Justin, an autoimmune disease and trauma specialist with a Master’s degree in Human Nutrition, believes when someone goes through a horrific experience, their body becomes a crime scene.
Over half of all Americans will experience at least one traumatic event in their lifetimes.
And even long after the initial occurrence, their mind, body, and spirit are impacted.
Justin, an autoimmune disease and trauma specialist with a Master’s degree in Human Nutrition, believes when someone goes through a horrific experience, their body becomes a crime scene. It does not seem secure, and their bodies might reveal themselves in various ways, including autoimmune illnesses.
Unfortunately, autoimmune illness is on the rise, and mainstream medicine doesn’t have a cure other than symptom treatment, which is excellent but doesn’t address the underlying issues that made someone sick in the first place. Justin’s primary goal is to educate people, especially women, so they can take control of their health and achieve the health they deserve, and share his healing abilities.
Justin Janoska has worked with ladies who have Hashimoto’s, Psoriasis, Lupus, Inflammatory Bowel Disease, and other autoimmune disorders and was compelled to show the world what is possible after learning the data and truths of autoimmunity.
He’s been able to help ladies with complicated trauma and PTSD in ways that mainstream psychiatry and psychotherapy haven’t been able to. While remaining grounded, Justin and his colleagues have filled a significant void for many individuals, particularly women dealing with unresolved trauma and mismanaged autoimmunity.
While Justin’s significant areas of expertise include Hashimoto’s, PCOS, and trauma, with the primary objective of assisting women in regaining control of their bodies, discovering a sense of completeness, improving their quality of life, and feeling alive, he still wants to make more of an impact in the autoimmune field.
Moreover, the accomplished clinician is enthusiastic about assisting women who have experienced trauma and are dealing with the numerous medical illnesses that come with it. A staunch believer of positivity, he states that there is a need to raise awareness about the mind-body link in these disorders since this is where the healing happens. He aims to raise the consciousness of the fact that the farther we separate our emotional and spiritual health from our physical bodies, the bigger the distance between our current self and our intended self gets.
The ace clinician strongly propagates that the more equipped a woman is to heal herself mentally and physically, the healthier she, her children, and their parenting methods will be. Much of what happens is that an ill parent is unable to care for their children, and as a result, the youngster develops trauma due to the experience. It’s a chain reaction. Trauma is handed down through the generations until someone is ready to confront it.
Shattering stereotypes in the clinical spheres, Justin hopes to inspire others through his body of work. He confesses that his primary goal is to assist women in various areas of health, but significantly to help them realize how it’s all one knotted knot. He constantly approaches clients with the mindset that everything is interconnected. While a diagnosis might be beneficial and necessary in some cases, it is not essential to take action to improve one’s health. Your health is in your own hands and the decisions you make and the actions you take regarding it, are the deciding factors for the relationship of your mind and any lingering with your body and their effect on it.
The appetite in many parts of the world has already increased for an alternative to Western-shaped globalization, but this does not necessarily mean deglobalization.
An article written by authors John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge for Bloomberg on March 24 sounded the alarm to announce the end of “the second great age of globalization.” The Western trade war and sanctions against China that predated the pandemic have now been joined by the stiff Western sanctions imposed against Russia after it invaded Ukraine. These sanctions are like an iron curtain being built by the United States and its allies around Eurasia. But according to Micklethwait and Wooldridge, this iron curtain will not only descend around China and Russia but will also have far-reaching consequences across the world.
Australia and many countries in Asia, including India and Japan—which are otherwise reliable allies of the United States—are unwilling to break their economic and political ties with China and Russia. The 38 countries that did not vote at the United Nations General Assembly meeting on March 24 to condemn Russia’s war in Ukraine included China and India; both of these countries “account for the majority of the world’s population,” Micklethwait and Wooldridge observe in their Bloomberg article. If the world bifurcates, “the second great age of globalization… [will come] to a catastrophic close,” the article states.
In 2000, Micklethwait and Wooldridge published the manual on this wave of globalization called A Future Perfect: The Challenge and Promise of Globalization. That book cheered on the liberalization of trade and finance, although its authors acknowledged that in this free market society that they championed, “businesspeople are the most obvious beneficiaries.” The inequalities generated by globalization would be lessened, they suggested, by the greater choices afforded to the consumers (although, as social inequality increased during the 2000s, consumers simply did not have the money to exercise their choices). When Micklethwait and Wooldridge wrote A Future Perfect, they both worked for the Economist, which has been one of the cheerleaders of Western-shaped globalization. Both Micklethwait and Wooldridge are now at Bloomberg, another significant voice of the business elites.
In an article for the International Monetary Fund, Kenneth Rogoff, a professor at Harvard University, warns of the risk of deglobalization. Such an unraveling, he notes, “would surely be a huge negative shock for the world economy.” Rogoff, like Micklethwait and Wooldridge, uses the word “catastrophic” to describe the impact of deglobalization. Unlike Micklethwait and Wooldridge, however, Rogoff’s article seems to imply that deglobalization is the production of Russia’s war on Ukraine and that it could be “temporary.” Russia, he states, “looks set to be isolated for an extended period.” In his article, Rogoff does not delve very much into concerns about what this means to the people in many parts of the world (such as Central Asia and Europe). “The real hit to globalization,” he worries, “will happen if trade between advanced economies and China also drops.” If that happens, then deglobalization would not be temporary since countries such as China and Russia will seek other pathways for trade and development.
Longer Histories
None of these writers acknowledges in these recent articles that deglobalization, which is a retreat from Western-designed globalization, did not begin during the pandemic or during the Russian war on Ukraine. This process has its origins in the Great Recession of 2007-2009. With the faltering of the Western economies, both China and Russia, as well as other major economic powers, began to seek alternative ways to globalize. China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which was announced in 2013, is a signal of this gradual shift, with China developing its own linkages first in Central and South Asia and then beyond Asia and toward Africa, Europe and Latin America. It is telling that the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, a backwater event founded in 1997, has become a meeting place for Asian and European business and political leaders who see this meeting as much more significant than the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting held in Davos, Switzerland.
