#powell memo

[robertreich]

How the Corporate Takeover of American Politics Began

The corporate takeover of American politics started with a man and a memo you've probably never heard of.

In 1971, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce asked Lewis Powell, a corporate attorney who would go on to become a Supreme Court justice, to draft a memo on the state of the country.

Powell’s memo argued that the American economic system was “under broad attack” from consumer, labor, and environmental groups.

In reality, these groups were doing nothing more than enforcing the implicit social contract that had emerged at the end of the Second World War. They wanted to ensure corporations were responsive to all their stakeholders — workers, consumers, and the environment — not just their shareholders.

But Powell and the Chamber saw it differently. In his memo, Powell urged businesses to mobilize for political combat, and stressed that the critical ingredients for success were joint organizing and funding.

The Chamber distributed the memo to leading CEOs, large businesses, and trade associations — hoping to persuade them that Big Business could dominate American politics in ways not seen since the Gilded Age.

It worked.

The Chamber’s call for a business crusade birthed a new corporate-political industry practically overnight. Tens of thousands of corporate lobbyists and political operatives descended on Washington and state capitals across the country.

I should know — I saw it happen with my own eyes.

In 1976, I worked at the Federal Trade Commission. Jimmy Carter had appointed consumer advocates to battle big corporations that for years had been deluding or injuring consumers.

Yet almost everything we initiated at the FTC was met by unexpectedly fierce political resistance from Congress. At one point, when we began examining advertising directed at children, Congress stopped funding the agency altogether, shutting it down for weeks.

I was dumbfounded. What had happened?

In three words, The Powell Memo.

Lobbyists and their allies in Congress, and eventually the Reagan administration, worked to defang agencies like the FTC — and to staff them with officials who would overlook corporate misbehavior.

Their influence led the FTC to stop seriously enforcing antitrust laws — among other things — allowing massive corporations to merge and concentrate their power even further.

Washington was transformed from a sleepy government town into a glittering center of corporate America — replete with elegant office buildings, fancy restaurants, and five-star hotels.

Meanwhile, Justice Lewis Powell used the Court to chip away at restrictions on corporate power in politics. His opinions in the 1970s and 80s laid the foundation for corporations to claim free speech rights in the form of financial contributions to political campaigns.

Put another way — without Lewis Powell, there would probably be no Citizens United — the case that threw out limits on corporate campaign spending as a violation of the “free speech” of corporations.

These actions have transformed our political system. Corporate money supports platoons of lawyers, often outgunning any state or federal attorneys who dare to stand in their way. Lobbying has become a $3.7 billion dollar industry.

Corporations regularly outspend labor unions and public interest groups during election years. And too many politicians in Washington represent the interests of corporations — not their constituents. As a result, corporate taxes have been cut, loopholes widened, and regulations gutted.

Corporate consolidation has also given companies unprecedented market power, allowing them to raise prices on everything from baby formula to gasoline. Their profits have jumped into the stratosphere — the highest in 70 years.

But despite the success of the Powell Memo, Big Business has not yet won. The people are beginning to fight back.

First, antitrust is making a comeback. Both at the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department we’re seeing a new willingness to take on corporate power.

Second, working people are standing up. Across the country workers are unionizing at a faster rate than we’ve seen in decades — including at some of the biggest corporations in the world — and they’re winning.

Third, campaign finance reform is within reach. Millions of Americans are intent on limiting corporate money in politics – and politicians are starting to listen.

All of these tell me that now is our best opportunity in decades to take on corporate power — at the ballot box, in the workplace, and in Washington.

Let’s get it done.

#youtube #videos #video #powell memo #corporations #wall street #finance #corruption #politics #lobbying #government

[thoughtportal]

Corporate takeover of the US

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_F._Powell_Jr.

#tiktok #Lewis f powell #powell memo #citizen's united #us supreme court #capitalism is a scam #labor movements #labor movement #advertising #reagan was a terrible president #ronald reagan #reagan #FTC #anti-trust laws #corporate greed #corporate welfare #us political lobbying #us political financing #robert reich #us elections #workers rights #workers vs capital #union workers #price gouging #taxes #history #american history

[theculturedmarxist]

"Attack on American Free Enterprise System"

That about adding Regan's inauguration got me to thinking. I wonder of there's a correlation between the recipients of The Powell Memo and financial contributors to Ronald Reagan's election campaign.

On August 23, 1971, less than two months before he was nominated to serve as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, Lewis F. Powell, Jr. mailed a confidential memorandum to his friend Eugene B. Sydnor, Jr., Chair of the Education Committee of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The memo was titled Attack On American Free Enterprise System and outlined ways in which business should defend and counter attack against a "broad attack" from "disquieting voices."

Initially the memo was viewed, and praised, by only a select few within the Chamber. That all changed on September 28 & 29, 1972, when the leaked document was the topic of negative treatment in syndicated newspaper columnist Jack Anderson's Washington Merry Go Round. With quotations from the document now public, the Chamber published it in full in Washington Report, the Chamber's newsletter. An off-print of the memo was made available to anyone requesting it from the Chamber.

Interest in the memorandum was revived in the early 1990s. The Alliance for Justice's 1993 report, Justice for Sale, mentions it prominently. The case for the memo being a seminal document in the neoconservative movement in the U.S. was made in 2000 with the publication of John B. Judis’s The Paradox of American Democracy. The Internet became a medium for access to the memo and for posting articles about it. Mediatransparency.org was one of the first World Wide Web sites to feature the memo, as was the official site of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Today the memo is both credited as having "changed America" and scorned as being "far out of touch with the concerns and structures of the current right."

