Hedging Their Bets

... or maybe they just don't give a fuck (more likely IMO), because they think they'll be fine no matter what because they have the money to buy their way into the power circles, and out of whatever trouble it might bring them.

This is not "Late-Stage Capitalism", inviting the inference of a collapsing system - this is Early-Stage Plutocracy, as unfettered market-driven capitalism comes back into full flower.

Hat Tip = The Professional Left Podcast

These 50 companies have donated over $23 million to election deniers since January 6, 2021

Donald Trump lost the 2020 election.

Then, according to the report of the bipartisan January 6 Commission, Trump engaged in a "multi-part conspiracy to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 Presidential election."

Trump did not do this alone. He was supported by members of Congress who endorsed his lies and voted against certifying the election results, state attorneys general who filed briefs in support of Trump's baseless legal claims, and local officials who helped Trump create slates of fake electors. This all culminated in the violence of January 6, 2021, by a mob that was incited and encouraged by Trump, both before and during the attack.

Ultimately, Trump's efforts to cling to power came up short and Joe Biden, the rightful winner, was inaugurated. But in the intervening three years, the threat to democracy has not ebbed — it has intensified.

Trump won the Republican presidential primary and will be on the ballot again in November 2024. He has not abandoned his lies about 2020. Instead, he has made them central to his reelection campaign.

At rallies, Trump refers to the rioters who were sentenced in connection with the violent attack on the United States Capitol as "January 6th hostages." Before each campaign rally, he plays a version of the national anthem performed by people who participated in the mob violence. He is promising to pardon all of them if he wins the presidency again.

In other words, Trump has recast the violent attack of January 6, 2021, as an expression of patriotism. It sends a clear message to Trump supporters as America barrels toward what promises to be another close election.

Should he lose again, Trump warned ominously of "bedlam in the country" and "the opening of a Pandora’s box" after a January court appearance. Asked by a reporter if he would rule out more violence by his supporters, Trump simply walked away. (At a campaign event earlier this month, Trump said there would be a "bloodbath for the country" if Biden wins, but insists he was only talking about the domestic electric vehicle industry.)

Despite all of this, Trump has the near-unanimous support of the Republican Party. And many Republican election officials are not simply endorsing Trump — they are endorsing his lies about the 2020 election. The group States United Action has identified 170 federal and statewide officials and candidates who are election deniers, including 136 members of Congress, 22 statewide officials, and 12 candidates on the ballot for statewide office.

A new investigation by Popular Information, using state and federal campaign finance databases, found that 50 prominent corporations have donated $23,273,400 to the campaigns and political committees of these election deniers since January 6, 2021. Some of the largest contributors to election deniers are also some of the country's leading companies, including AT&T, Comcast, Walmart, and Microsoft.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. On January 4, a large group of business leaders signed onto a statement arguing that the planned objections to vote were destructive. "Congress should certify the electoral vote on Wednesday, January 6," the business leaders wrote. "Attempts to thwart or delay this process run counter to the essential tenets of our democracy." The Chamber of Commerce, which represents nearly every major corporation in America, released a similar statement.

As Popular Information comprehensively documented, in the aftermath of the attack on the U.S. Capitol, many of these corporations pledged to cut off support to members of Congress who voted to overturn the election.

Since then, the election deniers in Congress and around the country have not changed.

Just last month, Congresswoman Elise Stefanik (R-NY) said that had she been in the position of former Vice President Mike Pence (R) on January 6, 2021, she would not have certified election results. Stefanik said she stood by her vote against certifying the 2020 results, calling the election not "legal" and "unconstitutional." Notably, Stefanik also refused to commit to certifying the 2024 election results, calling Democrats "desperate." She also accused Democrats of "trying to steal" the 2024 election.

Over the last three years, Stefanik has received $503,500 from the 50 prominent corporations included in Popular Information's investigation through her committee and leadership PAC, including Home Depot, General Motors, FedEx, UnitedHealth, and Toyota. And Stefanik is not alone. Corporate cash is flowing to many officials who are not only defending their efforts to subvert the democratic process in 2020 but threatening to run the same playbook in 2024.

AT&T: $1,234,100 to 120 election deniers
After January 6, 2021, AT&T released a statement saying, “Employees on our Federal PAC Board convened a call today and decided to suspend contributions to members of Congress who voted to object to the certification of Electoral College votes last week.”

AT&T resumed donating to political committees supporting Republican objectors in February 2021. Those donations increased in September 2021. By January 2022, AT&T fully broke their pledge and resumed donations to individual Republican objectors. AT&T argued that the “employee PAC suspended contributions to those lawmakers’ campaigns for more than a year.” But since corporate political donations are capped over a two-year cycle, AT&T didn't miss out on an opportunity to donate the maximum to any candidate.

From January 6, 2021 to the present, AT&T has donated $1,234,100 to 109 election deniers at the federal level and 11 election deniers at the state level.

This includes $10,000 to House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and $5,000 to Johnson’s leadership PAC. On January 6, 2021, hours before the insurrection, Johnson posted on X, “We MUST fight for election integrity, the Constitution, and the preservation of our republic! It will be my honor to help lead that fight in the Congress today.” Johnson voted to overturn the results of the election later that day, and reportedly coached Republican colleagues before the vote. Over a year later, Johnson said on his religious podcast “Truth Be Told” that “he and his colleagues had been right to object to the election results.” In January 2024, during an interview on CBS’ “Face The Nation,” Johnson continued to push claims that there was election interference in the 2020 election. “The Constitution was violated in the run up to the 2020 election…That’s just a fact,” Johnson said. Many courts have reviewed the claim that the conduct of the 2020 election was unconstitutional and all have rejected it.

