09 September 20
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09 September 20
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Less Than 8 Weeks to Save Our Democracy From a Grotesque, Bigoted, Illiterate Game Show Host and Real Estate Grifter
David Faris, Informed Comment
Faris writes: "The last four years have been an exhausting, non-stop crisis."
n 2016, thanks largely to the antiquated, nonsensical design of its creaky electoral system, the U.S. presidency was awarded to a candidate who lost the election by nearly 3 million votes to his opponent. This elderly man, a functionally illiterate game show host and petty real estate grifter with an unbroken, lifelong trail of stiffed creditors, unpaid workers, disastrous bankruptcies, acrimonious divorces and criminal allegations, oozes at every moment a grotesque, seething and conspiracy-laced resentment against women, minorities, immigrants and what he nearly always calls “the Democrat Party.” He pours this toxic ensemble into a cocktail shaker with empty embarrassing braggadocio, adding in equal portions of a genuinely bottomless ability to lie shamelessly and an all-around lack of even the most rudimentary ability to head the executive branch of the most powerful country in the world. The resulting concoction has been force-fed to us for nearly four years now. It is the worst drink I’ve ever had.
This unctuous, insecure narcissist slithered into office in January 2017, already wildly unpopular, and began a relentless around-the-clock assault on our senses, our institutions and our decency that has been much more successful than is widely acknowledged. A catalog of President Trump’s misdeeds could fill a supertanker, so it is easier for the sake of brevity to paint them in broad strokes: The elevation of bloodthirsty conspiracy theorists into positions of power, the ceaseless retweeting of fascists and Nazis and certifiable kooks, the defense of mass murderers, the casual extortion schemes he has unfurled to remain in power, the constant bleating about his own persecution and helplessness, the sad transformation of the Republican Party into his personal enablement vessel, the daily violations of ethics laws and informal norms meant to prevent the use of the federal government as a vehicle for the president’s revenge quests, the blithe permission granted to Republican officials to commit crimes, defy subpoenas and hide behind his pardon power, the casual unleashing of a terrible, violent, racist ugliness across the land, the staggering mismanagement of the worst public health crisis in a century, the manic hyper-partisanship in every statement, Tweet and policy decision, the diseased relish with which he cavorts with tyrants and thieves while spurning democratic allies.
The last four years have been an exhausting, non-stop crisis. Political scientist Paul Musgrave wrote recently that it has been “a struggle between firefighters and a spree arsonist,” as the Trump administration has taken delight in using the immense power of the federal government to threaten disfavored groups and marginalized citizens with sudden policy reversals and outrageous indecencies, overwhelming those fighting back with the sheer quantity of provocations. As Musgrave writes, many of these trial balloons go nowhere (like the threat to eliminate birthright citizenship), but others have succeeded. The cumulative effect is akin to the fog of war.
In perhaps the most justifiably famous essay of this era, The Atlantic’s Adaw Serwer argued that the message of this vindictive mayhem is that “Only the president and his allies, his supporters, and their anointed are entitled to the rights and protections of the law, and if necessary, immunity from it. The rest of us are entitled only to cruelty, by their whim.” The dispiriting trajectory of this period in our history has proven the scholars who doubted that our vaunted institutions would save us from authoritarianism completely right.
As Masha Gessen wrote in the aftermath of the election, “The problem, however, is that many of these institutions are enshrined in political culture rather than in law, and all of them—including the ones enshrined in law—depend on the good faith of all actors to fulfill their purpose and uphold the Constitution.” Trump has validated her fears by proving that the presence of laws on the books is not enough to prevent criminal conduct and illegal maneuvering, because his allies figured out early on that they could tie it all up in the courts almost indefinitely. Once the takeover of the federal judiciary is completed in a second Trump term, even modest legal pushback will evaporate.
Gessen’s good faith has been most conspicuously absent from the only organized group of people with the power to put a stop to any of it. The most disturbing development of the past four years has been the near-total capitulation of the Republican Party to President Trump’s lawlessness. The sight of GOP senators scampering away from reporters asking them about the latest outrage has become a kind of ongoing self-parody. Almost no elected Republican official has been willing to stake his or her career on a real confrontation with the president. The few who chose not to go along retired rather than suffer the humiliation of the president’s invective or endure a primary defeat.
They rolled over when Russia ran an open and illegal disinformation campaign with the eager assistance of Trump and his allies. They rolled over when President Trump refused to divest himself of his financial interests and hired as advisors a coterie of self-dealers who made a mockery of the “drain the swamp” campaign slogan. They rolled over when he tried to sabotage the 2020 election by extorting our Ukrainian allies to fabricate damning information about eventual Democratic nominee Joe Biden and his son.
