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Debunking Myth #8: “Corporate tax cuts create jobs” BUNK! Robert Reich Friends, I’m tired of hearing Republicans claim that we should reduce taxes on corporations because corporate tax cuts create jobs. It’s untrue. Also untrue are the repeated Republican assertions that tax increases on corporations, and regulations requiring corporations to better protect the health and safety of their consumers and workers and the environment, are “job killers.” Here’s the truth: Most American jobs are created by poor, working, and middle-class people whose increased spending on goods and services causes businesses to create more jobs. If most Americans don’t have enough purchasing power to buy the stuff businesses produce, businesses will lay workers off. If Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more Debunking Myth #8: “Corporate tax cuts create jobs” BUNK! Robert Reich Jul 19 READ IN APP (Please click on the above and see our video.) Friends, I’m tired of hearing Republicans claim that we should reduce taxes on corporations because corporate tax cuts create jobs. It’s untrue. Also untrue are the repeated Republican assertions that tax increases on corporations, and regulations requiring corporations to better protect the health and safety of their consumers and workers and the environment, are “job killers.” Here’s the truth: Most American jobs are created by poor, working, and middle-class people whose increased spending on goods and services causes businesses to create more jobs. If most Americans don’t have enough purchasing power to buy the stuff businesses produce, businesses will lay workers off. If they have more purchasing power, businesses will add jobs. In 1914, Ford boosted its workers’ wages. As a result, Ford employees — and the employees of other big firms who felt they had no choice but to raise their wages to compete in the job market with Ford — could afford to buy Model T Fords, enlarging the demand for Model T’s, thus creating more jobs at Ford (and at every other automaker). The Great Crash of 1929 ushered in the Great Depression of the 1930s because people didn’t have enough money to buy the goods and services the economy could produce. Which caused a vicious cycle of fewer jobs and even less money in the pockets of average people. The cycle ended only when the government stepped in through vast public spending on World War II. So when you hear that corporations need tax cuts in order to create more jobs, or that tax increases on corporations or regulations on corporations are job killers, know that this is baloney. The best way to create more jobs is to put more money into the pockets of more workers. Which is why we need a higher minimum wage, an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit, and stronger unions that can bargain for higher wages. All these will increase demand for the goods and services businesses produce, thereby creating more jobs. Remember, it’s working people who create jobs when they have enough money in their pockets to buy.they have more purchasing power, businesses will add jobs. In 1914, Ford boosted its workers’ wages. As a result, Ford employees — and the employees of other big firms who felt they had no choice but to raise their wages to compete in the job market with Ford — could afford to buy Model T Fords, enlarging the demand for Model T’s, thus creating more jobs at Ford (and at every other automaker). The Great Crash of 1929 ushered in the Great Depression of the 1930s because people didn’t have enough money to buy the goods and services the economy could produce. Which caused a vicious cycle of fewer jobs and even less money in the pockets of average people. The cycle ended only when the government stepped in through vast public spending on World War II. So when you hear that corporations need tax cuts in order to create more jobs, or that tax increases on corporations or regulations on corporations are job killers, know that this is baloney. The best way to create more jobs is to put more money into the pockets of more workers. Which is why we need a higher minimum wage, an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit, and stronger unions that can bargain for higher wages. All these will increase demand for the goods and services businesses produce, thereby creating more jobs. Remember, it’s working people who create jobs when they have enough money in their pockets to buy.
Cas Mudde, a political scientist who specializes in extremism and democracy, observed yesterday on Bluesky that “the fight against the far right is secondary to the fight to strengthen liberal democracy.” That’s a smart observation.
During World War II, when the United States led the defense of democracy against fascism, and after it, when the U.S. stood against communism, members of both major political parties celebrated American liberal democracy. Democratic presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman and Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower made it a point to emphasize the importance of the rule of law and people’s right to choose their government, as well as how much more effectively democracies managed their economies and how much fairer those economies were than those in which authoritarians and their cronies pocketed most of a country’s wealth.
Those mid-twentieth-century presidents helped to construct a “liberal consensus” in which Americans rallied behind a democratic government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, and protected civil rights. That government was so widely popular that political scientists in the 1960s posited that politicians should stop trying to court voters by defending its broadly accepted principles. Instead, they should put together coalitions of interest groups that could win elections.