In the aftermath of the Great Recession, countries such as China began to de-dollarize their currency reserves. They moved from a largely dollar-based reserve to one that was more diversified. It is this move toward diversification that led to the drop in the dollar’s share in global currency reserves from 70 percent in 2000 to 59 percent in 2020. According to author Tony Norfield, the share of dollars in Russian foreign exchange reserves was 23.6 percent in 2019 and dropped to 10.9 percent by 2021. Deprived of dollars due to the sanctions imposed by the West, the Central Bank of Russia has attempted various maneuvers to de-dollarize its currency reserves as well, including by anchoring the ruble to gold, by preventing the outward flow of dollars and by demanding that its buyers of fuel and food pay in rubles rather than in dollars.
As the United States widens its net to sanction more and more countries, these countries—such as China and Russia—seek to build up trade mechanisms that are not reliant upon Western institutions anymore.
Deglobalization Leads to a Different Globalization
On January 1, 2022, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP)—the world’s largest free trade pact—went into effect. Two years ago, 15 countries met virtually in Hanoi, Vietnam, to sign this treaty. These countries include close allies of the United States, such as Australia, Japan and South Korea, as well as countries that face U.S. sanctions, such as China and Myanmar. A third of humanity is included in RCEP, which accounts for a third of global gross domestic product. The Asian Development Bank is hopeful that RCEP will provide relief to countries struggling to emerge from the negative economic impact of the pandemic.
Blocs such as RCEP and projects like the BRI are not antithetical to the internationalization of trade and development. Economists at the HKUST Business School in Hong Kong show that the BRI “significantly increases bilateral trade flows between BRI countries.” China’s purchases from BRI countries have increased, although much of this is in the realm of energy and minerals rather than in high-value goods; exports from China to the BRI countries, on the other hand, remain steady. The Asian Development Bank estimates that the BRI project would require $1.7 trillion annually for infrastructural development in Asia, including climate-related investments.
The pandemic has certainly stalled the progress of the BRI project, with debt problems affecting a range of countries due to lower than capacity use of their BRI-funded infrastructure. The economic and political crises in Pakistan and Sri Lanka are partly related to the global slowdown of trade. These countries are integral to the BRI project. Rising food and fuel prices due to the war in Ukraine will further complicate matters for countries in the Global South.
The appetite in many parts of the world has already increased for an alternative to Western-shaped globalization, but this does not necessarily mean deglobalization. It could mean a globalization platform that no longer has its epicenter located in Washington or Brussels.
Their plan is to take over the machinery of our democracy from the ground up by electing Trump loyalists in this coming fall’s midterms
Friends,I thought long and hard about sending you today’s newsletter because all of us are stressed enough about Putin’s war, new strains of the pandemic, and the latest consequences of climate change. But several of you responded by wanting more information about how Trump and his co-conspirators (Steven Bannon, Michael Flynn, and others) are laying the groundwork for what can only be described as an attempted coup in the 2024 presidential election.
So I felt I had to share this with you.
Their plan is to take over the machinery of our democracy from the ground up by electing Trump loyalists in this coming fall’s midterms — so that in the 2024 presidential election only Trump loyalists will be certifying elections. As Bannon said: “We’re taking over all the elections.”
Remember, Trump ultimately failed to overturn the 2020 election because a few election officials — secretaries of state in particular — rightfully certified the results despite heavy pressure from him and his enablers to overturn them. In 37 states, the secretaries of state are the chief elections officers. That means they oversee elections and voter registration. In 2020, they held the United States’ rickety democracy together by certifying Joe Biden’s win.
But what happens if secretaries of state won’t protect democracy? In most states, secretaries of state are elected. And it’s precisely those elections that Trump and Bannon are targeting, especially in key swing states. For example:
Trump’s choice for Georgia’s Secretary of State is Jody Hice, who voted against certifying the 2020 election in the Georgia House.
His choice for Michigan’s Secretary of State is Kristina Karamo, who falsely claimed to have witnessed election fraud.
His choice for Arizona’s Secretary of State is Mark Finchem, a QAnon-supporting member of the Oath Keepers militia who participated in the January 6 insurrection.
At least 20 other candidates now running for secretary of state around the nation do not believe in the legitimacy of the 2020 election. In addition, thousands of others who have taken up Bannon’s call have signed up to be local elections officials and poll workers. These positions are the last lines of defense in a democracy.
We’ve seen what happens when secretaries of state put partisan interests ahead of election integrity. In 2018, Brian Kemp ran Georgia elections as its secretary of state — while he was running for governor against Stacey Abrams. During his tenure, Kemp oversaw the purging of almost 1 and a half million voter registrations and the closing of more than 200 polling places. In the weeks leading up to the election, he put more than 50,000 voter registrations on hold, 70% of which belonged to Black people. He won by 55,000 votes.
And remember back in the 2000 presidential election, when Al Gore won the popular vote? Nonetheless, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, who had been co-chair of George W Bush’s statewide campaign, ended up calling Florida for Bush, which handed him the election.
Trump and Bannon’s goal is to replicate these abuses across America and put into power next fall Trump loyalists who care more about electing Trump in 2024 than in upholding democracy.
What can we do about this? In 2020, millions of people organized, volunteered, and voted to keep American democracy alive. In coming months, we must work to elect public servants who will uphold democracy and stand up to those who are hellbent on undermining it.
So please:
Make sure your friends and family know what the stakes are this fall. (For starters, you might take a look at the video that I’ve pasted here, which I and my colleagues at Inequality Media are releasing today — and share it as widely as possible.)
Next, get information about who is running for secretary of state in your state and for local election positions in your locale. If you have reason to believe they’re more dedicated to Trump’s reelection than to democracy, spread the word.
