist the United States after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. As reported in Politico,

Referring directly to Trump's comments, Sikorski underlined that “the [NATO] alliance is not a security agency,” stressing that NATO allies came to America's aid after the September 11 attacks and that Poland fought alongside U.S. troops in Afghanistan. “We didn't send the bill to Washington,” he said.

Dozens of readers posted Comments and sent emails noting that it is beyond hypocritical for Trump to pretend that timely payment of bills is grounds for abandoning an ally. Trump famously stiffs every lawyer, contractor, service provider, and vendor possible, leaving a string of unpaid debts and collection lawsuits in his wake.

Many major media outlets continued coverage of Trump's statement, notably the NYTimes, which ran a front-page “news analysis” titled, “Trump Steps Up, Helping Biden Just When the President Needs Him,” and a second story highlighting Trump's attack on Nikki Haley’s husband, Major Mike Haley, “Defending Troops, Haley Says Golf Course Is Closest Trump Has Come to Combat.”

The thesis of the Times coverage is that Trump consistently draws attention away from Biden’s age by injecting Trump's recklessness into the political equation. Per the Times news analysis,

The stunner from Mr. Trump over the weekend not only drew attention away from the president’s memory problems, as detailed in a special counsel report, but also provided a convenient way for Mr. Biden’s defenders to reframe the issue: Yes, they could now say, the incumbent may be an old man who sometimes forgets things, but his challenger is both aging and dangerously reckless. It was not the first time, nor likely will it be the last, that Mr. Trump has stepped up when an adversary was in trouble to provide an escape route with an ill-considered howler of his own. Mr. Trump’s lifelong appetite for attention has often collided with his evident best interest.

For Mr. Biden, that may be the key to this year’s campaign, banking on his opponent’s inability to stay silent at critical moments and hoping that he keeps reminding voters why they rejected him in 2020.

But Trump's dangerous views on foreign policy are not mere campaign fodder. They have infected his party, which is looking for a way to kill aid for Ukraine.

As the Senate moves closer to a final vote on supplemental funding for Ukraine and Israel, Speaker Mike Johnson preemptively rejected the bill because—wait for it—the foreign aid bill does not include US immigration reform and border security provisions!! See The Hill, Speaker Johnson fires warning shot as Senate prepares to vote on Ukraine aid

In case you have forgotten, Trump ordered congressional Republicans to kill a prior version of the aid bill that included immigration reform and border security provisions. Because of Trump's opposition to immigration reform and enhanced border security, GOP Senators voted down the combined bill.

Now that the Senate is sending a bill with foreign aid only, Speaker Mike Johnson is playing the legislative version of the “rope-a-dope” gambit where the American people and Ukraine are the victims of a bad-faith delaying strategy.

While foreign policy rarely plays a decisive role in US presidential campaigns, Trump's threat to abandon NATO and encourage Russian aggression deserves the attention of every American who values global stability. If Ukrainian soldiers cannot contain Russia’s expansionism, the next country in Putin’s sights will be Poland—a NATO member.

[Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter]

#Robert B. Hubbell #Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter #NATO #war in Ukraine #NATO allies #MAGA Gop

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realcleverissues · 1 year

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abortion logic

I’m pro-choice. Fetuses are not people, and forcing people to give birth produces horrible life outcomes for both the adults and the child. The current abortion bans (like most of GOP policy) is just terrible.

That said...

I don’t understand why some conservatives make exceptions for rape or incest.

Obviously we all know that both of those are horrible things... but I don’t understand why some conservatives allow that as an exception if their belief is that abortion is murder. It's just terribly inconsistent:

If the idea is that a child of incest may not be healthy, then they should be fine with women aborting children with other health issues - but they very much aren’t, which is why women now are being forced to carry fetuses with horrible deformities and which have zero chance of survival.

And if the idea is that a woman pregnant from rape shouldn’t have to endure the mental and material hardships of having the child of rape, then why doesn’t the mental and material hardship from other pregnancy situations matter as well? **

Personally, I think they know that it’s inconsistent, but they also know that their abortion views are generally unpopular and would be even more unpopular and transparently evil if they didn’t make the exceptions. But the reality is the same: Forcing people to give birth is bad.

So while I utterly hate the anti-abortion positions, even more as they become more extreme, I can at least have some sort of respect for consistency among those who want no exceptions. They’re honest. They’re consistent. Let the GOP be that honest and consistent and then let people vote on which ideology makes more sense to them.

**p.s. One possible reason: Conservatives LOVE the idea of forcing people to be “responsible”, to pick themselves up by their own bootstraps and deal with all outcomes of their own making. Including pregnancy (thus the exceptions for rape and incest, which were not choices). And of course, those are important ideas. Responsibility is important. But it also ignores the reality that many situations are literally too much for one person to handle, that we all make mistakes, that life throws us curveballs, that as a species we have survived by working together, and that sometimes the best way to help is to actually help and not force someone to drown in their woes. But they apparently disagree.

#abortion #conservatism

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schraubd · 1 year

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Endless Stunt Investigations is All the House GOP Will Do, Because It's All They Can Agree Upon

Having finally secured his chair as House Speaker, Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has given his caucus marching orders -- and those orders are "do nothing but launch petty performative investigations of the Biden administration".

Kevin McCarthy has told House Republicans to treat every committee like the Oversight panel — that is, use every last bit of authority to dig into the Biden administration. That work begins in earnest this week.

Several sprawling probes — largely directed at President Joe Biden, his family and his administration — set the stage for a series of legal and political skirmishes between the two sides of Pennsylvania Avenue. It’s all with an eye on the true battle, the 2024 election, as Biden flirts with a reelection run and House Republicans hope to expand their control to the White House.

After two impeachments of former President Donald Trump and a select committee that publicly detailed his every last move to unsuccessfully overturn the 2020 election results, GOP lawmakers are eager to turn the spotlight. And their conservative base is hoping for fireworks, calling on Republican leaders to grill several Biden world figures, including Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, retired chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci and presidential son Hunter Biden.

This isn't at all surprising, of course. In fact, it was probably inevitable after the Speaker vote fiasco exposed just how bitterly divided the GOP is (and how in thrall it is to its nihilist caucus). They're never going to forward an affirmative policy agenda, since they can't agree on any particulars beyond sloganeering (and also, policies tend to require money, which the GOP adamantly refuses to raise or spend unless it is on gut-busting upper-bracket tax cuts). But investigations? That doesn't require any policy agenda at all -- that's just mugging for the camera and talking about how much they hate Democrats. Right in their wheelhouse!

That the GOP is still nursing ludicrous levels of grievance over the terrible unfairness of a House panel exposing why coups are bad only exacerbates their belief that this is naught but turnabout being fair play. And as the New York Times reported the other day, the GOP's view of "investigations" is to take it as a divine axiom that they and theirs are being abused, then pursue that axiom to hell and back no matter how little evidence ends up supporting the proposition.