As traditional Republicans and Democrats moved away from a defense of democracy, the power to define the U.S. government fell to a small faction of “Movement Conservatives” who were determined to undermine the liberal consensus. Big-business Republicans who hated regulations and taxes joined with racist former Democrats and patriarchal white evangelicals who wanted to reinforce traditional race and gender hierarchies to insist that the government had grown far too big and was crushing individual Americans.
In their telling, a government that prevented businessmen from abusing their workers, made sure widows and orphans didn’t have to eat from garbage cans, built the interstate highways, and enforced equal rights was destroying the individualism that made America great, and they argued that such a government was a small step from communism. They looked at government protection of equal rights for racial, ethnic, gender, and religious minorities, as well as women, and argued that those protections both cost tax dollars to pay for the bureaucrats who enforced equal rights and undermined a man’s ability to act as he wished in his place of business, in society, and in his home. The government of the liberal consensus was, they claimed, a redistribution of wealth from hardworking taxpayers—usually white and male—to undeserving marginalized Americans.
When voters elected Ronald Reagan in 1980, the Movement Conservatives’ image of the American government became more and more prevalent, although Americans never stopped liking the reality of the post–World War II government that served the needs of ordinary Americans. That image fed forty years of cuts to the post–World War II government, including sweeping cuts to regulations and to taxes on the wealthy and on corporations, always with the argument that a large government was destroying American individualism.
It was this image of government as a behemoth undermining individual Americans that Donald Trump rode to the presidency in 2016 with his promises to “drain the swamp” of Washington, D.C., and it is this image that is leading Trump voters to cheer on billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy as they vow to cut services on which Americans depend in order to cut regulations and taxes once again for the very wealthy and corporations.
But that image of the American government is not the one on which the nation was founded.
Liberal democracy was the product of a moment in the 1600s in which European thinkers rethought old ideas about human society to emphasize the importance of the individual and his (it was almost always a “him” in those days) rights. Men like John Locke rejected the idea that God had appointed kings and noblemen to rule over subjects by virtue of their family lineage, and began to explore the idea that since government was a social compact to enable men to live together in peace, it should rest not on birth or wealth or religion, all of which were arbitrary, but on natural laws that men could figure out through their own experiences.
The Founders of what would become the United States rested their philosophy on an idea that came from Locke’s observations: that individuals had the right to freedom, or “liberty,” including the right to consent to the government under which they lived. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” Thomas Jefferson wrote, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” and that “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
In the early years of the American nation, defending the rights of individuals meant keeping the government small so that it could not crush a man through taxation or involuntary service to the government or arbitrary restrictions. The Bill of Rights—the first ten amendments to the Constitution—explicitly prohibited the government from engaging in actions that would hamper individual freedom.
But in the middle of the nineteenth century, Republican president Abraham Lincoln began the process of adjusting American liberalism to the conditions of the modern world. While the Founders had focused on protecting individual rights from an overreaching government, Lincoln realized that maintaining the rights of individuals required government action.
To protect individual opportunity, Lincoln argued, the government must work to guarantee that all men—not just rich white men—were equal before the law and had equal access to resources, including education. To keep the rich from taking over the nation, he said, the government must keep the economic playing field between rich and poor level, dramatically expand opportunity, and develop the economy.
Under Lincoln, Republicans reenvisioned liberalism. They reworked the Founders’ initial stand against a strong government, memorialized by the Framers in the Bill of Rights, into an active government designed to protect individuals by guaranteeing equal access to resources and equality before the law for white men and Black men alike. They enlisted the power of the federal government to turn the ideas of the Declaration of Independence into reality.
Under Republican president Theodore Roosevelt, progressives at the turn of the twentieth century would continue this reworking of American liberalism to address the extraordinary concentrations of wealth and power made possible by industrialization. In that era, corrupt industrialists increased their profits by abusing their workers, adulterating milk with formaldehyde and painting candies with lead paint, dumping toxic waste into neighborhoods, and paying legislators to let them do whatever they wished.
Those concerned about the survival of liberal democracy worried that individuals were not actually free when their lives were controlled by the corporations that poisoned their food and water while making it impossible for individuals to get an education or make enough money ever to become independent.
To restore the rights of individuals, progressives of both parties reversed the idea that liberalism required a small government. They insisted that individuals needed a big government to protect them from the excesses and powerful industrialists of the modern world. Under the new governmental system that Theodore Roosevelt pioneered, the government cleaned up the sewage systems and tenements in cities, protected public lands, invested in public health and education, raised taxes, and called for universal health insurance, all to protect the ability of individuals to live freely without being crushed by outside influences.