Third, get involved directly. Volunteer to be a poll worker or local election official. Every position matters.
Merrick Garland must do it now, before it’s too late
On Friday, Trump endorsed J.D. Vance in the Ohio Senate Republican primary. This follows his endorsement of Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania’s Senate Republican primary and Herschel Walker in the Georgia Senate race. The press has framed these endorsements as long-shot bets that “could put [Trump’s] desired image as a kingmaker at risk.” But this misses the point. What’s really at stake for Trump is the selling of Trump and his big lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
To be endorsed by Trump, candidates apparently must fulfill three prerequisites:
They have to be running in swing states whose primaries and general elections will attract lots of media attention.
They must be totally committed to Trump and his big lie.
And they must have shown themselves capable of promoting Trump and his lie with the kind of celebrity pizzaz that sells well on television.
Vance — celebrity author of “Hillbilly Elegy” — was originally appalled by Trump and his lie, and said so. But now that he’s running for the Senate, Vance has become one of the most forceful promoters of Trump and articulate peddlers of his big lie. As Trump noted about Vance, “he gets it now.”
Oz is a celebrity television doctor who has over the years come under fire for bogus on-air medical advice, which makes him perfect for promoting Trump and his big lie, too. Trump admires Oz’s television bona fides: “They liked him for a long time,” Trump said of Oz at a rally in Pennsylvania last week. “That’s like a poll. You know, when you’re in television for 18 years, that’s like a poll. That means people like you.”
Walker fits the criteria, as well. He was both a college and NFL star.
Trump couldn’t care less whether he’s viewed as a “kingmaker” by the press and politicians inside the Beltway. He cares only about his narcissistic need to delegitimize the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. And he has a knack for recognizing ambitious, unprincipled, television-savvy hucksters who will help him.
Let me pause here to emphasize two things that are too easily forgotten. First, no one to this day has produced even a shred of evidence that fraud affected the results of the 2020 election. Sixty federal judges, along with Trump’s own departments of justice and homeland security, have concluded that Biden won fair and square.
Second, the lynchpin of democracy is the peaceful transition of power from those who lose elections to those who win them. Yet it’s been over a year and half since Trump has refused to concede — continuously spreading his big lie that the election was stolen, pushing public officials at all levels of government to overturn the election, and instigating an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on the day Congress was to certify the election results. As Federal District Court Judge David Carter stated in a recent opinion, “[T]he Court finds it more likely than not that President Trump corruptly attempted to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021.”
Trump is already well on the way to rebuilding the Republican Party around his big lie. He is purging the GOP of his critics and installing loyalists in key state positions. And he is inspiring GOP-state legislatures to enact election sabotage laws that will give Trump and his supporters opportunities to rig congressional election results. The upcoming 2022 congressional elections will serve as proving grounds for his attempt to steal the 2024 presidential election.
Trump is a growing menace to our system of self-government. The longer he goes without being held accountable for what he has done, the more danger he poses.
The critical question, then, is whether Attorney General Merrick Garland will bring criminal charges against him — and when. The window of opportunity is closing fast. The House Select Committee on January 6 will be holding public hearings in a few weeks and report its findings thereafter. (The committee has already collected nearly 10,000 documents and conducted more than 860 depositions and interviews, including with Trump family members and his close associates.) If Republicans take over the House in the midterm elections, they are sure to close down the inquiry.
Moreover, immediately after the midterm elections, America will be in the gravitational pull of the 2024 presidential primaries — in which Trump will almost certainly play a leading role, unless he is indicted and convicted. He has already amassed a campaign chest of more than $120 million, more than double that of the Republican National Committee. During the last six months of 2021, his PAC raised more money online than the GOP every day but two. And once he is a declared candidate, it will be impossible for Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms to stop him from engulfing them with his lies.
Some say Garland should not bring criminal charges against Trump because criminal charges have never before been brought against a former president. This is a specious argument because no former president has ever before attempted to overthrow a duly elected President — the first attempted coup in the 233-year history of the United States government.
Others worry that criminal charges against Trump — along with a trial and possible imprisonment — would only deepen the fierce partisan divide that’s already drained trust out of much of American democracy. This is a legitimate concern. But failure to hold Trump accountable for what he has done would pose a far greater risk for American democracy — permanently entrenching distrust in our election system and legitimizing future battles over every contest, possibly provoking repeated rounds of violence.
Trump’s indictment and conviction must occur as quickly as possible. The upcoming midterm elections won’t simply be a battle between Republicans and Democrats. They will be a battle between Trump acolytes and fair election supporters over protecting the integrity of our elections and our democracy. The sooner Trump is held accountable for his criminality, the safer American democracy will be.
The House committee can still succeed, but success won’t be like onlookers hope. Will it help prevent the next coup? Read January 6 Committee Revelations here!
The House Select Committee investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol has produced several bombshell revelations in the last two weeks.
First came the news that Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, had texted Trump administration Chief of Staff Mark Meadows exhorting him to fight to overturn the 2020 election results. Then, on Monday, a federal judge, in deciding to grant the committee access to emails from conservative lawyer John Eastman, ruled that former president Donald Trump “more likely than not” committed federal crimes.
The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob claims it has evidence that Eastman, a former law clerk to Justice Thomas, believed he would support his legal maneuver to block a Joe Biden victory.
These revelations remind us of how critical it will be for the public to get a full sense of what investigators find, as well as for the legal system to hold the perpetrators accountable, lest another coup attempt take place.
But there is another hard historical reality we must also face. Selecting our governmental leaders through free and fair elections and a peaceful transfer of power is a concept not embraced by all Americans. Indeed, the Capitol insurrection was not the first of its kind on U.S. soil. And after past coup attempts, the U.S. government failed to prosecute the conspirators, allowing them to go free or even permitting them to remain in power when they succeeded. As the public learns more about the Jan. 6 insurrection and the politicians, organizations and funders behind the attempted coup, calls for indictments will take place within a historical context of past coups and coup attempts that evaded accountability.
