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Evolution of Evil?


Heather Cox Richardson Aug 5

To some fanfare, Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign today launched Republicans for Harris, which will kick off with events this week in the swing states of Arizona, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. Their goal, campaign officials told Zeke Miller of the Associated Press, is to make it easier for Republican voters put off by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump to back Democratic presidential nominee Harris. Curiously, though, in their embrace of the nation’s growing democratic coalition, Republicans crossing the aisle in 2024 are returning to their party’s origins.

The Republican Party itself began as a coalition that came together to stand against an oligarchy whose leaders were explicit about their determination to overthrow democracy. As wealth had accumulated in the hands of a small group of elite southern enslavers, those men had turned against American democracy.  “I repudiate, as ridiculously absurd, that much-lauded but nowhere accredited dogma of Mr. Jefferson, that ‘all men are created equal,’” South Carolina senator James Henry Hammond said. 

Enslaver George Fitzhugh of Virginia rejected the other key principle of the Declaration of Independence: that everyone has a right to a say in the government under which they live. “We do not agree with the authors of the Declaration of Independence, that governments ‘derive their just powers from the consent of the governed,’” he wrote in 1857. “All governments must originate in force, and be continued by force.” There were 18,000 people in his county and only 1,200 could vote, he said, “[b]ut we twelve hundred…never asked and never intend to ask the consent of the sixteen thousand eight hundred whom we govern.”

Enslavers like Hammond and Fitzhugh believed that some people were better than others and had the right—and the duty—to impose their will on everyone else. If they did not, men like Fitzhugh believed, poor men and marginalized people would insist on being equal, receiving the value of their work and living as they wished. 

Under this dangerous system, Fitzhugh wrote, “society is insensibly, and often unconsciously, marching to the utter abandonment of the most essential institutions—religion, family ties, property, and the restraints of justice.” He defended human enslavement as the highest form of society, since paternalistic Christian masters would care for their wards, preventing a world of “No-Government and Free Love.”

The elite enslavers came to control the Democratic Party and, through it, the Senate, the White House, and the Supreme Court. The Whig Party tried for decades to make peace with the increasingly extremist southern Democrats, and as they did so, the party splintered, with those opposed either to human enslavement or the spread of human enslavement to the West—those were actually not the same thing—creating their own upstart parties. 

And then, in 1854, with the help of Democratic president Franklin Pierce, elite enslavers managed to push through the Senate a bill to organize the two giant territories of Kansas and Nebraska in such a way that they would be able to spread their system across the American West. The new slave states that would form there would be able to join forces in the House of Representatives with the southern slave states to outvote the northern states that rejected enslavement. Without a brake on their ambitions, the enslavers would be able to spread their worldview across the nation. From their position at the head of the United States, they expected to spread their slave-based economy around the globe.

But their triumph was not to be. With the bill under debate in the Senate, Democrat Amos Tuck of New Hampshire—the state Pierce hailed from—wrote: “Now let Frank Pierce consummate his treason, if he dare. There is a North, thank God!… We have…rebuked treason, condemned the Nebraska Bill, and discarded the President.” Tuck noted that the Democrats were losing “their best men. I think they (the leaders) can never recover from the consequences of having tried to betray their country.” He looked forward to “bringing out in future the true characteristics of our people, so long belied by the most unworthy demagogues….” 

Tuck was not alone. The day after the House of Representatives began to debate the Kansas-Nebraska bill, Whig representative Israel Washburn of Maine invited about thirty antislavery representatives to meet at the rooms of his friends, Massachusetts representatives Thomas D. Eliot and Edward Dickinson (whose talented daughter Emily was already writing poetry), in Mrs. Crutchett’s select boardinghouse in Washington, D.C. The men who called the meeting were northern Whigs, and the men who came to it entered the elegant room as members of a variety of political parties, but they all left committed to a new northern organization that would stand against the spread of slavery into the West. They called themselves “Republicans,” hoping to invoke Thomas Jefferson—who had called his own political party Republican—and recall the principles of the Declaration of Independence.

When the House passed the bill on May 22 and Pierce signed it on May 30, the anti-Nebraska movement took off. Conventions across the North called upon all free men to fight together “for the first principles of Republican Government and against the schemes of aristocracy, the most revolting and oppressive with which the earth was ever cursed or man debased.” There were 142 northern seats in the House of Representatives; in the midterm elections that year, voters put “anti-Nebraska” congressmen in 120 of them. Anti-Nebraska coalitions elected 11 senators and swept Democrats out of state legislatures across the North.