AT&T also donated $10,000 to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R). After the 2020 election, Paxton filed a Supreme Court lawsuit attempting to invalidate the results of the election in key battleground states. Paxton argued that the states “exploited the COVID-19 pandemic to justify ignoring federal and state election laws and unlawfully enacting last-minute changes, thus skewing the results of the 2020 General Election.” In May 2022, Paxton posted a statement on X saying he “stand[s] by this lawsuit completely.” Paxton called it a “historic challenge to the unconstitutional 2020 presidential election.”

AT&T did not respond to a request for comment.

Microsoft: $112,500 to 29 election deniers
On February 5, 2021, Microsoft released a statement stating that it would “suspend contributions for the duration of the 2022 election cycle to all members of Congress who voted to object to the certification of electors. We will also suspend contributions for the same period for state officials and organizations who supported such objections or suggested the election should be overturned.”

Since January 6, 2021, however, Microsoft has donated $112,500 to 27 election deniers on the federal level and two election deniers on the state level.

In a statement to Popular Information, the company said, “Microsoft maintained our commitment for the duration of the 2022 election cycle and gave no money to candidates who objected to the certification of electors. Should any candidate continue to deny the results of the 2020 U.S. presidential election in 2024, we will not contribute to their campaign.”

Microsoft’s recent donations, however, include multiple election deniers who continue to question the validity of the 2020 election results. On June 30, 2023, Microsoft donated $3,000 to Representative Byron Donalds (R-FL). At an Axios event this month, Donalds maintained that "states did not follow election laws in 2020." Donalds said that, if he became vice president, he would consider not certifying election results.

Microsoft also donated $15,000 to Johnson and $1,000 to Stefanik.

Comcast: $787,500 to 91 election deniers
After January 6, 2021, Comcast pledged to “suspend all of our political contributions to those elected officials who voted against certification of the electoral college votes, which will give us the opportunity to review our political giving policies and practices.” Comcast condemned the insurrection in a statement, saying, “The peaceful transition of power is a foundation of America’s democracy… This year, that transition will take place among some of the most challenging conditions in modern history and against the backdrop of the appalling violence we witnessed at the U.S. Capitol last week.”

Since January 6, 2021, however, Comcast has donated $787,500 to 83 election deniers on the federal level and eight election deniers on the state level.

This includes $5,000 to Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH). The January 6 Committee found that Jordan was a “significant player” in Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. According to the committee’s report, Jordan “participated in numerous post-election meetings” where they “discussed strategies for challenging the election, chief among them claims that the election had been tainted by fraud.” During his bid to become House Speaker in October 2023, Jordan was asked in a press conference if he thought the 2020 election was stolen. “I think there were all kinds of problems with the 2020 election. I’ve been clear about that,” Jordan said.

Comcast also donated $2,500 to Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall (R). In March 2022, Marshall “refused to call President Joe Biden the ‘duly elected and lawfully serving’ president of the country.”

Comcast did not respond to a request for comment.

Walmart: $384,000 to 89 election deniers
After January 6, 2021, Walmart released a statement saying, “In light of last week’s attack on the U.S. Capitol, Walmart’s political action committee is indefinitely suspending contributions to those members of Congress who voted against the lawful certification of state electoral college votes.”

Since January 6, 2021, however, Walmart has donated $384,000 to 82 federal election deniers and seven election deniers on the state level.

Walmart's donations include $2,500 to Alabama Governor Kay Ivey (R). In 2022, Ivey released a campaign ad that pushed claims of election fraud. In the ad, Ivey stated, “The fake news, Big Tech and blue state liberals stole the election from Donald Trump. But here in Alabama, we’re making sure that never happens.”

Walmart also donated $15,000 to House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) and $7,500 to Scalise’s leadership PAC. In November 2023, Scalise “repeatedly did not answer whether or not the 2020 election was not stolen” in an interview with ABC News. “What I’ve told you is there are states that didn’t follow their laws. That is what the … U.S. Constitution requires,” Scalise said.

In a statement to Popular Information, Walmart equated Trump's attempt to overturn the 2020 election with symbolic votes to object by seven Democrats in 2017, months after Hillary Clinton conceded:

We’ve long believed we can more effectively advocate on behalf of our associates, customers, communities and shareholders by engaging with policymakers of both parties. However, our political contributions do not mean we support every view of an elected official. We continually examine our political giving strategy and contribute to those who are focused on issues important to our business and key stakeholders. As part of our ongoing reassessment and in line with the above approach, we resumed giving to select members of Congress who contested the 2020 presidential election, just as we’ve given in the most recent election cycle to some of the House Democrats who objected to electoral votes following the 2016 presidential election.

In the most recent election cycle, Walmart donated $4,500 to three Democrats who cast a symbolic vote against certifying the 2016 election.

Corporate governance experts weigh in

Bruce Freed, the president of the Center for Political Accountability, thinks these companies are making a mistake. Freed told Popular Information that the corporations sending millions in PAC donations to election deniers are "putting themselves at risk." He thinks the companies are underestimating the economic danger of undermining "the rule of law." Instead of focusing on the preservation of "the political system that they need to be able to operate and grow," they are engaged in "very short term" thinking.