Violent overthrows of democratically elected state and local governments happened multiple times in the aftermath of the Civil War.
For example, in 1874, a Democratic Party-aligned militia of Confederate veterans known as the White League took over the Louisiana Capitol and New Orleans City Hall for three days, in what was known as the Battle of Liberty Place. The paramilitary organization was dedicated to upholding white supremacy and intimidating Black voters, expelling Republicans from power and defending a “hereditary civilization and Christianity menaced by a stupid Africanization.” Louisiana’s Republican governor had been elected two years earlier because of the Black vote, and the elected lieutenant governor was Black.
In response, President Ulysses S. Grant ordered the army to suppress the insurrectionists, who had killed at least 13 officers in the city’s integrated police force, cut New Orleans’ telegraph lines, and demanded the resignation of the governor and the installation of his losing Democratic opponent. Yet none of the insurrectionists were charged and that was it.
Three years later, Reconstruction was over. In 1877, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes became president, and he removed federal troops from the South. The Confederates regained control of Louisiana and suppressed the Black vote. In 1891, a monument praising the coup attempt — depicted as the “overthrow of carpetbag government ousting the usurpers” — was erected.
In the Wilmington Massacre of 1898, a white supremacist mob known as the Red Shirts forcibly removed the progressive biracial coalition of White and Black elected leaders of Wilmington, N.C., a majority Black city and the largest city in the state. The thought of Black people governing and competing with White people was unthinkable for those who saw their way of life threatened and who sought to “protect” White women from Black men.
Over 100 Black government officials were removed from power at gunpoint, and replaced with unelected Whites under a White Declaration of Independence. The offices of the Daily Record, a Black-owned newspaper, were burned to the ground, and as many as 250 Black people were murdered and thousands fled the city. The coup was a deemed a success for the city’s White business elite. In 1900, the state legislature enacted voting restrictions to disenfranchise Black voters, including a poll tax and literacy test. Black power would not return for the greater part of a century.
Even those who targeted the presidency evaded consequences. In 1933, a group of the wealthiest men in America — Wall Street bankers and leaders of business and industry — hatched a plan to remove President Franklin D. Roosevelt from office and replace him with a fascist dictator. Wall Street financiers opposed Roosevelt’s New Deal — a program of public works projects, economic regulations, and income and wealth redistributive measures designed to end the Great Depression and attack economic inequality. Critics viewed Roosevelt as part of a socialist, communist or Jewish conspiracy to end capitalism. With capitalism not working for the masses, these men viewed fascism as a solution.
Here was their plan: as part of what has become known as the Business Plot or Wall Street Putsch, a paramilitary force of 500,000 veterans was to march to the Capitol. Wall Street would supply $30 million with Remington Arms supplying the guns. Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, a highly decorated Marine veteran and a Quaker who had participated in every U.S. war since the Spanish-American War, was recruited to lead the coup. Butler had participated in regime change in Latin American countries and the installation of dictators on behalf of corporate America, who would exploit these countries and their resources for profit.
But Butler refused to participate and he revealed the plot to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who said he had no authority to investigate, and had no evidence a federal crime had been committed. Hoover then told Roosevelt, who reportedly laughed and said: “Fantastic!”
The McCormack-Dickstein Committee, later known as the House of Representatives Committee on Un-American Activities held hearings on the conspiracy. And yet, legally, nobody was held accountable, leaving historians and journalists to debate who was even involved (Many have speculated that coupplanners included General Motors’ Alfred P. Sloan, the DuPont family, former New York governor and presidential nominee Al Smith, and Prescott Bush — father of George H.W. Bush and grandfather of George W. Bush — who would later become a U.S. senator — despite the fact that none were ever concretely linked to the plot.)
Although the Business Plot was not carried out to completion — Roosevelt presumably struck a deal with the executives to not pursue treason charges in exchange for dropping their opposition to the New Deal — none of those who plotted the coup was prosecuted or even subpoenaed to testify. Further, the committee withheld the names of the plotters in Butler’s testimony in its final report to Congress.
The history of coup attempts shows a disturbing trend: people whose ideas were too unpopular and repulsive to prevail at the ballot box have resorted to violent, extralegal and antidemocratic means to get their way.
A nation unable or unwilling to deal with its legacy of insurrection is consigned to a future of insurrections. At a time of heightened government corruption, extensive efforts to suppress and disenfranchise voters and a lack of faith in social institutions to solve our problems, some people believe elections are rigged or make little difference.
Conspiracy theories abound, and growing public distrust in free and fair elections only provides a breeding ground for domestic insurgencies. Remedies for restoring public trust include greater transparency and accountability from government and media companies that spread disinformation, reforming or replacing broken institutions, and increasing civic education and participation.
The House committee can still succeed, but success won’t be like onlookers hope. Will it help prevent the next coup? Read January 6 Committee Revelations here!
The House Select Committee investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol has produced several bombshell revelations in the last two weeks.
First came the news that Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, had texted Trump administration Chief of Staff Mark Meadows exhorting him to fight to overturn the 2020 election results. Then, on Monday, a federal judge, in deciding to grant the committee access to emails from conservative lawyer John Eastman, ruled that former president Donald Trump “more likely than not” committed federal crimes.
The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob claims it has evidence that Eastman, a former law clerk to Justice Thomas, believed he would support his legal maneuver to block a Joe Biden victory.
These revelations remind us of how critical it will be for the public to get a full sense of what investigators find, as well as for the legal system to hold the perpetrators accountable, lest another coup attempt take place.
But there is another hard historical reality we must also face. Selecting our governmental leaders through free and fair elections and a peaceful transfer of power is a concept not embraced by all Americans. Indeed, the Capitol insurrection was not the first of its kind on U.S. soil. And after past coup attempts, the U.S. government failed to prosecute the conspirators, allowing them to go free or even permitting them to remain in power when they succeeded. As the public learns more about the Jan. 6 insurrection and the politicians, organizations and funders behind the attempted coup, calls for indictments will take place within a historical context of past coups and coup attempts that evaded accountability.
Violent overthrows of democratically elected state and local governments happened multiple times in the aftermath of the Civil War.
For example, in 1874, a Democratic Party-aligned militia of Confederate veterans known as the White League took over the Louisiana Capitol and New Orleans City Hall for three days, in what was known as the Battle of Liberty Place. The paramilitary organization was dedicated to upholding white supremacy and intimidating Black voters, expelling Republicans from power and defending a “hereditary civilization and Christianity menaced by a stupid Africanization.” Louisiana’s Republican governor had been elected two years earlier because of the Black vote, and the elected lieutenant governor was Black.
In response, President Ulysses S. Grant ordered the army to suppress the insurrectionists, who had killed at least 13 officers in the city’s integrated police force, cut New Orleans’ telegraph lines, and demanded the resignation of the governor and the installation of his losing Democratic opponent. Yet none of the insurrectionists were charged and that was it.
Three years later, Reconstruction was over. In 1877, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes became president, and he removed federal troops from the South. The Confederates regained control of Louisiana and suppressed the Black vote. In 1891, a monument praising the coup attempt — depicted as the “overthrow of carpetbag government ousting the usurpers” — was erected.
In the Wilmington Massacre of 1898, a white supremacist mob known as the Red Shirts forcibly removed the progressive biracial coalition of White and Black elected leaders of Wilmington, N.C., a majority Black city and the largest city in the state. The thought of Black people governing and competing with White people was unthinkable for those who saw their way of life threatened and who sought to “protect” White women from Black men.
Over 100 Black government officials were removed from power at gunpoint, and replaced with unelected Whites under a White Declaration of Independence. The offices of the Daily Record, a Black-owned newspaper, were burned to the ground, and as many as 250 Black people were murdered and thousands fled the city. The coup was a deemed a success for the city’s White business elite. In 1900, the state legislature enacted voting restrictions to disenfranchise Black voters, including a poll tax and literacy test. Black power would not return for the greater part of a century.
Even those who targeted the presidency evaded consequences. In 1933, a group of the wealthiest men in America — Wall Street bankers and leaders of business and industry — hatched a plan to remove President Franklin D. Roosevelt from office and replace him with a fascist dictator. Wall Street financiers opposed Roosevelt’s New Deal — a program of public works projects, economic regulations, and income and wealth redistributive measures designed to end the Great Depression and attack economic inequality. Critics viewed Roosevelt as part of a socialist, communist or Jewish conspiracy to end capitalism. With capitalism not working for the masses, these men viewed fascism as a solution.
Here was their plan: as part of what has become known as the Business Plot or Wall Street Putsch, a paramilitary force of 500,000 veterans was to march to the Capitol. Wall Street would supply $30 million with Remington Arms supplying the guns. Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, a highly decorated Marine veteran and a Quaker who had participated in every U.S. war since the Spanish-American War, was recruited to lead the coup. Butler had participated in regime change in Latin American countries and the installation of dictators on behalf of corporate America, who would exploit these countries and their resources for profit.
But Butler refused to participate and he revealed the plot to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who said he had no authority to investigate, and had no evidence a federal crime had been committed. Hoover then told Roosevelt, who reportedly laughed and said: “Fantastic!”
The McCormack-Dickstein Committee, later known as the House of Representatives Committee on Un-American Activities held hearings on the conspiracy. And yet, legally, nobody was held accountable, leaving historians and journalists to debate who was even involved (Many have speculated that coupplanners included General Motors’ Alfred P. Sloan, the DuPont family, former New York governor and presidential nominee Al Smith, and Prescott Bush — father of George H.W. Bush and grandfather of George W. Bush — who would later become a U.S. senator — despite the fact that none were ever concretely linked to the plot.)
Although the Business Plot was not carried out to completion — Roosevelt presumably struck a deal with the executives to not pursue treason charges in exchange for dropping their opposition to the New Deal — none of those who plotted the coup was prosecuted or even subpoenaed to testify. Further, the committee withheld the names of the plotters in Butler’s testimony in its final report to Congress.
The history of coup attempts shows a disturbing trend: people whose ideas were too unpopular and repulsive to prevail at the ballot box have resorted to violent, extralegal and antidemocratic means to get their way.
A nation unable or unwilling to deal with its legacy of insurrection is consigned to a future of insurrections. At a time of heightened government corruption, extensive efforts to suppress and disenfranchise voters and a lack of faith in social institutions to solve our problems, some people believe elections are rigged or make little difference.
Conspiracy theories abound, and growing public distrust in free and fair elections only provides a breeding ground for domestic insurgencies. Remedies for restoring public trust include greater transparency and accountability from government and media companies that spread disinformation, reforming or replacing broken institutions, and increasing civic education and participation.
Believers of Trump’s big lie about the 2020 election continue to ignore national media and election experts. Will they be convinced by poll workers and local leaders to trust the democratic process again?
As 2022’s primaries approach, an unprecedented wave of public and private efforts are underway to foster trust in election operations and election officials in response to ongoing claims by Donald Trump and his supporters, including many officeholders and candidates, that President Joe Biden was not legitimately elected.
Public-facing efforts include creating an election official appreciation day on April 12, a newly launched Election Official Legal Defense Network to counter new Republican-drafted laws that criminalize mistakes in administering elections, and federal lobbying to protect election officials and their families from threats. There also are behind-the-scenes efforts to educate local civic, business and faith leaders so that trusted voices can help to respond to election deniers.
The efforts come as scores of candidates for statewide and local office, including many seeking reelection, have made the unproven claim that Trump’s second term was stolen a key feature of their 2022 campaigns, and, as a supermajority of Republicans—a figure unchanged since late 2020—still believe that Democrats and election insiders stole the presidential election.