In 1855, Pierce insisted that Americans opposing the spread of human enslavement were trying to overturn American traditions, insisting that the United States was a white man’s republic and that the Founders had intended to create a hierarchy of races. 

But those coming together to oppose enslavement denounced Pierce’s recasting of American history as “False all through!” As for the Founders, Chicago Tribune editor Joseph Medill wrote, “their ‘one guiding thought,’ as they themselves proclaimed it, was the inalienable right of ALL men to Freedom, as a principle.” 

When Democrats tried to call those coming together as Republicans “radicals,” rising politician Abraham Lincoln turned the tables by standing firm on the Declaration of Independence. “[Y]ou say you are conservative—eminently conservative—while we are revolutionary, destructive, or something of the sort,” he said, addressing the Democrats who remained determined to base the United States in enslavement.

“What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried? We stick to, contend for, the identical old policy on the point in controversy which was adopted by ‘our fathers who framed the Government under which we live’; while you with one accord…spit upon that old policy, and insist upon substituting something new…. Not one of all your various plans can show a precedent or an advocate in the century within which our Government originated.”

When voters elected Lincoln president, the fledgling Republican Party turned away from a government that catered to an oligarchy trying to overturn democracy and instead reinvented the American government to create a new, active government that guaranteed to poorer men the right to be treated equally before the law, the right to a say in their government, and access to resources that had previously been monopolized by the wealthy.

The present looks much like that earlier moment when people of all different political backgrounds came together to defend the principles of the United States. In today’s moment, when someone like J.D. Vance backer billionaire Peter Thiel says, “Democracy, whatever that means, is exhausted,” and the Republicans’ Project 2025 calls for replacing democracy with Christian nationalism, it makes sense for all people who care about our history and our democratic heritage to pull together. 

Today, Olivia Troye, who served on national security issues in the Trump White House, said, “[W]hat is happening here with the Republican Party… is dangerous and extreme. And I think we need to get back to the values of…observing the rule of law, of standing with our international allies and actually providing true leadership to the world, which is something that Kamala Harris has exhibited during the Biden Administration.” 

As Lincoln recalled, when people in his era realized that the very nature of America was under attack, they “rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach—a scythe—a pitchfork—a chopping axe, or a butcher’s cleaver. We…are rapidly closing in…. “ And, he said, “When the storm shall be past,” opponents “shall find us still Americans; no less devoted to the continued Union and prosperity of the country than heretofore.”

Indeed, when the storm passed in his day, Americans found that the magnitude of the crisis they had weathered, and the rise of entirely new issues meant that old party lines had fallen apart and people reorganized along entirely new ones. Famously, Lincoln’s secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, who in 1860 had worked for the election of extremist Democrat John C. Breckinridge, stood heartbroken by Lincoln’s bedside as he breathed his last and blessed him, saying: “Now he belongs to the ages.”

—

Notes:

https://apnews.com/article/harris-trump-republicans-kinzinger-haley-voters-8b67604df273c0e198b1d46eb4755d50

George Fitzhugh, Cannibals All! Or, Slaves Without Masters (Richmond, Virginia, 1857), pp. 353–354.

George Fitzhugh, Sociology For The South Or The Failure of Free Society, (Richmond, Virginia: 1854), pp. x–xi.

Chicago Tribune, January 9, 1856, p. 2.

James Henry Hammond to Thomas Clarkson, Esq, January 28, 1845, in Selections from the Letters and Speeches of the Honorable James H. Hammond of South Carolina (New York: John F. Trow & Co., printers, 1866). 

Gaillard Hunt, Israel, Elihu, and Cadwallader Washburn: A Chapter in American Biography (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1925). 

Abraham Lincoln, Address at Cooper Institute, New York City, February 27, 1860, in Basler, Collected Works, 3:522–550.

Peter Thiel

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Politicians: victims of their own ineptitude!


Apparently, the political class has fallen into disarray along with their seemingly inability to do the simple job of legislating instead of “gotcha” politics. Some of us are relishing the hyperbole and vitriol while missing the point that no rational or reasonable legislation is being offered or proposed. This is not them against us, it is the elite’s will being done by legislators we (the people) elected to do our (the people’s) work. Promises made, promises broken always no matter what is said on the stump. party designations are no more than identification for voting purposes, what we (the people) need to heed are the words and deeds along with the effects on our lives.

Rogue court following rogue “former guy”?


Apparently, the high court is as corruptible as “the former guy” and so much of the GOP/ Dems The modern-day politics have become more of a “knee jerk” war rather than a movement to inform voters on the candidates. Remember the High court opened the door for “dark money”, so no surprise in recent revelations and rulings.