So this is entirely within expectations for the new GOP House. Expect nothing but loud yelling investigations for two years as they throw everything they can at a wall and wait for something to stick. They don't agree on or even believe in anything else, but they can agree on doing that.

via The Debate Link https://ift.tt/k46hDip

#Biden administration #ethics reform #GOP #House of Representatives #Kevin McCarthy #Republicans

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dontmeantobepoliticalbut · 1 year

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When Kevin McCarthy was just a handful of votes from becoming House Speaker, he promised a lot of wacky stuff to right-wing holdouts, from investigatory rabbit holes to rules changes to votes on legislation so bad or unpopular it would normally never see the light of day. In that last category, McCarthy promised Georgia congressman Earl “Buddy” Carter that he would hold a floor vote on a version of the “Fair Tax” proposal that has been kicking around the conservative fever swamps since the early aughts, when Atlanta talk-show host Neal Boortz popularized the concept and talked some politicians into promoting it. Carter loyally backed McCarthy, and all of the Speaker-vote holdouts joined in his call for a floor vote on his bill, reflecting its popularity in the House Freedom Caucus.

The basic idea is to replace today’s federal taxes — income taxes, estate taxes, Social Security payroll taxes, corporate taxes, even gift taxes — with a single federal sales tax. It would obviously have to be set at very high rates, at least 30%, by most estimates, to offset the revenue lost from ending the other taxes. Carter’s proposal would include “prebates,” i.e. federal payments to low-income households, to reduce the impact of a high tax on living essentials. But there’s no way to make this sort of tax system anything other than a large boon to people with income and wealth far beyond what they need to live on, which if saved or invested would remain tax free. That’s why the Fair Tax has a perpetual fan base among consumers of right-wing talk and grassroots conservative activists. Because of Boortz’s role in promoting the scheme, it has become something of a Pet Rock for Georgia Republicans in the House, where Carter has picked up the torch originally carried by veteran conservative lawmaker John Linder.

Proponents of the Fair Tax boast that it would lead to the abolition of most of the federal tax code and of the Internal Revenue Service, making April 15 just another day (albeit another day of very high taxes on sales). But there’s another wrinkle that makes the Fair Tax not just wildly regressive but extremely risky in the unlikely event it were ever enacted, as The Bulwark’s Jim Swift explains:

“To ensure that the legislation actually replaces rather than adds to existing taxes, [Carter’s] bill includes a provision that the new tax would expire in seven years if the Sixteenth Amendment, which allows for federal income taxes, is not repealed. (Keen-eyed readers will notice that this creates the bizarre possibility of federal tax revenue going down to zero after seven years, if income taxes are not collected but the Sixteenth Amendment remains on the books.)”

Anyone familiar with how hard it is to enact constitutional amendments will be alarmed at this provision. Then again, for all its popularity among regular folks who think of themselves as virtuous tightwads, the Fair Tax has never been taken very seriously in Washington, even among conservatives. Yes, 2008 presidential candidate Mike Huckabee campaigned on it, and it has always hung around the margins of public policy like a recurring nightmare. But the more moderate Republicans hate it as a seductive but unworkable scheme that would brand the GOP as the party of high sales taxes rather than the party that wants to keep all taxes as low as possible.

Democrats, of course, are eager to hear a lot more about Republican support for the Fair Tax, as Joseph Zeballos-Roig of Semafor observes:

“Outside the deepest trenches of conservatism, a 30% sales tax is mostly seen as an obvious political loser. Democrats, for their part, can hardly seem to believe their luck that their opponents might attach themselves to it.

‘Great idea,’ Biden deadpanned during a speech Monday. ‘It would raise taxes on the middle class by taxing thousands of everyday items from groceries to gas, while cutting taxes for the wealthiest Americans.’”

You’d normally figure the Fair Tax chestnut would get buried in the Ways and Means Committee with a lot of other tax-policy proposals that won’t see the light of day in the Senate. But McCarthy promised Carter and his friends a floor vote. The question is how long he can delay the fulfillment of that promise and whether putting it on the back burner risks a grassroots rebellion from the kind of people who consider progressive taxation deeply immoral. It’s one of many calculations McCarthy will have to make to get through the next two years without losing his gavel to a motion to vacate the chair and without creating too much campaign fodder for Democrats.

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qqueenofhades · 2 years

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Why are conservatives at the point of global warming denial and spreading Sandy Hook conspiracy theories?

Er, "at the point of?" They've been denying climate change for literal decades, ever since it entered the public consciousness as an organised concept. (They have now largely switched to "your personal actions are responsible for climate change, and not those blameless mega-corporations," but yes.) And the Sandy Hook conspiracy theories, reprehensible as they are, are largely the work of one person/entity, aka Alex Jones/Infowars. He has been spreading them for ten years, ever since the shooting in 2012, and now is finally on the point of getting the bejesus sued out of him by the bereaved families. And frankly, I hope they run him into the ground, take everything he has, and then back the truck up and do it again. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

What this means, in other words, is that neither of these positions are particularly new, and in the case of Sandy Hook, are largely spread by one person. However, this reflects the paranoid conspiracy thinking that has become a hallmark of modern "conservatism," from claiming that 9/11 was an inside job to, of course, the Big Lie about the 2020 election. In this mindset, you can never have lost fairly or on the merits of your ideas; it must be because nefarious opposing forces colluded to cheat you. It's the "do your own research!" mindset taken to extremes, where nothing is true, everything has been covered up, and everyone is out to get you at all times. Which, to be honest, sounds like a truly exhausting way to live, but for some people, there is literally nothing except their sense of grievance and dispossession.

As for school shootings, the mainstream Republican line now isn't to outright deny that they happened, but to just tweet "thoughts and prayers" and do literally nothing else. To them, there is no amount of mass shootings that will convince them to give up their guns, as they believe that they need them for "protection!" from Democrats, black people, Muslims, etc. They don't care if a troubled teenager with a history of making threatening statements can walk into a store and legally buy an AR-15 on his eighteenth birthday, as long as that kid is white. When violence inevitably happens, they fall over themselves blaming literally everything else (as with the "there were too many doors!" nonsense after Uvalde). Even though in that situation, their other favorite solution, "a good guy with a gun," was in fact worse than useless to the point of active criminal liability. If literally 400 armed cops stood outside the school for 40 minutes and did nothing while kids were killed, because they were all too cowardly to risk their lives against a single military-grade assault rifle, why the fuck does anyone need to have one? Good question. Ask the Republicans.

Anyway, as I have written about in many other asks, the ultimate answer to this, and most of the other insanity of the modern GOP, is completely unhinged reactionary racism stemming from the election of Obama and the subsequent white-grievance-fueled rise of Trump. This is also why the people, including Biden at one point, who thought the Republicans would "come to their senses" and automatically return to more moderate positions after Trump was gone were so wrong. Instead, the Republican have raced to adopt even more extreme policies even faster, fueled by more grievance at Trump being "cheated," and also because they have been fully radicalized, which is a major and permanent shift in mental state. There's no such thing as just "snapping out" of it, which is why people who study the psychology of cults have written about Trump and his whole movement fit that exact mold. It is much easier to radicalize someone than it is to de-radicalize them, and assuming that they will just automatically return to their prior state of mind is, at the best, deeply naïve.

