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Possible Wuhan Lab Leak can No Longer be Ignored

by Mitch Maley — For more than a year, the official institutional narrative of the global scientific community advised that there was broad consensus among virologists that SARS-CoV-2 was almost certainly a naturally occurring virus, and that there was no reason whatsoever to believe it had been deliberately altered and had escaped from a laboratory. As that narrative continues to crumble, we should demand answers if only to plot a better path forward.

The internet has become an increasingly complex part of modern society. As technology continues to expand access to both high-speed connections and cheap handheld devices, the rapid pace at which information can be broadly disseminated has become staggering. While the information was still traversing the globe with anything approaching that degree of saturation on a scale of days to weeks when the world experienced its last real global pandemic a century ago, it now takes only a few hours for individual tidbits to be fully absorbed into the collective conscience.

However, because getting information from the internet can be like trying to take a sip of water out of a fire hydrant, this can be both a good and bad thing. When a major global event takes place, the sheer volume of content that instantly becomes available can be overwhelming. When the topic is politically charged and culturally divisive, you can also bet that much of the coverage will cater to the biases of whatever demographic the producer is targeting. In other words, you can very easily find someone to tell you what you’d prefer to hear.

But even when a journalist has the most honest of intentions and works for an ethical publication, stories like the COVID crisis are amongst the most difficult to report on. When information is constantly changing and the subject itself is terribly complex, the challenges to getting it right are compounded greatly, especially with such a high premium falling on how quickly you get the information out to the public. In these instances, experts and institutions are paramount.

In nearly a quarter-century of journalism, I’ve never encountered a story that required as much research, self-education, and dedicated column inches as COVID-19. I authored 25 lengthy installments of the COVID Chronicles series, and a dozen or so other lengthy, COVID-related features. From nearly the beginning there were low-level murmurs about a possible lab leak in China, though they were all but drowned out by a loud chorus of experts and institutions who said that was almost certainly not the case.

Whenever a large contingent of experts express agreement on something the rest of us know very little about, it rarely gets challenged, especially when the most respected institutions in that field echo the same narrative on a subject that is a fast-moving target with many other moving parts. When it came to COVID-19, the most critical information the public was seeking was, How bad is this thing and what should we do to keep us and our families safe? Where it came from, was more commonly spoken in terms of partisan rancor.

Theories on how it came to be fell much further down the list in terms of news demand and, because of the institutional narrative that flowed from experts and institutions to the most credible sources were overwhelmingly favoring the institutional narrative, few experts, institutions, journalists, or publications—all of whom had the bulk of their resources trained at different questions—challenged it. Those who did, quickly found themselves relegated to the junk food aisle of their respective lane, whether they be a scientist, journalist, or any related institution. As such, the Wuhan lab leak story was broadly considered a fake news conspiracy theory unworthy of serious examination, especially when there were more pressing questions.

However, as the fog of war started to lift, that began to change. Scientists who had been biting their tongues spoke up, lending weight to a handful of dissidents who hadn’t gone along from the start. As the numbers increased, journalists and their publications followed and we are only now beginning to contemplate the sort of robust debate on the subject that is desperately needed. Let’s take a look at some of the most critical information.

Gain of Function Research

Gain of function mutations confer new or enhanced functions to a protein, including things like the ability to jump species and/or be spread in airborne droplets. Essentially, gain of function (GOF) research attempts to quickly incite mutations that may or may not have otherwise occurred in nature over much longer periods of time, in order to study what would happen, the implications, and potential remedies.

Virologists have long warned that our modern world of factory farms and cheap air travel is highly conducive to the spread of novel viruses and, pre-COVID, warned that it was only a matter of time before we faced a pandemic that would rival the Spanish flu of 1918. New viruses crop up all of the time in food animals like pigs and chickens, sometimes mutating to the point where they can jump from an infected animal to a human. This is relatively rare in terms of how many novel viruses do not, but it happens often enough to be a valid concern.