Yale University's Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a corporate governance scholar who convened gatherings of CEOs before and after January 6, 2021, offered a qualified defense. Sonnenfeld told Popular Information that the CEOs he spoke with only committed to "a two year moratorium through the next election cycle" and not "a permanent moratorium." But, while some companies publicly limited their pledge to two years, most left it open ended. Further, as Popular Information has documented, many major corporations resumed donating to election deniers well before the end of two years. Sonnenfeld also stressed that in the first two years, overall corporate contributions to election deniers were lower.

Thomas Lyon, a corporate governance expert at the University of Michigan, was less positive. Lyon told Popular Information that corporate donors to election deniers are exposing themselves to "some scenarios in which some really ugly things happen." Lyon predicted that, if there is a repeat of violence after the 2024 election, there would be some "pretty serious blowback." He attributed the flow of millions in corporate cash to election deniers to "arm-twisting by politicians."

Other major corporate donors:

In a statement to Popular Information, Home Depot said that “our associate-funded PAC is bipartisan. It supports candidates and organizations on both sides of the aisle who champion pro-business, pro-retail positions that create jobs and economic growth.”

General Motors sent Popular Information the following statement: “The General Motors employee-funded PAC supports the election of U.S. federal and state candidates from both sides of the aisle who foster sound business policies, support American workers and understand the importance of a robust domestic auto industry as we pursue an all-electric vehicle future.”

Union Pacific told Popular Information, “Union Pacific donates to candidates on both sides of the aisle in compliance with national and state rules. We review our giving annually to every candidate as part of a comprehensive oversight process that ensures all political contributions are made in a legal and ethical manner.”

UBS and Wells Fargo declined to comment. The rest of the companies did not respond to a request for comment.

Today I Learned

1. Elon didn't start Tesla
2. Tesla was saved by a government bailout loan
3. Elon didn't start PayPal
4. Elon has a god complex just like other uber-wealthy assholes

Russian Assets

Unfortunately, guys like Ron Johnson and Rand Paul and Mike Lee are effectively Russian assets because they're all owned and operated (IMO) by global plutocrats like Charlie Koch (and Vladimir Putin, BTW) who are getting together and dividing up the world among themselves.

This shit fits with my bit about Project Plutocracy.

Ron Johnson Says 'Putin Will Not Lose the War,' Votes Against Ukraine Aid

Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson has elaborated on his decision to go against a measure to allow the House of Representatives to vote for further aid to Ukraine, saying that Russia's leader Vladimir Putin "will not lose the war."

On Monday night, a bipartisan coalition of senators approved motions to push forward a package of further aid to countries including Ukraine and Israel. Senators voted in a majority to end dilatory debate on the $95 billion package, setting up a final vote for early Tuesday morning to send it to the House. Johnson, a Republican, was among a large group of GOP senators who voted against it.

Speaking on conservative news network Real America's Voice, Johnson said that, while Putin was "a war criminal", some of the things the Russian president said in his interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, that aired last week, were right.

"Our policy should be focused on how do we bring Vladimir Putin to the table," Johnson said.

"We're cutting off our nose to spite our face with some of these sanctions," he added, saying that it was making American dollars less important as Russia starts to trade in other currencies.

Johnson said: "A lot of the points that Vladimir Putin made are accurate. They're obvious, and so many of our people here in Washington D.C. are just ignoring that, making people believe like Ukraine can win. Putin won't lose. Putin will not lose. He's not going to lose."

Johnson added that people needed to accept this reality to deal with the war and bring it to a close.

Newsweek contacted representatives for Johnson by email for comment.

The package politicians are deliberating would allocate $60 billion in aid to Ukraine's military operation, $14 billion to Israel and US military operations in the region and more than $8 billion to US partners in the Indo-Pacific region, including Taiwan. It also allocates nearly $10 billion for humanitarian efforts in Ukraine, Israel and Gaza.

Republicans have long argued that any additional aid to Ukraine should be tied to additional border security funding, amid soaring encounters on the southern border.

In a statement, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson criticized the deal, and said it lacked border security provisions. "House Republicans were crystal clear from the very beginning of discussions that any so-called national security supplemental legislation must recognize that national security begins at our own border," he said.

He added: "America deserves better than the Senate's status quo."

On Monday, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, said the weekend votes demonstrated "beyond doubt that there's strong support" for advancing the foreign aid package.

Schumer said: "These are the enormously high stakes of the supplemental package: our security, our values, our democracy. It is a down payment for the survival of western democracy and the survival of American values."

He added: "The entire world is going to remember what the Senate does in the next few days. Nothing—nothing—would make Putin happier right now than to see Congress waver in its support for Ukraine; nothing would help him more on the battlefield."

During his interview with Carlson, which represented the first time the Russian leader was interviewed by Western media since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Putin suggested that Russia was open to peace talks with Ukraine, but claimed that the United States was getting in the way.

A Letter

... to the editors at WaPo, from Alan Guttman in Hampton VA:

Opinion

The border bill shows the House is political theater

Regarding the Feb. 5 front-page article “Senate reveals border package”:

While Republican senators continue to work with their Democratic counterparts and President Biden to hammer out legislation to address issues around immigration and border security, more and more House Republicans are jumping on board former president Donald Trump’s ark toward injustice.

The convening of the House Homeland Security Committee to take up articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, along with the announcement from House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) that a proposed Senate bill on immigration and border security would be “dead on arrival” in the House, is not political theater; it is insidious reality. These actions signal that many House Republicans have now chosen to follow the dictates of a U.S. citizen charged with 91 felonies rather than work with Mr. Biden, the only person who can sign their bills into law.