Lack Of History


Apparently, the lessening of historical information is evident in our politics. The banning of books, the removal of true history in schools and lack of “civics” education all should remind us of the reason for 1933 – 1945 world war and it’s aftermath. One (1) person played on the woes of their countrymen to persuade them that they were being targeted by a specific group of citizens and those “people” were the reason for their problems. Fast forward to 2016- the most unlikely candidate for President of the United States gains that position. This event provided some of the same primal issues that resulted in our Civil War as well as a basis for the later European, then worldwide conflicts resulting in millions of lives lost, countries devastated and a long slog to normalcy. During that time of “normalcy”, the United States continued its “Jim Crow ” ways resulting in years of repression for anyone who was considered “less than”. This underlying layer of America appeared to be subsiding at one point but was rapidly revived with the election of DJT. aka, LOTUS, Orangeman or any of several other sobriquets. Using the same (less than or othering) playbook DJT took on the office of President and proceeded to run it as he ran his businesses with an iron fist and no plans other than whims (against expert advice in many cases). Aided by a group of sycophants and Neer do well Congressional members, laws were enacted which had no basis in the real and overall needs of the country.

What Do We Have?


Democracy:  system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives.

Republic: system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives:

The two descriptions above appear to be the same until it’s interpreted by any one of many factions or beliefs. The Names can and have been interchanged over the years to suit the speaker or factions that follow the basic tenets of each. It is unfortunate that “buzz words” and “alternate” descriptions dominate the airwaves and print as “news” creating a confusion or conflation of facts which serves to sway the thinking of voters. When the public can no longer deem the media as credible then we have the crumbling of a Republic or Democracy. It is a fact that some of the worst historical wars and human tragedies have occurred when the basic ideas of those two words were replaced by the darker side of humanity espoused by charismatic people whose sole objective is their own personal gain. We can’t have it all or any if we are not informed on the facts. This brings up the Media that either tells the fact or distorts them (lies). We need to choose and be open to the truth and historical facts.

Summary!


Mary Trump Explains Donald Trump!


Mary Trump slammed her uncle, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, as the “death candidate” in a blistering new edition of her newsletter, “The Good In Us.”

The former president’s niece noted the irony of the Supreme Court’s recent overturning of the Donald Trump-era ban on bump stocks and her uncle’s response that he actually “respected” the decision. Trump has taken the opposite approach with recent legal judgments against him, from his hush money trial conviction to the fines he has been slapped with in civil fraud and defamation cases.

Oh, and she also called out his subsequent boast about being endorsed by the National Rifle Association.

The court’s decision “horrified” Mary Trump, she said. But it also made “so clear what the election in November is all about: life or death” and that her uncle is “the death candidate,” she added.

The ex-POTUS’ ambivalence to gun violence and his kowtowing to the gun lobby wasn’t the only reason for slapping him with the scathing moniker, though, she said.

His “incompetence and malicious inaction” during the coronavirus pandemic, essential killing of the GOP and risking of lives with his stance against abortion rights, denial of the climate crisis and calls for violence are all added reasons for the nickname, she argued.

“The harsh reality is that Donald is a serious national security threat to the American people. This is a life-or-death election,” Mary Trump concluded the newsletter. “And my uncle is the death candidate. Let’s choose life, shall we?”

Who’s most responsible for the monopolization of America? As the United States moves against Google, antitrust law is still under the influence of Robert Bork


(Robert Bork is a failed nominee for the high court under Pres. Reagan)

ROBERT REICH
SEP 12

Friends,

One of the most important initiatives of the Biden administration is its attack on corporate monopolies.

Today, the Justice Department’s case against Google goes to trial. The Department alleges that Google illegally abused its power over online search to throttle competition. It is the government’s first monopoly trial of the modern internet era.

Later this month, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) will file its lawsuit against Amazon, alleging that Amazon favors its own products over competitors’ on its platforms and uses predatory tactics with outside sellers on Amazon.com.

Whether it’s Ticketmaster and Live Nation consolidating control over live performances, Kroger and Albertsons dominating the grocery market, or Amazon and Google scooping up every operation in sight, corporate concentration is on the rise.

Over the past several decades, giant corporations have come to dominate most American industries, as this chart shows:

[Source: “100 Years of Rising Corporate Concentration” by Spencer Y. Kwon, Yueran Ma, Kaspar Zimmermann]

The social costs of corporate concentration are growing.

— The typical American household is paying more than $5,000 a year because corporations can raise their prices without fear that competitors will draw away consumers.

— Such corporate market power has also been a major force driving inflation.

— Huge corporations also suppress wages, because workers have fewer employers from whom to get better jobs.