Reformers sought, as Roosevelt said, to return to “an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him.”
It is that system of government’s protection of the individual in the face of the stresses of the modern world that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and the presidents who followed them until 1981 embraced. The post–World War II liberal consensus was the American recognition that protecting the rights of individuals in the modern era required not a weak government but a strong one.
When Movement Conservatives convinced followers to redefine “liberal” as an epithet rather than a reflection of the nation’s quest to defend the rights of individuals—which was quite deliberate—they undermined the central principle of the United States of America. In its place, they resurrected the ideology of the world the American Founders rejected, a world in which an impoverished majority suffers under the rule of a powerful few.
I’ve had a lot of conversations since Tuesday revolving around the question of why Donald Trump won. The economy and inflation. Kamala Harris didn’t do this or that. Sexism and racism. The border. That trans-inmate ad that ran a jillion times. And so on.
These conversations have usually proceeded along lines where people ask incredulously how a majority of voters could have believed this or that. Weren’t they bothered that Trump is a convicted felon? An adjudicated rapist? Didn’t his invocation of violence against Liz Cheney, or 50 other examples of his disgusting imprecations, obviously disqualify him? And couldn’t they see that Harris, whatever her shortcomings, was a fundamentally smart, honest, well-meaning person who would show basic respect for the Constitution and wouldn’t do anything weird as president?
The answer is obviously no—not enough people were able to see any of those things. At which point people throw up their hands and say, “I give up.”
But this line of analysis requires that we ask one more question. And it’s the crucial one: Why didn’t a majority of voters see these things? And understanding the answer to that question is how we start to dig out of this tragic mess.
The answer is the right-wing media. Today, the right-wing media—Fox News (and the entire News Corp.), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeart Media (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more—sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win.
Let me say that again, in case it got lost: Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country. Not The New York Times. Not The Washington Post (which bent over backwards to exert no influence when Jeff Bezos pulled the paper’s Harris endorsement). Not CBS, NBC, and ABC. The agenda is set by all the outlets I listed in the above paragraph. Even the mighty New York Times follows in its wake, aping the tone they set disturbingly often.
If you read me regularly, you know that I’ve written this before, but I’m going to keep writing it until people—specifically, rich liberals, who are the only people in the world who have the power to do something about this state of affairs—take some action.
I’ve been in the media for three decades, and I’ve watched this happen from the front row. Fox News came on the air in 1996. Then, it was an annoyance, a little bug the mainstream media could brush off its shoulder. There was also Rush Limbaugh; still, no comparison between the two medias. Rush was talented, after a fashion anyway, but couldn’t survive in a mainstream lane (recall how quickly the experiment of having him be an ESPN color commentator went off the rails.) But in the late 1990s, and after the Internet exploded and George W. Bush took office, the right-wing media grew and grew. At first, the liberal media grew as well along with the Internet, in the form of a robust blogosphere that eventually spawned influential, agenda-setting web sites like HuffPost. But billionaires on the right have invested far more heavily in media in the last two decades than their counterparts on the left—whose ad-supported, VC-funded operations started to fizzle out once social media and Google starting eating up the revenue pie.
And the result is what we see today. The readily visual analogy I use is: Once upon a time, the mainstream media was a beachball, and the right-wing media was a golf ball. Today, the mainstream media (what with layoffs and closures and the near death of serious local news reporting) is the size of a volleyball, and the right-wing media is the size of a basketball, which, in case you’re wondering, is bigger.
This is the year in which it became obvious that the right-wing media has more power than the mainstream media. It’s not just that it’s bigger. It’s that it speaks with one voice, and that voice says Democrats and liberals are treasonous elitists who hate you, and Republicans and conservatives love God and country and are your last line of defense against your son coming home from school your daughter.
And that is why Donald Trump won. Indeed, the right-wing media is why he exists in our political lives in the first place. Don’t believe me? Try this thought experiment. Imagine Trump coming down that escalator in 2015 with no right-wing media; no Fox News; an agenda still set, and mores still established, by staid old CBS News, the House of Murrow, and The New York Times.