Likewise, the Republican base has now been so inoculated to such a high starting level of extremism that any politician hoping to appeal to that crowd has to be as crazy as possible-- whether or not they personally believe it, which is even more dangerous and irresponsible, as they deliberately cultivate and exploit the worst parts of America for selfish money and power. Likewise, you can see signs that the movement is starting to ditch Trump more and more, as he is an active liability who appears to be in line for multiple criminal prosecutions and was always an unhinged sociopathic idiot who the GOP hitched their wagon to because he was useful. Now, however, we are seeing a slow but steady shift to Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida, who appears to be Trumpism's heir apparent. Which is even more terrifying, because while Trump was obviously moronic, incoherent, and borderline illiterate, DeSantis is a well-educated, well-dressed, well-spoken fascist who is "respectable" enough to win back the votes of "moderate" Republicans who had no problem with Trump's repellent political policies but were offended by his personal vulgarity. Everyone is talking about a Trump rerun in 2024 (though please god, let him be either in prison or dead by then), but in my view, we should be much more vigilant about DeSantis. Because the media will go wild hyping him up as a "real challenger" to Biden, he will get endless unearned airtime and positioning as a serious figure.

This is especially the case since there is a framework for a billionaire/corporate tax in the Democrats' new budget bill. The oligarchs will fight tooth and nail for DeSantis, even though he is such a true-believer nutjob that he went after goddamn WALT DISNEY WORLD, aka the biggest employer in the state and 75% of the reason that anyone apart from Republican retirees ever goes to Florida. That is because big business always thinks that it can "make a deal" with fascists, and they don't particularly care if that's what happens to everyone else, as long as they get their tax breaks. Of course, they don't want to be SEEN doing this, which is why they will publicly pledge to stop all political donations to election deniers, then quietly pick them up again after a suitable amount of time has passed and they think nobody is looking.

Basically, as the tide of public momentum continues to turn against Trump, I see the establishment GOP deciding to throw him under the bus, blame him and him alone for January 6, and insist that the problem was with him and not the entire structure, personnel, and philosophy of the entire modern Republican Party. Then they can move on to some more "mainstream" white-Harvard-alum fascist a la the DeSantis/Hawley/Cruz crowd, who will be just as bad or worse, but much more able to appear "normal," put coherent sentences together, and act "respectable." I don't know how that will end, but the way things are right now, I sure don't feel particularly hopeful.

#anonymous #ask #politics for ts #cw gun violence

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seashellsoldier · 11 months

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“The Teachers: A Year Inside America’s Most Vulnerable, Important Profession” by Alexandra Robbins (2023)

As one elementary school teacher aptly summarized, “Politics, greed, and mismanagement have made [teaching] incompatible with physical and mental health” (p. 90, Libby).

Well, one more disheartening report on how our society’s pillars are crumbling, and it couldn’t be more infuriating. Education is the bedrock of any advanced society; well, education and overall health, and good health is attained through solid education. The United States of Hypocrisy is failing dramatically at both of these keystones, and the parallelisms are flagrant.

”Between 2020 and 2022, there was a marked increase in parents harassing, intimidating, and threatening school staff; in several states, parents physically assaulted teachers because they were upset about school mask policies even during virus surges. NBC News reported in 2021, ‘The teacher is now viewed by a small, loud contingent not as a public servant but as a public enemy.’ The following spring, FOX News host Tucker Carlson said that teachers should be ‘beaten up’—and encouraged viewers to ‘thrash the teacher’” (p. 68, Libby).

This mirrors how certain demographics in America have likewise railed against science and healthcare, and just about everything else that scares them. Now, look at education attainment within the United States (https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/educational-attainment.html). It is terribly sad, but terribly telling too.

Any wonder such a drastic shift has happened in such a short period of time with a toddler tyrant and his sycophants in the White House, entire news networks pandering and puppeteering and propagandizing their virulent misinformation and weaponized disinformation, and global social media-empires profiting off such clickbait bs, to truly influence too many towards an undereducated and incredibly gullible Idiocracy, just so the entitled can reap all the rewards from it while the mindless mobs fight to hold onto xenophobic-based White Christian Nationalism (despite all the data saying it’s the absolute minority in this country now)? All the screeching Karens in Moms For Liberty exemplify this brainwashed desperation, and the GOP couldn’t work harder at watering these poisonous weeds at every opportunity. Heck, the GOP fights against anything that would best benefit the middle and lower classes, seemingly hell-bent on doing everything possible to reinforce systemic poverty. I wonder why. Now, teachers and librarians are under attack, verbally and physically, from emotionally stunted adults who have lost the skills required for good parenting, wanting instant gratification through their bullying and tantrums. The American Psychological Association (APA) has been tracking this well (https://www.apa.org/education-career/k12/violence-educators.pdf), which of course NPR cares about too (https://www.npr.org/2022/03/17/1087137571/school-violence-teachers-covid).

I’ve written this so many times, but the priorities of this country are painfully delusive. Affordable health care and quality education SHOULD BE foundational rights for every single person, and free of charge. Teachers and police officers SHOULD BE the highest trained and best paid public servants on every budget. This is what creates an educated (dare I say “enlightened”), multicultural, vibrant and empathetic, and safe-for-all society. We need to trust our teachers; they are some of the most educated people in society, having to be experts in child development, social-emotional development, curriculum development and assessment, as well as unpaid tutors, parent liaisons, book buyers, charity workers, therapists, social workers, crisis managers, security staff, and human shields. Tell me you do more at whatever job you currently have.

Robbins gives some painfully clear examples of how both “the system” itself, and society at large, work to undermine education in America, save for the lily-white and wealthy enclaves and their for-profit charter school islands (even if teachers form cliques of their own, and fall into patterns of childish bullying, petty rumormongering, and mindless sabotage upon their colleagues). Systemic racism is baked into every fiber of this nation, and education is historically a glaring fault line. Read Poverty, By America by Matthew Desmond for kicks, and look at Florida for the reactionary, clownish insanity of today (and watch as the state slowly, ignorantly allows the sea to reclaim the peninsula in a constantly warming world).

From Columbine High to Robb Elementary, nothing has been done to stop mass murder in schools except to make teachers frontline shields for your children. All of this is a glaring national crisis that reaches the heart of what a nation is.

So: 1. We have a seriously undereducated populace . . . 2. The deep-rooted problems with tech addiction and an unregulated internet erode an undereducated society in all-too apparent ways . . . 3. Parenting, in so many ways for so many children, has changed over the past three generations to be another symptom of a deteriorating society . . . 4. And small-minded, primitive-brained people suck.

