— from Foreign Policy In Focus
A few months before the coronavirus shut down the world, Chile exploded against neoliberalism. A World Bank economist, Sebastian Edwards, was on the ground to record the rebellion:
On Oct 18, 2019, and to the surprise of most observers, massive protests erupted throughout the country. Demonstrations were triggered by a small increase in metro fares—thirty pesos, or the equivalent of four cents of a dollar. But the rallies were about much more than the fare increase. Hundreds of thousands of people marched in several cities and demonstrated against the elites, corporate abuse, greed, for-profit schools, low pensions, and the neoliberal model. Demonstrators asked for debt forgiveness for students and free universal health services.
Having done my dissertation on Chile over 40 years earlier and participated in the internationational solidarity against the dictator August Pinochet, who subjected the country to both neoliberal transformation and massive repression, I was elated. I even entertained the idea that the rebellion in Chile could be the spark for a global revolt against neoliberalism, much like the Bolsheviks thought their seizure of power in Russia would trigger the socialist revolution in Europe. But that fanciful thought was quickly shelved. Despite the international coverage of events there, Chile stood alone.
So you think the rich have life easy, do you? Just try telling that to the deep pockets who’ve spent tens of millions buying condos at 432 Park Avenue, the 11-year-old Manhattan luxury tower that once rated as our hemisphere’s tallest residence. Condo owners in the tower have had to put up with “faulty elevators, leaky plumbing, and noise issues.” They’re now suing the building’s operator.
Or consider the plight of those fabulously wealthy souls who’ve had to pay millions to move their mansions off the sandy coast of Nantucket, the one-time hippie refuge that’s become a summer “holiday hot spot for billionaires.” The problem? With climate change raising water levels, seaside homes on this Massachusetts island now have a nasty habit of “falling into the ocean.”
Or contemplate what life would be like if you were a person of means who fell in love with a mega-yacht the length of a football field and just had to be able to call that yacht your own. The purchase sets you back well over $100 million. But now you’ve just realized you’ll be annually paying at least 10% of that purchase price to dock and staff and fuel and insure your oh-so-cute new plaything.
— from Oil Change International
June 1, 2024, the grand opening day, came and went—but nothing actually happened. It was the latest of many proposed start dates that have come and gone over the years.
The highly controversial Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) was meant to start a year ago, then last month, and finally, on June 1. Again, that deadline was missed.
The company behind the fracked gas pipeline, Equitrans Midstream Partners (EQM), is still burying sections of it, while testing other sections. Problems persist, as they have done for years. Last week, local news reported that more pipeline “anomalies” have been discovered, with tests of MVP pointing to over 130 “potential problems” that “required additional analysis.”
Meanwhile, MVP continues to face significant and fierce opposition from local residents who vehemently oppose the $7.85 billion pipeline. Stretching 303 miles from West Virginia to southern Virginia, the project has been met with mounting resistance, further contributing to its delays.
Because we keep hearing so much about how convicted felon Donald Trump is doing "outreach" to Black voters, much of the press assumed that was what was going on with a recent Bronx rally where Trump made a big deal of appearing with a few D-list rappers who are facing criminal charges of their own. "Courting Black Voters, Trump Turns to Rappers Accused in Gang Murder Plot," declared the headline at the New York Times, which characterized the event as "clumsy" while taking Trump's purported overtures to Black voters at face value. Most outlets did, even though the rally itself was rather small.
This follows Trump and his media allies repeatedly claiming that his 2023 mug shot, from his arrest in Georgia on charges related to his attempt to steal the 2020 presidential election, would endear him to Black voters. "That’s why the Black people like me," Trump said of his mug shot," because they see what’s happening to me happens to them." Fact check: While there are a couple of Black defendants who were in the conspiracy, the vast majority of people charged with crimes related to the coup or the January 6 insurrection are white.
Weeks after The New York Times reported that two flags representing Donald Trump's Stop the Steal campaign in his efforts to overturn the 2020 election were flying outside of both his residential home and vacation home, US Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has refused to recuse himself from any January 6 related cases.
The high court justice has blamed the flags on the fact that his wife wanted to fly them.
Journalist and documentary filmmaker Lauren Windsor attended a the Supreme Court Historical Society dinner last week, and posed as a Christian conservative, according to Rolling Stone, while interviewing the justice's wife.
Windsor talked to MSNBC's Joy Reid about the encounter on the latest episode of The ReidOut.
— from Robert Reich's Substack
Friends,
I’m no fan of secret recordings designed to entrap public officials into saying things they’d rather not have the public hear, but Justice Samuel Alito’s remarks to filmmaker Lauren Windsor at the Supreme Court Historical Society dinner on June 3 — released today — confirm everything I assumed about Alito’s approach to the law.
After Windsor told Alito that, as a Catholic, she couldn’t see herself getting along with liberals in the way that needs to happen for the polarization to end, and that the Supreme Court should be about “winning,” Alito responded:
“I think you’re probably right. On one side or the other — one side or the other is going to win. I don’t know. I mean, there can be a way of working — a way of living together peacefully, but it’s difficult, you know, because there are differences on fundamental things that really can’t be compromised. They really can’t be compromised. So it’s not like you are going to split the difference.”
Believe it or not, I can’t recall a time in my life when I didn’t feel the standard allotment of insecurity, riddled with self-doubt and the fear that on any given day I would be met by a challenge I couldn’t meet. When we start out, everything is a mystery, and everyone is bigger. Having begun our lives with little power or understanding of the game we were in, some degree of inadequacy would be natural to us, difficult to displace, and a lifelong burden.
Most of us learned to conceal our worries about not being what we needed to be. Wearing brave faces in order to face the world that threatened to overwhelm us was one of the first survival mechanisms we learned. Quit crying, keep calm, and get on with it. Use the toilet. Tie your shoes. Learn your A-B-Cs. Mind your Ps and Qs. Don’t jump in mud puddles. Don’t talk to strangers. Don’t eat the yellow snow. Play nice.
Every year of schooling presented us with new teachers, new rules, new conundrums. It was so easy to get things wrong, to embarrass one’s self in the classroom or on the playground at recess. There were bullies and boogeymen, plus lots of errant temptations to misbehave. And, if all that wasn’t enough, there were ways to misunderstand what was expected of us in ways that we could be shamed for doing something we sincerely thought was the right thing to do.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin is failing at his job of holding the Supreme Court accountable. While he continues issuing stern statements and making floor speeches about Justice Samuel Alito’s recent flag scandals, he isn’t actually doing anything about it. Now other Democrats—like Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland—are stepping up to fill the leadership void.
Alito already blew off Durbin and Whitehouse’s demands that he recuse himself from insurrection-related cases, despite his display of Stop the Steal flags. Whitehouse followed up with a letter Monday, inquiring about a tax case from which he pressed Alito to recuse himself.
Before the hearing for that case, Alito was interviewed for The Wall Street Journal by one of the lawyers, David Rivkin Jr. In the article, Alito declared that both he and the Supreme Court are above the law.
Donald Trump tells us we are experiencing “American carnage” and the solution is to round up and put into concentration camps 11 million immigrants; imprison prosecutors, judges, Democrats, and reporters he says criticized him; and replace the FBI and our court systems with his own armed cadre that is loyal to him. The Proud Boys are stepping up again, and he is embracing them.
Seventy million Americans — and commentators across the massive rightwing media ecosystem — agree with him, as I learned Friday when I debated a conservative talk show host in New York before an audience of hundreds of rightwing (and a small handful of liberal) talkshow hosts and program directors at the nation’s largest convention of talk radio and television media. (Glenn Beck was the keynote speaker.)
A father stands tall in their child’s eyes. Mine towered. He was a 6’6”, red-headed giant of a man, a farmer who loved rock ‘n roll and corny jokes. He taught me to stand up for the underdogs, fight the good fight, and stick it to the Man.
He also taught me to speak out for peace.
My father was a conscientious objector and an anti-war organizer during the Vietnam War. In his 20s, he blockaded naval maneuvers off the coast of Maine and helped drafted young men get to Canada. His life inspires my own peace activism. Because of his example, I have the courage to stand up for peace and take risks to oppose war. He showed me that a life of courage and service can be found in stopping war, not fighting in it. Today, I know that by raising my voice for peace, I make my father proud.
Over the years, the sexual, often drug-related, and financial scandals of politically powerful conservative evangelical leaders like Jimmy Swaggart, Ted Haggard, Jim Bakker, Benny Hinn, Jerry Falwell Jr, and many others made for titillating headlines. There is another dedicated group of evangelical hustlers – advocates of what is called the Prosperity Gospel – that have been building fortunes off of the generosity of their megachurch flocks. Meet Creflo Dollar, one of the richest pastors in America. Dollar, who two years ago made headlines by reversing his position on tithing, telling his followers to dump every one of his books, tapes, etc. that refers to tithing — has yet to return any money to his fleeced flock. (More on the tithing controversy below).
Dollar is the founder and senior pastor of the non-denominational World Changers Church International, a megachurch based in College Park, Georgia.
Dollar also heads the Creflo Dollar Ministerial Association, Creflo Dollar Ministries, and Arrow Records. According to The Richest website, Dollar is worth around $27 million.
Dollar has also published Change Magazine and The Max, and over 30 books and devotionals, such as:
On a warm evening almost a decade ago, I sat under the stars with Daniel Ellsberg while he talked about nuclear war with alarming intensity. He was most of the way through writing his last and most important book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. Somehow, he had set aside the denial so many people rely on to cope with a world that could suddenly end in unimaginable horror. Listening, I felt more and more frightened. Dan knew what he was talking about.
After working inside this country’s doomsday machinery, even drafting nuclear war plans for the Pentagon during President John F. Kennedy’s administration, Dan Ellsberg had gained intricate perspectives on what greased the bureaucratic wheels, personal ambitions, and political messaging of the warfare state. Deceptions about arranging for the ultimate violence of thermonuclear omnicide were of a piece with routine falsehoods about American warmaking. It was easy enough to get away with lying, he told me: “How difficult is it to deceive the public? I would say, as a former insider, one becomes aware: It’s not difficult to deceive them. First of all, you’re often telling them what they would like to believe—that we’re better than other people, we’re superior in our morality and our perceptions of the world.”
— from Robert Reich's Substack
Friends,
As usual, Trump signals what he’s planning to do before he does it.
He’s already signaled that he won’t accept the results of the 2024 election if he loses. Since announcing his candidacy, he has cast doubt on the fairness of the 2024 election on average once a day (according to an analysis by The New York Times).
As he did before the 2020 election, Trump refuses to commit to accepting the 2024 election results. “If everything’s honest, I’ll gladly accept the results,” he said in a May 1 interview with The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.”
Trump has also signaled that if elected he’ll use the Justice Department against his “enemies.”
INTRODUCTORY NOTE: The piece below was published more than 20 years ago in The San Francisco Chronicle Sunday Forum Section. The last two decades have seen the Chronicle shrink to a fraction of what it once was. Fewer and fewer of us get our news of opinion from print media now. As much as any other factor explaining how we have fallen so far, so fast, and so hard can be traced to the shrinking number of people who get news of the world from local newspapers. Reading requires more thought and time, and far too many people would rather take their perception of things from brief squibs of clearly biased opinions on television or social media.
One plank of former President Donald Trump's 2024 campaign is lowering prices for gas and groceries, which remains a top concern of most American voters. But at least one economic expert is doubtful that Trump's policies would do anything to make goods more affordable — in fact, he says prices will likely jump even higher under a second Trump administration.
Trump has argued that he plans to "knock the hell out of the inflation" if sent back to the White House, mainly through a combination of extending his tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, gutting regulations and slashing government spending. Most of the regulations he has run on eliminating are ones President Joe Biden put in place on extractive industries. Trump has also campaigned on repealing subsidies for the renewable energy industry like those in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.
But according to the New York Times, Michael Strain — who is the director of economic policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute — said all signs point to higher prices if the policies Trump is running on become reality.
Trump, as loser, faces legitimate penalties galore; but Biden, as loser, faces vindictive DOJ retribution not for crimes but for not winning.
In a receding golden age, losers in the White House sweepstakes packed up, swallowed defeat, and retired with comfortable pensions and fat book contracts. Now, any non-MAGA presidential loser must in advance bank a war chest to offset punitive, wholly lawless Trump prosecution. What a vicious, un-virtuous cycle implying any future MAGA president can then ambush any losing “enemy” – real, perceived or imaginary. Other than opinions, what can a retired Biden scribbling in archives do to an empowered Trump?
The contrast here is that Trump, allergic to democratic strictures and fairness, defies majority rule, legal statutes, justice, the Electoral College and confirmed, fair elections. Indeed, as the MAGA contagion spreads across a third campaign, blinkered Trump crusaders demand elections should not only decide leaders (if they win!) but are public witch trials on the losers moral and legal culpability. That makes even daring to challenge, let alone defeat Trumpism, wickedness itself, deserving harassment. “If you go after me, I am coming for you,” from a Trump tweet, echoing constant revenge manias that he will pay back ten times any opponent. “Revenge is mine,” saith the Trumpster, forgetting that God was there first.
We hear the word “unprecedented” a lot lately, but before we lock in on that adjective describing events in these times we're living in, we might consider Shakespeare’s line about there being nothing new under the sun. Though there have been quite a few distinctive aspects to this century thus far, and lots of people and events that were startling, quirky, and seeming to be unlike anything that had ever happened before, that’s probably because even those of us who are far from new arrivals are not new.
Donald Trump, who seems so unprecedented in his malevolence, likes to repeat the notion that “no one’s ever seen anything like this before” whenever he wants to engage in his customary ritual of feeling sorry for himself in public. He whines incessantly, not quite blubbering like Alex Jones, but what Trump's spared us in tears, he's made up for in telling us about all the troubles he’s seen, incessantly bitching about every slight, slur, or crime against him by enemies he finds everywhere, but mostly on the left. Still, even his henchmen or henchwomen on the right are all to often mean to him, too.
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.
The election will likely come down to a few ten thousand moderate voters across a handful of swing states. And former President Donald Trump so far is not making any efforts to court them.
That's according to The Bulwark publisher Sarah Longwell, who is also the executive director of the group Republican Voters Against Trump. She told Politico in a recent report that a focus group she conducted with Republicans who voted for Trump both in 2016 and 2020 was educational for her in showing how the ex-president's felony convictions were a bridge too far.
"[A] lot of these sort of suburban swing voters will look at Trump and say ‘I can’t do it.’ Especially with the conviction — and not just the conviction, but January 6," she said. Longwell added that the focus group saw the 34 felony convictions handed down by a New York jury last week "as just more confirmation of how unfit he is."
"Trump has not figured out how to appeal to more center-right voters, and I think he doesn’t think he has to," Longwell said. "I think he thinks that frustration with Biden and the economy is enough to sort of drive these college-educated suburban swing voters back to him."
The politically cancerous pattern of using racism for political gain and financial profit dates back to the earliest days of our republic, but now, amplified by Donald Trump, is again increasingly in our faces.
Black workers at a General Mills plant in Georgia are suing over white management allegedly sanctioning a “Good Ole Boys” club that uses Confederate symbols and open racism to intimidate and cow them.
A producer on The Apprentice show is — now that his NDA has expired — telling the story of Trump’s casual and repeated use of the N-word, questioning whether Americans would ever “buy a n— winning” the show’s faux business competition.
The GOP and rightwing hate media have turned racism into both a political weapon and a machine to generate billions in annual profits. Today’s “school choice” movement, racial and anti-immigrant hatred, and the MAGA movement all have the same roots.
For a study in contrasts, it doesn't get more stark than the partisan reactions to the 34 felony convictions of Donald Trump versus the ongoing trial of Hunter Biden, the son of the sitting president. Even though Trump was convicted in a New York state court by a jury of 12 ordinary people, Republicans rushed forward to defend Trump with a series of lies and conspiracy theories. Although President Joe Biden had no hand in the prosecution, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La. blamed the "Biden administration" for an imaginary "weaponization of our justice system." Attorney General Merrick Garland was hauled before Congress and sat through hours of Republicans blaming him for the verdict. While few Republicans are stupid enough to pretend Trump is innocent, they refuse to accept that the only man responsible for the convictions is the man who committed the 34 felonies: Donald J. Trump.
In contrast, Democrats just aren't defending Hunter Biden on charges that he lied on a gun application about his drug addiction. President Biden released a statement affirming that he has "boundless love" for his son, but that he "won't comment" further. He has since affirmed he will not pardon his son if he's convicted. When asked about it, Democratic politicians and progressive pundits mostly reaffirm faith in the justice system and leave it at that. The only politician defending the younger Biden appears to be Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who said (accurately enough), "I don’t think the average American would have been charged with the gun thing." Outside of the rabid conspiracy theory MAGA circles, the social media response has mostly been variations of, to quote one Redditor, "Dear weirdos. no one cares about Hunter Biden. Signed, normal America."
In the wake of former President Donald Trump's guilty verdict on 34 felony counts in New York, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) is now trying to make it virtually impossible for any local or state prosecutor to bring charges against him ever again. But trying to get enough support from within his conference for the concept is another challenge altogether.
Axios reported Friday that Johnson is trying to enlist members of the House Republican Conference to support the No More Political Prosecutions Act. That bill would make it so a current or former president could have any case brought by a local or state-level prosecutor moved to federal court. This would then put those local and state cases under a president's jurisdiction to either have his appointed attorney general dismiss or allow a president to pardon himself if convicted.
However, one major roadblock Johnson has run into is the more moderate faction of his caucus, as Republicans from swing districts have expressed reticence to fully support that legislation.
— from Robert Reich's Substack
Friends,
The consensus among economists is that this morning’s jobs report, showing that the United States added a whopping 272,000 jobs in May, will cause the Fed to leave interest rates unchanged at their current high level when the Fed meets next week.
Fed officials still fear the specter of inflation. Average hourly earnings rose 0.4 percent in May from April, and 4.1 percent from a year ago.
But it would be a mistake for the Fed to postpone reducing interest rates. Five reasons:
Former President Donald Trump, who will turn 78 next week, may spend the rest of his natural life in prison if he doesn't prevail in the November 5 presidential election, according to a former federal prosecutor.
During a recent episode of his podcast, Harry Litman — the former U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania — opined that the 45th president of the United States may not experience freedom again if he enters a prison cell and loses his reelection bid to President Joe Biden. The Hill reported that Litman viewed this fall as a do-or-die moment for the ex-president to not only retake power, but to spend the end of his life as a free man.
“If he doesn’t win, he has an appreciable chance of dying in prison,” Litman told former U.S. Senator Al Franken (D-Minnesota). “The whole timeline, the whole crisis point of November goes away. So, if he doesn’t win on [November] the fifth, those cases lie ready to bring.”
Republicans know that their war on legal, accessible birth control is unpopular. But that's not stopping them because, as they learned from convicted felon Donald Trump, the way to hide what you're up to is simple: Lie. Lie a lot. Lie every time you open your mouth. Lie with a straight face, and have faith that the weak "fact checks" offered by the mainstream media don't matter. The Republican comfort levels with lying are sky-high in the era of Trump. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., does it with a smirk, satisfied that no one can stop him. It is somehow still staggering how much they lie about birth control and their nefarious intentions toward it. The good news is that Democrats are taking action to cut through the GOP's thick forest of falsehoods.
On Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., held a vote on the Right to Contraception Act, which guarantees the right of an individual "to obtain contraceptives and to voluntarily engage in contraception." The legislation also protects the right of licensed health care providers "to provide contraceptives, contraception, and information, referrals, and services related to contraception." Despite loudly insisting they have no desire to take away birth control, all but two Republicans voted against the bill. This follows a 2022 vote on the bill in the House, in which all but 8 Republicans voted against the right to use contraception.
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