Whatever it's influence, it has been and remains today the single most requested document in the Lewis F. Powell, Jr. Papers. On the fortieth anniversary of its creation, the Powell Archives has here assembled links to the memo and related documents from the Powell Papers. Lyman Johnson, Robert O. Bentley professor of law at Washington and Lee university School of Law, also wrote this piece in commemoration of this anniversary.

#powell memo #ronald reagan #reactionary politics #capitalism #class war

[teachanarchy]

Watch "The Government Just Serves the Rich and Powerful" on YouTube

#media #corporations #capitalism #economics #government #powell memo #academia #class war #Youtube

[hezigler]

The worst memo in American history

"We have the best government money can buy." Mark Twain

#robert reich #powell memo #the powell memo #political corruption

[sataniccapitalist]

#thewaronyou

#powell memo

[sweetwhispersofchaos]

Danny and Lewis at the Miami game.

Glen at the Texas game.

Jay at the LSU game.

…Monica at a Dior event….

I guess our girl isn’t a football fan 🤣🤣🤣

#or she missed the memo #wonder if any of them invited her #danny ramirez #lewis pullman #glen powell #jay ellis #monica babaro

[readingismyhustle]

#corporate greed #powell's memo

[ridenwithbiden]

On Friday, Kenneth Chesebro pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to file false documents in the Fulton County 2020 election conspiracy case, becoming the second high-level Donald Trump co-defendant to become a state’s witness in two days. Chesebro received an especially lenient sentence of five years’ probation, a small financial penalty, and 100 hours of community service.

With the guilty plea and cooperation deal Georgia prosecutors struck on Thursday with Team Trump attorney Sidney Powell, Chesebro’s plea deal should be viewed as an earthquake in the case against Trump. Given Powell’s close proximity to the former president and his legal advisers at crucial times in his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, her testimony will be particularly devastating not only as to defendant Trump, but to co-defendants Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman.

Chesebro’s testimony, meanwhile, implicates one of the key portions of the conspiracy both in Georgia and in the federal Jan. 6 case against Trump, specifically the efforts to create a slate of “false electors” to use during the Jan. 6 electoral count to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Now that both Chesebro and Powell are cooperating witnesses, the pressure on Giuliani and Eastman to plead and cooperate is exponentially higher.

That the significant cooperation under discussion involves four of Trump’s attorneys underscores the reality that the former president’s regularly touted defense that he was relying on the good-faith guidance of his attorneys during the attempted coup was, and is, nothing more than self-serving fantasy. In the courtroom—as compared with on television or in social media—he has never had the ability to offer that defense.

In court, the advice of counsel “affirmative defense” requires a defendant to prove two things: First, that he relied in good faith on his lawyer’s advice that the conduct in question at trial was legal, and second, that he made a full disclosure of all relevant facts to the attorney before receiving that advice.

Based on my four decades in the courtroom as both federal prosecutor and defense attorney, I can report that the assertion of the attorney-client privilege by a criminal defendant at trial is a black swan event—effective only with the consistent, overlapping trial testimony of both the attorney and the defendant, and the admission into evidence of any documents reflecting the communications or advice they testified about.

Putting aside the substantial evidence that Trump was warned by numerous White House lawyers that his efforts to overturn the 2020 election were in violation of the law, how does Trump establish the advice of counsel defense at trial?

As I have observed in prior articles, he is certainly not able to testify on his own behalf. There are surely no memos to the file, emails, or letters to the client evidencing such advice in writing. Finally in this regard, what lawyer is willing to testify he or she advised Trump it was, for example, lawful for him to ask the Georgia secretary of state to “find” enough votes for him to win that state?

Long before the Powell and Chesebro deals were announced, the absurdity of expecting any Trump attorney’s testimony to be anything but harmful to his cause was made crystal clear by Michael Cohen. More recently, when Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran was forced to testify against the former president based on the “crime fraud” exception to the attorney-client privilege, the testimony he gave and the internal memos he was compelled to produce, proved not to be shields for the former president, but swords to be wielded against him—as it is with Powell and Chesebro, and so it will be with others.

After all, what can you expect when your standard for choosing at least some of your lawyers is their willingness to turn a blind eye to whatever your weak ego and malicious intentions require?

In sum, while Georgia and DOJ attorneys have each received great potential benefits from the Powell and Chesebro deals, it was in no way structured to protect against a defense they know Trump cannot employ.

Finally, speaking of structure, the great deals Powell and Chesebro struck, getting probation while facing up to 20 years in jail on a RICO conviction, are certainly a blessing for them—they even get to finally tell the truth.

But District Attorney Fani Willis’ seeming generosity is a sign of shrewd judgment, not weakness.

Prosecutors have both the carrot and the stick to get what they want, and the two deals Willis just made were large carrots, signaling to the other defendants that she is someone they can deal with, and that there are potentially acceptable pathways out of the mess they are in. At the same time, she has just made her case against other, more significant defendants meaningfully stronger and her stick that much larger.

Of course, Willis is a long way from where she needs to be, but those who had originally feared she had overindicted the 19-defendant RICO case might now be a little less concerned and a little more impressed.

[sharpestasp]

Movie Watch

Bumblebee

(six years after release, however long since the DVD came out, FINALLY watching this)

This is going to be strictly a collection of my immediate reactions to the film because DAMN I HAVE NOT ENJOYED A TF FILM LIKE THAT SINCE '07. With less squick-humor too!

Please don't harsh my squee. I really, really loved this one.

OMG. ALL THE RECOGNIZABLE CONS AND BOTS! Poor son had to deal with me naming them off Prime doing Jet Judo

John Cena is a mess

BABY! Bumblebee, you were never meant to fight a seeker one on one Nice moves though MY BABY! Oh my poor baby. BOOYAH! That's my BOY!

Oh trivia: Bell, Burns' (Cena's) friend on the exercise? Is Aldis Hodge's brother. (he was in "The Jailhouse Job" too)

Real dysfunctional family vibes there

Soundtrack is rocking.

CLIFFJUMPER! NO

Shatter is fascinating though.

I'm loving Gwen Stacy, I mean, Charlie Alright, at least I'm not calling her Kate Bishop

Mom and Ron are so 80s. In their parenting.

OH she stayed! She saw he was having trouble.

"Tell me things. Sometimes." YOU DON'T LISTEN MOM!

BUMBLEBEE, so scared!

OH! THE FACE TO THE HANDS

I think Charlie is awesome, BTW

oh dear. Arriving Decepticon now? Okay, that was a little gross, but Roy vaguely deserved it at least? And the woman survived.

Okay Bumblebee and dogs is just a recurring theme? Charlie explaining the need to stay hidden. BEE! Silly boy. Hiding his head in the sand

"Nonbiologicals" THEY ARE BIOLOGICALS, JUST A DIFFERENT BIOLOGY Oh GREAT. We're going to go with the deception part of Decepticon.

Optimus's message. OH HONEY. HELLO RAVAGE.

Bee keeps flinching so much. His PTSD. It is bad. LOL. I said "Not a Smiths fan" before Charlie did. +wibbles so hard+ Bee has his first human.

(listening to Charlie talk about losing her dad, hit son and me both. Him for the recent loss of his, me for coming up on Mom's deathiversary)

Memo is adorable in a particular way that is so the 80s oh Charlie is a teenager! So much.

Okay Sector 7's Powell is WORSE than Simmons was in the first movie.

Do not be stupid teenagers. "You Got the Touch", really?

Okay, Bee, a little much there. Oh dear. Cops. I love Bee, but boy he is very young (and damaged memory processors)

OH NO. MAKING HIM STAY HOME. This is going to go so badly. OH NO. NO NO NO BEE! And now the 'cons know.

Mom needed to hear all that.

OH JAYS, I actually had to look at the trivia to get that, BAD ASP. Judd Nelson - Hot Rod in the original '86 film / All the Breakfast Club spots in this

SHE'S DOING CPR! This is so The Abyss between Bud and Lindsey.

AND NOW IT IS IRON GIANT TIME! Very very good, well done.

okay the station wagon scene was cute

Okay, Charlie, honey? What in hell you think you gonna do? "I go, you stay" moment.

Bee against Dropkick DAMN BEE! Was Jazz your instructor? And Charlie to the rescue? She looks ... yep. Going after Shatter. Yep. Jazz taught Bumblebee how to fight, headcanon now. C'mon, Bee. HOLY SHIT! GREAT MOVE WITH THE CHAIN. AWWWWWW Bee saving Burns! And then, AND THEN! He took Shatter right out! Burns made the right choice.

And now, HOLY SHIT. They have to leave each other. I LOVE THEM SO MUCH (I feel bad for him having to deal with Sam after knowing Charlie.) MY HEART! SWEET! Nice car. Family reunion time. I APPLAUD the "not quite there yet" OMG I LOVED

And yeah, works better as a soft reboot than a prequel with that last scene Also, Bee-the-camaro riding alongside CLASSIC Semi that looked like PRIME of the cartoon? PRICELESS

#transformers #autobot bumblebee #bumblebee 2018

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Antitrust is - and always has been - about fairness

It’s easy to take the Supreme Court’s flurry of judicial atrocities as a contemporary phenomenon, but all the way back in 1993, SCOTUS engaged in a historical fantasy that has taken a terrible toll on the American people and American political legitimacy. Long before Citizens United, there was Brooke Group Ltd. v. Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp:

https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/509/209/

It was an antitrust case, and in 1993, decades of antitrust precedent that sought to prevent the accumulation of power into a few companies’ hands was being upended by a radical, far-right doctrine called “consumer welfare” — a doctrine that spread to “liberal” justices as well, as 40% of the federal bench took part in the Manne Seminars, lavishly funded “education” junkets:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/03/powell-memo/

In Brooke Group the Supremes moved an outlier — 1962’s Brown Shoe Inc — into the center of antitrust law, with Kennedy quoting Brown Shoe for the majority: “It is axiomatic that the antitrust laws were passed for ‘the protection of competition, not competitors.’”

What Kennedy meant was that antitrust laws don’t exist to protect small businesses per se — rather, they exist to promote “efficiency,” which is best understood as “prices going down.” So long as prices are going down, antitrust is working as intended — irrespective of the ruined lives and places that are sacrificed to low prices and the corruption begat by concentrated power.

The question of what antitrust should do is certainly up for fair debate. I understand the “efficiency” argument, even though I thoroughly disagree with it. What isn’t (or shouldn’t be) up for debate is what purpose antitrust was created to serve. That is a historical fact, easily verified by looking at contemporaneous primary source documents from the recent past.

But for 40 years, we’ve accepted an alternate history of antitrust law, an unhinged conspiratorial account that pretended that the lawmakers who drafted and fought for antitrust law and who told us over and over why they did so were speaking in code — that we can’t rely on their plain language and must instead fall back on gnostic interpretations where every word can mean its opposite.

Finally, that age of mystic nonsense is coming to a close. The new antitrust enforcers not only reject the ahistorical gibberish that pretends to explain antitrust’s origins, they embrace the intent of antitrust’s framers: to prevent the accumulation of commercial — and thus political — power into the hands of “autocrats of trade,” be they Rockefellers and Carnegies, or Kochs and Seids.

In the US, three powerful Biden appointees are leading the charge: Tim Wu in the White House, Jonathan Kanter in the DoJ Antitrust Division, and FTC chair Lina Khan. But while these three may be the face of US trustbusting, they are by no means alone — rather, they are supported by stalwart lieutenants and an army of supporters.

One of these lieutenants is FTC Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya. Last month, Bedoya gave a barn-burning speech to the Midwest Forum on Fair Markets, explaining the once and future history of antitrust; the transcript of his speech was just published in The American Prospect:

https://prospect.org/economy/returning-to-fairness-rural-america-open-markets/

Bedoya starts with the unequivocal history of antitrust. In 1888, when Congress was debating the Sherman Act, its first antitrust law, it “did not talk about efficiency.” Instead witnesses complained about the meatpacking cartel, which was cheating ranchers out of a fair price for their cattle.

This theme — cartels and monopolies abusing small producers — is the recurring motif of all antitrust law debates thereafter. In 1936, Congress debated protection for small-town grocers “being driven out of business by powerful chain stores who got secret payoffs from their suppliers.”

In those debates, Congress made clear its purpose: “What we are trying to take away from them is secret discounts, secret rebates, and secret advertising allowances. We are trying to take away from them those practices that are unfair.” Antitrust is, and always has been, about fairness, not efficiency.

When Sen John Sherman took his landmark antitrust bill to the Senate floor in 1890, he thundered: “If we will not endure a King as a political power we should not endure a King over…the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity.”

https://marker.medium.com/we-should-not-endure-a-king-dfef34628153

Congress passed five more antitrust bills over the next 60 years, each of them designed to protect small firms from large ones. There is no reasonable world in which the judges enforcing these laws could say that it was “axiomatic” that they didn’t exist to protect the small from the large:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254130964_The_Robinson-Patman_Act_and_competition_Unfinished_business

Today, small firms — and the communities they serve — face existential threats from large, consolidated ones. Bedoya describes the annihilation of independent pharmacies in West Virginia, where, 20 years ago, the sector was composed of 39 companies — pharmacies, benefit managers and insurers. Today, those 39 companies have merged into three monoliths:

https://content.govdelivery.com/attachments/ARAG/2022/05/11/file_attachments/2156162/2022-05-11-%20Insulin%20Complaint%20FINAL%20DRAFT.pdf#page=77

Perhaps that’s efficient? Not hardly. When a WV family goes to their local pharmacy to fill a prescription for their child who has cancer, they are turned away, told instead that they must fill this order with their Pharmacy Benefit Manager’s proprietary mail-order pharmacy, and their child must wait two weeks for their medicine:

https://www.wvinsurance.gov/Portals/0/pdf/pressrelease/Drug%20Complaint%20Press%20Release%20Draft%208.8.2021-FINAL%20(1).pdf

A tsunami of mergers — waved through by Bedoya’s predecessors at the FTC — produced nationwide pharmacy and insurance consolidation, to the detriment of patients. It was also an extinction-level event for rural pharmacies: “In Minnesota, from 2003 to 2018, 30 rural zip codes lost their only pharmacy.” It’s a nationwide epidemic:

https://rupri.public-health.uiowa.edu/publications/policybriefs/2018/2018%20Pharmacy%20Closures.pdf

Agribusiness is extraordinarily concentrated. At a listening session in Des Moines, Bedoya heard from cattlemen and corn growers, who were all in crisis. No wonder: 40% of your grocery store dollar once went to the farmer who grew your food. Today, it’s 16%:

https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-dollar-series/documentation

Once, dozens of firms provided agricultural inputs and services (“fertilizer, seeds, grain buying, meatpacking”). Today, all of these functions are undertaken by just four companies, but they don’t compete with each other — rather, they have divided up the nation so that farmers have only one supplier for key inputs:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/blog/2021/09/08/addressing-concentration-in-the-meat-processing-industry-to-lower-food-prices-for-american-families/

This isn’t just unfair — it’s also inefficient. When one company owns all the meatpacking facilities and shuts down — as some did during the covid lockdown — there’s no alternative. Bedoya: “One of the cattlemen described through tears how he had to gas a warehouse full of cattle when the one processing plant accessible to him was shut down because of COVID.”

Monopoly isn’t just unfair to humans, it’s also unfair to livestock: “Another described animal abuse on the lot that he said was unheard of in competitive markets. A cow that he raised was bolted in the head, killed, dragged out of a trailer with a log chain, and dumped in the garbage because she had slipped in the trailer on the drive to the processing plant.”

The unfairness goes deeper than we know or can know. Bedoya says that the people who came to his meeting were terrified to speak, frightened of retaliation by the monopolists. I encountered this myself: when Rebecca Giblin and I were working on Chokepoint Capitalism, our book about monopolies and creative labor markets, everyone we spoke to about the Ticketmaster/Livenation monopoly requested anonymity for fear of reprisals.

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

The unfairness goes all the way up the supply chain, from producers to retailers. Rural communities and low-income neighborhoods rely on independent grocers, and independent grocers are also facing looming extinction. That’s because the large grocers and large manufacturers have secret arrangements that make it possible for grocery monopolists to sell at prices that independents can’t match.

Take RF Buche, who owns 21 independent grocers in South Dakota Indian Country, a business that his family has been in for 117 years; Buche’s stores are “the only place where locals can easily get fresh milk and produce.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACQp7q0refA&t=2220s

Many times, manufacturers literally won’t sell Buche the same packages that they market to the big-box stores. When those goods are on offer, they’re sold at much higher prices than the big box stores enjoy, even when Buche offers to buy in the same quantity.

During the lockdown, Buche was not able to buy items like baby formula, as the supply was preferentially diverted to big box stores (this was long before the nationwide shortage). To get these items for his customers, he had to drive 1,000 miles/week to move items from his low-volume stores to his busier ones. His competitors, the big box stores, all had overflowing shelves.

Bedoya asks how it is that judges expect him to protect “efficiency” when the laws themselves — to say nothing of human decency — demand that he protects “fairness”? “Fairness,” Bedoya says, isn’t squishy and “impressonistic.” Rather, “Congress and the courts have told us, directly and repeatedly, how to implement protections against unfairness.”

Bedoya pledges his support for Chair Khan’s promise to enforce the antitrust laws as they are written, not as the “autocrats of trade” who control our economy and thus our political system wish they were written.

This is one of the most important changes to American politics in a generation. The FTC is blocking mergers, the White House is undertaking 72 specific antitrust actions, the DoJ is chasing anticompetitive conduct. That may sound commonsense — and it is — but it’s the first time it’s been a part of American politics in ten presidential administrations:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/09/rest-in-piss-robert-bork/#harmful-dominance

[Image ID: A collage. In the top right corner is a sadistic, bewigged judge pointing an accusatory finger towards the opposite corner. In that corner is a cutout of the classic Rockwell WPA portrait of a farmer speaking up at a town meeting. Between them in a thought-bubble, two figures do battle. Nearest the judge is a drawing of a dancing 'Rich Uncle Pennybags' from Monopoly; he has removed his face to reveal a grinning skull. Nearest the farmer is a trustbuster editorial cartoon of Roosevelt swinging his 'big stick'; his face has been replaced with that of FTC chair Lina M Khan, a monocle over her left eye. Behind them, a faded image of industrial symbols (e.g. railroads, oil wells, etc) surmounted by a gilded dollar sign.]

#pluralistic

[theculturedmarxist]

hi! i’m 18 and just got my state ID and registered to vote! i’d like to hear your thoughts on biden’s potential second term - i think he’s incompetent but it feels like i have to vote for him bc it would be worse if trump won. kind of a “the lesser of two evils” situation

Apologies for taking so long to answer this. It's a question that's been coming up a lot lately and I wanted to try and answer it thoroughly.

In my opinion, Biden being "the lesser of two evils" is I think pretty hard liberal cope. It's a line designed to prey on people like you that might not have the experience of knowledge to assess the political situation in this country or the dynamics at play.

So you're 18. That means you were born, what, around 2005? So you wouldn't really remember Bush II, would probably have just started being aware of things during Obama's presidency, becoming a teenager during Trump's first term, and turning 18 during Biden's. A pretty eventful youth so far.

The Democrats have been "the lesser evil" for a while now, but what does that mean exactly?

Things would start to change significantly after World War 2, and especially with the death of FDR.

The Democrat's platform starts at the 10:50 mark.

The "New Deal" Democrats would last until Jimmy Carter, but 12 years of Reaganomics would pretty much kill it. It might have been 16 if not for Ross Perot in the 92 election. For that and various other reasons, like the fall/dismantling of the Soviet Union, Clinton won.

The Reagan era significantly changed the Democratic Party, but it wasn't Reagan alone that's responsible. Reagan was the product of bourgeois reaction to the New Deal. The Powell Memo is often pointed to as the beginning of this reactionary period where the bourgeoisie started to claw back the gains the working class had made via the New Deal and LBJ's Great Society. In short, the wealthy and wealth-aspirant thought that the working class was too comfortable, too educated, and too politically active for its own good, and that would have to change.

1991 saw the dissolution of the Soviet Union, one of the greatest disasters of the 20th century. For all its faults, the shadow of the Soviet Union presented a very real threat to the bourgeoisie—the wealthy class of capitalists that own businesses big and small. As long as the USSR existed, there was a viable alternative and counterweight to the USA and everything it represented. Once the USSR was gone and the threat of revolutionary communism with it, the capitalists no longer felt they had any need to compromise with the working class.

So going into the 90s, the Democrats abandoned blue collar laborers to instead start pursuing the conservative, educated, moderately wealthy "middle class," actually the same demographics that the Republicans traditionally attracted. To appeal to them (and to satisfy their corporate backers), the Democrats started a number of reactionary measures. "Welfare reform" was one, basically cutting down New Deal programs and restricting how much they provided, to whom, and for how long. Ultimately they'd gut labor power with programs like NAFTA, and send millions to jail with the "Crime Reform Bill."

Without the Soviet Union, the 90s would also see the beginning of virtually unrestrained American military intervention. Iraq was first, but Yugoslavia would be destroyed by NATO not long after.

In short, Bill Clinton and the Democrats continued what Ronald Reagan started. This stage would culminate with the 2000 presidential elections, where Al Gore capitulated to George Bush by refusing to contest the intervention of the Supreme Court in order to not upset Republicans.

George Bush becomes president, 9-11 happens, and it's 8 years of The War On Terror. The Patriot Act is passed. The Department of Homeland Security is created. First Afghanistan is invaded, and then two years later Iraq. The US is transformed into a surveillance state, and the changes that Clinton had inaugurated continued under Bush. The Democrats made a lot of noise, but they still worked with Bush virtually every step of the way, funding his wars, confirming his judges, renewed and expanded the Patriot Act, etc.

Things just kept getting worse, right up to the economic crisis of 2007. I really can't overstate how bad this was. If China hadn't stepped in and extended the US a line of credit, there was the very real danger of the entire global economy collapsing in on itself.

People had had enough. Obama was virtually carried into office on the people's shoulders after a historic turnout. Democrats weren't the "lesser evil." They were good guys, and for once, finally, the good guys had won! We'd won! No more world policing. No more terror. No more tyranny. Everything was going to change!

Everything came to a stop as a massive spontaneous party broke out. And why not? We were finally going to get publicly funded healthcare. The Patriot Act was going to be undone. We were going to end the Iraq War. Guantanamo would be closed and the use of torture ended for good. Immigrants would get a path to citizenship. The right to abortion would finally be a legal guarantee. Wall Street would be punished for putting hundreds of thousands of people out of work and costing And there was nothing the Republicans could do to stop it, with an unstoppable Democrat majority in the Senate and the House.

So imagine our surprise when none of that happened.

Instead of punishing Wall Street, they picked Obama's cabinet while millions of people lost their homes. In spite of not having to give one single shit about what the Republicans thought, Obama bent over backwards to appease them, but also to protect the private insurance industry. Abortion rights were neglected as not a priority in order to, once again, appease Republicans. The wars no only continued, but expanded. Wanton murder was employed around the globe by the relentless use of drones. Promise after promise was broken, and the Republicans made gains in congress.

Things would only continue to get worse. Libya was destroyed. ISIS was created by funneling weapons looted from Libya to rebels in Syria. Syria would be spared the same fate by giving up its chemical weapons to avoid Obama's "red line" threat.

Occupy Wall Street would emerge as a global phenomenon in response to the failure to provide the aid the working class was promised. Obama would oversee a coordinated national police crackdown, fully employing the police state that the Bush administration and their Democrat collaborators had built.

What I want you to understand is that Trump didn't come out of nowhere. 24 years of Republican and Democrat collaboration went into the groundwork for his election campaign.

And of course, it was the Democrats and Hillary Clinton's campaign that worked to elevate him to prominence. The Democrats further helped by running the most unpopular candidate in history against him and sabotaging the at the time most popular politician in the country (but it's okay, the courts say they had the right to do it anyway).

I don't know how well you remember the Trump years. They certainly weren't great, but for all the Liberal screaming about him, he wasn't all that different than every other president we had. He did some good things, and a lot of bad things. The only real difference was that all the awful things he did, Democrats and their supporting institutions pretended to give a shit about. Like Frankenstein, they went insane because of the monster they created. Instead of owning up to the fact that decades of misrule had made them unpopular, no one liked the candidate that they'd forced down everyone's throats, their arrogance alienated the electorate even further, and that 8 years of remorselessly broken promises and oppression at home and abroad had everyone completely fed up, they instead came up with an elaborate conspiracy theory about Russian subversion to explain why Hillary Clinton lost to a fucking reality TV gameshow host that they themselves had pit against her.

And now he's back! Again! And why? Because, once again, in spite of all their promises and bullshit, Biden was more of the fucking same—only somehow worse.

It's really astonishing how badly the Democrats managed to fuck things up. For all the bitching about Trump's covid response, it managed to accomplish a lot. The eviction moratorium and, ugh, "stimulus checks," kept millions of people from losing their homes. The expanded child tax credit lifted millions more out of poverty. Medicare expansions provided millions of people with healthcare and would keep them from getting kicked off it for the duration of the emergency. Student loan payments were stopped. For the first fucking time in American history people were able to get medical care at the point of service without having to deal with private insurance bullshit and at no cost to themselves! There was government mandated, paid sick leave! And we can't forget Operation Warp Speed, which provided the vaccines that Biden would eventually take credit for and cut all our throats with.

And Biden basically killed all of that. He declared Covid over and ended the state of emergency, which brought an end to all these programs. Millions lost healthcare and dropped back into poverty. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed because Biden lied about the vaccines protecting from infection, and thousands continue to die every week, even now.

The children Biden promised to free remained caged. Roe V Wade was struck down and absolutely nothing was done to prevent it in spite of knowing about it weeks in advance. Restrictions on abortion and laws punishing abortion seekers were passed and nothing was done. Laws persecuting trans people have proliferated and no one was punished. The Biden administration abandoned Afghanistan to the Taliban in order to recklessly start a war in Ukraine using a neo-Nazi run government. Now they're openly, knowingly, and willfully aiding and abetting a full scale genocide in Palestine, and threatening to rain more destruction on Yemen, another state in which it participated in genocide, another "bipartisan presidential effort, covering both the Obama and Trump administrations."

I've covered a lot here, but this isn't even exhaustive. There's more, so much more. The point though, at long last, is that the Democrats are not "the lesser evil." They are actively, eagerly complicit in every bit of evil that they blame on the Republicans. They blame, and complain, and bemoan, and then the Republicans get what they want anyway. The Democrats act upset about it, and promise to "fight for" access, or reforms, or whatever, and then it never happens. They make up some excuse like "the senate parliamentarian told us no." Or some bullshit about how the filibuster won't let them do what they really want to do. Or some dogshit about bipartisanship. Or some other fucking stupid crap, when really they have all the power they need. They just don't want to. They bitch and moan, but they actually love the Republicans and desperately need them around.

It goes back to abandoning the New Deal and waging class war against the working class. The Democrats represent certain sections of the petite and major bourgeoisie, and their interests are totally, fundamentally opposed to the working classes. They have nothing they can realistically offer us because doing so would improve our lot at the expense of their PMC servants and capitalist masters. Their power relies on our weakness.

The reason why the Republicans, who the Democrats decry as fascists, as threats to "our democracy," continue to be a thing at all is because their objectives and the Democrats are actually one and the same. The Democrats make a big show of opposition, talk loudly about their principles and "fighting for" what they think is right, and then they go ahead and give the evil fascist Trump an entirely new fucking military for his trouble.

The Democrats aren't, and have never been "the lesser evil." They're an essential component in perpetuating evil. They always have been, and always will be, and you shouldn't let anyone deceive you into thinking otherwise.

#democrats #lesser evil #2024 elections #2024 us presidential election #donald trump #joe biden

[dollsahoy]

The author of the memo in which Powell and Bartiromo put so much stock offered detailed and utterly false claims of how Dominion Voting Systems helped rig the election for Biden. She also shared a bit about herself, writing that she gains insights from experiencing something "like time-travel in a semi-conscious state."

#🙃

[stele3]

#destiel daily digest

[kp777]

By Thom Hartmann

Common Dreams Opinion

Jan. 3, 2024

Fascism can happen here and we know this because it is happening here. And unless more people wake up and fight back, it will be too late.

Like an alcoholic family that won’t discuss alcoholism (proving Don Quixote’s warning never to mention rope in the home of a man who’s been hanged), far too many Americans are unwilling to acknowledge or even discuss the ongoing collapse of democracy in the United States.

We see it in everything from our last two Republican presidents having lost the national vote but taking office anyway, to the extreme gerrymandering happening in every Red state in the country, to the naked bribery of our legislators and Supreme Court justices.

And our media exclude it from almost every conversation. Networks run promotions mentioning Trump’s indictments, but completely fail to point out that he is calling for the end of democracy in America, the suspension of the Constitution, and playing the role of a “dictator” on day one.

The extent of the problems within our political and economic structures are laid bare with startling and sometimes frightening clarity.

President Jimmy Carter took it head-on when he told me on my radio program that the Citizen’s United decision, which brought us this crisis:

“[V]iolates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. And the same thing applies to governors and U.S. senators and congress members. So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election’s over.”

This “complete subversion of our political system” grew, in large part, out of Richard Nixon’s 1972 appointment of tobacco lawyer and rightwing extremist Lewis Powell to the Supreme Court.

Powell, in 1971, had authored the infamous Powell Memo for the US Chamber of Commerce, strongly suggesting that corporate leaders needed to get politically involved and, essentially, take over everything from academia to our court system to our political system.

In 1976, in the Buckley case, Powell began the final destruction of American democracy by declaring that when morbidly rich people or corporations own politicians, all that money that got transferred to the politicians wasn’t bribery but, instead, was Constitutionally-protected First Amendment-defined “Free Speech.”

Powell expanded that when he personally authored the decision in the 1978 Bellotti case, which acknowledged corporations as “persons” with full access to the Bill of Rights, including their own “free speech” right to own politicians. Five corrupt and in-the-bag Republicans on the Supreme Court radically expanded that doctrine in 2010 with Citizens United.

As a result, there’s really very little democracy left in our democracy.

— Our votes are cast in districts so gerrymandered that a 50/50 electorate can produce an 70/30 outcome in congressional representation.

— Our laws are written, more often than not, by corporate lawyers/lobbyists or representatives of billionaire-level wealth.

— And our media is owned by the same class of investors/stockholders, so it’s a stretch to expect them to do much critical reporting on the situation.

In his book The Decline of the West, first published in German in 1918 and then in English in 1926, Oswald Spengler suggested that what we call Western civilization was then beginning to enter a “hardening” or “classical” phase in which all the nurturing and supportive structures of culture would become, instead, instruments for the exploitation of a growing peasant class to feed the wealth of a new and strengthening aristocracy.

Culture would become a parody of itself, average people’s expectations would decline while their wants would grow, and a new peasantry would emerge, which would cause the culture to stabilize in a “classic form” that, while Spengler doesn’t use the term, seems very much like feudalism — the medieval system in which the lord owned the land and everyone else was a vassal (a tenant who owed loyalty to the landlord).

Or its more modern incarnation: fascism, a word that didn’t even exist when Spengler wrote Decline.

Spengler, considering himself an aristocrat, didn’t see this as a bad thing. In 1926 he prophesied that once the boom of the Roaring Twenties was over, a great bust would wash over the Western world. While this bust had the potential to create chaos, its most likely outcome would be a return to the classic, stable form of social organization, what Spengler calls “high culture” and I call neofeudalism and/or fascism.

He wrote:

“In all high Cultures, therefore, there is a peasantry, which is breed stock, in the broad sense (and thus to a certain extent nature herself), and a society which is assertively and emphatically ‘in form.’ It is a set of classes or Estates, and no doubt artificial and transitory. But the history of these classes and estates is world history at highest potential.”

Twentieth and 21st century cultural observers, ranging from billionaire George Soros in his book The Crisis of Global Capitalism, to professor Noreena Hertz inThe Silent Takeover: Global Capitalism and the Death of Democracy, have pointed to deep cracks in the foundational structure of Western civilization, traceable in part to the current legal status of corporations versus humans.

More recently, Jane Mayer has laid out in painful detail in her book Dark Money how the Koch Network and a few other political-minded billionaires have essentially taken over the entire Republican Party, as has Nancy MacLean with her book Democracy in Chains. The extent of the problems within our political and economic structures are laid bare with startling and sometimes frightening clarity.

As a result, of all these changes in our politics (most driven by five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court putting oligarchy above democracy), Princeton scholars Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page famously found that the odds of average Americans’ political desires being translated into policy are about the same as “random noise,” whereas what they referred to as “economic elites” frequently get everything they want from the political class.

They wrote that we still have the “features” of democracy like elections, but ended their paper with this cautionary note:

“[W]e believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.”

It seems that America has arrived at the point Spengler saw in early 20th century Europe, and, indeed, there are some concerning parallels, particularly with the late 1920s and early 1930s. Italy, Germany, and Spain all lost their democracies and moved to fascism during that era, while Spengler and his acolytes cheered.

And, indeed, it was one of FDR’s biggest challenges in the early 1930s: steering America through a “middle course” between communism (which was then growing popular) and fascism (also growing popular). He pulled it off with small (compared to Europe) nods to democratic socialism, instituting programs like Social Security, the minimum wage, and establishing the right to unionize (among other things).

American democracy can’t afford many more years of corruption before it’s dead

Mark Twain is often quoted as saying that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. Many look at the all-out war being waged against American government by the hard right, from Trump and his cronies to the billionaire networks funding right-wing propaganda and lobbying outlets, and think “it can’t happen here.”

They’re wrong. It can happen here.

We now have police intervening in elections, privatized corporate voting systems, and a massive voter suppression campaign to prevent elderly, young, and non-white Americans from being able to vote.

Meanwhile, Republican politicians and the billionaires who own them are now dropping any pretense at all to caring about the fate and future of our country’s fiscal health, so long as they get and keep their tax cuts.

In summary, what’s left of our democratic institutions are under siege.

Add to that a largely billionaire-funded/owned right-wing media machine that’s willing to regularly and openly deceive American voters (documented daily by Media Matters), and you have the perfect setup for a neofeudalist/fascist takeover of our government.

Or, as President Carter so correctly called it, oligarchy.

This year’s election may be our last chance to push back against the oligarchy that the GOP has been constructing for the past forty-three years. President Biden and Democrats in Congress made a valiant try with the For The People Act that would have expanded voter rights, outlawed gerrymandering, and reversed Citizens United to strip dark money out of our electoral system, but were stabbed in the back by Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema.

If Biden is re-elected and Democrats can take the House and hold the Senate, there’s a very good chance — particularly without Manchin and Sinema to sabotage the process like they did in 2022 — that such legislation can be brought up again and pass.

Double check your voter registration — particularly if you live in a Blue city in a Red state, where they’re already purging millions of voters every month — and help everybody you know get their registration up to date.

American democracy can’t afford many more years of corruption before it’s dead: our time to act is now.

#american democracy

[jamieroxxartist]

✔ Mark Your Calendars: Thurs June 1 on 🎨#JamieRoxx’s Pop Roxx Radio 🎙️#TalkShow and 🎧#Podcast w/ Featured Guest: #JenSenko, #Director, #Author (The Brainwashing of My Dad documentary) ☎ Lines will be open [phone] Call in with your Questions and Comments Live on the Air. ● Click here to Set a Reminder: http://tobtr.com/12227736 Pop Art Painter Jamie #Roxx (www.JamieRoxx.us) welcomes Jen Senko, Director, Author (#TheBrainwashingofMyDad) to the Show! ● WEB: www.thebrainwashingofmydad.com ● FB: @thebrainwashingofmydadmovie ● TW: @BrainwashingDad ● IG: @the_brainwashing_of_my_dad ● TB: thebrainwashingofmydad.tumblr.com ● YT: @jensenko6987 As filmmaker, Jen Senko, tries to understand the transformation of her father from a non political, life-long Democrat to an angry, right-wing fanatic, she uncovers the forces behind the media that changed him completely: a plan by Roger Ailes under Nixon for a media takeover by the GOP, The Powell Memo urging business leaders to influence institutions of public opinion -especially the universities, the media and the courts, and under Reagan, the dismantling of the Fairness Doctrine, and The Telecommunications 'Reform' Act signed by Bill Clinton. As her journey continues, we discover that her father is part of a much broader demographic, and that the story is one that affects us all. ● Media Inquiries: www.thebrainwashingofmydad.com