For two semesters, I was a counseling intern at an outpatient day-treatment center for kids and teens whose schools deemed them unfit due to behavioral issues. This was a partnership with the county school district, and we had an inpatient facility too. Individual, group, and family sessions were mixed into their weekly coursework, which we continued through licensed educators. Our goal was to help these kids, and their families, find some equilibrium with diagnosed conditions and help them reintegrate back to their home schools. This was, without a doubt, the most rewarding work I’ve ever done. While some conditions are biological or genetic in origin, all too many were direct products of toxic family dynamics. It takes a village to help a child; it takes a village to help a family help their child. Teachers, therapists, child psychologists, a psychiatrist, and all the supporting staff all worked as that village for every single kid. The emotionally, if not physically abandoned, the sexually molested, the physically abused, the psychologically tormented, and the otherwise traumatized were cared for through tears and screams and tantrums of furious energy, but they ultimately knew they were safe and protected, at least for eight hours each day. This is what every school should look like, working as interdisciplinary teams to help every child succeed and thrive. Every child should be given access to every resource imaginable in the wealthiest nation in human history. The future depends upon such a seismic shift in societal priorities.

Robbins also highlights the existential issues alongside viable solutions, which she apparently shared with the Next Big Idea Club (https://nextbigideaclub.com/magazine/teachers-year-inside-americas-vulnerable-important-profession-bookbite/41045/). Solutions are very possible with enough public willpower. We can dynamically transform society in radical ways that can empower the lower classes to thrive with the resources, infrastructure, and opportunities to do so. Ensuring teaching professions are “worth their weight in gold” is a crucial first step. This means giving them the respect and trust they deserve, safe working environments, fair and effective protections, collective bargaining, more staffing, loan forgiveness, supply-rich classes and small class sizes, well-defined and realistic job descriptions, and of course well-paid salaries with encouraging incentives. It takes a certain type of person to be a good teacher; it takes a system that nurtures those good people to pursue education as a life-long career. Again, this is the bedrock of a modern society.

Helping all struggling parents is a future-focused second step that benefits society holistically.

Let the Lost Cause racists scream into the ether, since our bought-out politicians can’t do anything about regulating and policing up the internet, AI, autonomous weapons, and whatever the whole thing evolves into (it will happen sooner than we realize). However, in the meantime, our police forces need the power and motivation to track, prosecute, and punish every ignoramus who bullies, assaults, and casts death threats at everything they don’t like, and protect our public servants from the slathering public, from brick-throwing dads to AR-15-toting teens. (I do realize the bind this puts me in: power to the people, but only those who behave themselves like the adults they’re supposed to be.) Behaviors have consequences, and we need to start policing up such behaviors, collectively. Online public shaming doesn’t seem to affect enough of them, and oftentimes they’re simply parroting their elected officials and media darlings. Adults who lack emotional intelligence will surely produce children doing likewise. The “moral majority” have turned into rabid dogs since the 1960s, and classrooms filled with gunned-down kids don’t phase them one bit. Instead of harassing teachers, they should be parenting their children and grandchildren, helping them prepare for a highly uncertain future. Education will help them. It takes a village, right?

We need to move forward, overturn the priorities of this country, and rebuild our infrastructure from the ground skyward. Education, health care, labor, and pensions. However, this country looks to be a sinking ship captained by selfish, deluded morons voted into office by equally selfish, deluded, and poorly educated idiots. Idiocracy, here we come as climate change falls like a hammer on humanity.

Thank you, Public Library System, for having this title available; and, thank you tenfold, to all the teachers who challenged, encouraged, supported, and enlightened me along the way.

#bookreview #education #idiocracy #teachersareheroes #destroythegop

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madamspeaker · 2 years

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Of course the last 24 hours has seen the far-left scream into the void about how the Dobbs decision is the fault of Dems, and how Nancy Pelosi can’t possibly be genuinely upset at it because she backed Henry Cuellar in Texas. Reasoning with this deluded bunch of ignorant tossers is of course pointless, but the cold hard fact is this - Henry Cuellar has literally fuck all impact on Roe. He is the solitary “pro-life” vote in the Dem House caucus. His no vote last autumn never jeopardised the bill to codify Roe as it went through the House. He is an otherwise solid Dem vote though - having been a yes on the BIF, the original version of the BBB, the Equality Act, and the Safer Communities Act (the gun violence prevention bill), despite leftists saying he is a shill for the NRA. I don’t much like the guy, and loathe his stance on abortion, and I suspect Nancy doesn’t much like him either, but when you are a leader part of that job entails supporting your team. She has always had a policy of endorsing incumbents, which I imagine in a lot of instances is not exactly something she enjoys doing for certain individuals, but endorsing imcumbents is one of the best ways to keep a party united, and when you have such a tiny majority, one in which any handful of dissenting members can create chaos, it is more important than ever to keep members on side because you never know when you will need to twist their arm on a vote. The other thing to note is Cuellar’s district. Whether we like him or not, he won more of the vote there than Biden did, which suggests that he’s doing something right by his constituents - and in what will be a very difficult mid-term election for Dems, keeping that seat Blue might well mean the difference between Dems holding the House and the GOP retaking it. Naturally lefists get none of this - which probably explains why they can never get any legislation passed. They remain deludedly stuck on the notion that a one size fits all candidate is the way to go, when any sane person knows it clearly isn’t, and that you should run candidates that fit in with the area. Nancy Pelosi sadly has more on her plate than just Roe - as she made clear in her presser yesterday, the GOP are going after marriage equality and contraception. She has to think in terms of the bigger picture, of future legislation that she may need to pass between now and the end of the year, and with the numbers she has at her disposal now, that sadly means she has to back all her members, whether she agrees with them on certain issues or not. It also explains why she is called the master legislator and is responsible for some of the most meaningful and important legislation ever passed through Congress, and Bernie’s big legislative achievement is some post office names.

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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 years

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Abortion surveillance only incidentally involves period-trackers

I get it. The deeper we get into this GOP christofascist Handmaid’s Tale LARP, the more it feels like we are living in a dystopian novel and the more draw on stories to understand our experience. The idea that a cyberpunk Red State sheriff — Boss Hogg meets Robocop — would use period-tracking apps for dragnet abortion surveillance is a great setup for a novel, but it’s not very reflective of reality.

I’m a novelist and I work on public policy, and the difference is that novels are very, very simplified. They tend to work in linear, verse-verse-chorus fashion, where causes beget effects in a way that is easy to understand; if a cause-effect relationship is complexified, it in service to a surprise ending or plot-twist — it’s not just par for the course.

In actual public policy fights, things are really messy. I’m not saying that we don’t live in a causal universe, but I am saying that figuring out which intervention will produce what outcome is a matter of informed guesswork and requires constant iteration and revision.

That’s not just because of the complexity of the real world, either — it’s also because real world policy fights are adversarial. Every move you make begets a countermove from your adversary. If your adversary is attacking you on one front, moving defenses there may not do you any good — not if you have another flank the attacker can costlessly shift to.

Which brings me to period-tracking apps and abortion surveillance. It’s 100% true that many period tracking apps are privacy dumpster-fires. Over and over again, investigations of period-tracking apps have found an indefensible mix of poor security practices and indiscriminate data collection, usage, sale and sharing, compounded by outright lies from the vendors:

https://www.consumerreports.org/health-privacy/what-your-period-tracker-app-knows-about-you-a8701683935/

But just because period-tracking apps could be a way to trawl for people who might have had abortions, it doesn’t follow that getting rid of your period-tracking app will make you safe. Giving up automated period-tracking imposes a high cost — and it’s a cost with very few benefits in terms of security from forced-birth law-enforcement attacks.