They rolled over when the Attorney General William Barr revealed himself to be a GOP operative who goes on hyper-partisan talk shows to yap about how Democrats have become a “Rousseau-ian Revolutionary Party that believes in tearing down the system.” They rolled over when President Trump installed one of his lackeys to obliterate the Postal Service and unapologetically tried to delegitimize vote-by-mail. Of course, none of this should be surprising – they rolled over in October 2016 when a tape surfaced of Trump bragging about sexual assault, and they haven’t stopped tumbling downhill since.
If nothing else they really must be quite tired.
Even if former Ohio Governor John Kasich standing at a literal crossroads during his brief video for the Democratic National Convention was hokey, he’s not wrong. The ever-gentle Biden campaign won’t come out and say this directly, but the 2020 election will likely decide whether American democracy can recover from its current shambolic state, or whether as a society we decide that this slide into autocracy that is undeniably unfolding before our eyes is just fine. The political assassins of the Lincoln Project, briefly on our side for this campaign, have snappily termed it “America or Trump.”
But this is not quite right. The thing that most Americans don’t understand about authoritarianism is that for most people, life goes on. They struggle and go to work and school and get married and have kids and rent apartments and shop at fully stocked grocery stores and host dinner parties and go to the gym. In all but the most ruthless, violent dictatorships, or states in the midst of full-on collapse, everyday life has a veneer of normalcy that it takes some effort to pierce. There is talk of politics everywhere, and the rulers are frequently the subject of disdain, ribaldry and mockery.
You have to spend significant time in these kinds of countries to get a sense of what is lost or missing, as it is experienced in daily life by the people who actually live there. In the soft authoritarian or hybrid regimes that the United States increasingly resembles, elections are hotly contested and deeply fraught but ultimately unfair with more or less preordained outcomes. Opposition parties and groups hold some leverage, and leaders cannot necessarily act with total impunity at all times, but the regime’s power is a fortress surmounted only with sustained, creative and extremely dangerous organizing. Its authority is passed along to designated successors while regime insiders identify critical points where power can be temporarily relaxed or reinforced.
The systems of patronage and elite privilege in authoritarian countries are not all that different from the way that wealthy Americans have gamed just about every institution in the country, from college admissions to unpaid internships and plum clerkships, to their advantage. As in the United States, substantial numbers of citizens conclude that the political system can do nothing for them, and they simply stop caring. This also is to the dictator’s benefit.
All of which is to say that the world will not suddenly wink out like some exhausted celestial body if Donald Trump is re-elected president of the United States on November 3rd. We will wake up the next day and trudge to work like we did in 2016, even if that slog is just to a different room in the house. Right wing militias will not kidnap you in the middle of the night and disappear you into some black site, nor will Trump have yet fully conquered the judiciary, which might maintain appellate circuit redoubts of opposition throughout his second term. The long-term arc will be more like aging, where you gradually, sometimes imperceptibly, lose your capabilities, your parents, your friends and your siblings. It does not happen all at once. But make no mistake – the various offensives that Trump and his allies have mounted, some successful and some not, on America’s democratic institutions will be given fresh life. And once the two elderly liberals on the Supreme Court step down or die, as they almost certainly will before 2024, there will be almost nothing to stand in the way of further backsliding.
The difference between the United States and Russia or Egypt today therefore is one of degree, not kind. The chief and most important distinction, for now, is that it is still possible, despite all of the absurd obstacles including the Electoral College, rampant voter suppression, the attempted knifing of the USPS and whatever the Russians have in store for us, for Democrats to win the presidency and take full control of Congress in 2020. The U.S. military, for now, wants no part of any scheme to annihilate popular democracy so that the GOP’s doddering president can continue ruling on behalf of a rapidly vanishing white majority. The election theft scenarios drawing thousands of likes on Twitter, such as the idea that GOP state legislatures in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin can anoint Republican electors on some flimsy pretext even if Trump loses the state, are far-fetched. This is not to say that the playing field is even, or that nefarious efforts are not underway to tilt the election to Republicans, but rather that Trump has no clear way around a decisive defeat other than a break with the constitutional order that would likely fail spectacularly.
Yet it is not encouraging that this break feels much less fanciful than it might have four years ago. Then as now, Trump mused about not accepting the results of the election if he didn’t like them. What has changed is that in the interim, he has convinced some 40% of the country that he could not possibly lose, that an electoral defeat cannot be the product of his political incompetence and loathsome character but rather must be an electoral fraud conspiracy launched by the “deep state,” abetted by “suppression polls” and the “fake news media.”
In a very real sense, Trump’s ignominious reign has ensured that unprecedented numbers of Americans will never believe that the results of the 2020 election are real. Over 50% of Republicans in a recent survey agreed with the statement that “The traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.” Fewer than 10% disagreed with the idea that “It is hard to trust the results of elections when so many people will vote for anyone who offers a handout.” Rank-and-file Republicans now talk about – and sometimes assault – members of the media in ways that would sound perfectly plausible coming out of Kim Jong Un’s press shop, and have been whipped up into a fervor that may not be controllable should Biden win. While not everyone in Trump’s base is necessarily one election loss away from taking up arms, the seed of future armed conflict has been planted. It seems like the kind of plant that can flourish even in the shade.
A Trump victory would return the utterly shameless group of people who produced this wreckage to power. And the slide from there could be irreversible. You can read How Democracies Die cover to cover without encountering a country that recovered from a descent as far into authoritarianism as the United States will plummet in a second Trump term without suffering a prolonged period of tyranny and violence. In a very real sense, winning this election will not save American democracy, but rather grant us an extended opportunity to do so. While a Biden landslide would likely be impossible for Trump and his minions to overturn, a narrower win or a 2000-style contested outcome might require further heroic efforts from those who have spent the past four years fighting incipient tyranny.
Even if Biden is sworn in on January 21st, confronting the forces of chaos and white nationalism that Trump has cultivated and loosed on us will be a perpetually urgent task. And should we fail yet another test and send President Trump forward for another 4-year-term, it is more likely than not that ordinary Americans will eventually have to graduate from calling their representatives, donating money and showing up for the occasional protest to actions typically seen overseas – general strikes and massive occupations of urban centers, or if there is another Electoral College misfire, to arrive at a real conversation about dividing this broken country.
If, on the other hand, you’d rather just win decisively and then fight from a position of power rather than abject weakness, you have less than eight weeks left to help make it happen.
On Twitter, E. Jean Carroll (right) slammed the Department of Justice's attempt to take over her defamation suit against President Trump, telling him to 'bring it.' (photo: Seth Wenig/AP)
Justice Department Intervenes to Take Over Trump's Defense in E. Jean Carroll Defamation Lawsuit
Mark Katkov, NPR
Katkov writes: "The U.S. Justice Department on Tuesday moved to assume responsibility for defending President Trump in a defamation lawsuit brought by a woman who says Trump raped her in the 1990s."
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Daniel Prude. (photo: AP)
Rochester Police Chief, Other High-Ranking Officials Resign After Accusations of Cover-Up in Daniel Prude Case
Shayna Jacobs and Tim Craig, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "The police chief and other high-ranking officials in this city's 850-officer department have left their jobs amid controversy over the death of Daniel Prude while in police custody in March, the mayor announced to the city council Tuesday at what was slated to be a virtual briefing about police relations with protesters."
“The entire command staff has decided to retire,” Mayor Lovely Warren said in a meeting that was being conducted on Zoom. The meeting was adjourned shortly after the announcement.
The city’s handling of Prude’s death during a failed crisis intervention with the Rochester Police Department has drawn widespread scrutiny and has made national headlines as one in a string of unarmed Black men who have died while interacting with police in numerous cities. Prude was seen on body camera video naked and acting erratically as police handcuffed him. Police threw a hood over his head to serve as a spit guard — a move that was ultimately determined to have led to his death.
Police Chief La’Ron Singletary has appeared by the mayor’s side in recent days, and although Warren criticized him for failing to inform city officials of the use of force in the encounter at the time of the arrest, she also said she had no plans to fire him.
“As you all know, this has been very challenging times for the city of Rochester and the chief was not asked to give his resignation,” Warren told the council members, without elaborating.
Singletary said in a news release that he is retiring after 20 years of service to the Rochester Police Department due to how he has been treated in recent days as a result of revelations about Prude’s treatment and death. Singletary said broadly that he has viewed some outside criticism as personal attacks and “mischaracterization” of the truth.
“As a man of integrity, I will not sit idly by while outside entities attempt to destroy my character,” Singletary said in the statement. “The events over the past week are an attempt to destroy my character and integrity. The members of the Rochester Police Department and the greater Rochester community know my reputation and know what I stand for. The mischaracterization and the politicization of the actions that I took after being informed of Mr. Prude’s death is not based on facts, and is not what I stand for.”
Deputy Chief Joseph Morabito also announced his retirement Tuesday after nearly 34 years of service to the department, though he did not address the Prude investigation in his statement. He said being a part of the Rochester Police Department is “one of the proudest achievements” of his lifetime.
Commander Fabian Rivera also announced his retirement. Another deputy chief, Mark Simmons, is returning to a previous rank of lieutenant, as is Commander Henry Favor, according to a police department news release.
Warren said Tuesday evening that Singletary plans to remain in charge of the department through the end of September and said that “while the timing and tenor of these resignations is difficult, we have faced tough times before. We will get through this together.”
She said that she wanted to “assure this community that I am committed to instituting the reforms necessary in our Police Department,” and that she has spoken to police leaders about “maintaining our restraint regarding the ongoing protests” and she asked “all involved to remain peaceful.”
Antonio Romanucci, attorney for Daniel Prude’s children, said in a state Tuesday that the police chief’s departure is “an important and necessary step to healing and meaningful reform” in the Rochester community.
“Clearly, the conduct of the officers in Mr. Prude’s case was inhumane, and the subsequent coverup was unacceptable,” Romanucci said. “We look forward to securing justice for Mr. Prude and to having Rochester leaders do the hard work needed to address issues of systemic racism and training protocols in the police department.”
Seven RPD officers have been suspended amid an ongoing investigation into Prude’s death, and the New York state attorney general has convened a grand jury. There have been nightly Black Lives Matter protests here since last week, when the body cam footage of the incident was released by Prude’s family.
Anti-Trump protest in Manhattan. (photo: Scott Lynch/Gothamist)
Donald Trump Is Undermining Social Security - Will Democrats Stop Him?
Ari Rabin-Havt, Jacobin
Excerpt: "Donald Trump's plan to suspend the collection of the payroll tax risks both the financial well-being of workers and Social Security. Instead of outsourcing the case against Trump to Republican opponents of Social Security in the Lincoln Project, Democrats need to stand up for popular social programs."
onald Trump’s latest tax scam is his most dangerous yet. Based on an executive order, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) will suspend collecting Social Security payroll tax from workers earning less than $4,000 every two weeks, or $104,000 per year. More than one million federal employees will automatically see this change in their September paychecks, while private sector employers will have the option to participate. These workers will see their take-home pay rise by 6.2 percent until the end of the year.
But like many of Donald Trump’s financial dealings, this is nothing more than a bait and switch for workers that will end up costing them even more down the road.
In May, I wrote that no one should be fooled by Donald Trump’s then-proposed payroll tax cut. It was simply a back door to slashing Social Security benefits down the road. His administration’s new policy is far more dangerous. It is not a back-door attack on Social Security, but instead a full-frontal assault on the financial well-being of working people and the programs they rely on.
The program Trump is implementing isn’t simply a tax holiday — he can’t do that without congressional approval. They are instead simply deferring collection of the tax that funds our Social Security system. In essence this is an involuntary loan that next year the IRS will begin collecting right out of people’s paychecks. Their take-home pay won’t just return to its original amount, it will shrink even further as the IRS claws back even more funds to cover the deferred payments from this year.
Next year, Congress or the new administration will be given a choice: continue this deferment or risk violating the shibboleth of not raising taxes on people earning less than $250,000 per year as their first act in office. (Biden has recently pledged not to raise taxes on anyone earning under $400,000.)
Fail to recoup this money and Social Security’s financial solvency will be put at risk almost immediately, leading to cuts in both disability funds and ultimately payments for the elderly.
Nancy Altman, who has been one of the foremost experts and chief advocates against Social Security cuts for decades explained,
According to estimates from the independent chief actuary of the Social Security Administration, if all Social Security contributions from payroll tax stopped on Jan. 1, 2021, the nearly 10 million people today getting Social Security Disability Insurance benefits, which averages about $1,125 every month, would see them stop abruptly in the middle of 2021. Those 55 million receiving Social Security Old-Age and Survivors Insurance benefits, which average around $1,440 a month, would see them disappear two years later. Social Security would be without money to pay benefits by 2023.
Trump, in order to pretend he is giving workers a tax cut as Election Day approaches, has set an inescapable time bomb.
Option 1: See your take-home pay dramatically shrink just as 2021 begins.
Choice 2: Cut Social Security, the only safety net many families have keeping the elderly and the disabled from living in poverty.
Trump’s decision to move down this path and the chaos it will inevitably develop in its wake does create an opportunity. His egomaniacal desire to be seen as delivering a tax cut to the middle class before Election Day means he has laid his hands on the third rail of American politics.
There is a reason that every politician who has touched it has not walked away unscathed.
This offers politicians who want to defend Social Security with a line of attack that is easily converted into thirty-second attack ads. Instead of outsourcing the case against Trump to Republican opponents of Social Security in the Lincoln Project, Democrats can now stand up for a popular social program. “Donald Trump is trying to destroy Social Security. We will protect it.”
It’s a simple appeal, but one that many establishment Democrats might choose to forego.
Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. swears in President Elect Donald J. Trump. (photo: Getty Images)
The Supreme Court Is Already Considering Another Threat to Abortion Rights
Ian Millhiser, Vox
Millhiser writes: "The Trump administration could force abortion patients to have unnecessary surgeries."
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A woman holds up a sign that reads, 'These are not collective homicides, these are massacres,' Bogota, Colombia, Sept. 7, 2020. (photo: EFE)
Colombia: Three Massacres in One Day Leave 15 People Dead
teleSUR
Excerpt: "Colombia's Peace and Reconciliation Foundation confirmed that three new massacres left 15 people dead in the departments of Bolivar, Antioquia, and Cesar in the last 24 hours."
On Sunday night, four young people were killed after a shooting in the Villa Maria neighborhood in Bolivar. The names of the victims have not yet been released. Hours earlier, an armed group killed three people in the Simiti Municipality. Their bodies were found by Colombia's Army on Sunday noon.
"We are focusing our efforts on identifying the victims and revealing these murders' causes," Interior Ministry's representative in Bolivar Carlos Monsalve said.
Peace and Reconciliation Foundation also confirmed a new massacre in Antioquia, where at least five people were killed with a firearm in the Zaragoza municipality.
Besides Bolivia's and Antioquia's massacres, three people were murdered in the Aguachica municipality, in Cesar Department.
Armed men on a motorcycle entered a house and shot 23-year-old woman Maria Mosquera, who was five months pregnant. They also attacked two other men who were with her. All three victims are Venezuelan citizens.
So far this year, Colombia records 57 massacres, according to the Institute of Studies for Development and Peace (Indepaz).
The Hennessey fire in Napa County. (photo: Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images)
California Wildfires Scorch Land the Size of Delaware During Record Heat
Jordan Davidson, EcoWatch
Davidson writes: "On a Labor Day weekend when the temperature hit 121 degrees in Los Angeles County, fire crews around California struggled to contain ongoing and growing blazes that have so far consumed more than 2 million acres this summer. That's equal to the entire state of Delaware going up in flames."
The record heat coupled with dry and windy conditions is making the 22 fires in the state difficult for crews to contain. In a preventive measure, the state's power authority shut off electricity to 172,000 homes and businesses in 22 counties in Northern California. The power will not be fully restored until Wednesday evening, according to CNN.
The small mountain town of Big Creek in the Sierra Nevada mountain range saw trapped campers airlifted to safety while the fire burned through the town, destroying roughly two dozen homes, according to NBC News.
While a hydroelectric plant owned by Southern California Edison was destroyed, three propane tanks with 11,000 gallons of the flammable gas exploded and an elementary school caught fire.
The school's superintendent, Toby Wait, evacuated with his family, but his home was destroyed after they fled.
"Words cannot even begin to describe the devastation of this community," he said to The Fresno Bee, as NBC News reported.
The fire started on Friday and grew to burn nearly 80,000 acres Monday, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. It is zero percent contained.
"This one's in a class by itself," said U.S. Forest Service Supervisor Dean Gould during a Monday night press briefing, as CNN reported.
Farther south, Los Angeles and Ventura county are under a red flag warning as the cooling temperatures after the weekend's record heat are expected to usher in high winds, which may fan the flames of ongoing fires.
The state's fire authorities are currently battling 24 fires across the state, according to the BBC.
While the red flag warning in Los Angeles and Ventura counties is expected to last through Wednesday, the state will also see wind gusts of up to 50 mph in Northern California. Those high winds are particularly dangerous as they pose the threat of spreading flames over the dry vegetation that is parched after the weekend's heat, according to PG&E senior meteorologist Scott Strenfel, as CNN reported.
"Unfortunately, this wind event is occurring on the heels of the current heat wave and will produce critical fire potential conditions," Strenfel said, as CNN reported.
"Windy conditions, like those being forecast, increase the potential for damage and hazards to the electric infrastructure, which could cause sparks if lines are energized. These conditions also increase the potential for rapid fire spread," PG&E said in a news release on Monday.
All campgrounds across the state have been canceled in a season that has seen a record number of campers. The U.S. Forest Service said the following in a press release: "Most of California remains under the threat of unprecedented and dangerous fire conditions with a combination of extreme heat, significant wind events, dry conditions, and firefighting resources that are stretched to the limit."
According to the BBC, the Valley Fire in San Diego County has burned more than 10,000 acres near the small town of Alpine. In Angeles National Forest, the Bobcat fire has burned through nearly 5,000 acres and prompted the evacuation of the Mount Wilson Observatory.
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