That atmosphere would have denied an outrageous figure like Trump the oxygen he needed to survive and flourish. He just would not have been taken seriously at all. In that world, ruled by a traditional mainstream media, Trump would have been seen by Republicans as a liability, and they would have done what they failed to do in real life—banded together to marginalize him.
But the existence of Fox changed everything. Fox hosted the early debates, which Trump won not with intelligence, but outrageousness. He tapped into the grievance culture Fox had nursed among conservatives for years. He had (most of the time) Rupert Murdoch’s personal blessing. In 2015-16, Fox made Trump possible.
And this year, Fox and the rest of the right-wing media elected him. I discussed all this Thursday with Matthew Gertz of Media Matters for America, who watches lots of Fox News so the rest of us don’t have to. He made the crucial point—and you must understand this—that nearly all the crazy memes that percolated into the news-stream during this election came not from Trump or JD Vance originally, but from somewhere in the right-wing media ecosystem.
The fake story about Haitian residents of Springfield, Ohio eating cats and dogs, for example, started with a Facebook post citing second- and third-hand sources, Gertz told me; it then “circulated on X and was picked up by all the major right-wing influencers.” Only then did Vance, a very online dude, notice it and decide to run with it. And then Trump said it himself at the debate. But it started in the right-wing media.
Likewise with the post-debate ABC “whistleblower” claims, which Gertz wrote about at the time. This was the story that ABC, which hosted the only presidential debate this election, fed Team Harris the questions in advance. This started, Gertz wrote, as a “wildly flimsy internet rumor launched by a random pro-Trump X poster.” Soon enough, the right-wing media was all over it.
Maybe that one didn’t make a huge difference (although who knows?), but this one, I believe, absolutely did: the idea that Harris and Joe Biden swiped emergency aid away from the victims of Hurricane Helene (in mostly Southern, red states) and gave it all to undocumented migrants. It did not start with Trump or his campaign or Vance or the Republican National Committee or Lindsey Graham. It started on Fox. Only then did the others pick it up. And it was key, since this was a moment when Harris’s momentum in the polling averages began to flag.
I think a lot of people who don’t watch Fox or listen to Sinclair radio don’t understand this crucial chicken-and-egg point. They assume that Trump says something, and the right-wing media amplify it. That happens sometimes. But more often, it’s the other way around. These memes start in the media sphere, then they become part of the Trump agenda.
I haven’t even gotten to the economy, about which there is so much to say. Yes—inflation is real. But the Biden economy has been great in many ways. The U.S. economy, wroteThe Economist in mid-October, is “the envy of the world.” But in the right-wing media, the horror stories were relentless. And mainstream economic reporting too often followed that lead. Allow me to make the world’s easiest prediction: After 12:00 noon next January 20, it won’t take Fox News and Fox Business even a full hour to start locating every positive economic indicator they can find and start touting those. Within weeks, the “roaring Trump economy” will be conventional wisdom. (Eventually, as some of the fruits from the long tail of Bidenomics start growing on the vine, Trump may become the beneficiary of some real-world facts as well, taking credit for that which he opposed and regularly denounced.)
Back to the campaign. I asked Gertz what I call my “Ulan Bator question.” If someone moved to America from Ulan Bator, Mongolia in the summer and watched only Fox News, what would that person learn about Kamala Harris? “You would know that she is a very stupid person,” Gertz said. “You’d know that she orchestrated a coup against Joe Biden. That she’s a crazed extremist. And that she very much does not care about you.”
Same Ulan Bator question about Trump? That he’s been “the target of a vicious witch-hunt for years and years,” that he is under constant assault; and most importantly, that he is “doing it all for you.”
To much of America, by the way, this is not understood as one side’s view of things. It’s simply “the news.” This is what people—white people, chiefly—watch in about two-thirds of the country. I trust that you’ve seen in your travels, as I have in mine, that in red or even some purple parts of the country, when you walk into a hotel lobby or a hospital waiting room or even a bar, where the TVs ought to be offering us some peace and just showing ESPN, at least one television is tuned to Fox. That’s reach, and that’s power. And then people get in their cars to drive home and listen to an iHeart, right-wing talk radio station. And then they get home and watch their local news and it’s owned by Sinclair, and it, too, has a clear right-wing slant. And then they pick up their local paper, if it still exists, and the oped page features Cal Thomas and Ben Shapiro.