Why? Well, the data-leakage from some period apps might be ghastly, but it isn’t exceptional. Apps — sold as a tool for improving software quality and security by subjecting it to oversight from Google and Apple — are privacy nightmares. The same high-stakes data-mishandling that plagues period-trackers also plagues childcare apps, Muslim call-to-prayer apps, distance-ed evaluation apps, and more:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/23/peek-a-boo/#attack-helicopter-parenting

Indeed, the whole tech sector, from bottom-feeding ad-tech also-rans to multi-trillion-dollar global giants, spies on you all the time, in every way, and both their security policies and their law-enforcement cooperation policies are both exceptionally weak.

Take location data; this is harvested by many of the apps you routinely use, sometimes without the app-maker’s explicit knowledge — widely used, free app development kits are notorious for gathering and selling location data from their customers’ users. This data is then passed on to location brokers, who make it incredibly easy to discover who visited an abortion clinic, and who sell this data cheap to cops and anyone else who wants to snoop on you:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/07/safegraph-spies-and-lies/#theres-no-i-in-uterus

The Dobbs decision brings all this into focus, but for millions of people, primarily people of color and poor and/or indigenous, fertility has long been a criminal justice. This is the Shitty Technology Adoption Curve in action — when you want to inflict technological harms with a new product, you try it out on the people with the least social capital and privilege, which lets you sand down the rough edges and normalize the technology as you move it up the privilege gradient:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware

Longstanding government intrusion into marginalized people’s fertility has produced a rich evidentiary record. By looking at how cops inflicted themselves on the uteruses of excluded and marginalized people, we can gain insight into how they will impact a widening sphere of targets. Take “Surveilling the Digital Abortion Diary,” Cynthia Conti-Cook’s open-access article for The University of Baltimore Law Review:

https://scholarworks.law.ubalt.edu/ublr/vol50/iss1/2/

Conti-Cook trawls through the record to examine the role of technological surveillance and forensics in abortion prosecutions. She finds that cops and prosecutors use things like text-messages and search history to produce evidence that a miscarriage was the result of a medication abortion rather than spontaneous abortion.

I found Conti-Cook’s article through “Fear, Uncertainty, and Period Trackers,” a must-read Medium article from Kendra Albert, Maggie Delano and Emma Weil, which sharply critiques the focus on period-tracking apps for a lack of factual grounding in the history of abortion criminalization:

https://medium.com/@Kendra_Serra/fear-uncertainty-and-period-trackers-340ab8fdff74

The authors stress that criminal prosecutions of abortions turn on that question of distinguishing medication abortions from spontaneous miscarriages, and for that, they need to establish intent — to produce evidence of the thoughts that preceded the miscarriage.

As Melissa Gira writes in the New Republic in “The Growing Criminalization of Pregnancy,” abortion cops are dependent on tips from people in your life: partners and ex-partners, relatives, health-care professionals, con-artists working for “crisis pregnancy centers” and snoopy neighbors who rat you out to the cops as a suspected abortion-criminal.

https://newrepublic.com/article/166312/criminalization-abortion-stillbirths-miscarriages

Once the cops suspect you of procuring an abortion, data from your period app is of limited value to building the case against you. But your search history (“buy abortion pills, mifepristone online, misoprostol online”) and messages with friends or out-of-state helpers are devastatingly effective in building that case.

This factual analysis of the recent history of criminalized abortion allows us to construct a framework for minimizing criminal prosecution risks when seeking a self-managed abortion. EFF’s “Security and Privacy Tips for People Seeking An Abortion” is a good starting point:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/06/security-and-privacy-tips-people-seeking-abortion

Tambien en Español:

https://www.eff.org/es/deeplinks/2022/06/security-and-privacy-tips-people-seeking-abortion

Of course, privacy is a team sport, so abortion providers should familiarize themselves with “Digital Security and Privacy Tips for Those Involved in Abortion Access”:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/05/digital-security-and-privacy-tips-those-involved-abortion-access

Tambien en Español:

https://www.eff.org/es/deeplinks/2022/05/digital-security-and-privacy-tips-those-involved-abortion-access

This short video, starring EFF’s Eva Galperin and Daly Barnett, is a great and accessible entree to the subject:

https://archive.org/details/Digital_Security_for_Abortion_Access

Note that none of these guides advise deleting your period app. Here’s Consumer Reports’ guide to privacy-preserving period apps, which gives high marks to Euki, Drip and the Apple Health app:

https://www.consumerreports.org/health-privacy/period-tracker-apps-privacy-a2278134145/

I started off by noting that the privacy problems of period apps are not unique; the entire mobile world is a horror of bad data-handling. Albert et al stress the importance of never consenting to a law-enforcement search of your mobile device. Make them get a warrant (“Consent searches are inherently coercive and should be banned”).

US law enforcement agencies have gone on a spending spree, buying up sketchy mobile device search tools. Thousands of agencies have these tools, produced by Vichy nerds who use their technological freedoms to take away other people’s:

https://www.upturn.org/work/mass-extraction/

One final note on the fight for abortion rights: despite the revisionist history emanating from the illegitimate SCOTUS justices as they perch on their stolen seats, abortion is indeed “deeply rooted.” If you don’t believe it, check out Dr Eleanor Janega’s “medieval abortion reading list”:

https://going-medieval.com/2022/06/29/a-medieval-abortion-reading-list/

Image: Paul Sableman (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/pasa/6149265334

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[Image ID: A Planned Parenthood clinic; over the roofline, we see a giant glaring red eye of HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey; it has lines radiating from it that wash out the sky.]

#pluralistic

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longwindedbore · 1 year

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Today’s question is “Has the Fed’s raising of interest rates resulted in ANY consumer seeing ANY reduction in Inflation?”

Of course not.

In classic Capitalist Economics (dead since 1913) increasing Supply and or Decreasing Demand affects inflation.

We the 90% just can’t reduce our Demand for essential items like food, shelter, transportation, heating and luxuries like insulin.

But Supply doesn’t INCREASE

When Landlords pull 18,000,000 residences from the market

Inflation skyrockets with high interest for a loan for a vehicle - essential where there is little or no Publicly provided commuting option.

The credit card borrowing costs for the I-Phone which is critical to holding a job skyrockets under the Feds policies.

Just icing on the real Inflationary cake:

Manipulating the Fed to make it nearly impossible for bridge loans to be obtained by small landlords, small manufacturers, small retail outlets.

These businesses create jobs.

Big Monopolistic Hegemonies forcing small competitors to sell out or go bankrupt.

The favored option of collapsing the stock market by starting a selling stamped was so disastrous in 2008 that I don’t think they dare repeat.

No small business or new businesses and the Rich are confident that the Great Resignation will end

They intend to use Stagflation to force us into neo-slavery.

You probably don’t remember…

Since 2002 the GOP and the Fed has printed Monopoly money then delaued the inevitable Weimar Inflation by putting about $22,000,000,000,000 in the Stock Market.

$6 Trillion in Bush/Cheney tax cuts,

$8 Trillion in the ‘08 bailout, $

$2 Trillion in Trump/Ryan/McConnell 2017 tax cuts,

$2Trillion the Rich corporations’ 2020 PPP Loans( none repaid), $

$4 Trillion (maybe $6) on loans to the Stock market 2019-2020.

Why would you remember this having been distracted by the political antics that resulted from moving the National Zoo’s Chimpanzee exhibit to in the Congress.

Not like any of this was debated in public or reported in the Corporate -Owned Media.

How can this 💩 be going on?

If the US dollar wasn’t the World’s Reserved Currency this whole Enron-inspired Ponzi Scheme would have collapsed.

Other countries understand that our Economic System is a pile of 💩 and occasionally make noises about maybe the Euro or Asia creating an equivalent to the Euro as a reserve curedd we next.

But there’s a reason why we have 21 of the world’s 22 nuclear aircraft carriers and the world’s only fleet of atomic powered attack submarines.

We WILL remain the World’s Reserve Currency…

Unless Schrödinger’s Economy

The variable is that both here and in China the populace has been pushed - maybe - a little too far.

The Rich Sociopaths running the Systems around the world are hoping it’s 1932 and a Reichstag fire still works.

They have forgotten France in 1787 and Eastern Europe 1989.

May the odds be ever in our favor.

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mariacallous · 2 years

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The GOP’s Transformation Left It Ill-Equipped To Argue

The third theory, and the one that might have the most long-term implications, is that the GOP has lost its ability to engage on bread-and-butter policy questions ― in part because it just doesn’t seem that interested anymore.

There was a time when Republicans had big designs for entitlements, for example, including not just Medicare and Medicaid but also Social Security. They also had a comprehensive vision for scaling back regulations and rewriting the tax code.

They were great plans or terrible plans or something in between, depending on your perspective, but they were real. And while they frequently got less emphasis than the arguments focusing on race, gender or (more recently) sexual identity, they remained a core and much-discussed part of the GOP brand.

Those policy proposals still exist, and you can certainly find members of the greater conservative universe who care passionately about them. But the plans don’t get nearly the attention they once did. And while a party’s interest in policy is a difficult thing to measure objectively, one telltale sign of how much things have changed is the GOP platform from the 2020 campaign. There wasn’t one, for the first time in modern history.

That absence of a platform had a lot to do with the GOP’s presidential nominee ― i.e., incumbent Donald Trump ― who famously had no interest in the substance of governing. And it’s hard not to think his takeover of the party is a big factor in the atrophy of the GOP’s policy mind. Developing substantive positions and then promoting them takes patience, negotiation and a lot of serious intellectual work. Suffice to say these are not the hallmarks of Trump or his most devoted cheerleaders, especially in the press.

GOP Ideas On Economy, Social Welfare Remain Unpopular

Of course, one reason Trump didn’t talk a lot about policy is that he understood instinctively how wildly unpopular many core GOP ideas are.

People forget that he ran in the 2016 primaries as a different kind of Republican, one committed to protecting Medicare and Social Security ― and that his vow to repeal “Obamacare” came with a promise of great health care for everybody, which is not anywhere close to what GOP repeal schemes actually offered. Today, Republicans mostly know better than brag about their designs for curtailing popular spending programs. When the occasional conservative gives it a shot, as Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) did earlier this year, party leaders quickly distance themselves from it.

To be clear, there are some substantive issues that still attract intense interest from Trumpified Republicans ― anything connected to immigration, for starters, as well as the supposed left-wing assault on patriotism and Christian values, especially in schools.

But whatever the merits and popularity of conservative positions on these questions, they have very little to do with helping seniors pay for their drugs or dealing with the threat of a warming planet. And so when the conversation is about those topics, as it has been when Democrats were putting together legislation for the past 16 months, Republicans simply haven’t had a lot to say.

Whether this ultimately helps or hurts Republicans politically remains to be seen. Ignoring debates about economic, environmental and health policy in order to focus on grievances with leftists and their allies in the media and intellectual elite might turn out to be a winning long-term strategy for the GOP.

But that approach to governing cedes an awful lot of intellectual territory to liberals. That seems bad for conservatives. It also makes for a less vibrant debate. That seems bad for everybody.

Why The Trumpified GOP Is So Hapless At Governing

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 7 months

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M.Wuerker

* * * * *

Meanwhile, Joe Biden continues to deliver!

October 5, 2023

ROBERT B. HUBBELL

As the House spirals into chaos, President Joe Biden announced the cancellation of $9 billion of student debt for public service workers. Per the NYTimes (accessible to all),

President Biden canceled an additional $9 billion in student debt on Wednesday as repayments started up again this month after a three-year pause. The move affects 125,000 people who qualify under existing programs, including for public-service workers such as teachers and firefighters and for people on permanent disability, according to a White House statement. “This kind of relief is life changing for individuals and their families,” Mr. Biden said on Wednesday.

The $9 billion in forgiveness for public service workers is a small portion of Biden’s plan to forgive $400 billion in student debt for about 43 million Americans, a plan that was invalidated by the Supreme Court under the so-called “Major Questions Doctrine.” That doctrine is a judicially invented artifice that allows the Supreme Court to invalidate any congressional legislation it objects to on policy grounds.

Of course, Congress could overrule the Supreme Court’s opinion blocking the forgiveness of student debt—but that would require Democrats to gain a majority in the House, retain control of the Senate, and re-elect President Biden. Each of those outcomes is achievable. If we can achieve those goals in 2024, Democrats can also pass national legislation to protect reproductive liberty, regulate the sale of firearms, protect voting rights, ensure the equality of LGBTQ people, and expand the Supreme Court.

Biden’s act of forgiving student loan debt for 125,000 Americans provides a glimpse of the promise of 2024 if Democrats regain control of Congress and re-elect Joe Biden. I know we are all working at full speed and do not need additional motivation. But it is helpful to recall how much better things can be if we are successful.

The race to replace Kevin McCarthy.

Let’s get this out of the way: No, Donald Trump won’t be the next Speaker of the House, despite suggestions to that effect from Marjorie Taylor Greene. The one thing Republicans love more than Trump is holding onto their jobs. They know that electing Trump as Speaker would ensure the loss of control of the House and the defeat of Trump as a presidential candidate. Republicans will figure out that fact after they have milked their fifteen minutes of fame for nominating Trump as Speaker.

Trump doesn’t want to be Speaker, which is a real job that requires hard work in exchange for the enmity of the Republican caucus. And if Republicans lose their collective minds and elect Trump as Speaker, he will trigger government shutdowns, legislative gridlock, and physical altercations on the House floor (among Republicans). He would quit in weeks, forcing Republicans to go through a humiliating third election for Speaker in a year.

Trump had plenty of opportunity to step up to the Speaker’s job when McCarthy went through fifteen rounds of votes. He didn’t then, and he isn’t going to do so now.

Finally, Trump is ineligible to be Speaker under rules passed by the Republican caucus. See MSNBC, Why Trump, despite the chatter, won’t become House speaker. Per MSNBC,

House Republican Conference rules for the 118th Congress clearly states, “A member of the Republican Leadership shall step aside if indicted for a felony for which a sentence of two or more years imprisonment may be imposed.”