— And corporate giants are also fueling massive flows of big money into politics (one of the major advantages of large size).

Yet the federal courts have been reluctant to do anything about this and are pushing back against the Biden administration’s efforts. Why? Because of a man named Robert Bork.

Let me explain.

I first met Bork in September 1971, when I took his class on antitrust at Yale Law School. I recall him as a large, imposing man, with a red beard and a perpetual scowl.

He was only in his mid-40s then, but he seemed impatient and bored with us (also in that class were Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton).

We kept challenging his view that the only legitimate purpose of antitrust law was to lower consumer prices.

“What about the political power of giant corporations?” we asked.

His retort: “How do you expect courts to measure political power?”

“But what about the power of big corporations to suppress wages?”

“Employees are always free to find better jobs.”

“What about their power to undercut potential rivals with lower prices?”

“Lower prices are good for consumers.”

“What about the sheer power that comes from their gigantic size?”

“Also good for consumers. Large size means lower costs through efficiencies of scale.”

Bork had an answer to each of our objections, but we were never satisfied. He spouted economic theory based on dubious “Chicago School” assumptions that all economic players have perfect information and face no cost of entering or leaving markets (Bork had attended the University of Chicago and its law school).

Even in our mid-20s, we knew this was bullshit.

Bork refused to recognize power — even though antitrust laws emerged from the Gilded Age of the late 19th century, when a central concern was the untrammeled power of giant corporations.

A few years later, Bork wrote a book called The Antitrust Paradox that summarized his ideas. The staff of a conservative California governor bound for the White House read it and passed it along to their boss, and Bork’s book formed a basic tenet of Reaganomics.

Federal judges read it, too. Most judges didn’t (and still don’t) know much economics and hated getting bogged down in interminable and almost incomprehensible antitrust trials that could last for years. They found Bork’s simplicity and cogency helpful in limiting such lawsuits.

BORK’S INFLUENCE over the courts represented the culmination of years of work by the monied interests to kill off antitrust law. They’re still at it.

Which is why the new view of antitrust now being pioneered by the Biden administration through the FTC and the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department is so important.

This new view regards corporate concentration as a problem even if it provides economies of scale that might allow lower consumer prices in the short term. That’s because corporate concentration also means less innovation, more wage suppression, predatory behavior, price-push inflation, and increased political power.

Besides their lawsuits against Google and Amazon, the FTC and the Justice Department have proposed new merger guidelines to keep monopolies in check. Not surprisingly, giant corporations are doing whatever they can to stop these new protections from taking effect.

The optimist in me thinks that as the public becomes more aware of the close connections among corporate power, predation, inflation, wage suppression, and political corruption, the new antitrust movement will eventually succeed.

What do you think?

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No generation ever feels empowered, why?


Engagement is empowerment! In order to feel empowered is to dig through the obvious trash and look back a bit at what has occurred. Each administration benefits from the work of the previous one (sometimes). When the time to elect a Head of state arrives look at history and understand what was done and the effect it has now. All work done is not grandiose, fully 90% is done by routine daily work. Sensationalism is to benefit the larger public many of whom want instant action, but Government does not work that fast sine what they do affects millions not just a few. Following the crowd is not the way to change government, voting with intelligence is!

The Real Trump Years



Worse than inflation: Let’s remember Trump’s real record in office

Anyone who looks back on the Trump years as a golden time when things were so much better isn’t remembering reality

By HEATHER DIGBY PARTON

Columnist

PUBLISHED JUNE 7, 2024 9:48AM (EDT)

Public opinion polls about the current presidential race are mystifying in a lot of ways. How can it be that the twice impeached, convicted felon Donald Trump is the presumptive nominee for the Republican Party again? As inexplicable as it is to many of us, I think after eight years we have to accept that almost half the country is beguiled by the man while the other half looks on in abject horror and carry on from there. But as much as we may be dismayed by this adoration and fealty to Trump the man, it’s still maddening that so many voters — including even Democrats — insist that everything was so much better when Donald Trump was president. I can’t believe that people have forgotten what it was really like. By almost any measure it was an epic sh**show. 

One obvious explanation is that Trump lies relentlessly about his record. So after a while people start to believe him. According to Trump, we had unprecedented prosperity, the greatest foreign policy, the safest, the cleanest, the most peaceful world in human history and it immediately turned into a toxic dystopia upon his departure from the White House. 

What people think they miss about the Trump years was the allegedly great pre-pandemic economy and the world peace that he brought through the sheer force of his magnetic personality.

The reality, of course, was far different.