The former president’s harmful actions and inaction on Jan. 6, 2021, continue to fester within the same legislative body that was attacked on that day three years ago. Rather than doing his job and addressing the crisis at our southern border, Mr. Johnson has made clear his plans to essentially hold the House and the American people hostage at least until after the November election.

Mike Johnson is the latest in a string of malignantly incompetent GOP Speakers. And I lump him in with John Boehner and Paul Ryan, who seemed at the time to be trying to bring some regular order to a House that was rapidly degenerating into the Big Fuckin Mess it is now, because I think they both knew where it was headed, but they didn't get up on their hind legs and call it out.

And I think they were unable or unwilling to publicly criticize the rabble (then the Tea Party and now MAGA) because the establishment plutocrats were telling them to let it go, thinking the rubes were doing the work, and the fat cats would reap the rewards.

Even though more people are starting to recognize the danger, we could see the end of American democracy unless these next few election cycles go to the Blue side in a big way.

There's likely a thought that Trump has given us a taste of how bad the bad cop can be, and now it's time to send in the good cop - Nikki Haley.

Project Plutocracy is still on. Don't get cocky and start thinking it's all good, and we can go back to ignoring everything but our hobbies, funny animal videos, and our crazy friends on Instagram.

Democracy is not something we have

if it's not something we do

Privateering

1. Cut the budget
2. Cut the budget some more
3. Shit on under-paid, over-worked teachers every chance you get
4. Point at "those failing government schools"
5. Run for re-election on "properly funding education" and "parents' rights"
6. Push for school vouchers
7. Push hard
8. Push harder, and wait for the whole thing to crumble
9. Sell off the assets of failed school systems to your brother-in-law, who very recently discovered he has a burning passion for K-12 education
10. Start it all over with "those failing government water works"

This is the Plutocracy Project.

Upside Down And Backwards

Are Republicans trying to turn it all inside out again? Cuz this latest wrinkle sounds a lot like:

"The FBI hates Trump so much, they incited, and then led, an insurrection that was aimed at keeping him in power. But never mind that - THE FBI HATES TRUMP SO WE HAVE TO HATE THE FBI - LET"S GET 'EM !!!!!!!"

It doesn't make sense, but I think that's the point - it's not supposed to make sense.

They need people to look past Jan6 ("It's too complicated - they'll never figure that one out - let's just forget about it and move on") because now the immediate need is to discredit the institutions of law enforcement so the bad guys (ie: Daddy State Republicans) won't be held to account.

The goal is to dictate reality to us.

Today's SCOTUS Fuckup

Clarence Thomas finally gets a little relief for his bruised ego self-loathing.

The guy got some of his schooling under Affirmative Action. I get the feeling he's always been eager to pull the ladder up behind him because he's spent 35 or 40 years listening to "conservatives" as they told him, almost straight up, that he didn't deserve anything he got because he stole the place that rightfully belonged to some white kid and blah blah blah.

Thomas has been gunning for Affirmative Action since before his appointment so this one may not look like some kind of outlier - unless...

Let's take Paranoid Mike's little tour and see how we might get to these odd-seeming decisions.

First: 

All of these "conservative" justices were chosen for nomination specifically to address particular pieces of the Project Plutocracy agenda. They've all been groomed and placed on the court in order to have a desired effect on whatever items their handlers deem appropriate at any given time.

Second:

Nobody is outright buying decisions from this court. That's totally illegal, and even though these dark-money yacht-buying assholes don't really care about following the law, they don't have to do it that way.

They pick a justice they're pretty sure is sympathetic to their side of the issue-du-jour, and they treat that justice to a really spiffy time at an exotic vacation spot, or they arrange a nice little junket to speak to a group of 'concerned citizens', having arranged for the justice to receive a right handsome honorarium from a grateful bunch of just regular hard-working Americans.

And they do all of that well before they start any legal action. 

The point of the exercise is to make all the legal steps fit with an overall strategy - combining political campaign funding, Voter Education SuperPACs, advertising and other media manipulation - together with some client head-hunting in order to get the right people with the right standing, in front of the right judges in the right lower courts, making the right arguments based on whatever loophole, gray area, or cockamamie "theory" they can come up with.

As the case works its way through the system, they keep refining the terms and testing the arguments on focus groups and OpEd pages and white papers and speeches and and and.

I'm betting it's way more gnarly and complicated than the picture I have in my cluttered little brain, but no matter how twisty-turny it gets, or how carefully it's set up, there can be surprises - it doesn't always work.

But this is Political Capitalism, and the players are going to do everything possible to be sure they know the outcome before the voting even starts.

We're told all our lives that we really don't want to see how they make the sausage - and we've been able to convince ourselves the ugliness of it was pretty well concentrated in the Legislative Branch. And maybe they've been mostly right. But this is definitely not the case now - not anymore.

Affirmative Action

Supreme Court Strikes Down Race-Based Admissions at Harvard and U.N.C.

The 6-3 ruling could drastically alter college admissions policies across the country. Criticizing the decision, President Biden said this was “not a normal court” and directed the Education Department “to analyze what practices can build a more inclusive and diverse” student body.

Image

Activists celebrate the affirmative action opinion at the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. on Thursday.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

Balanced Reporting

... my ass.

NYT runs a long report on the fucked-up-edness of the world economic structure, and forgets that journalism can be straightforward and honest without being poisonously neutral about the extremely shitty consequences of an economy that delivers practically all the benefits to the Ownership Class while leaving everybody else to scramble for table scraps.