Could Republicans amend their own rule? Sure! But they won’t.

I could be proven wrong, but I don’t think I will be. Why? I believe House Republicans will put their self-interest in re-election over their faux fealty to Trump. As we saw yesterday, it takes only five Republicans to break from the party to stop the GOP caucus in its tracks.

Okay, with that elephant in the courtroom out of the way, let’s talk about the two announced candidates. But before we do, I want to answer a question a reader posed: Did Democrats make a mistake by not backing McCarthy? Will we end up with someone worse?

No. Democrats did not make a mistake. McCarthy said in his farewell pity party that he did not want to work with Democrats. He said,

he would not have wanted to be speaker at the cost of relying on Democrats to provide votes or making concessions to win their votes. “No. I’m a Republican. I win by Republicans, and I lose by Republicans.”

If Democrats had begun voting for McCarthy on the motion to vacate, other Republicans would have started voting against him or he would have resigned before the vote concluded. McCarthy wouldn’t allow Democrats to choose the Speaker of the House while Republicans hold the majority.

This brings us to Jim Jordan and Steve Scalise, both miserable candidates for the job of Speaker. Are they worse than McCarthy? That’s a high bar—or is it a low bar? (You get the point.) Both are unfit for the office, but the GOP caucus is apparently not ready to acknowledge that it cannot govern unless it nominates a candidate capable of building a coalition.

See Slate op-ed by Norman L. Eisen, Siven Watt, and Fred Wertheimer, Jim Jordan shows he's unfit to lead the Judiciary Committee.

See The Guardian, House speaker contender Steve Scalise reportedly called himself ‘David Duke without the baggage.”

But here is the most disqualifying fact about Jordan and Scalise: Both objected to the count of the electoral ballots on January 6 after the assault on the Capitol! See Vox, 147 Republican lawmakers still objected to the election results after the Capitol attack. For the record, Kevin McCarthy also objected to the electoral count after the attack on the Capitol. That fact should be a red flag for every Republican thinking of supporting Jordan or Scalise.

Trump continues to attack prosecutors and judges.

On the third day of his trial in New York state court for fraudulent business practices, Trump continued his attack on Attorney General Letitia James and Judge Engoron. He posted on his vanity social media platform:

The Trial in NYC brought by the Racist A.G., Letitia James . . . should be dismissed in that [DELETED] and the Judge fraudulently reduced the value of Mar-a-Lago, and other assets, in order to make their FAKE case more viable. This is yet another Witch Hunt for purposes of Election Interference. Letitia is a Dirty Cop . . . .

(Note that I deleted a racist term used by Trump to refer to Attorney General Letitia James.)

Trump accuses Judge Engoron of “fraudulently” reducing the value of Trump's assets, and says that A.G. James was a “Dirty Cop.” I cannot understand why such language has not resulted in severe sanctions against Trump.

Dennis Aftergut reviews Judge Engoron’s existing gag order against Trump in The Messenger, Trump’s Consequences for Crossing the Line: A Gag Order That Opens the Door for More. Aftergut explains that Engoron’s order opens the door for Judge Chutkan to issue more expansive relief:

Trump is facing an October 16 hearing on a motion by special counsel Jack Smith for a gag order in D.C.; that's where Trump's federal indictment for criminally conspiring to overturn the 2020 election is set to be tried in March. While what just happened in the New York case is very different from the situation in the federal case, Trump just handed D.C. federal district court Judge Tanya Chutkan a first-ever precedent for limiting Trump's speech. No judge wants to act in the absence of a prior ruling in the same direction, particularly as to a gag order motion that presents highly sensitive First Amendment issues. [¶] It’s a safe bet that as the D.C. trial date approaches, Trump will continue, even escalate, his vile attacks on the administration of justice. [¶] A stalwart federal judge like Tanya Chutkan will not be intimidated; indeed, her judicial spine likely will only be stiffened by [such] threats . . . .

Trump is pushing the envelope, whether he intends to or not. I noted a few weeks ago that Trump seems to be losing control of his emotions and thoughts in a way that suggests a mental breakdown or a progressive cognitive decline. Or he could be seeking a confrontation, betting that no judge would jail him. While jailing Trump would be traumatic for the nation, it will be far worse to do so after violence occurs.

A story by Lucian Truscott in his Substack blog lends great weight to the notion that Trump is looking for confrontation. You will recall that Trump visited a gun store in South Carolina and made a show of buying a gun. When the media noted that it was illegal for him to buy a gun while on pretrial release for 91 felony counts, his spokesperson claimed that Trump did not actually complete the purchase transaction.

But as Lucian Truscott explains, the real story is that Trump selected the gun store in South Carolina as a signal to white supremacists that he stands with them. See Lucian Truscott, The mainstream media completely missed the story when reporting on Trump's visit to the South Carolina gun store.

Truscott writes:

Candidate Trump’s stop at a gun store in South Carolina on Monday wasn’t just an offhand visit: His eight SUV convoy doesn’t do anything without advance planning days or even weeks ahead of any event Trump attends or location he visits. He made a decision to stop at Palmetto State Armory in Summerville, South Carolina, because he knew that that specific gun store was where the racist shooter in Jacksonville, Florida bought the guns he used to kill three Black people at a Dollar General store in late August. On the receiver of one gun, the [Jacksonville] killer had painted a swastika right next to the engraved name of the store where he bought it, Palmetto State Armory. It’s just one month after the killings occurred. Memories are strong, and emotions in the Black community are still raw.

As Truscott notes, the choice of the Palmetto State Armory store was no accident. The store is well-known “among gun people for its connections to the racist Boogaloo Boys,” whose members were involved in the kidnap attempt of Michigan Governor Whitmer and were present at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville (about which Trump said there were “good people on both sides.”).

There is more detail in Truscott’s deeply researched article. Check it out.

Here’s the point: The evidence suggests that Trump is intentional in his provocations. He knows exactly what buttons he is pushing. Federal and state judges should assume so when evaluating whether Trump should be jailed pending his criminal trials.

#Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter #Speaker of the House #House Republicans #student loan debt #TFG #gag order #Robert B. Hubbell #Lucian Truscott #M.Wuerker

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solarbird · 2 years

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Karma is a Mirror - karmaonesixone - June 11, 2022 Propaganda being handed out by the fash below in the park at CDA Pride. Coeur d'Alene, ID June 11th, 2022 [Image showing handout of anti-LGBT slander statistics, particularly oriented at labelling "homosexuals" universally as pedophiles]

Wow, they're bringing out Paul Cameron again.

It's been a while, but the fact that his lies still circulate in fundamentalist and fascist circles isn't even a little surprising.

I'm surprised they haven't included "54% regularly consume the feces of their sexual partners" too.

For people who don't remember, the fundamentalists have a long history of setting up lie-generating pseudo-science organisations, and of propping up a small number of fake-science-generating "researchers."

One of which is Paul Cameron, the source of some of these numbers.

Huh, the fucker is still alive. Go fig, evil never dies.

Anyway, they generate bullshit but superficially-real-looking studies that are built to produce results which describe their targets, excuse me their research subjects, as absolute monsters.

When not just straight up lying, the data is generated by pre-selecting a subjects who will produce the intended result. This group is then described as a sample of the population.

Note the lack of the word "representative" before "sample." But we'll get there.

They then generate other "research papers" which extensively reference these previous "studies," and suddenly "sample" becomes "representative sample." Wash, rinse, repeat, and thus, the bullshit is laundered.

You'll have to go five, six studies deep to get back to Paul Cameron or someone like him to find out how the "results" were ginned up.

(I'm not even discussing the insanity of how they make definitions to reach conclusions. Pre-selected subjects is only one of the tricks.)

Sometimes they prewrite all of them at once and at least once screwed it up. I found a circular reference chain that way. Paper A referred to Paper B referred to Paper C referred to Paper D referred back to Paper A. At no point was there any actual presentation of data.

But the rank and file don't know and don't care. It's "science" and "data" that says with what they already want to believe and therefore it's true, and that's literally the reason why it's true, because that's how they judge truth.

This was the culture already in place when their cultural takeover of the @GOP happened, and has a lot to do with why I could see all of this coming.

And after that takeover - well, that's when Republicans started talking about creating their own realities, and how there should be different "truths" for different people, depending upon status.

Real truth for Donald Rumsfeld, affirming lies for the rank and file.

That was, of course, an early and crude manifestation of what was coming. They were too willing to say it straight up in public, and that's a little too far, even for them.

But it's still what they're doing, and what the fundamentalists have always done. Fake the reality they want, declare it real, make policy to punish their targets.

a.k.a. "make up shit and get mad about it"

...and then lash out.

The only change has been putting way less effort into the shit they make up, because they've realised how little of that is really needed. They used to work much harder. Maybe this is a sign that's coming back.

What hasn't changed is that the arbiter of truth is still "does it serve the cause?" - or, for the rank and file, "do I like it?" which is the same thing.

It's weaponised confirmation bias.

Incredibly effective, and useful... as long as you're a complete psychopath who doesn't give a single fuck about reality and truth.

Hence, today's @GOP - and hence, where we are.

#right wing #fascists #fundamentalism #us politics #american politics

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sublimeobservationarcade · 1 month

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The Culture Wars & Demonising Woke

The culture wars pits extreme reactionary conservatives against progressives. The war on woke is an example of this, where ordinary folk are encouraged to see efforts in favour of redressing the situation, where those among us traditionally excluded from a seat at the big table, as unnecessary. White supremacists are, of course, big fans of this and in some instances driving this ‘anti-woke’ narrative. Diversity inclusiveness is being pilloried as somehow unfair to the dominant white male cohort within our communities – this is ridiculous. The figures do not back this up in any way. The culture wars and demonising woke play to the politics of grievance.

Anti-Elite Another Right Wing Beat Up

The anti-elitist strategy is another beat up and manipulation by those on the right. Politically, it enables parties traditionally associated with big business to extend their appeal to working class people. This championing of the often bigoted values of non-college educated folk is another false narrative. Blaming one side for all the ills in the politics of grievance debate is further misinformation and deflection from the truth of the matter. The socially progressive policies of those wanting to include those marginalised, like LGBTQI+, women, and new migrants, are demonised by those on the right. Religious groups align with those on the right so that they can defend their right to discriminate against those that do not conform to their religious laws, which were developed many hundreds of years ago. These Bronze Age values were tribal and do not reflect the reality of urban living in big cities in the 21C. We are no longer primarily goat farmers.

Anti-Women Patriarchal Policies Underpinning GOP Patriarchal family values are outdated for good reasons and policies that seek a return to this power structure will not appeal to many, especially women. In the US, we are witnessing hardline conservative think tanks driving MAGA Republican party policy in this regard. “Wealthy right-wing think tank The Heritage Foundation has published a detailed plan for the next Republican president to use the executive branch of the federal government to attack the rights of women, LGBTQ people and the BIPOC community, by eliminating the agencies and offices responsible for enforcing civil rights laws and placing trained right-wing ideologues in staff positions throughout the federal government. “ (https://msmagazine.com/2024/02/08/project-2025-conservative-right-wing-trump-woke/) Anti-abortion state policies and laws have galvanised opposition among women across America. Further efforts to ban contraception and limit the freedoms of women, more generally, are on the cards and it is hard to see how these will appeal to voters. The stacking of the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) by former President Donald Trump provides another non-democratic pathway for the imposition of these laws and policies to be enacted at the state level in red states. However, women in these red states are rising up and the GOP are losing seats and representatives on this basis. You can see why Trump and MAGA want to take over the US by a coup or insurrection because they will not win the 2024 presidential election with the policies they have. Indeed, it would be a good bet that the GOP will also lose control of Congress at the next election too.

“Lock Em Up & Throw Away The Key” In Australia, we have a right wing opposition that takes its lead from the US. Their relentless attacks and negativity means they offer no credible alternative to the Labor government currently in charge. Peter Dutton, their leader, seeks to enflame fears and anxieties within the electorate whenever possible. Immigration policy has been a popular platform upon which to sew exaggerated fears now and in the past. Attitudes toward Australia’s Indigenous communities is another area in which the opposition divides the nation via polarising statements. Of course, they have no policies and only opinions on everything. Law and order remains a conservative touchstone, where knee jerk responses to sensationalised incidents of crime reported in the media play well to the gallery. Again, no ideas or solutions apart from locking everybody up are ever proffered by the LNP.

Old White Guys Want To Have Their Cake & Eat Yours Too The culture wars and demonising woke are popular here in Australia too. Old white guys want to have their cake and eat yours too. The war on woke appeals to dumb entitled folk who don’t bother thinking too deeply about much. Fairness was supposedly a great Aussie tradition, but only if you were white and like everybody else. Apparently, mateship and equality were and are reserved for the assimilated Anglo Aussie. Slagging off at stuff and people outside this box is all good fun. If it doesn’t bother the bloke saying it why should it bother the person being slagged off! This logic pervades the racism endemic throughout Australia. The culture wars are a beat up for political purposes. The real aim of the game is to get your vote and to put their insider mates in clover. Think PwC and all those billions being syphoned off from the public sector to private wealth via the consultancy business. Think the insider mates who got the billion dollar offshore detention money over many years. Think the labour hire sector where private interests grew fat on more and more government contracts across the board. This massive increase saw the private wealth of the few grow exponentially whilst the many were shafted. Wage growth during the Coalition years was moribund, union was power was decimated, and the rich got much richer at our expense. We now live in a much unfairer Australia. The divide between the haves and the have nots is a widening gulf. Robert Sudha Hamilton is the author of America Matters: Pre-apocalyptic Posts & Essays in the Shadow of Trump. ©WordsForWeb https://read.amazon.com.au/kp/embed?asin=B0CY8CMT33&preview=newtab&linkCode=kpe&ref_=cm_sw_r_kb_dp_2K12J9EM5063CJ5BHEGK Read the full article

#American #Australia #culturewars #PeterDutton #politics #power #rightwing #Trump #waronwoke

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