Liberals, rich and otherwise, live in a bubble where they never see this stuff. I would beg them to see it. Watch some Fox. Listen to some Christian radio. Experience the news that millions of Americans are getting on a daily basis. You’ll pretty quickly come to understand what I’m saying here.
And then contemplate this fact: If you think they’re done, you’re in fantasy land. They’re not happy with the rough parity, the slight advantage they have now. They want media domination. Sinclair bought the once glorious Baltimore Sun. Don’t think they’ll stop there. I predict Sinclair or the News Corp. will own The Washington Post one day. Maybe sooner than we think.
I implore you. Contemplate this. If you’re of a certain age, you have a living memory of revolutions in what we used to call the Third World. Question: What’s the first thing every guerilla army, whether of the left or the right, did once they seized the palace? They took over the radio or television station. First. There’s a reason for that.
It’s the same reason Viktor Orban told CPAC in 2022: “Have your own media.”
This is a crisis. The Democratic brand is garbage in wide swaths of the country, and this is the reason. Consider this point. In Missouri on Tuesday, voters passed a pro-abortion rights initiative, and another that raised the minimum wage and mandated paid leave. These are all Democratic positions. But as far as electing someone to high office, the Man-Boy Love Party could probably come closer than the Democrats. Trump beat Harris there by 18 points, and Senator Josh Hawley beat Lucas Kunce, who ran a good race and pasted Hawley in their debate, by 14 points.
The reason? The right-wing media. And it’s only growing and growing. And I haven’t even gotten to social media and Tik Tok and the other platforms from which far more people are getting their news these days. The right is way ahead on those fronts too. Liberals must wake up and understand this and do something about it before it’s too late, which it almost is.
‘Trump isn’t fun anymore’: Columnist claims MAGA leader’s greatest charm has died
Story by Adam Nichols- RAW STORY
• 21h • 2 min read
The dancing, joking, story-telling persona that helped lure Donald Trump’s adoring MAGA base has become a casualty of Kamala Harris’ campaign, a columnist wrote Friday.
And she based the revelation on Trump’s emergence from days of Mar-a-Lago isolation to give a news conference Thursday that many commentators described as a chaotic event suggesting a flailing campaign.
“He was dour and angry and frankly is starting to look a whole lot older, just in the past few months,” Parton wrote.
“He’s not enjoying himself and it shows and, compared to the excited crowds greeting Harris and Walz this week, this sad, pathetic appearance seemed almost funereal.”
Parton wrote that the change was fully down to Biden stepping aside and Harris taking the mantle as the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate. Even facing possible prison time in four criminal prosecutions hadn’t dampened his spirits as much.
“Donald Trump is in a bad way,” she wrote.
Parton went on, “I think he’s considering for the first time that he might lose again and he is not psychologically equipped to deal with that reality.
“Sure, he’ll fight it and tell his supporters that it was stolen and perhaps even incite more violence. But deep down he knows he might actually lose just as he knows deep down that he lost in 2020. There’s a look of panic in his eyes right now.
“If he fails this time he might just break apart at the seams. “
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.”
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.
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?”
Comments Off on 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.
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.
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, 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.
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.
On August 6, 1880, Republican presidential candidate James A. Garfield gave one of his most famous speeches. Then a congressional representative from Ohio, Garfield was in New York City to make peace with Roscoe Conkling, a Republican kingmaker who hated him and his insistence on clean government.
In the evening, Garfield spoke to a crowd of well-wishers, made up in large part of men who had fought in the Civil War, as Garfield had. The one-time college professor spoke directly to the “Boys in Blue,” telling them “how great a thing it is to live in this Union and be a part of it.” He told them that they, the soldiers of the Civil War, represented the same ideas of union embraced by the men who framed the Constitution.
“Gentlemen,” said Garfield to great applause, “ideas outlive men; ideas outlive all earthly things. You who fought in the war for the Union fought for immortal ideas, and by their might you crowned the war with victory. But victory was worth nothing except for the truths that were under it, in it, and above it. We meet to-night as comrades to stand guard around the sacred truths for which we fought. And while we have life to meet and grasp the hand of a comrade, we will stand by the great truths of the war.”
In 1880, four years after unreconstructed southern Democrats had taken control of all the former Confederate states and cemented the process of taking the vote away from Black men, Garfield promised that “we will remember our allies who fought with us.” He explained: “Soon after the great struggle began, we looked behind the army of white rebels, and saw 4,000,000 of black people condemned to toil as slaves for our enemies; and we found that the hearts of these 4,000,000 were God-inspired with the spirit of liberty, and that they were all our friends.”