“You can’t have 30 percent of the county not believing in elections,” said Benjamin Ginsberg, a veteran Republican Party election lawyer who has spoken out against the “big lie”—Trump’s assertion of victory—and a co-chair of the Election Official Legal Defense Network.
“Where we are really lacking is how we talk to that 30 percent,” he continued, speaking on a March 28 podcast with Sarah Longwell, publisher of the Bulwark, a media outlet featuring Republicans who reject the big lie. “There is a dialog that really has to take place about the election system and how reliable it in fact is… That’s an important conversation that we’re trying to figure out how to have, but haven’t really succeeded yet.”
The comments by Ginsberg, who said he has “spent 30 years doing Election Day operations for Republican Party committees and candidates” and “never” found evidence of Democrats or an election official who rigged the results, underscore both the challenge and, so far, the limited impact of trying to convince Trump’s base that elections are trustworthy and 2020’s results were accurate.
Nonetheless, the efforts to instill confidence and build new guardrails is a departure from more traditional election protection work, where teams of lawyers help voters cast their ballots and sometimes sue to ensure their votes are counted. Those efforts, led nationally by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, usually focus on the fall’s general elections and not the earlier primaries. Yet the primaries tend to draw the most partisan candidates and voters.
2022’s primaries feature an unprecedented number of candidates who deny that Biden won and who cite an array of doubts and conspiracies to press their case.
“As of April 4, 2022, in two out of three governor and secretary of state contests, there is an Election Denier running. This is true for one out of three attorney general contests as well,” reported States United Action, a group supporting inclusive and accurate elections, in an update to a March report that detailed how the post-2020 trend of pro-Trump Republicans pushing for more restrictive voting laws has evolved into candidates who deny Biden won, spread conspiracies about the election, and attack election officials and voting systems.
“Replacing the refs—the people who administer our elections—is a key pillar of the anti-democracy playbook. Voters across the political spectrum should be paying attention to who these Election Deniers are, where they are running, and the seriousness of their false claims about the 2020 election results,” said Thania Sanchez, senior vice president of research and policy development at States United Action.
What remains to be seen is how 2022’s candidates and their base will react—in words and actions—if they lose in the primaries, as many of them will because some of them are seeking their party’s nomination for the same office. And, moreover, what would or should be done if Election Day and vote-verifying steps that follow are intentionally disrupted or contested by conspiratorial assertions that hidden hands have tampered with the results.
Election officials, some of whom were threatened by right-wingers in recent months, have been steeling themselves for 2022’s elections and preparing to respond to emotion-laden threats.
“Not only are our elections technically more complex, [but] we are expected to know a lot of things that… wouldn’t be typical of a public servant,” Natalie Adona, Nevada County, California, assistant clerk-recorder, told a national organizing call for April 12’s Thank Election Heroes day organized by Public Citizen, one of many groups supporting the effort.
“I had to learn all that I can about de-escalation—and it’s something that I would normally depend on the police to offer,” Adona said. “Our workers, who I train to serve at our vote centers, are increasingly being confronted by more and more aggressive people. I, myself, have been confronted by people who have threatened me.”
Challenges Are Clear, Answers Are Not
There have been numerous webinars and reports from organizations that work with current and former election officials seeking to counter Trump-led disinformation. These efforts, which usually feature civil service professionals who are highly regarded for their election work, reveal a deepening understanding of the election deniers in their midst. But acquiring a new understanding of their critics and adversaries is not the same thing as changing their minds.
At the National Association of State Election Directors’ semi-annual meeting in early March, one session open to the press featured Colorado’s Judd Choate, who recounted how his office had surveyed voters last summer and identified some contradictory beliefs. Many voters distrusted 2020’s national results but had confidence in local elections. Choate said his state’s response was “not so much countering misinformation but getting good information out.”
An April 6 report and briefing on neutralizing partisan impulses among election officials from the Washington-based Bipartisan Policy Center and Election Reformers Network differentiated between which election officials and workers were more and less likely to be partisan, which may be an index of who can best attest to the reliability and accuracy of elections.
Kevin Johnson, Election Reformers Network executive director, noted that the U.S. was unique among democracies because (as Business Insider’s Grace Panettapointed out) about 60 percent of the approximately 8,000 state and local election administrators across the country had “pretty substantial ties to political parties.”
These officials, who run for office or are appointed, include secretaries of state, many county or municipal officials, canvass boards (which assess voter intent on ambiguously marked ballots and other documents) and partisan observers appointed by their political party. “[They] see each other as existential threats to the nation and its democracy,” Johnson said.
On the other hand, most election administrators “run their offices in a professional way and want to get the count right” despite their personal views, said Matt Weil, Bipartisan Policy Center elections project director. But Weil added that partisan local officials were more of a concern than high-profile statewide officials because they “have access to witnesses, and they have access to ballots… [And there’s] no real good way of monitoring that on any kind of comprehensive scale.”
At a late-March webinar on countering disinformation, Chris Piper, the former Virginia election commissioner, whom Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican elected last fall, recently replaced with Susan Beals, suggested that poll workers could attest to the legitimacy of elections and convince “those folks in the middle that could be swayed either way [by facts or fiction].”
“What we really focused on… was how elections are run by everyday people,” Piper said. “Not only are they run by everyday people, but there are thousands and thousands, literally hundreds of thousands of people that are required to put on a national election… It’s important for us to explain [that] these are your friends, these are your neighbors, co-workers.”
The voices of local poll workers largely have been missing from the responses to election denial. Some Republicans, such as the Bulwark’s Sarah Longwell and GOP election lawyer Benjamin Ginsberg, believe these and other locally respected voices might be persuasive to less ideological voters. During their March 28 podcast, they both said that little else has changed people’s minds.
“I really agree,” said Longwell, whose podcast included comments from focus groups she had convened where Trump supporters would not consider that he lost in 2020. “It has to be hyperlocal because [with] the breakdown of trust, it can’t come from national sources. It has to be from people like them in their communities that they know.”
“Going into 2022 and 2024, I would like to hear from a lot of the poll workers themselves,” she continued. “The people from the community talking about how seriously they take it; and how they stand side by side with other people who [they politically] disagree with… That, to me, is trying to inject some of that civic virtue back into it.”
“I completely agree with that. I think it’s got to be local,” said Ginsberg. “If you need an example of why the national approach doesn’t work: For the past 15 months, the mainstream media, every organization, has repeatedly talked about the big lie… And, as you know from your polls, the number of people who still don’t believe that the elections were accurate has not budged one iota in those 15 months. If anything, it’s gone up.”
“That just tells you that the national messaging from the big media outlets is not getting through, and people do not believe the national entities,” he continued. “We’ve got to start going local, and the communities where you’ve got to go first is pretty self-evident.”
Those communities are the handful of swing counties in swing states, especially jurisdictions targeted by election deniers since 2020. In Georgia, this includes metro-Atlanta counties and outlying areas where pro-Trump Republicans have ousted longtime election officials who are elected Democrats. In Michigan, they are urban counties where Republicans have replaced moderates on canvass boards with pro-Trump loyalists.
Steven Rosenfeld Independent Media Institute
This article was produced by Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
Pundits and historians are comparing President Joe Biden and the Democrats to the Social Democrats, the staunchest supporters of the short-lived German Weimar Republic which Adolf Hitler and the Nazis toppled in 1933.
I googled “Weimar and Joe Biden” and got a slew of hits.
The comparison between Weimar and today “is imperfect, but the cautionary tale is still clear,” Salon’s Matthew Rozsa wrote last year. He’s pursuing a Ph.D. in history.
Added Rozsa, “If Donald Trump’s movement is destined to be America’s answer to Nazism, then the Joe Biden administration is currently a rough equivalent of the Weimar Republic.”
Murray State University historians David Pizzo and Ken Wolf get the comparison.
“Biden and the Democrats are institutionalists like the Social Democrats, who were called the ‘Midwife of the Weimar Republic,” said Pizzo. “In other words, they had faith in the democratic system. So do the Democrats.”
The left-of-center Social Democrats were the main party throughout most of the Weimar period. The republic was founded in 1918 when Imperial Germany lost World War I. (Germany’s current chancellor is a Social Democrat; the Social Democrats are the main party in a three-party parliamentary coalition.)
To the end, most Social Democrats had faith that Germany’s parliamentary democracy, however fragile, would ultimately triumph over Nazism, even as the Nazis grew more popular and more violent.
“Biden has an institutionalist mindset, too,” said Wolf, an MSU professor emeritus. “He and the Democrats believe in the system.”
Hitler’s Brownshirts considered themselves patriots on a mission to destroy the Weimar Republic and “cleanse Germany from the Communists and the Jews.” The pro-Trump militias also see themselves as patriotic.
But Pizzo and Wolf fear Trumpian authoritarianism, largely rooted in white nationalism and tinged with violence, is a clear and present danger to our republic. “Biden should be shouting ‘five alarm fire!’ now,” Pizzo said.
He and Wolf agreed that the president’s forceful Jan. 6 address was a good start. But the two historians warn that Biden must back up his strong words with strong action. “The Social Democrats vowed to resist Hitler and the Nazis by burying guns in their back yard,” Wolf said. “You shouldn’t say things like that unless you mean it.”
Meanwhile, the Republican National Committee has unanimously resolved that the pro-Trump insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, were engaging in “legitimate political discourse.”
The mob, which aimed to overthrow the November, 2020, election and keep Trump in power, included members of white supremacist and white nationalist militia groups, QAnon cultists, and neo-Nazis.
“Many QAnon theories and violence chillingly mirror Nazi propaganda and terrorizing activity,” wrote Teri Schure in Worldpress.org shortly after the failed Trump coup, which was been likened to the Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler’s abortive 1923 coup.
While the pro-Trump militias are loosely organized, Hitler had the Brownshirts, a paramilitary group that guarded Nazi rallies and “threatened and terrorized opposing party members and violently intimidated [Romani, …trade unionists and] journalists who opposed Hitler,” Schure explained. “The Brownshirts were particularly cruel to the Jews and rabidly carried out unbridled and unchecked street violence against them.”
She added that the Brownshirts considered themselves patriots on a mission to destroy the Weimar Republic and “cleanse Germany from the Communists and the Jews.” The pro-Trump militias also see themselves as patriotic.
Rozsa warned that “there is an obvious risk that… Biden and the narrow Democratic majorities in Congress will fail, and that Trump or a successor will take over and then cement themselves into power for at least the next generation. Every American who wants to avoid this — especially Biden and the leading Democrats in Congress — needs to learn the right lessons from Germany in the 1920s and 1930s.”
Biden, Rozsa urged, “must recognize the gravity of the crisis and prioritize neutralizing it. That means making sure Republicans can’t cover up the truth about Trumpism’s anti-democratic agenda, and that voting rights are protected.”
Yet he wrote that “none of that will be possible as long as Republicans in the Senate can filibuster legislation to death.”
Rozsa proposed that if the president can’t convince Sens. Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema to quit backing the filibuster and get behind his program, then they deserve to be effectively treated as Republicans even if they remain nominal Democrats.
He added that “Biden can still creatively use executive power to at least somewhat follow this next step. That step is to make sure that he adequately addresses the people’s legitimate needs. The Weimar Republic fell, in part, because of widespread economic hardships that the government simply could not fix. Biden needs to make sure that the vast majority of Americans feel economically secure, safe from threats foreign and domestic (like terrorists and pandemics), and protected from long-term existential crises like global warming, plastic pollution, and income inequality. Any legislation passed anywhere in the nation that limits citizens’ access to voting must be stricken from the books. Lies spread in bad faith to discourage voting, from Trump claiming he won in 2020 to myths about mail-in ballots, have to be proactively rebutted.”
Lastly, he argued, Biden must never let the public forget the attack on the Capitol. “Just as George W. Bush’s presidency was defined by his response to the 9/11 terrorist attack, so too will Joe Biden’s be defined by whether he can make 1/6 into a cornerstone of our political consciousness. If he can do that, he will be able to make sure that Trumpism’s anti-democratic philosophy — which poses a far more dangerous threat to America than Islamist terrorism — is known by all but its followers for what it is.”
Rozsa admitted, “This won’t be easy, but we don’t have a choice. A century ago one of the world’s great powers collapsed into authoritarian evil with astonishing rapidity: While monarchists and major capitalists believed Adolf Hitler was a clown they could control, the opponents were divided, confused, and ineffective. Aspects of that history are repeating themselves, and the question now is whether we have learned from the mistakes of the past to alter the outcome.”
Rozsa cited disturbing similarities between Hitler and Trump, notably their contempt for democracy. Trumpism, like Nazism, is based on the “big lie,” which Hitler defined in Mein Kampf as a lie so brazen and told so often that the public will believe it.
Hitler appealed to anti-Semitism and nationalism by falsely “claiming that Germany had actually won World War I but had been betrayed behind the scenes by socialists and Jews.” Trump, who panders to prejudice, especially racism, sexism, xenophobia, and religious bigotry, is still trotting out his Big Lie that Biden stole the election from him in 2020.
In addition, Pizzo said the behavior of Germany’s conservative establishment toward Hitler and the Nazis is remarkably similar to how America’s Old Right has reacted toward Trump and Trumpism.
After Hitler gained power in 1933, he outlawed all political parties but the Nazis. “The Social Democrats opposed him, but the conservative parties all went along with it just as McConnell and the Republicans have gone along with Trump,” Pizzo said.
Once in control, the Nazis launched a ruthless program of state-sponsored terrorism against Jews — the first step toward the Holocaust — and brutally suppressed Social Democrats, Communists, the anti-Nazi press, and other groups that opposed them. Many were killed, thrown into Dachau, Hitler’s first concentration camp, or forced to flee the country.
“It is fatal for conservatives to think that they can play with the fire of right-wing extremism without getting burned.” Robert Gerwarth wrote in Foreign Policy magazine. “Trump is no Hitler, but his deliberate mobilization of the far-right has made the Republican Party dependent on voters who include militant nationalists, Holocaust deniers, white supremacists, and conspiracy theorists — in short, people who want more than just a different government.”
Pizzo said that if the Republicans retake the House — and possibly the Senate — in November, and Trump or a Trumpian is elected president in 2024, American democracy will likely perish.
“The Republicans will systematically dismantle every circuit breaker, every firebreak, every levee – pick your analogy,” he said. “We are already closer to a fascist coup than we have ever been in our history.”
For convenience, we often think of politics in terms of “right” and “left”—a classification that stems from the position of legislators in the chambers of the French legislature when the right were royalists and the left were not. For our purposes here, though, it’s probably more accurate to call the left the party of labor, while the right is the party of business or capital.
Complaints about the predominance of the right (capital) over the left (labor) elicit protests from those capital has convinced. And the spending on marketing to convince the public that capital (the right) is a persecuted minority has virtually no limit. The Kochs, the epitome of the political right, spent a reported $889 million on politics in 2016, for just one example.
The spending on marketing to convince the public that capital (the right) is a persecuted minority has virtually no limit.
The Kochs are extremists, too. Their father, Fred Koch, patented the processes by which we still refine crude oil into useful products. As the CEO of Koch Industries, Fred built refineries all over the world, including for Hitler and Stalin. He reportedly hated the Russians, but loved the Germans. He even hired a German nanny to raise his sons. That nanny was a Nazi—no, not a stern disciplinarian, but an actual member of Hitler’s party.
So raised-by-a-Nazi Kochs are pretty hard right, and helped found numerous right-wing think tanks, including Cato (libertarian), the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Heritage, Manhattan, Mercator, etc. They also were founding members of the John Birch Society—an organization that called Dwight Eisenhower a commie (or commie dupe). For a little perspective, I’d say Attilla the Hun would be slightly to the left of the Kochs.
Complain about the dominance of right-wing propaganda, and you’ll hear “What about George Soros?”…the “lefty” who supposedly balance this right-wing bias. But Soros’ political spending in 2016 was reportedly only $27 million—a lot of money, but Kochs spent more than 30 times more in that election. Soros is also no friend of labor. He made his bones speculating in currency, and is a capitalists’ capitalist.
An actual lefty would be someone like Bernie Sanders, a New Deal Democrat who understand that monopolies in particular are best run by the state. This is evident in the Sacramento region where a publicly-owned utility (SMUD) supplies power. Privately-owned PG&E supplies the nearby areas with electricity. SMUD is 35% cheaper, and its executives are not consulting with criminal attorneys about their lack of maintenance leading to negligent homicides as their power lines spark forest fires. Lest you think Sacramento is just getting what it’s paid for, SMUD’s chief executive is paid far less than PG&E’s CEO too.
Single payer healthcare—something that Sanders and a majority of the American population support—would also be cheaper and better. It’s not at all controversial that Canadians have longer life spans and pay roughly half what the U.S. spends, per-capita, on health care.
The “progressive” ideas discussed or supported by Biden—from protecting the climate to providing child care, from better health care to fairer taxation, from gun control to voting rights—are all supported by two thirds or more of Americans.
Yet pundits typically complain about anything resembling labor-friendly or socialism-based as though it would be more costly, or more bureaucratic, or just plain bad. Even the word (“socialism”) is enough to turn most people off. The preponderance of news simply ignores the possibility.
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.
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.