Ya mean to say that if you deliver enormous wealth and power to a few people without regard to making sure they don't abuse their privilege, they'll prob'ly end up being total assholes about it by using their wealth and power just to get more wealth and power?

Gosh - whoodathunk it.

And don't forget to look for the part that rationalizes Trump's "populism".

Why It Seems Everything We Knew About the Global Economy Is No Longer True

While the world’s eyes were on the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and China, the paths to prosperity and shared interests have grown murkier.

When the world’s business and political leaders gathered in 2018 at the annual economic forum in Davos, the mood was jubilant. Growth in every major country was on an upswing. The global economy, declared Christine Lagarde, then the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, “is in a very sweet spot.”

Five years later, the outlook has decidedly soured.

“Nearly all the economic forces that powered progress and prosperity over the last three decades are fading,” the World Bank warned in a recent analysis. “The result could be a lost decade in the making — not just for some countries or regions as has occurred in the past — but for the whole world.”

A lot has happened between then and now: A global pandemic hit; war erupted in Europe; tensions between the United States and China boiled. And inflation, thought to be safely stored away with disco album collections, returned with a vengeance.

But as the dust has settled, it has suddenly seemed as if almost everything we thought we knew about the world economy was wrong.

The economic conventions that policymakers had relied on since the Berlin Wall fell more than 30 years ago — the unfailing superiority of open markets, liberalized trade and maximum efficiency — look to be running off the rails.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the ceaseless drive to integrate the global economy and reduce costs left health care workers without face masks and medical gloves, carmakers without semiconductors, sawmills without lumber and sneaker buyers without Nikes.

The idea that trade and shared economic interests would prevent military conflicts was trampled last year under the boots of Russian soldiers in Ukraine.

And increasing bouts of extreme weather that destroyed crops, forced migrations and halted power plants has illustrated that the market’s invisible hand was not protecting the planet.

Now, as the second year of war in Ukraine grinds on and countries struggle with limp growth and persistent inflation, questions about the emerging economic playing field have taken center stage.

Globalization, seen in recent decades as unstoppable a force as gravity, is clearly evolving in unpredictable ways. The move away from an integrated world economy is accelerating. And the best way to respond is a subject of fierce debate.

Of course, challenges to the reigning economic consensus had been growing for a while.

“We saw before the pandemic began that the wealthiest countries were getting frustrated by international trade, believing — whether correctly or not — that somehow this was hurting them, their jobs and standards of living,” said Betsey Stevenson, a member of the Council of Economic Advisers during the Obama administration.

The financial meltdown in 2008 came close to tanking the global financial system. Britain pulled out of the European Union in 2016. President Donald Trump slapped tariffs on China in 2017, spurring a mini trade war.

But starting with Covid-19, the rat-a-tat series of crises exposed with startling clarity vulnerabilities that demanded attention.

As the consulting firm EY concluded in its 2023 Geostrategic Outlook, the trends behind the shift away from ever-increasing globalization “were accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic — and then they have been supercharged by the war in Ukraine.”

It was the ‘end of history.’

Today’s sense of unease is a stark contrast with the heady triumphalism that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991. It was a period when a theorist could declare that the fall of communism marked “the end of history” — that liberal democratic ideas not only vanquished rivals, but represented “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution.”

Associated economic theories about the ineluctable rise of worldwide free market capitalism took on a similar sheen of invincibility and inevitability. Open markets, hands-off government and the relentless pursuit of efficiency would offer the best route to prosperity.

It was believed that a new world where goods, money and information crisscrossed the globe would essentially sweep away the old order of Cold War conflicts and undemocratic regimes.

Really? What a buncha fuckin' idiots (I get to say it that way because I used to be one of those fuckin' idiots - now I'm a different kind of fuckin' idiot)

Unfettered Free-Market Capitalism can be labeled a lot of ways, but "democracy-promoting" isn't on the list.

Have you seriously never been in a company meeting where somebody disagrees with some new policy decision, and says something like, "Well I didn't vote for that", only to have the boss come back with "This isn't a democracy, dummy" ?

Jesus H Fuq - we have to recover some sense of reality or we're just going to keep volunteering to get hosed by these fuckers.

There was reason for optimism. During the 1990s, inflation was low while employment, wages and productivity were up. Global trade nearly doubled. Investments in developing countries surged. The stock market rose.

The World Trade Organization was established in 1995 to enforce the rules. China’s entry six years later was seen as transformative. And linking a huge market with 142 countries would irresistibly draw the Asian giant toward democracy.

China, along with South Korea, Malaysia and others, turned struggling farmers into productive urban factory workers. The furniture, toys and electronics they sold around the world generated tremendous growth.

The favored economic road map helped produce fabulous wealth, lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and spur wondrous technological advances.

But there were stunning failures as well. Globalization hastened climate change and deepened inequalities.

In the United States and other advanced economies, many industrial jobs were exported to lower-wage countries, removing a springboard to the middle class.

Policymakers always knew there would be winners and losers. Still, the market was left to decide how to deploy labor, technology and capital in the belief that efficiency and growth would automatically follow. Only afterward, the thinking went, should politicians step in to redistribute gains or help those left without jobs or prospects.

Companies embarked on a worldwide scavenger hunt for low-wage workers, regardless of worker protections, environmental impact or democratic rights. They found many of them in places like Mexico, Vietnam and China.

Television, T-shirts and tacos were cheaper than ever, but many essentials like health care, housing and higher education were increasingly out of reach.

The job exodus pushed down wages at home and undercut workers’ bargaining power, spurring anti-immigrant sentiments and strengthening hard-right populist leaders like Donald Trump in the United States, Viktor Orban in Hungary and Marine Le Pen in France.

In advanced industrial giants like the United States, Britain and several European countries, political leaders turned out to be unable or unwilling to more broadly reapportion rewards and burdens.

Nor were they able to prevent damaging environmental fallout. Transporting goods around the globe increased greenhouse gas emissions. Producing for a world of consumers strained natural resources, encouraging overfishing in Southeast Asia and illegal deforestation in Brazil. And cheap production facilities polluted countries without adequate environmental standards.

It turned out that markets on their own weren’t able to automatically distribute gains fairly or spur developing countries to grow or establish democratic institutions.

Jake Sullivan, the U.S. national security adviser, said in a recent speech that a central fallacy in American economic policy had been to assume “that markets always allocate capital productively and efficiently — no matter what our competitors did, no matter how big our shared challenges grew, and no matter how many guardrails we took down.”

The proliferation of economic exchanges between nations also failed to usher in a promised democratic renaissance.

Communist-led China turned out to be the global economic system’s biggest beneficiary — and perhaps master gamesman — without embracing democratic values.

“Capitalist tools in socialist hands,” the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping said in 1992, when his country was developing into the world’s factory floor. China’s astonishing growth transformed it into the world’s second largest economy and a major engine of global growth. All along, though, Beijing maintained a tight grip on its raw materials, land, capital, energy, credit and labor, as well as the movements and speech of its people.

Money flowed in, and poor countries paid the price.

In developing countries, the results could be dire.

The economic havoc wreaked by the pandemic combined with soaring food and fuel prices caused by the war in Ukraine have created a spate of debt crises. Rising interest rates have made those crises worse. Debts, like energy and food, are often priced in dollars on the world market, so when U.S. rates go up, debt payments get more expensive.

The cycle of loans and bailouts, though, has deeper roots.

Poorer nations were pressured to lift all restrictions on capital moving in and out of the country. The argument was that money, like goods, should flow freely among nations. Allowing governments, businesses and individuals to borrow from foreign lenders would finance industrial development and key infrastructure.

“Financial globalization was supposed to usher in an era of robust growth and fiscal stability in the developing world,” said Jayati Ghosh, an economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. But “it ended up doing the opposite.”

Some loans — whether from private lenders or institutions like the World Bank — didn’t produce enough returns to pay off the debt. Others were poured into speculative schemes, half-baked proposals, vanity projects or corrupt officials’ bank accounts. And debtors remained at the mercy of rising interest rates that swelled the size of debt payments in a heartbeat.

Over the years, reckless lending, asset bubbles, currency fluctuations and official mismanagement led to boom-and-bust cycles in Asia, Russia, Latin America and elsewhere. In Sri Lanka, extravagant projects undertaken by the government, from ports to cricket stadiums, helped drive the country into bankruptcy last year as citizens scavenged for food and the central bank, in a barter arrangement, paid for Iranian oil with tea leaves.

It’s a “Ponzi scheme,” Ms. Ghosh said.

Private lenders who got spooked that they would not be repaid abruptly cut off the flow of money, leaving countries in the lurch.

And the mandated austerity that accompanied bailouts from the International Monetary Fund, which compelled overextended governments to slash spending, often brought widespread misery by cutting public assistance, pensions, education and health care.

Even I.M.F. economists acknowledged in 2016 that instead of delivering growth, such policies “increased inequality, in turn jeopardizing durable expansion.”

Disenchantment with the West’s style of lending gave China the opportunity to become an aggressive creditor in countries like Argentina, Mongolia, Egypt and Suriname.

Self-reliance replaces cheap imports.

While the collapse of the Soviet Union cleared the way for the domination of free-market orthodoxy, the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation has now decisively unmoored it.

The story of the international economy today, said Henry Farrell, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, is about “how geopolitics is gobbling up hyperglobalization.”

Old-world style great power politics accomplished what the threat of catastrophic climate collapse, seething social unrest and widening inequality could not: It upended assumptions about the global economic order.

Josep Borrell, the European Union’s head of foreign affairs and security policy, put it bluntly in a speech 10 months after the invasion of Ukraine: “We have decoupled the sources of our prosperity from the sources of our security.” Europe got cheap energy from Russia and cheap manufactured goods from China. “This is a world that is no longer there,” he said.

Supply-chain chokeholds stemming from the pandemic and subsequent recovery had already underscored the fragility of a globally sourced economy. As political tensions over the war grew, policymakers quickly added self-reliance and strength to the goals of growth and efficiency.

“Our supply chains are not secure, and they’re not resilient,” Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen said last spring. Trade relationships should be built around “trusted partners,” she said, even if it means “a somewhat higher level of cost, a somewhat less efficient system.”

“It was naïve to think that markets are just about efficiency and that they’re not also about power,” said Abraham Newman, a co-author with Mr. Farrell of “Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.”

Economic networks, by their very nature, create power imbalances and pressure points because countries have varying capabilities, resources and vulnerabilities.

Russia, which had supplied 40 percent of the European Union’s natural gas, tried to use that dependency to pressure the bloc to withdraw its support of Ukraine.

The United States and its allies used their domination of the global financial system to remove major Russian banks from the international payments system.

China has retaliated against trading partners by restricting access to its enormous market.

The extreme concentrations of critical suppliers and information technology networks has generated additional choke points.

China manufactures 80 percent of the world’s solar panels. Taiwan produces 92 percent of tiny advanced semiconductors. Much of the world’s trade and transactions are figured in U.S. dollars.

The new reality is reflected in American policy. The United States — the central architect of the liberalized economic order and the World Trade Organization — has turned away from more comprehensive free trade agreements and repeatedly refused to abide by W.T.O. decisions.

Security concerns have led the Biden administration to block Chinese investment in American businesses and limit China’s access to private data on citizens and to new technologies.

And it has embraced Chinese-style industrial policy, offering gargantuan subsidies for electric vehicles, batteries, wind farms, solar plants and more to secure supply chains and speed the transition to renewable energy.

“Ignoring the economic dependencies that had built up over the decades of liberalization had become really perilous,” Mr. Sullivan, the U.S. national security adviser, said. Adherence to “oversimplified market efficiency,” he added, proved to be a mistake.

While the previous economic orthodoxy has been partly abandoned, it is not clear what will replace it. Improvisation is the order of the day. Perhaps the only assumption that can be confidently relied on now is that the path to prosperity and policy trade-offs will become murkier.

Tearing It All Down

Capitalism is an excellent thing - until it's not.

The plutocrats are pushing hard to take us backwards. Not to the 1950s or the 1850s, but all the way back to the 1750s, when the Owner Class called all the shots - political, social and economic.

The point of the exercise is to rule.

I Shouldn't, But I Will

I would normally avoid quoting or boosting a Never-Trumper in any way, but sometimes even a pimp like Charley Sykes should get a look-see.

Retribution, Eradication, and the Coming Storm
The words of CPAC

Former U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to reporters before his speech at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Hello darkness, my old friend.

If you want a preview of what’s coming our way, take a look at the vocabulary of CPAC, including the former president’s promise of retribution, obliteration, and war.

Attention, perhaps, should be paid.

“Retribution”

“In 2016, I declared, ‘I am your voice,’” Donald Trump told his acolytes at CPAC. “Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution.”

In case anyone missed it, Trump repeated the phrase: “I am your retribution”.

It was probably the strongest line of his speech, and the threat was intentionally unsubtle and unmistakable. He would “totally obliterate the ‘deep state,” and wreak vengeance on the sinister scum who opposed him.

Ronald Reagan proclaimed “It’s Morning in America”; Trump declared, I am Nemesis.

This is not, to put it mildly, normal political rhetoric, at least in the English language. But it gives a taste of the bleak storm to come. The Atlantic’s John Hendrickson writes:

For much of the speech, Trump’s voice took on more of a soft and haggard whisper than the booming, throaty scream that characterized his campaign rallies. His language, by contrast, was bellicose.

Tonight’s address was among the darkest speeches he has given since his “American carnage” inaugural address. Trump warned that the United States is becoming “a nation in decline” and a “crime-ridden, filthy communist nightmare.”

He spoke of an “epic battle” against “sinister forces” on the left.

He repeatedly painted himself as a martyr, a tragic hero still hoping for redemption. “They’re not coming after me; they’re coming after you, and I’m just standing in their way,” Trump told the room. He pulled out his best, half-hearted Patton: “We are going to finish what we started. We’re going to complete the mission. We’re going to see this battle through to ultimate victory.”

He was heavy on adjectives, devastating with nouns. “We will liberate America from these villains and scoundrels once and for all,” he said…

And he is all-in on the Insurrection:

After seven mind-bending, soul-crushing years, it’s easy to get numbed by this sort of thing. But, as former congressman Joe Walsh writes in this morning’s Bulwark, we ought take this sort of language seriously. Tom Nichols agrees, writing yesterday, “We need to stop treating support for Trump as if it’s just another political choice and instead work to isolate his renewed threat to our democracy and our national security.”

“There can be no middle way in dealing with transgenderism. It is all or nothing. If transgenderism is true, if men can become women, then it’s true for everybody of all ages.

“If it is false, then for the good of society, and especially for the good of the poor people who have fallen prey to this confusion, transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely — the whole preposterous ideology.”

“Eradicated”

ICYMI, Michael Knowles, a commentator for the Daily Wire and BFF of Ted Cruz, declared at CPAC:

“There can be no middle way in dealing with transgenderism. It is all or nothing. If transgenderism is true, if men can become women, then it’s true for everybody of all ages.

“If it is false, then for the good of society, and especially for the good of the poor people who have fallen prey to this confusion, transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely — the whole preposterous ideology.”

Michael Knowles tells CPAC that "there can be no middle way in dealing with transgenderism. ... Transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely." https://t.co/57hJF4frgq pic.twitter.com/szvnC1qWrP

— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) March 4, 2023

After Knowles was accused of using genocidal language, he threatened lawsuits and indignantly insisted that he was not talking eradicating transgender people, only transgender-ism. This was enough of a distinction that the Daily Beast changed it’s original headline “to more literally reflect the words Knowles used.” Insisted Knowles:

“Nobody’s calling to exterminate anybody because the other problem with that statement is that transgender people is not a real ontological category,” he added. “It’s not a legitimate category of being.”

But “eradicated,” is a distinctive word with distinctive connotations and associations, and we should pay Knowles the compliment of thinking that he chose it carefully, specifically, and specially for the occasion.

He could have said that we should “challenge,” “confront,” “oppose,” “resist,” or “push-back” against transgenderism.

Instead, he chose to use the word “eradicate.” Oxford Languages offers a few synonyms for his word choice: eliminate, exterminate, destroy, annihilate, extirpate, obliterate, kill, wipe out, liquidate, decimate, abolish, extinguish.

So let’s try an experiment here. Imagine that we had a speaker — at an event that is definitely not meant to be CPAC — who said, “Jew-ishness must be eradicated from public life.” Or how about “Judai-ism must be eradicated.” Or, how about saying “Zion-ism must be eradicated from the Middle East.:

He (or she) might deny that this in any way suggested the eradication, elimination, or extermination of any actual Jews or Zionists. But it seems unlikely that anyone except the most determined denialists and rationalizers would swallow that explanation.

“Knowles may or may not be smart enough to realize that a word like eradicate inherently carries a hint of physical menace,” writes Jonathan Chait.

The most generous account of his argument is that he lacks the intelligence to grasp the implications of his own position. The least generous account is that he is making a winking nod to ugly and hateful forces he has no intention of holding back.

But Michael Knowles is not dumb.

In fact, he is a very smart guy, who understands the language of the right: its nuances, and its various dog whistles. Back in the Before Times (2016) he actually wrote a valuable guide to to the Alt-Right, which included “8 Things You Need To Know.” (It was so good, I included it in a footnote in my book, “How The Right Lost Its Mind,” page 169.)

The first thing Knowles said we should know about the New Right?

• Racism is not a fringe element of the Alt-Right; it’s the movement’s central premise.

And he offered some examples of the language and signals they used:

• Sam Francis, the late syndicated columnist who famously called for a “white racial consciousness”
• Theodore Robert Beale, the white nationalist blogger better known by his pen name Vox Day, who counts as a central tenet of the Alt-Right that “we must secure the existence of white people and a future for white children,” which represents one half of the white nationalist, neo-Nazi numerical symbol 1488. (That phrase contains 14 words, while 8 refers to the eighth letter of the alphabet, H, which doubled represents “Heil Hitler.”)
• Paul Ramsey, a white nationalist who produced a video titled “Is it wrong not to feel sad about the Holocaust?” and who seeks to revise historical accounts of the Holocaust, asking, “Do you mean that six million figure? You know that six million figure has been used many times before World War II, did you know that?”

Some other things Knowles said we needed to know about the Alt-Right:

• It’s also explicitly anti-Semitic….
• The Alt-Right loves Christendom but rejects Christianity. The Alt-Right admires Christendom primarily for uniting the continent and forging white European identity.
• The Alt-Right wants to burn American politics to the ground. The Alt-Right most immediately opposes conservatism.
• The Alternative Right asks conservatives to trade God for racial identity, liberty for strongman statism, and the unique American idea that “all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” for a cartoon Nazi frog.

The point is that Knowles knows the nomenclature, the memes, and the signals of the movement that now seems to have blended into CPAC/MAGAism. So, while he may not have been advocating actual genocide, or even the harm of any individuals, he knew perfectly well that he was using the sort of eliminationist rhetoric that fires up the fever swamps.

He knew his audience and the words they wanted to hear.

“When I said, like, I don’t know, it’s sort of weird that Pennsylvania managed to elect a vegetable, they criticize me as being ableist. I didn’t know what that was. But there’s always an ‘ist’. It doesn’t matter what you’re talking about. And apparently an ableist is someone who discriminates against those with disabilities.”

“I said: ‘Well, I’m not discriminating against any... ‘ I’d love for John Fetterman to have, like, good gainful employment. Maybe he could be, like, a bag guy at a grocery store. But, like, is it unreasonable for me to expect, as a citizen of the United States of America, to have a United States senator have basic cognitive function?”

Nota bene: A reminder that Trumpism is not merely post-truth and post-shame, but also post-even-a-shred-of-decency.

Pretending To Be Clean

When the USSR crapped out in the late 80s - early 90s, it became the wild west. For years, Russia was where Milton Friedman's gang of merry economic shock therapy practitioners got to apply his totally fucked up "Unfettered Free Market Capitalism" theories.

Poppy Bush sent Bob Strauss to help the transition, thinking a little "kinder gentler" window dressing would help keep things calm, but the scramble was on, and there would be almost literally nothing left on the carcass when the Soviet State Assets had been auctioned off to - or flat-out stolen by - the oligarch buzzards.

Enter Bill Browder, who's not exactly one of the bad guys, but definitely someone who was pretty much blinded to the shitty behavior going on all around him, as he concentrated on taking advantage of the new-found riches made available by privatizing the Russian government.

If you're OK with what Putin's up to, you're gonna fuckin' love the shit we can look forward to if we allow the GOP to continue with their American Plutocracy Project.

The Fuckery Within

Next time you hear someone bitch about how slowly the DOJ is moving, or what a no good rotten wimpy little milquetoast Merrick Garland has to be when it's been years and what the fuck is he doing and blah blah blah - when you hear that, remember, Garland has to deal with an obvious infestation of rats on the inside of every part of government.

Knowing these rats fucked with investigations and indictments all through Trump's term, and that way too many of them are still there, fucking with things - if for no other reason that to hide out waiting for their next opportunity to fuck things up. Knowing all that, there's no reason to wonder about what a fucking nightmare Garland's job has to be right now.

All that said - what the fuck, Mr Attorney General?

Rachel Maddow 01-30-2023