Archive for category: #Fascism #Elections #Bonapartism

How did the Oath Keepers go from opposing government tyranny to being an enthusiastic and bloody arm of it?

We speak to award-winning journalist Jonathan Katz about his new book “Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire.” The book follows the life of the Marines officer Smedley Butler and the trail of U.S. imperialism from Cuba and the Philippines to Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and Panama. The book also describes an effort by banking and business leaders to topple Franklin D. Roosevelt’s government in 1934 in order to establish a fascist dictatorship. The plot was exposed by Butler, who famously declared, “War is a racket.” The far-right conspiracy to overthrow liberal democracy has historical parallels to the recent January 6 insurrection, says Katz.

A cruel irony: Our misguided faith that America is special is shielding Trump and the fascists from punishment

Domestic and racially motivated violent extremists are developing plans to attack the U.S. electric sector reports The Daily Beast.

The Beast obtained an intelligence bulletin from the DHS.

“DVEs have developed credible, specific plans to attack electricity infrastructure since at least 2020, identifying the electric grid as a particularly attractive target given its interdependency with other infrastructure sectors,” the alert said.

As usual, lone wolf attacks are singled out.

Will Republicans in Congress howl like they usually do?

I remember under President Bush the DHS put together a very serious report that came out after President Obama took office. It said this country was at risk from right-wing extremist groups.

As usual this caused a total freak out on Fox News and every other right-wing outfit. Brit Hume and Michelle Malkin spearheaded the attack on the FBI for “silencing conservatives.” Please.

As David Neiwert wrote for us back in April of 2009, “Conservatives Indict Themselves With Shrieking Over DHS Report On Right-wing Terrorism.”

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A temporary security fence topped with razor wire surrounds the US Capitol on February 17, 2021, in Washington, DC. The fence was erected around the Capitol-area buildings following the deadly January 6, 2021, insurrection. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Is it election theft, minority rule, voter suppression, or all of the above?

Leading Democrats, many academics, liberal commentators, and left-leaning activists agree: American democracy is in grave peril. It’s besieged on all sides, the threats culminating so far in Donald Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 presidential election from Joe Biden. More tumult likely lies ahead.

But there’s a surprising amount of murkiness about what, exactly, this peril entails — and what can and should be done about it.

Several dark scenarios for the future have been posed, but each is quite different. One is the threat of a stolen election — Republicans could outright steal elections Democrats won, as Trump tried to do, perhaps enhanced by mob violence. Another is the minority rule threat, in which Republicans could consistently win according to the rules but without getting a majority of votes nationwide, due to advantages in the Senate, Electoral College, and redistricting.

There has also been much discussion of the threat of voter suppression. Democrats worry that GOP policy changes making it more difficult to vote could thwart a majority’s will.

Another fear is less about the way Republicans win power, but is more about what they’ll do with it. Let’s call this the irresponsible party threat. For the people with this point of view, any Republican win — even one with sweeping voter majorities — is dangerous, since a faction that does not respect democracy is influential and arguably dominant in the party.

There’s a great deal of debate on just how plausible, and how worrying, each of these scenarios is. Some argue they’re all unfolding at once and are all immensely serious — and that’s part of why this problem is so difficult to solve. There’s also disagreement about root causes, most notably, on how much of the problem comes from Donald Trump personally, and how much comes from broader forces in American society or institutions.

Too often, though, all this is conflated and treated as similarly urgent in what has become a thinkpiece-industrial complex about democracy’s peril, and by a liberal establishment mostly concerned with offering reasons to vote for Democrats rather than Republicans. These threats may well have a common root, but they are distinct problems that would have separate solutions.

The threat of election theft

Many believe that the worst, most dangerous threat to American democracy by far was Trump’s conduct after the 2020 election, leading up to his supporters storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

In this line of thinking, the many other issues liberals care about — voter suppression laws, gerrymandering, the Senate’s rural skew, Trump’s election in the first place — pale in importance when compared to the attempted theft of 2020. Institutional biases or voter suppression might affect election outcomes on the margin. But election theft is about throwing out the results entirely. That arguably should make it the most dangerous scenario for democracy, at least in the short term, as my colleague Zack Beauchamp writes.

Though the mob at the Capitol rightfully got much attention, many experts don’t think the mob itself is the main problem. “The looming danger is not that the mob will return; it’s that mainstream Republicans will ‘legally’ overturn an election,” Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt wrote at the Atlantic last year. That means stealing an election, but through institutions like election officials, legislatures, or Congress, not through brute force.

Trump tried to pressure officials at all these levels to try and throw out Biden’s wins, but his efforts failed. The question is whether he, or someone else, could succeed next time. His supporters are trying to replace various GOP officials who upheld the results with hardcore believers in his narrative of election fraud, or cynics more willing to pander to such beliefs.

If you believe this threat looms above all, then addressing vulnerabilities in the system is paramount. So Democrats should jump at Republicans’ offer to discuss reforming the Electoral Count Act, the antiquated law Trump tried to use to get Congress and Vice President Pence to throw out results. The specific details of said reforms will matter a great deal, but as Rick Hasen writes at Slate, it’s worth getting talks rolling, rather than scoffing at them, as some Democratic leaders have so far.

But the greater threat of a stolen election might come in the states — either from partisan state officials who refuse to certify rightful results, or state legislators who block the winner’s electors. If either happens, it’s not clear the courts will intervene to set things right, since many conservatives argue states have ultimate authority over their own elections.

If possible (it may not be), it would be worth trying to include protections against state election theft in Electoral Count Act reforms. But there’s no foolproof solution. The system will only work if enough people in power agree to let it work. So one key test will be in whether Republicans who stood up to Trump, like Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, can survive primary challenges. Retaining a core of elites in the Republican Party who respect democratic norms is crucially important. Much could also hinge on whether Trump himself runs again and wins the GOP nomination.

The threat of minority rule

Yet many Democrats, activists, and academics aren’t just worried about elections being outright stolen. They’re also concerned that Republicans could consistently win elections while lacking a majority of overall votes nationwide. This, they argue, is an affront to the core democratic principle that a majority should prevail, and to the idea that some people’s votes shouldn’t be worth more than others.

Lately, many United States’s electoral institutions have given the GOP an advantage. “The GOP has dropped any pretense of trying to appeal to a majority of Americans,” writes Ari Berman of Mother Jones. “Instead, recognizing that the structure of America’s political institutions diminishes the influence of urban areas, young Americans, and voters of color, it caters to a conservative white minority that is drastically overrepresented in the Electoral College, the Senate, and gerrymandered legislative districts.”

In 2020, Biden won the popular vote by more than 4 percentage points, but only barely eked out a win in the tipping point Electoral College state. The median states were even a bit more tilted toward the GOP, suggesting the party has a 4- to 6-point advantage in competition for the Senate. Gerrymandering will likely continue to give the GOP a narrow advantage in the House of Representatives and far greater advantages in some swing state legislatures. And we shouldn’t forget the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which has three justices appointed by a president who never won a majority of the nationwide vote.)

This is a frustrating state of affairs for Democrats, but is it a fundamental threat to democracy comparable to that of stolen elections? The US has never had a system where the popular vote dictated these outcomes. Republicans (including those who criticized Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election) argue that they have been playing by the long-established rules of the game, and that Democrats are simply upset that they are losing. Democrats argue back that the rules are unfair because they disadvantage nonwhite voters.

Whatever the arguments, there are few plausible solutions. The party’s filibustered election bill would have reformed House gerrymandering, but it left these other institutions untouched. Other proposals preferred by some on the left, such as adding new states to the Senate and packing the Supreme Court, didn’t even make the cut. The most popular idea for reforming the Electoral College — a “compact” among states to give their electors to the popular vote winner — isn’t going anywhere unless Democrats seize power in many more swing states.

There are some arguments that these problems are surmountable without big reforms. The current round of redistricting probably won’t be as bad for Democrats as many expected in the House (some state legislatures are another story, though). And the Electoral College bias is hardly set in stone — Democrats had a slight advantage in it compared to the popular vote in 2004, 2008, and 2012. Democrats’ woes there, as in the Senate, are in large part a Trump-era problem brought on by a sharp increase in the polarization of the electorate by education.

Yet reversing that trend would likely require a change in the party’s political coalition. They’d have to get significantly better at appealing to the non-college-educated voters, particularly white voters, whose power is amplified by these institutions, as Democratic data guru David Shor has argued. For the foreseeable future, the conversation about reforming the Electoral College or the Senate is a dead end — no constitutional convention is coming to save us. Democrats’ only option is to try to win despite their disadvantages.

The threat of voter suppression

Another threat that’s gotten enormous attention from Democrats, advocates, and experts this year is voter suppression. They argue that Republicans have a longtime practice of trying to effectively trying to distort the electorate, making it harder for certain voters (especially young, poor, nonwhite, and immigrant voters) to actually cast their ballots, so the GOP can have a better shot at winning.

This effort accelerated in 2021 with a set of new laws in GOP-controlled states. Some toughened voter ID requirements, some reduced the time in which mail ballots can be requested, some limited drop boxes, some made it easier to “purge” voter rolls. Republicans claim they’re simply rolling back pandemic expansions or trying to combat possible fraud, but occasionally a Republican admits these measures are aimed at helping their party win.

Biden and others have compared these laws to the old Jim Crow laws of the South. “We feel if they can do these voting rights laws and other voting rights laws, we will never have a majority,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer recently told the Washington Post. And the provisions of certain new laws that could enable partisan election subversion — election theft — could be quite dangerous.

But whatever Republicans’ malign intentions or Democrats’ fears, the real-world effects of voter suppression provisions on election outcomes seem likely to be considerably less dramatic. “There is very little that politicians can do to alter election administration in such a way that it would have a permanent, obvious effect on turnout or the composition of the electorate,” MIT political scientist Charles Stewart told my colleague Ian Millhiser last year.

There simply haven’t been big variations in state election outcomes based on how much early or mail voting states have — it just doesn’t seem to matter much, because people largely adapt to the new rules. Study after study has found that voter ID laws have little effect on outcomes. And it isn’t the case anymore, if it ever was, that high-turnout elections are self-evidently bad for Republicans, given the parties’ changing coalitions and recent voting patterns.

Some political scientists are still worried. Charlotte Hill, Jake Grumbach, Hakeem Jefferson, and Adam Bonica write that it’s “not at all clear” that voter suppression policies have little impact. They posit that perhaps outcomes don’t change “because grassroots groups have invested ever-greater resources” to overcome barriers to voting, and such investment might not be sustainable.

Expanding and standardizing voting accessibility can be a worthwhile and important thing to do regardless of its partisan effects or impact on outcomes. Provisions of these laws, like the Georgia one that bans giving away food and water to people waiting in line at a polling place, can be cruel and arbitrary. And if an election is close enough, even policies with very small effects could theoretically tip the outcome. But major transformations of the electorate in these states from policies of this kind seem unlikely.

The threat of the irresponsible party

Finally, some liberals would define the threat to democracy in even more worrying terms. It wouldn’t just be a stolen election, or a Republican win without a majority of votes — any Republican victory at all is a threat, because of what the GOP might use its powers to do next time around.

“There’s something deep to confront about the aberrant nature of this particular faction and political formation that is the primary problem that all others flow from,” MSNBC’s Chris Hayes recently argued on The Ezra Klein Show.

Trump’s actions, and the willingness of so much of the GOP to excuse or accommodate them, go a long way toward making the case that the GOP may well not respect future election results if it’s in power. The more difficult question is what can be even done about this. “What do you do in a two-party system if one coalition is not fully committed to democracy?” Hayes continued.

The solution Democrats would prefer, of course, is that everyone should just vote for Democrats. But as recent election results and polling numbers suggest, that likely won’t work. The Republican Party is going to stick around and remain competitive in the future, at the state level and nationally. The grand, final defeat of Trump or the GOP, either electorally or legislatively, is a pipe dream.

Some have mused about electoral reforms like a top 5 ranked-choice system, which perhaps could give GOP moderates a path to the general election. But the forces pushing the GOP in extreme directions, such as identity-based polarization and media dynamics, are broad and unlikely to be solved by policy tweaks.

So for those who believe the Democratic Party and the forces of democracy are permanently locked in combat with an extremist GOP, there’s not a comforting prescription. Whether this will change depends on the GOP itself.

But at least when it comes to election theft, there’s a counterargument that the party isn’t yet lost. In particular, key Republicans with positions of authority to affect the results largely didn’t use their formal powers to help Trump steal the election. Swing state governors, state officials, state legislative leaders, GOP-appointed judges, Senate leaders, and Justice Department leaders let Biden’s win through. Many in the party postured irresponsibly, some sought to use their power corruptly, but it’s not the case that the GOP is a well-oiled election-stealing machine: at least not yet.

If Trump is deposed or retires, and is replaced by a less conspiracy-addled, norm-breaking, boundary-pushing party leader, that could help. If the party accepts that they’re making gains among nonwhite and other low-propensity voters and stops trying to suppress their turnout, that would be nice. If high-ranking members of the party who oppose election theft and respect democratic norms manage to hold on to their positions, rather than being purged, that would be encouraging.

Trump’s coup last time around was stopped, in large part, because Republican elected officials stopped it. Whether they will do so again is not really something Democrats or liberals can control. They can only hope for the best — and fear for the worst.

Rick Wilson of the Lincoln Project did an epic Twitter thread yesterday with his vision of what’s really at stake in the next two elections. He started by commenting on Newt Gingrich’s threats that Democrats face jail for the Jan. 6th investigation if Republicans take control:

“He’s right. He’s just saying the quiet part out loud. We’ve been warning you all along that this election isn’t about BBB or prescription drugs or guns or climate or anything else in the policy domain. It’s about the emergent authoritarian state shambling its way toward the end of small-d democratic politics.

“Speaker Jordan (and no, Kevin, he didn’t take your deal and he is going to shank you) and the MAGAe will comprise a clear majority of the GOP caucus in 2022 and they are Trump’s political vergeltungswaffe. They don’t care about policy. They care about power.

“On the first day of the new GOP’s reign, the impeachment of Joe Biden begins. The endless Benghazi 2.0 investigations begin. Expect weeks to TV on Hunter Biden’s laptop. Expect endless hearings on the BLM and the imaginary Antifa threat.

“You know why.

“They’re doing a few things. First, the purpose of terror is to terrorize. They want the Democrats on defense and the Democrats, being Democrats, will fall into the trap, day one. They’ll try the shame the GOP out of it and we know how well that’ll work.

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For those of us who can’t follow the intricacies of the Trump coup attempt, this new MeidasTouch video, “A Coup In Plain Sight,” spells it all out, beginning to end.

Maybe we could force Republicans to watch it with their eyes propped open, like “A Clockword Orange”?

MeidaaTouch is giving full permission to any mainstream news network who wants to air this video in its entirety to do so. Let’s hope some of them do it.

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Capitalism and democracy are compatible only if democracy is in the driver’s seat.

That’s why I took some comfort just after the attack on the Capitol when many big corporations solemnly pledged they’d no longer finance the campaigns of the 147 lawmakers who voted to overturn election results.

Well, those days are over. Turns out they were over the moment the public stopped paying attention.

A report published last week by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington shows that over the past year, 717 companies and industry groups have donated more than $18m to 143 of those seditious lawmakers. Businesses that pledged to stop or pause their donations have given nearly $2.4m directly to their campaigns or political action committees.

But there’s a deeper issue here. The whole question of whether corporations do or don’t bankroll the seditionist caucus is a distraction from a more basic problem.

The tsunami of money now flowing from corporations into the swamp of American politics is larger than ever. And this money – bankrolling almost all politicians and financing attacks on their opponents – is undermining American democracy as much as did the 147 seditionist members of Congress. Maybe more.

The Democratic senator Kyrsten Sinema – whose vocal opposition to any change in the filibuster is on the verge of dooming voting rights – received almost $2m in campaign donations in 2021 even though she is not up for re-election until 2024. Most of it came from corporate donors outside Arizona, some of which have a history of donating largely to Republicans.

Has the money influenced Sinema? You decide. Besides sandbagging voting rights, she voted down the $15 minimum wage increase, opposed tax increases on corporations and the wealthy and stalled on drug price reform – policies supported by a majority of Democratic senators as well as a majority of Arizonans.

Over the last four decades, corporate PAC spending on congressional elections has more than quadrupled, even adjusting for inflation.

The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.

Labor unions no longer provide a counterweight. Forty years ago, union PACs contributed about as much as corporate PACs. Now, corporations are outspending labor by more than three to one.

According to a landmark study published in 2014 by the Princeton professor Martin Gilens and Northwestern professor Benjamin Page, the preferences of the typical American have no influence at all on legislation emerging from Congress.

Gilens and Page analyzed 1,799 policy issues in detail, determining the relative influence of economic elites, business groups, mass-based interest groups and average citizens. Their conclusion: “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.” Lawmakers mainly listen to the policy demands of big business and wealthy individuals – those with the most lobbying prowess and deepest pockets to bankroll campaigns and promote their views.

It’s probably far worse now. Gilens and Page’s data came from the period 1981 to 2002: before the supreme court opened the floodgates to big money in the Citizens United case, before Super Pacs, before “dark money” and before the Wall Street bailout.

The corporate return on this mountain of money has been significant. Over the last 40 years, corporate tax rates have plunged. Regulatory protections for consumers, workers and the environment have been defanged. Antitrust has become so ineffectual that many big corporations face little or no competition.

Corporations have fought off safety nets and public investments that are common in other advanced nations (most recently, Build Back Better). They’ve attacked labor laws, reducing the portion of private-sector workers belonging to a union from a third 40 years ago to just over 6% now.

They’ve collected hundreds of billions in federal subsidies, bailouts, loan guarantees and sole-source contracts. Corporate welfare for big pharma, big oil, big tech, big ag, the largest military contractors and biggest banks now dwarfs the amount of welfare for people.

The profits of big corporations just reached a 70-year high, even during a pandemic. The ratio of CEO pay in large companies to average workers has ballooned from 20-to-1 in the 1960s, to 320-to-1 now.

Meanwhile, most Americans are going nowhere. The typical worker’s wage is only a bit higher today than it was 40 years ago, when adjusted for inflation.

But the biggest casualty is public trust in democracy.

In 1964, just 29% of voters believed government was “run by a few big interests looking out for themselves”. By 2013, 79% of Americans believed it.

Corporate donations to seditious lawmakers are nothing compared with this 40-year record of corporate sedition.

A large portion of the American public has become so frustrated and cynical about democracy they are willing to believe blatant lies of a self-described strongman, and willing to support a political party that no longer believes in democracy.

As I said at the outset, capitalism is compatible with democracy only if democracy is in the driver’s seat. But the absence of democracy doesn’t strengthen capitalism. It fuels despotism.

Despotism is bad for capitalism. Despots don’t respect property rights. They don’t honor the rule of law. They are arbitrary and unpredictable. All of this harms the owners of capital. Despotism also invites civil strife and conflict, which destabilize a society and an economy.

My message to every CEO in America: you need democracy, but you’re actively undermining it.

It’s time for you to join the pro-democracy movement. Get solidly behind voting rights. Actively lobby for the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.

Use your lopsidedly large power in American democracy to protect American democracy – and do it soon. Otherwise, we may lose what’s left of it.

Robert Reich

Reposted with permission from Robert Reich’s Blog.

The post Are Corporate Seditionists Any Better than the Seditionists Who Attacked the Capitol? appeared first on LA Progressive.

Sidney Powell’s Kraken was more than a silly sideshow

New reporting has revealed that the scheme to use fake electors to disrupt the certification of the Electoral College vote on January 6, 2021, was coordinated by members of former President Donald Trump’s campaign team, including Rudy Giuliani, who was his personal lawyer at the time.

Giuliani and other campaign associates coordinated the plan on a state-by-state level, sources told CNN. The Trump campaign was directly involved in finding Trump loyalists to participate in the plan in seven states, and ensured that fake electors could have rooms in statehouses to conduct their unofficial business.

The fake electors’ documents – which were forged but purported to be official – were sent to the National Archives.

The second part of the plan required involvement from former Vice President Mike Pence, who oversaw the certification of the Electoral College. In order for the plan to come to fruition, Pence had to either accept the fraudulent electors’ votes as real, or say that he couldn’t count any of the votes out of supposed confusion over which were actually legitimate. But despite a campaign to get Pence to participate in the plan, the former vice president refused to do so.

While the fake electors scheme was materializing, Giuliani forwarded letters to Pence from Republican state legislators across the U.S., urging him to accept the false documents as legitimate. The former vice president’s legal team reportedly reviewed the requests but were unswayed, noting that there wasn’t a legal basis for accepting the illegitimate votes.

The scheme to present fake electors and their forged documents as legitimate may become a new focus of the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol building. Some members of the commission have expressed an interest in discerning whether or not Trump was involved in the scheme along with his campaign team.

Although Trump vocally supported overturning the 2020 election in the weeks after President Joe Biden was announced the winner, the extent to which the former president was involved in the fake electors scheme is unclear.

The committee expects to receive hundreds of documents from the National Archives in coming days, as the Supreme Court recently dismissed a last-ditch appeal by Trump to keep his presidential records hidden from the January 6 commission. It’s possible that these documents will reveal more information about the extent of Trump’s involvement in his campaign team’s plan.

“We want to look at the fraudulent activity that was contained in the preparation of these fake Electoral College certificates,” committee member Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) said. “And then we want to look to see to what extent this was part of a comprehensive plan to overthrow the 2020 election.”