As the crowd applauded, he continued: “We have seen white men betray the flag and fight to kill the Union; but in all that long, dreary war we never saw a traitor in a black skin.” To great cheers, he went on: “Our comrades escaping from the starvation of prison, fleeing to our lines by the light of the North star, never feared to enter the black man’s cabin and ask for bread.” “That’s so!” yelled a man in the crowd. “In all that period of suffering and danger, no Union soldier was ever betrayed by a black man or woman.”
“[S]o long as we live we will stand by these black allies,” Garfield said. “We will stand by them until the sun of liberty, fixed in the firmament of our Constitution, shall shine with equal ray upon every man, black or white, throughout the Union. Fellow-citizens, fellow-soldiers, in this there is the beneficence of eternal justice, and by it we will stand forever….” To wild cheers, Garfield concluded: “[T]he Republic rises on the glorious achievements of its dead and living heroes to a higher and nobler national life. We must stand guard over our past as soldiers, and over our country as the common heritage of all.”
In an era in which the smart money said the Democrats, with their promise to overturn the Reconstruction laws that established a legal framework for racial equality, would win the 1880 election, Garfield squeaked into the White House.
But he did not live long enough to put his vision into law. After his death, the Republican Party slid away from the protection of equal rights, focusing instead on protecting big business, its leaders looking the other way as state laws increasingly kept Black Americans and immigrants from voting so long as that same focus on state power prevented national regulation of business.
But those who believed in civil rights never gave up. In 1909 the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) organized “to promote equality of rights and eradicate caste or race prejudice among citizens of the United States,” and worked to secure “complete equality before the law,” including voting rights.
NAACP members publicized racial atrocities and insisted that authorities enforce the laws already on the books. By the 1960s, those protecting Black rights ramped up their efforts to register voters and to organize communities to support political change. When voter registration workers disappeared during the “Freedom Summer” of 1964, popular anger at their disappearance gave Democratic president Lyndon Baines Johnson leverage to pressure Congress to act. It passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, in part to make it easier to vote.
After voters put Johnson back into the White House in November 1964, voting rights activists stepped up their efforts. In Selma, Alabama, where the voting rolls were 99% white even though Black Americans outnumbered white Americans, law enforcement officers harassed activists. After officers beat and shot an unarmed man marching for voting rights in a town near Selma, Black leaders planned a march from Selma to the state capitol at Montgomery to draw attention to voter suppression.
Law enforcement officers met the protesters on March 7, 1965, with billy clubs, bullwhips, and tear gas. On March 15, Johnson addressed a national televised joint session of Congress to ask it to pass a national voting rights act. “Our fathers believed that if [their] noble view of the rights of man was to flourish, it must be rooted in democracy,” he said. “The most basic right of all was the right to choose your own leaders. The history of this country, in large measure, is the history of the expansion of that right to all of our people.”
He submitted to Congress voting rights legislation, and Congress delivered.
On August 6, 1965, Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act to guarantee Black Americans the right to vote.
“Today is a triumph for freedom as huge as any victory that has ever been won on any battlefield,” Johnson told the American people in a televised joint session of Congress. The Civil War had promised equality to all Americans, but that promise had not been fulfilled. “Today is a towering and certain mark that, in this generation, that promise will be kept.”
“I pledge you that we will not delay, or we will not hesitate, or we will not turn aside until Americans of every race and color and origin in this country have the same right as all others to share in the process of democracy,” Johnson said.
That resolve did not hold. In the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, the Supreme Court significantly weakened the Voting Rights Act. Republican-dominated states immediately found ways to keep minority voters from the polls and their votes from being counted, and in 2020, then-president Trump tried to throw out the votes of people in majority Black districts in order to overturn the results of that year’s presidential election. On July 10, 2023, House Republicans introduced a sweeping “election integrity” bill that would loosen campaign finance regulations and make it harder to vote.
Eight days later, on July 18, Democrats in the House and Senate reintroduced the Freedom to Vote Act, which would make it easier for all Americans to vote, end partisan gerrymandering, require transparency in campaign donations to try to limit dark money in elections, and protect state and local election officials. “The story of American democracy is one of a relentless march towards further equality,” said Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY). “The Freedom To Vote Act would rectify one of the great historic harms of our past and put us closer to our goal of a fully representative democracy.”
And then, on August 1—last Tuesday—the Department of Justice charged Trump under laws Congress passed during Reconstruction to protect the Black Americans’ political rights. Trump is charged with conspiring to obstruct an official proceeding—violating a law passed to stop Ku Klux Klan terrorists from breaking up official meetings in the late 1860s—and obstructing that proceeding: the counting of electoral votes.
Trump is also charged with conspiring “to injure, oppress, threaten, and intimidate one or more persons in the free exercise and enjoyment of a right and privilege secured to them by the Constitution and laws of the United States—that is, the right to vote, and to have one’s vote counted.”
It’s not meant to be a trick question, but it is one that perhaps needs to be rethought for our modern world.
This has become all the more apparent as the White House and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy work on a possible deal to avert a United States debt default. We wrote earlier why this is not really a “negotiation” (more like a hostage crisis), but if legislation emerges (still in doubt at the time of this writing), it’s going to contain spending caps.
Everyone has already taken Social Security and Medicare off the table, so that leaves so-called discretionary spending, which can be divided into two buckets: the defense budget and everything else.
The Republican viewpoint is that defense spending should remain unaffected while deep cuts are made in the “everything else” category. The Biden administration, which actually asked for more money for defense in its budget, still wants to protect as much of “everything else” as possible.
Republicans make the point that we live in a dangerous world, with rising threats from China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and others. This is true. And they argue that cuts to the defense department could harm “national security.”
Senate Republican Whip John Thune of South Dakota recently told The Hill, “Once they do the caps, the big fights in the appropriations process will be how money gets prioritized and allocated. For sure, the Republican priority is going to be national security” (emphasis ours).
The phrase “national security” is often used as a synonym for the military and related functions intended to curb threats from abroad. The Department of Defense website says the agency “provides the military forces needed to deter war and ensure our nation’s security.” The CIA says on its website homepage that “the work we do … is vital to U.S. national security.” Then there’s the Department of Homeland Security, which basically has a synonym of “national security” in its very name. And of course the National Security Agency itself.
But if we were to define “national security” in more holistic terms as the general safety and security of the United States and its people, perhaps we should see it through a much wider aperture. The State Department is vital for our national security. So is our investment in science, the health of our children, education, our infrastructure, mitigating the dangers from the climate crisis, and on and on.
Many Democrats are making a version of this point. “There are a lot of federal agencies that contribute directly or indirectly to national security,” said Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Jack Reed of Rhode Island in the same article from The Hill. “They’re trying to set up a zero-sum game: defense wins, domestic loses. But it doesn’t make sense because national security embraces so many different agencies.”
While this argument is more expansive than the Republican talking points, it’s still too rooted in Washington-speak about agencies and budgets. Yes, those are currently in the crosshairs. But there is a much broader narrative that could resonate with the public to reframe the debate more permanently and may be particularly appealing for younger voters.
For those raised during the Cold War and with memories of World War II still recent, national security could be readily envisioned in tangible military assets like aircraft carriers, missile systems, and standing armies.
These still remain necessary aspects of the defense of the homeland and our global interests (while recognizing that the defense budget is prone to bloat and even corruption, as we did in this previous Steady piece).
At the same time, what about national security in an age of a pandemic? Rising sea levels? And artificial intelligence?
There are some who argue that we don’t need a strong military or that we can slash the defense budget by large percentages. But these are not mainstream positions or likely to happen. Much more concerning are those who still view national security through the antiquated lens of the 20th century.
And recently, it’s gotten even worse. In fact, many elected officials who rage about the prospect of cuts to defense spending support actual measures that undermine our national security.
Allowing weapons of war on our streets while obstructing commonsense gun laws undermines our national security, an effect we can measure in thousands of lost lives and the terror and trauma of mass shootings.
Attacking marginalized groups also undermines our national security because we are weakened by division.
Promoting the “Big Lie” about stolen elections threatens our national security because it undermines our democracy.
Banning books threatens our national security because we need a citizenry of informed critical thinkers.
Our adversaries measure our vulnerabilities not only via our troop deployments and fighter jets. They see our political extremism, our animosities, our anger, and our selfishness and seek to exploit them.
And frankly, they see a faction willing to blow up our economy by threatening to default on the debt unless they get their way. Talk about a threat to national security.
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