From the day after the election, Trump’s presidential tenure was a non-stop scandal. Even in the early days of the transition, there were substantial and well-founded charges of corruption, nepotism and collusion with foreign adversaries. There was the early firing of Trump’s national security advisor, the subsequent firing of the FBI director and eventually the appointment of a special counsel. He did manage to set a record while in the White House: the highest number of staff and cabinet turnovers in history, 85%. Some were forced out due to their unscrupulous behavior, others quit or were fired after they refused to carry out unethical or illegal orders ordered by the president. This continued throughout the term until the very last days of his presidency when a handful of Cabinet members, including the attorney general, resigned over Trump’s Big Lie and refusal to accept his loss. 

Yes, those were really good times. Let’s sign on for another four years of chaos, corruption and criminality.

Don’t let MAGA theatrics fool you: Donald Trump’s 34 felony convictions are not helping him

But, let’s face facts. What people think they miss about the Trump years was the allegedly great pre-pandemic economy and the world peace that he brought through the sheer force of his magnetic personality. None of that is remotely true. The Trump economy was the tail end of the longest expansion in history begun under President Barack Obama and the low interest rates that went with it. Nothing Trump did added to it and he never lived up to even his own hype:

Trump assured the public in 2017 that the U.S. economy with his tax cuts would grow at “3%,” but he added, “I think it could go to 4, 5, and maybe even 6%, ultimately.”If the 2020 pandemic is excluded, growth after inflation averaged 2.67% under Trump, according to figures from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Include the pandemic-induced recession and that average drops to an anemic 1.45%. By contrast, growth during the second term of then-President Barack Obama averaged 2.33%. So far under Biden, annual growth is averaging 3.4%.

Inflation started its rise at the beginning of the pandemic (Trump’s last year) and continued to rise sharply in the first year of the Biden administration before it started to come back down. The reasons are complex but the fact that it was lower under Trump is simply a matter of timing. Trump’s economy was good but it wasn’t great even before the pandemic. He had higher unemployment than we have now, he blew out the deficit with his tax cuts and his tariffs accomplished zilch. Sure, the stock market was roaring but it’s even higher now.

Unlike Trump, who simply rode an already good economy, Biden started out with the massive crisis Trump left him and managed to dig out from under it in record time. No other country in the world has recovered as quickly and had Trump won re-election there’s little evidence in his record that he could have done the same. All he knows is tariffs and and tax cuts and he’s promising more of the same. 

On the world stage, he was a disaster. From his ill-treatment of allies to his sucking up to dictators from Kim Jong Un to Vladimir Putin, everything Trump did internationally was wrong. He was impeached for blackmailing the leader of Ukraine to get him dirt on Joe Biden, for goodness sakes! Does that sound like a sound foreign policy decision? The reverberations of his ignorant posturing will be felt for a generation even if he doesn’t win another term.

And despite the alleged peacenik’s boast that he never had a war while he was president, it’s actually a lie. The US had troops in Afghanistan fighting throughout his entire term despite his promise to withdraw and there was a very ugly drone war carried out throughout his term. Trump bombed Syria and assassinated Iranian leaders and did all the things American presidents had been doing ever since 9/11. His only answer today to the vexing problems that are confronting Biden in Ukraine and Israel is to fatuously declare “it never would have happened” if he were president. On Gaza, Trump’s solution is “finish the problem” and I don’t think there’s any question about what he means by that. 

Trump’s labor record was abominable, his assaults on civil rights and civil liberties were horrific and he did nothing positive on health care. There was the Muslim ban, family separations, the grotesque response to the George Floyd protests and the rollback of hundreds of environmental regulations. And then there was January 6.

Trump, who called himself the greatest jobs president in history, was the first president since Herbert Hoover during the Great Depression to depart office with fewer jobs in the country than when he entered. He can say that doesn’t count because of the pandemic but so much of that was his fault that it actually is. It was his crucible and he failed miserably.

His administration had disbanded the pandemic office and failed to replenish the stockpiles of medical supplies so we already started out ill-prepared. He denied the crisis at first, and we learned from Bob Woodward’s interview that he knew very well how deadly it was, he lied, he put his son-in-law and some college buddies in charge of logistics. He pushed snake oil cures and disparaged common sense public health measures because they threatened his desire for a quick economic revival despite the fact that Americans were dropping dead by the thousands every single day. And, as always, he blamed everyone else for his problems. COVID killed far more Americans than other peer nations and it was due to Trump’s failed leadership. 

For all these reasons, anyone who looks back on the Trump years as a golden time when everything was so much better isn’t remembering the reality of those four awful years. There are worse things in life than inflation. 

By HEATHER DIGBY PARTON

Heather Digby Parton, also known as “Digby,” is a contributing writer to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism.