05 August 23
Live on the homepage now!
Reader Supported News
KEEPING RSN DESPERATE — “Why are you always desperate?” a reader asks. Good question. The answer of course is that people don’t donate until we are desperate, which ensures a perpetual state of desperation. Which make sense in a weird unnecessary and unproductive way. We have the readers. We need a few donations. Desperately yours.
Marc Ash • Founder, Reader Supported News
Sure, I'll make a donation!
Daniel Boguslaw | Private Equity Billionaire Tied to Jeffrey Epstein Led Industry Backing for Kyrsten Sinema
Daniel Boguslaw, The Intercept
Boguslaw writes: "Now embroiled in scandal, Leon Black made a safe bet on Sinema during her 2018 Senate campaign."
Now embroiled in scandal, Leon Black made a safe bet on Sinema during her 2018 Senate campaign.
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s close relationship with the titans of the private equity industry, whose agenda she has relentlessly championed in Congress, continues to bedevil her reelection campaign. In 2018, the first year she was elected to the Senate, she was backed by powerful private equity executives. Leon Black, then the CEO of Apollo Global Management, one of the largest such firms in the world, was one of them.
Now Black is back in the headlines, this time accused of raping a 16-year-old girl in the home of Jeffrey Epstein, a serial sex trafficker Black financed with more than $150 million.
Black’s support of Sinema is a window into the devil’s bargain the one-time radical leftist cut in order to rise through the ranks. Wall Street financing enabled her rise, even as it has forced her into politically unpopular positions, defending indefensible private equity giveaways in the tax codes, and linked her to unsavory characters always at risk of becoming a public relations liability.
In 2018, Black and his wife together made a $5,400 donation to Sinema’s campaign, the maximum legal contribution at the time. Three years later, Black was out from the top post at Apollo Global Management, the firm he helped found, after it was revealed that he paid the disgraced financier Epstein more than $150 million for estate planning and tax services. The Senate Finance Committee is currently investigating that payment and whether it involved tax evasion.
During her 2018 bid, Sinema received a smattering of donations from others in the private equity world, including a few dozen senior Blackstone managers, Bain executives, and Goldman Sachs financiers, but she received much more money through the Emily’s List political action committee and from Google employees.
After she entered office, however, what had begun as a smart bet on Sinema from private equity leaders like Black quickly evolved into a full-scale industry feeding frenzy, with private equity and investment firms seizing on her as a powerful ally in the fight to preserve their status quo. They have since become her strongest financial anchors, with hundreds of employees from the biggest Wall Street companies donating millions to Sinema’s campaign. All told, Sinema has raked in well over $3 million from investment and private equity firms in the past six years. Sinema’s office did not respond to questions about her association with Black and Apollo Global Management.
According to campaign finance data analyzed by Open Secrets, employees at Apollo Global Management represented the single largest corporate donor base to Sinema’s campaign committee between 2017 and 2022, contributing a combined $172,025. The laundry list of executives who have given since her election to the Senate include the chair of one of the largest private equity firms in the world, KKR; top directors at the Carlyle Group; the CEO of Blackstone; and dozens of other senior investment managers.
As The Intercept previously reported, Sinema has maintained close ties to the private equity industry, even interning — as a senator — then fundraising at a winery owned by private equity mogul Bill Price, co-founder of the private equity giant TPG Capital.
Her coziness with the industry has guided her hand against key Democratic priorities, including those designed to raise taxes on the wealthy in an effort to balance the federal budget. Sinema’s obstinance has soured her standing in her own state, Arizona. After ditching the Democratic Party, she now faces a tough reelection campaign; as an independent, she’ll be competing against both a Democrat and a Republican in the general election. Even as private equity cash continues to pour into Sinema’s campaign coffers, her Democratic opponent Rep. Ruben Gallego outraised her in the first quarter of this year, suggesting that fury at her continued allegiance to corporate donors will have a lasting impact.
President Joe Biden’s massive spending bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, was a pivotal point in Sinema’s mounting unpopularity. Sinema, along with Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., had to be wooed for her yes vote. The Arizona senator was eventually placated by Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., agreeing to kill many of the bill’s taxation priorities, most notably efforts to close the carried interest tax loophole.
That’s a tax break that allows hedge fund managers and private equity executives to pay taxes on their income as tax deferrable capital gains, subject to far lower rates than standard income. Eliminating the loophole would have generated an estimated $14 billion in revenue over 10 years.
The American Investment Council, which represents firms including Apollo, Blackstone, Carlyle, and KKR, staunchly opposed the reform effort, launching a media blitz pressuring Sinema and Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly to preserve the carried interest tax loophole — and in turn their executives’ salaries.
Former Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey, who now sits on Apollo Global Management’s board, also lent a hand in the effort to preserve the tax giveaway. In the run-up to the bill’s passage, he told the press that he was “not speculating about what [Sinema] is going to do, but I do know there are some provisions in this field that she has had reservations [about] in the past,” adding, “I’m looking forward to chatting with her this week.”
Sinema’s preservation of the carried interest tax loophole ensured that private equity billionaires like Black will continue to raise massive fortunes with little intervention by the IRS. The Senate committee interrogating Black’s finances has accused the former executive of consulting with Epstein to avoid hundreds of millions in taxes with payments that “were inexplicably large; well in excess of what Black paid any other financial advisors and far higher than the median compensation of Fortune 500 CEOs at the time.”
Last week, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., sent a letter to Black asking for additional information about the payments. The request is “part of an ongoing set of investigations by the Committee into the means by which ultra-high net worth persons avoid or evade paying federal taxes, including gift and estate taxes,” Wyden wrote.
Just days later, a woman filed a lawsuit against Black, accusing him of raping her at Epstein’s New York City townhouse in 2002, when she was a teenager. The filing in Manhattan federal court also alleges that Epstein confidant and convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell had trafficked the then-16-year-old girl to that location. Black’s lawyer denied the allegations and said that the plaintiff holds a “vendetta” against him. The lawsuit marks the third rape allegation against Black, and the second one in a property owned by Epstein. (The billionaire has denied all such accusations, and a lawsuit related to the second alleged rape at Epstein’s home remains pending.)
Last month, Black agreed to a $62.5 million settlement with the U.S. Virgin Islands to avoid a potential lawsuit in relation to the U.S. territory’s ongoing investigation into Epstein’s sex trafficking operation. This month, he continues to fend off investigators in the Senate.
READ MORE
Donald Trump. (photo: Erin Schaff/NYT/Redux)
Prosecutors Ask Judge to Issue Protective Order After Trump Post Appearing to Promise Revenge
Alanna Durkin Richer, Associated Press
Richer writes: "The Justice Department on Friday asked a federal judge overseeing the criminal case against former President Donald Trump in Washington to step in after he released a post online that appeared to promise revenge on anyone who goes after him."
The Justice Department on Friday asked a federal judge overseeing the criminal case against former President Donald Trump in Washington to step in after he released a post online that appeared to promise revenge on anyone who goes after him.
Prosecutors asked U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan to issue a protective order in the case a day after Trump pleaded not guilty to charges of trying to overturn his 2020 election loss and block the peaceful transition of power. The order — which is different from a so-called “gag order” — would limit what information Trump and his legal team could share publicly about the case brought by special counsel Jack Smith.
Such protective orders are common in criminal cases, but prosecutors said it's “particularly important in this case” because Trump has posted on social media about "witnesses, judges, attorneys, and others associated with legal matters pending against him."
Prosecutors pointed specifically to a post on Trump's Truth Social platform from earlier Friday in which Trump wrote, in all capital letters, “If you go after me, I’m coming after you!”
Prosecutors said they are ready to hand over a "substantial" amount of evidence — “much of which includes sensitive and confidential information” — to Trump's legal team.
They told the judge that if Trump were to begin posting about grand jury transcripts or other evidence provided by the Justice Department, it could have a “harmful chilling effect on witnesses or adversely affect the fair administration of justice in this case.”
Prosecutors' proposed protective order seeks to prevent Trump and his lawyers from disclosing materials provided by the government to anyone other than people on his legal team, possible witnesses, the witnesses' lawyers or others approved by the court. It would put stricter limits on “sensitive materials,” which would include grand jury witness testimony and materials obtained through sealed search warrants.
A Trump spokesperson said in an emailed statement that the former president's post “is the definition of political speech,” and was made in response to “dishonest special interest groups and Super PACs.”
The indictment unsealed this week accuses Trump of brazenly conspiring with allies to spread falsehoods and concoct schemes intended to overturn his election loss to President Joe Biden as his legal challenges floundered in court.
The indictment chronicles how Trump and his Republican allies, in what Smith described as an attack on a “bedrock function of the U.S. government,” repeatedly lied about the results in the two months after he lost the election and pressured his vice president, Mike Pence, and state election officials to take action to help him cling to power.
Trump faces charges including conspiracy to defraud the U.S. and conspiracy to obstruct Congress’ certification of Biden’s electoral victory.
It's the third criminal case brought this year against the the early front-runner in the 2024 Republican presidential primary. But it’s the first case to try to hold Trump responsible for his efforts to remain in power during the chaotic weeks between his election loss and the attack by his supporters on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
After his court appearance on Thursday before a magistrate judge, Trump characterized the case as a “persecution” designed to hurt his 2024 presidential campaign. His legal team has described it as an attack on his right to free speech and his right to challenge an election that he believed had been stolen.
Smith has said prosecutors will seek a “speedy trial" against Trump in the election case. Judge Chutkan has ordered the government to file a brief by Thursday proposing a trial date. The first court hearing in front of Chutkan is scheduled for Aug. 28.
Trump is already scheduled to stand trial in March in the New York case stemming from hush-money payments made during the 2016 campaign and in May in the federal case in Florida stemming from classified documents found at his Mar-a-Lago estate.
READ MORE
Special counsel Jack Smith. (photo: AP)
How Jack Smith Structured the Trump Election Indictment to Reduce Risks
Charlie Savage, The New York Times
Savage writes: "In accusing former President Donald J. Trump of conspiring to subvert American democracy, the special counsel, Jack Smith, charged the same story three different ways."
The special counsel layered varied charges atop the same facts, while sidestepping a free-speech question by not charging incitement.
In accusing former President Donald J. Trump of conspiring to subvert American democracy, the special counsel, Jack Smith, charged the same story three different ways. The charges are novel applications of criminal laws to unprecedented circumstances, heightening legal risks, but Mr. Smith’s tactic gives him multiple paths in obtaining and upholding a guilty verdict.
“Especially in a case like this, you want to have multiple charges that are applicable or provable with the same evidence, so that if on appeal you lose one, you still have the conviction,” said Julie O’Sullivan, a Georgetown University law professor and former federal prosecutor.
That structure in the indictment is only one of several strategic choices by Mr. Smith — including what facts and potential charges he chose to include or omit — that may foreshadow and shape how an eventual trial of Mr. Trump will play out.
The four charges rely on three criminal statutes: a count of conspiring to defraud the government, another of conspiring to disenfranchise voters, and two counts related to corruptly obstructing a congressional proceeding. Applying each to Mr. Trump’s actions raises various complexities, according to a range of criminal law experts.
At the same time, the indictment hints at how Mr. Smith is trying to sidestep legal pitfalls and potential defenses. He began with an unusual preamble that reads like an opening statement at trial, acknowledging that Mr. Trump had a right to challenge the election results in court and even to lie about them, but drawing a distinction with the defendant’s pursuit of “unlawful means of discounting legitimate votes and subverting the election results.”
While the indictment is sprawling in laying out a case against Mr. Trump, it brings a selective lens on the multifaceted efforts by the former president and his associates to overturn the 2020 election.
“The strength of the indictment is that it is very narrowly written,” said Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., a Harvard Law School professor and former public defender. “The government is not attempting to prove too much, but rather it went for low-hanging fruit.”
For one, Mr. Smith said little about the violent events of Jan. 6, leaving out vast amounts of evidence in the report by a House committee that separately investigated the matter. He focused more on a brazen plan to recruit false slates of electors from swing states and a pressure campaign on Vice President Mike Pence to block the congressional certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory.
That choice dovetails with Mr. Smith’s decision not to charge Mr. Trump with inciting an insurrection or seditious conspiracy — potential charges the House committee recommended. By eschewing them, he avoided having the case focus on the inflammatory but occasionally ambiguous remarks Mr. Trump made to his supporters as they morphed into a mob, avoiding tough First Amendment objections that defense lawyers could raise.
For another, while Mr. Smith described six of Mr. Trump’s associates as co-conspirators, none were charged. It remains unclear whether some of them will eventually be indicted if they do not cooperate, or whether he intends to target only Mr. Trump so the case will move faster.
Among the charges Mr. Smith did bring against Mr. Trump, corrupt obstruction of an official proceeding is the most familiar in how it applies to the aftermath of the 2020 election. Already, hundreds of ordinary Jan. 6 rioters have been charged with it.
To date, most judges in Jan. 6 cases, at the district court and appeals court level, have upheld the use of the statute. But a few Trump-appointed judges have favored a more narrow interpretation, like limiting the law to situations in which people destroyed evidence or sought a benefit more concrete than having their preferred candidate win an election.
Mr. Trump, of course, would have personally benefited from staying in office, making that charge stronger against him than against the rioters. Still, a possible risk is if the Supreme Court soon takes up one of the rioter cases and then narrows the scope of the law in a way that would affect the case against Mr. Trump.
Proving Intent
Some commentators have argued in recent days that prosecutors must persuade the jury that Mr. Trump knew his voter fraud claims were false to prove corrupt intent. But that is oversimplified, several experts said.
To be sure, experts broadly agree that Mr. Smith will have an easier time winning a conviction if jurors are persuaded that Mr. Trump knew he was lying about everything. To that end, the indictment details how he “was notified repeatedly that his claims were untrue” and “deliberately disregarded the truth.”
“What you see in Trump — a guy who seems to inhabit his own fictional universe — is something you see in other fraud defendants,” said David Alan Sklansky, a Stanford University law professor. “It’s a common challenge in a fraud case to prove that at some level the defendant knew what he was telling people wasn’t true. The way you prove it is, in part, by showing that lots of people made clear to the defendant that what he was saying was baseless.”
Moreover, the indictment emphasizes several episodes in which Mr. Trump had firsthand knowledge that his statements were false. Prosecutors can use those instances of demonstrably knowing lies to urge jurors to infer that Mr. Trump knew he was lying about everything else, too.
The indictment, for example, recounts a taped call on Jan. 2 with Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, in which Mr. Trump shared a series of conspiracy theories that he systematically debunked in detail. But on Twitter the next day, Mr. Trump “falsely claimed that the Georgia secretary of state had not addressed” the allegations.
And on Jan. 5, Mr. Pence told Mr. Trump that he had no lawful authority to alter or delay the counting of Mr. Biden’s electoral votes, but “hours later” Mr. Trump issued a statement through his campaign saying the opposite: “The vice president and I are in total agreement that the vice president has the power to act.”
In any case, several rioters have already argued that they did not have “corrupt intent” because they sincerely believed the election had been stolen. That has not worked: Judges have said that corrupt intent can be shown by engaging in other unlawful actions like trespassing, assaulting the police and destroying property.
“Belief that your actions are serving a greater good does not negate consciousness of wrongdoing,” Judge Royce C. Lamberth wrote last month.
Mr. Trump, of course, did not rampage through the Capitol. But the indictment accuses him of committing other crimes — the fraud and voter disenfranchisement conspiracies — based on wrongful conduct. It cites Mr. Trump’s bid to use fake electors in violation of the Electoral Count Act and his solicitation of fraud at the Justice Department and in Georgia, where he pressured Mr. Raffensperger to help him “find” 11,780 votes, enough to overcome Mr. Biden’s margin of victory.
“Whether he thinks he won or lost is relevant but not determinative,” said Paul Rosenzweig, a former prosecutor who worked on the independent counsel investigation into President Bill Clinton. “Trump could try to achieve vindicating his beliefs legally. The conspiracy is tied to the illegal means. So he has to say that he thought ‘finding’ 11,000 votes was legal, or that fake electors were legal. That is much harder to say with a straight face.”
Proving Mr. Trump’s intent will also be key to the charges of defrauding the government and disenfranchising voters. But it may be easier because those laws do not have the heightened standard of “corrupt” intent as the obstruction statute does.
Court rulings interpreting the statute that criminalizes defrauding the United States, for example, have established that evidence of deception or dishonesty is sufficient. In a 1924 Supreme Court ruling, Chief Justice William H. Taft wrote that it covers interference with a government function “by deceit, craft or trickery, or at least by means that are dishonest.” A 1989 appeals courts ruling said the dishonest actions need not be crimes in and of themselves.
This factor may help explain the indictment’s emphasis on the fake electors schemes in one state after another, a repetitive narrative that risks dullness: It would be hard to credibly argue that Mr. Trump and his co-conspirators thought the fake slates they submitted were real, and the indictment accuses them of other forms of trickery as well.
“Some fraudulent electors were tricked into participating based on the understanding that their votes would be used only if the defendant succeeded in outcome-determinative lawsuits within their state, which the defendant never did,” it said.
A Novel Charge
The inclusion of the charge involving a conspiracy to disenfranchise voters was a surprising development in Mr. Smith’s emerging strategy. Unlike the other charges, it had not been a major part of the public discussion of the investigation — for example, it was not among the charges recommended by the House Jan. 6 committee.
Congress enacted the law after the Civil War to provide a tool for federal prosecutors to go after Southern white people, including Ku Klux Klan members, who used terrorism to prevent formerly enslaved Black people from voting. But in the 20th century, the Supreme Court upheld a broadened use of the law to address election-fraud conspiracies. The idea is that any conspiracy to engineer dishonest election results victimizes all voters in an election.
“It was a good move to charge that statute, partly because that is really what this case really is about — depriving the people of the right to choose their president,” said Robert S. Litt, a former federal prosecutor and a top intelligence lawyer in the Obama administration.
That statute has mostly been used to address misconduct leading up to and during election, like bribing voters or stuffing ballot boxes, rather than misconduct after an election. Still, in 1933, an appeals court upheld its use in a case involving people who reported false totals from a voter tabulation machine.
It has never been used before in a conspiracy to use fake slates of Electoral College voters from multiple states to keep legitimate electors from being counted and thereby subvert the results of a presidential election — a situation that itself was unprecedented.
Mr. Trump’s lawyers have signaled they will argue that he had a First Amendment right to say whatever he wanted. Indeed, the indictment acknowledged that it was not illegal in and of itself for Mr. Trump to lie.
But in portraying Mr. Trump’s falsehoods as “integral to his criminal plans,” Mr. Smith suggested he would frame those public statements as contributing to unlawful actions and as evidence they were undertaken with bad intentions, not as crimes in and of themselves.
A related defense Mr. Trump may raise is the issue of “advice of counsel.” If a defendant relied in good faith on a lawyer who incorrectly informed him that doing something would be legal, a jury may decide he lacked criminal intent. But there are limits. Among them, the defendant must have told the lawyer all the relevant facts and the theory must be “reasonable.”
The indictment discusses how even though White House lawyers told Mr. Trump that Mr. Pence had no lawful authority to overturn Mr. Biden’s victory, an outside lawyer — John Eastman, described in the indictment as Co-Conspirator 2 and who separately faces disbarment proceedings — advised him that Mr. Pence could.
Several legal specialists agreed that Mr. Trump has an advice-of-counsel argument to make. But Samuel W. Buell, a Duke University law professor, said Mr. Smith was likely to try to rebut it by pointing to the repeated instances in which Mr. Trump’s White House legal advisers told him that Mr. Eastman was wrong.
“You have to have a genuine good-faith belief that the legal advice is legitimate and valid, not just ‘I’m going to keep running through as many lawyers as I can until one tells me something I want to hear, no matter how crazy and implausible it is,’” Mr. Buell said.
READ MORE
Voters at a polling precinct. (photo: Jessica McGowan)
Mississippi's Jim Crow-Era Voting Law Struck Down by Federal Appeals Court
Kira Lerner, Guardian UK
Lerner writes: "A federal appeals court on Friday struck down Mississippi's Jim Crow-era policy of permanently revoking voting rights from certain people with felony convictions, ruling that it is unconstitutional cruel and unusual punishment."
2-1 ruling on policy that revoked voting rights for certain people with felony convictions is surprise victory from conservative court
Afederal appeals court on Friday struck down Mississippi’s Jim Crow-era policy of permanently revoking voting rights from certain people with felony convictions, ruling that it is unconstitutional cruel and unusual punishment.
The 2-1 panel ruling is a surprise victory from the conservative fifth circuit court of appeals just over a month after the US supreme court refused to hear a challenge to the discriminatory law.
Before Friday’s ruling, Mississippi’s felony disenfranchisement law denied a higher percentage of its residents the right to vote than any other states in the United States. The policy blocked more than 10% of the adult population from voting if they had ever been convicted of one of 22 crimes, including murder, rape, bribery, theft and arson. The vast majority – more than 90% – of those people are no longer in prison.
The state’s policy also disproportionately affected Black voters, with nearly 16% of the Black voting age population prevented from casting a ballot because of a prior felony conviction.
In its ruling, the court found that the state’s policy serves no penological purpose.
“By severing former offenders from the body politic forever, [the state’s policy] ensures that they will never be fully rehabilitated, continues to punish them beyond the term their culpability requires, and serves no protective function to society,” the opinion said. “It is thus a cruel and unusual punishment.”
The only way for people to restore their rights, the court found, was through a “discretionary, standardless scheme” in which the state legislature could restore voting rights on an individualized basis by a two-thirds vote by all members of each house. The process is nearly impossible: there are no online instructions or applications, and lawmakers can reject or deny an application for any reason.
An average of seven people successfully made it through the process each year between 1997 and 2022, according to Blake Feldman, a criminal justice researcher in Mississippi.
In its ruling, the fifth circuit also pointed out that state legislatures have moved away from permanent disenfranchisement in recent years. Currently, just 12 states allow people to be disenfranchised for life in some cases, according to the Sentencing Project.
“Mississippi stands as an outlier among its sister states, bucking a clear and consistent trend in our nation against permanent disenfranchisement,” the opinion said.
The lawsuit was brought by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2018 on behalf of a group of named plaintiffs who lost their right to vote because of felony convictions. One of the named plaintiffs, Dennis Hopkins, is a grandfather who has been disenfranchised since 1998 when he was convicted of grand larceny.
“In school, they teach our kids that everybody’s vote counts, but no matter how I’ve lived for the past 20 years, I don’t count, not my values or my experience,” Hopkins said when the lawsuit was filed. “I have paid Mississippi what I owe it in full, but I still can’t cast my vote for my children’s future.”
Mississippi’s felony disenfranchisement policy dates back to the state’s 1890 constitution, written during Reconstruction when the white political leadership intentionally tried to suppress Black political power by selecting crimes that Black people were more likely to commit to be crimes that are punishable with lifetime disenfranchisement. The law remained largely unchanged, other than the addition of two disenfranchising crimes in 1968 and removal of one in 1950.
The fifth circuit ruling comes just over a month after the US supreme court turned away a case in June challenging Mississippi’s felony disenfranchisement policy. The high court refused to reconsider a 2022 decision by the fifth circuit which said Mississippi had remedied the discriminatory intent of its disenfranchisement policy by amending the list of disenfranchising crimes.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a dissent, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in which she argued that the list of disenfranchising crimes was “adopted for an illicit discriminatory purpose”.
READ MORE
RAND Corporation experts, panelists, and other guests attend the ribbon-cutting of the new RAND Corporation headquarters in Santa Monica, California. (photo: Ted Soqui/Corbis)
Jon Schwarz | The Big Myth About "Free" Markets That Justified History's Greatest Heist
Jon Schwarz, The Intercept
Schwarz writes: "The bank robber John Dillinger is one of history's most famous thieves, absconding with the equivalent today of about $7 million. You'd think that if someone had stolen $7 million on each of 7 million separate crime sprees, you would have heard about it, right? But you would be wrong."
A recent book details how the top 10 percent stole $47 trillion via intellectual warfare.
The bank robber John Dillinger is one of history’s most famous thieves, absconding with the equivalent today of about $7 million. You’d think that if someone had stolen $7 million on each of 7 million separate crime sprees, you would have heard about it, right? But you would be wrong.
In 2020, the RAND Corporation, a think tank in Santa Monica, California, released a study with the humdrum title “Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018.” RAND itself resides at the center of America’s establishment. In the decades following its founding after World War II, it was largely funded by and served the needs of the military-industrial complex. Daniel Ellsberg was working at RAND when he leaked the Pentagon Papers, which he had access to because RAND possessed several copies.
Incredibly enough, this dreary-sounding paper describes what might be the largest material theft since human civilization began. It examines a simple question: If U.S. income inequality had remained at its 1975 level through 2018, how much more money would the bottom 90 percent of Americans have made during these 43 years? Put another way, how much additional wealth flowed to the top 10 percent during this time, thanks to increased income equality?
If you have a butt, you should hold onto it, because the answer is 47 TRILLION DOLLARS.
This is a number so large that it surpasses human understanding. There are only a few hundred billion stars in the Milky Way; $47 trillion is about twice the size of the annual U.S. gross domestic product.
This raises an obvious question. Traditionally, this kind of upward concentration of wealth has required mass slaughter. How did America’s elites pull this off without needing to mow thousands of us down in the streets?
The answer can be found in the new book “The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market.” It was written by Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard, and Erik M. Conway, a historian at Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who previously collaborated on “Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues From Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming.”
As Oreskes and Conway explain, “The Big Myth” grew out of their previous book. While writing “Merchants of Doubt,” they discovered that the groundwork of global warming denialism had been laid in the 1980s by prominent scientists who understood the reality of the situation quite well. However, these scientists were convinced believers in what Oreskes and Conway call “market fundamentalism” (borrowing from George Soros, one of market fundamentalism’s loudest critics). This is a system of belief that holds that political and economic freedom are indivisible. They quote the physicist Fred Singer, who wrote that “if we do not carefully delineate the government’s role in regulating … dangers there is essentially no limit to how much government can ultimately control our lives.”
In other words, government interventions in the economy — such as laws removing lead from gas, carbon taxes, or mandated cooling-off breaks for people working in 100-degree heat — not only make us all poorer, but also put us on the road to Stalinist tyranny. Hence it’s crucial to head them all off at the pass, even if that requires a vast misrepresentation of observable fact.
This worldview is such incoherent drivel that it’s hard to believe anyone with a functioning brain stem can buy into it. Meanwhile, market fundamentalists are oddly unconcerned with government intervention that’s profitable for large corporations. If you’re an entrepreneur who boldly tries to manufacture and sell any of the pharmaceutical industry’s patented products in a free market, you will quickly encounter the suffocating hand of the administrative state. Yet there are no Wall Street Journal op-eds decrying this injustice. (This doesn’t mean there’s no justifiable rationale for patents, but that there are rationales for other government regulations too.)
There’s also the reality that markets are a human creation, not a phenomenon like gravity that would exist whether or not people ever came along. And since markets are created by us, it is legitimate and within our power to alter them to better serve our needs.
Finally, there’s the historical fact that no country has ever gone communist gradually, starting with minimum wage laws and ending up with gulags. Rather, it happened in various fell swoops in places with glaring injustices and vicious capitalistic inequality, and even then generally has required contemporary wars. As the renowned Soviet expert George Kennan put it in 1946, “communism is like malignant parasite which feeds only on diseased tissue.” Therefore, Kennan believed, “every courageous and incisive measure to solve internal problems of our own society” was a victory over communism.
This equanimity about using democratic power for the common good was common among U.S. potentates in the decades following World War II. Averell Harriman, the son of a 19th-century robber baron who later became secretary of commerce and governor of New York, believed that “Our social and economic system is working perhaps toward Swedish socialist concepts but not toward Soviet Communism. The government in Sweden has overcome poverty, achieved decent housing and medical services for all, but Sweden has in no way compromised the principle of representative government and concern for civil liberties.”
The story of how we got from there to here is shocking even if you consider yourself a wised-up malcontent, and “The Big Myth” tells it in granular detail. It’s a sweeping tale of what must be one of the most successful propaganda campaigns ever, one that transformed the intuitive common sense — what everyone “knows” without thinking about it — of both American elites and regular people.
You know the drill. Lowering taxes on billionaires will unleash their wondrous creativity and make us all richer in the long run. Minimum wage laws make regular people worse off and must stop going up. (Incredibly enough, the federal minimum wage has not been increased since 1968 and, adjusted for inflation, is now worth less than in 1950.) Stultifying environmental regulations are the reason your boss can’t give you a raise. Social Security was a mistake and is destined for extinction.
The funniest part is that this indoctrination into the glories of the “free” market could never have happened via free markets. Rather, as Oreskes and Conway illustrate, it required enormous subsidies from corporate America, much of it going to tenured professors working at nonprofit universities.
The book is an incredible work of scholarship, and every page has at least one sparkling, fascinating fact. Adam Smith’s 1776 book “The Wealth of Nation” is now seen as the key text proving the virtues (economic and political) of unregulated capitalism. This is not true at all: Smith argues that bank regulation is crucial; that workers should unionize; that businesspeople have often “deceived and oppressed” the public; and that any political proposal they make should be viewed with the utmost suspicion. George Stigler, a prominent economist at the University of Chicago and colleague of Milton Friedman, produced an edition of “The Wealth of Nations” that dealt with Smith’s inconvenient views by quietly excising many of them.
Also striking: Corporate funders realized that another book central to their cause, “The Road to Serfdom” by Friedrich von Hayek, was just too long and complicated for most people to get through it. So they paid for a simplified version that appeared in Reader’s Digest in the 1950s, where it found a devoted reader in Ronald Reagan.
And there is just so, so much more. It’s all enough to make you paranoid about what other thoughts were put in your head on purpose by people without your best interests at heart. The most important lesson of “The Big Myth” is a meta one. They write convincingly, “Ideas do not exist ex nihilo. They are developed, sustained, and promoted by people and institutions. [This] is the history of the construction of a myth.”
Speaking of, the RAND study was funded by the Fair Work Center in Seattle, which in turn is largely funded by the foundation of Nick Hanauer. Indeed, the question the paper answers was itself thought up partly by Hanauer, who’s a venture capitalist and early investor in Amazon — but one has with views much more in tune with the views of 1950s U.S. elites. Preposterous myths can be successfully promulgated with huge gobs of cash, but even getting the truth out there takes a lot of money.
READ MORE
Deforestation near Humaita, in Amazonas state, Brazil. (photo: Bruno Kelly/Reuters)
Amazon Rainforest: Deforestation in Brazil at Six-Year Low
Vanessa Buschschluter and Katy Watson, BBC
Excerpt: "In July of this year, 500 sq km (193 sq miles) of rainforest were cleared in Brazil - 66% less than in July of last year, national space agency Inpe said."
The rate of deforestation in Brazil's Amazon has dropped to its lowest in six years, space agency data suggests.
In July of this year, 500 sq km (193 sq miles) of rainforest were cleared in Brazil - 66% less than in July of last year, national space agency Inpe said.
The drop is a welcome boost for the government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who pledged to end deforestation by 2030 when he took office in January.
Rainforest destruction had surged under his predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro.
The far-right leader promoted mining in indigenous lands in the Amazon and forest clearances soared at the same time as resources to protect the forest were cut.
The Amazon rainforest is a crucial buffer in the global fight against climate change and 60% of it is located in Brazil.
Lula came to power promising to halt the damage done during Mr Bolsonaro's four-year term and the figures released by the satellite agency show that things are improving.
Inpe said that the area of forest cut down in the first seven months of 2023 was smaller than that razed in the same period in 2022.
The drop is substantial and makes for an impressive turnaround just days before an Amazon summit with leaders from countries that share the world's largest rainforest.
On Wednesday, Lula told the BBC that the meeting next week was something the whole world should watch.
He argued that all too often, promises made at global summits were not met, but he insisted that "where there's a will, there's a way".
Data released by Inpe also shows that the authorities are going after those engaging in illegal logging.
The fines imposed in the first seven months of this year have topped $400m (£315m), a rise of almost 150%.
Reversing the damage done in the Amazon remains challenging but the deforestation drop announced by Inpe on Thursday will send a reassuring message to the world that progress has been made in a relatively short time.
READ MORE
A saguaro skeleton. (photo: Cassidy Araiza/NYT)
Phoenix's Extreme Heat Withers Saguaros, Trademark Cactus of Desert Landscape
Associated Press
Excerpt: "After recording the warmest monthly average temperature for any American city ever in July, Phoenix climbed back up to dangerously high temperatures on Wednesday. That could mean trouble not just for people but for some of the region's plants, too."
Cactuses are commonly assumed to be made to endure scorching heat, but even they have their limits, as has been shown recently
After recording the warmest monthly average temperature for any American city ever in July, Phoenix climbed back up to dangerously high temperatures on Wednesday. That could mean trouble not just for people but for some of the region’s plants, too.
Residents across the sprawling metro are finding the extended extreme heat has led to fried flora. Nurseries and landscapers are inundated with requests for help with saguaros or fruit trees that are losing leaves.
Phones have been “ringing nonstop” about everything from a cactus to a citrus tree or ficus, said Sophia Booth, a landscape designer at Moon Valley Nursery. “A lot of people are calling and saying their cactus is yellowing really hard, fell over or like broken arms, that sort of thing. Twenty-year-old trees are losing all their leaves, or they’re turning a crisp brown.”
At the Desert Botanical Garden, three of the treasured institution’s more than 1,000 saguaro cactuses have toppled over or lost an arm in the last week, a rate that officials there say is highly unusual.
These saguaros, a towering trademark of the Sonoran Desert landscape, were already stressed from record-breaking heat three years ago, and this summer’s historic heat – the average temperature in Phoenix last month was 102.7F (39.3C) – turned out to be the cactus needle that broke the camel’s back.
Saguaros can live up to 200 years and grow as tall as 40ft (12 meters). Some in the Desert Botanical Garden date beyond its opening 85 years ago, and the largest there measure almost 30ft (9 meters), according to Kimberlie McCue, the garden’s chief science officer.
People commonly assume that cactuses are made to endure scorching heat, but even they can have their limits, McCue said. It wasn’t just this summer’s 31-day streak of highs at or above 110F (43.3C), but also the multiple nights when the low never dipped below 90F (32.2C). Night-time is when cactuses open their pores to get rid of retained water and take in carbon dioxide, she explained.
There is hope that the arrival of thunderstorms during the monsoon season, which traditionally starts on 15 June, could bring more delayed moisture that will help struggling flora.In Arizona, about half the rain that falls during the year comes during the monsoon. It can be a mixed bag – cooling sweltering cities like Las Vegas and Phoenix but bringing the risk of flooding to mountain towns and low-lying deserts alike. It carries a promise of rain but doesn’t always deliver. And even when it does, the moisture isn’t shared equally across the Four Corners region and beyond. The last two seasons were impressive, and the two before that largely duds.
As of Wednesday, there was no rain in the forecast for Phoenix anytime soon according to the National Weather Service. After two days of a slight drop, high temperatures reached 111F (43.9C) and are expected to be 110F or more for the next 10 days.
The Weather Service plans to issue an extreme heat warning Friday through Monday, when the highs will be between 111F (43.9C) and 117F (47.2C).
In the meantime, the Desert Botanical Garden has been working to propagate cactuses that seem better able to endure searing conditions after staffers noticed the 2020 heat was more difficult for some plants than others. Some just seemed to have a genetic makeup that allowed them to thrive.
“We want to try and capture that and grow more saguaros from seed here to add into our population at the garden with the idea that over time, that is going to bring more resiliency into our population here,” McCue said.
READ MORE
Contribute to RSN
Follow us on facebook and twitter!
Update My Monthly Donation
PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611