Most viruses that achieve such an ability end there. However, they can undergo additional mutations that would then allow the virus to be spread from human to human. Once this happens, additional mutations could enhance its transmissibility and, as unlikely as such a scenario may be in the grand scheme of things, such an outcome is plausible enough that many scientists do not believe we should leave the fate of the species to chance. They argue that we should instead enhance such viruses in secure laboratories so that vaccines and therapeutics can be developed before that ever were to happen.

One of the early, controversial examples of gain of function research occurred in 2012 and involved the H5N1 virus (bird flu), a type of influenza that had gained the ability to jump from birds to humans, killing about 60 percent of those who contracted it. However, the virus did not seem to be able to pass from human to human. Researchers attempted to see if they could get the virus to jump to mammals, from which it would be more likely to gain human transmission abilities. Ferrets, which have similar respiratory systems to humans and are a common vector in animal to human transmissions, were used in the studies. Eventually, the virus successfully infected a ferret, and, just ten ferret to ferret transmissions later, it had gained the function of human transmission.

With a 60 percent death rate among humans, H5N1, were it ever to gain airborne transmissibility among our species, could pose an existential threat to mankind. It would obviously be great to have effective vaccines and therapeutics in advance of potential mutations that could see such a virus transition to a global pandemic. However, almost a decade later, we’ve got nothing but Tamiflu and some spotty vaccines that, like other influenza vaccines, quickly see their effectiveness reduced by constant mutations. That begs the question, was it a foolish idea to give it increased functionality in the first place?

The Wuhan Institute of Virology

The Wuhan Institute of Virology is a research institute specializing in the study of coronaviruses that is administered by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (a state-controlled institution). It has strong ties to the Galveston National Laboratory in the United States, the Center for International Infections Research in France, and the National Microbiology Laboratory in Canada. It has also benefited from considerable funding from those countries, most notably the U.S.

Researchers at the lab were actively involved in GOF research on coronaviruses found in horseshoe bats at the time of the outbreak. Think about that for a moment. There was a laboratory doing gain of function research on coronaviruses in the very place where the virus originated, yet the institutional narrative, nearly top-to-bottom, became near certainty that the two things were unrelated—even though the popularized "wet market" theory, when examined in retrospect, seems like little more than an otherwise plausible guess, and that’s only if there was not a laboratory monkeying around with the same kind of viruses right down the road.

There are also other red flags virologists have pointed out that make a natural mutation seem less likely. First among them is the fact that it seemed to immediately have both the ability to jump from another animal to humans and be transmitted human to human, skipping a step, if you will. Next is the so-called "furin cleavage site" on the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, a unique attribute responsible for its relatively high infectivity compared to related viruses, the origin of which still puzzles researchers. Its proclivity to spread indoors rather than outside is also curious for a virus that was said to have evolved in the wild.

This is all compounded dearly by the fact that Chinese researchers had been previously criticized by the global scientific community for not enforcing rigorous safety standards regarding such research, including at the Wuhan lab just a year before the appearance of SARS-CoV-2. In 2018, a U.S. embassy delegation to the lab found its safety standards so lax that they sent those concerns to Washington in an official cable. In 2013, senior scientists warned that the new viral strains created by researchers in a different Chinese lab who mixed bird-flu virus with human influenza could escape from the laboratory to cause a global pandemic killing millions of people, calling it "appalling irresponsibility." Not that American labs have been free from such criticism. In 2014 alone, workers at a CDC lab in Atlanta were accidentally exposed to live anthrax; live smallpox was found in a freezer at a non-secure NIH lab outside of Washington, DC; and H5N1 was accidentally shipped from an Atlanta biosafety lab to a poultry lab in Athens, GA. In other words, human error seems every bit as dangerous as mother nature.

The biggest red flag, however, is news that at least three researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough in NOVEMBER OF 2019!!! to have sought hospital treatment. This, paired with the knowledge that the only investigations done so far have essentially been internal and riddled with conflicts of interest, suggests that it is not only possible that SARS-Cov-2 was a lab-enhanced virus that accidentally escaped, but that it was the most likely scenario.

Politics

The traditional politics involved are somewhat obvious. Chinese officials would clearly not be excited about the prospect of having to own up to such a mistake, even if it was the most honest of accidents, given the unprecedented consequences. Because then-President Trump, in the midst of a trade war with our biggest economic rival, was enthusiastic about blaming China from the start, that meant that the roughly half of Americans who were united against him were less inclined to be open to the idea, especially when the experts and institutions were telling them not to be.

Perhaps more importantly, however, the issue has shone a light on the fact that scientific communities are no more altruistic or immune to political infighting than those in other fields. It is troubling, to say the least, that so many highly credentialed scientists were uncomfortable voicing their opinions on the matter, allowing bureaucratic institutions to capture a narrative that seemed to speak for science at large when it is now clear that it did not. We live in a world where expertise increasingly takes a backseat to political power and while we’ve seen the dismal effects of politicians and their political lackeys moving away from the guidance of much better-educated analysts in fields like economics and climate science there may not be a field in which that could be more dangerous than virology.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Dr. Francis Collins, Director of the National Institutes of Health, are the two most influential proponents of GOF research and funding in the United States and, in 2017, were instrumental in ending a moratorium on GOF research that had been in place since 2014. That would seem to be a potential conflict of interest given their roles in the pandemic response, their influence on research funding, and the enormous platform given to Fauci on President Trump’s COVID-19 task force. In other words, none of that would seem likely to inspire scientists who valued their careers to go off script from the institutional narratives.

Fauci’s position on the issue has evolved, to say the least. While he most recently has said that he is in favor of thoroughly investigating the origins of the virus, always has been, and acknowledges that a lab leak scenario is possible, that simply hasn’t been his consistent position on the matter. In May of 2020, Fauci said, “If you look at the evolution of the virus in bats and what’s out there now, the scientific evidence is very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated. Everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that this virus evolved in nature and then jumped species.” 

That quote is from a National Geographic article titled: Fauci: No scientific evidence the coronavirus was made in a Chinese lab. As noted earlier, there were multiple reasons to doubt that assessment then (which a small but vocal contingent of scientists were doing) and until these recent revelations, Fauci’s position had never changed, at least publicly.

Risk vs. Reward

There are good reasons to do gain of function research, including to detect how pathogens respond and adapt to vaccines and therapeutic treatments. However, there are also, clearly, very good reasons why we should not be creating potentially cataclysmic viruses that can more easily escape into nature, either accidentally or nefariously, than they are likely to provide an answer to some future problem we ultimately may or may not face.

And when the scientific community is split on an issue, it seems even more prudent to crawl before we walk and—let’s be clear—the U.S., in particular, has been running toward GOF research at breakneck speed in terms of authorization and funding. We need a robust national conversation on the issue in which people resist the urge to descend into tribal, partisan camps. This is too important to pick a side based on who you most wish to be wrong instead of a common desire to get it right. It’s not hyperbole to suggest that the future of mankind could be at stake.

Mitch Maley is an editor and columnist for The Bradenton Times and the host of their weekly podcast. He is also the host of Punk Rock Politix on YouTube. With over two decades of experience as a journalist, he has covered Manatee County government since 2010. He is a graduate of Shippensburg University and later served as a Captain in the U.S. Army. Click here for his bio. His latest book, Burn Black Wall Street Burn, is available here.

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Let Them Eat (Shitty) Cake

by Mitch Maley On Friday, the National Labor Relations Board announced that workers at the Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama had voted 1,798 to 738, not to unionize. This wasn’t much of a surprise. Large corporations have increasingly expanded into Southern “Right to Work” (for less) states precisely because it’s much more profitable to operate in places where workers and communities are dripping with desperation for living-wage jobs.

The playbook is pretty straightforward. First, begin flirting with state and local governments in economically depressed regions. Your interest will catch the attention of their “economic development agencies,” where staffers are desperate to prove their relevance and, because they are always negotiating with someone else’s money, you’ll have even more leverage than usual. Let them know that you’re being courted by neighboring communities and states and just watch as they dangle an endless stream of carrots before you, whether or not they make economic sense on their end.

You’re sure to get long-term tax abatements because why should a Fortune 500 company be expected to pay into the property tax base of some backwater burg. That’s what the struggling mom and pop businesses are there for. Don’t worry about infrastructure either. There’s plenty of goodies in the bag on that end too. Once word gets out that you’re paying slightly more than the other businesses that do not have mammoth global income streams, the local media will fawn all over you with stories about the “good jobs” that will be provided. And once your abatements have expired or your new digs are losing their shine, you simply start the process all over again by courting a new community, as clawback protections are almost never in place.

Most of the communities have little to no recent history with strong unions and because Right to Work laws already make it much harder to unionize, few if any would-be workers will be likely to start squawking about the benefits of unionization. Factor in the solidly-red political demographics and the way the right has demonized collective bargaining as a gateway drug to socialism for the better part of a century and it becomes clear just how stacked the deck really is.

Despite the horrid conditions reported by Amazon warehouse workers, people in places like Bessemer will tell you that the jobs still compare very favorably to what else is available. In other words, the difference between $9 and $15 (or $0 and $15 in many cases) is more than enough for most people to overlook the inconvenience of having to shit in a box from time to time. In fact, it’s not much different in places like Indonesia where sweatshop labor, as offensive as many Westerners portend to find it, still beats the hell out of the next best option—picking through trash dumps for recyclable metal.

The staggering decline of U.S. labor unions has meant that fewer and fewer Americans have first-hand experience with the benefits of collective bargaining. In 1953, more than a third of the private-sector labor force in the United States was unionized. Today, only 6 percent of private-sector workers belong to a union. And while the public sector has faired better, less than 11 percent of overall workers belong to a union today, and state legislatures in right-to-work states have been launching non-stop attacks on their public-sector unions for years with misleading campaigns about “unfunded obligations” and solutions that would only ensure their demise.

Not surprisingly, corporate America has been the driving force behind the attack on public sector unionization precisely because they don’t like the message it sends to their employees by way of example. A shit sandwich tends to taste better when you’re not sitting next to someone eating filet mignon on a brioche bun.

Because Amazon is owned by Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post and has been increasingly vilified by the right, the Bessimer battle drew some strange bedfellows. A couple of weeks ago, I got an email from Marco Rubio’s office, wondering if I’d heard that my favorite empty suit of a Senator was supporting the Amazon workers. “Great!” I responded. “It would stand to reason that good old Marco will also be a strong voice in support of the PRO Act,” a pro-unionization bill that recently passed the House but is considered DOA in the Senate where both Republicans and corporate Democrats are expected to defeat it. I didn’t get a response.

In what could be a silver lining on the cloud over Bessimer, the results there seem to have rallied popular support for the PRO Act, making it a hot-buttoned issue that’s caught the interest of voters without a personal stake in the fight. Despite the beatings unions have been taking on the whole, unionization still enjoys high approval ratings and many who see growing wealth inequality as a top-tier issue have come to view ending Right to Work laws and broadening access to collective bargaining as an important tool in rebuilding some degree of economic equity in a country that hasn’t been this stratified since before the Great Depression.

The Pro Act would eliminate many of the tools corporations use to ensure not only that union votes fail, but, more importantly, that they never take place. That’s important because, when you drill down, you see that when unionization votes take place, they’re actually being won by the unions at an even higher rate than at the peak of collective bargaining’s popularity half a century ago. The problem is that so many fewer votes are being undertaken.

The Pro Act would almost certainly change that, which is why so many powerful interests (and the politicians they own) are lined up against it. Whether enough voters will put enough feet to the fire to see the legislation signed into law remains to be seen. But for anyone who thinks workers’ rights are a critical issue in modern American society, it will be as telling of a vote as we are likely to see in 2021.

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The House Always Wins

Hedge Funds routinely manipulate the market by using disinformation and institutional buying power to move perceived values in their favor, kneecapping corporations and putting hard-working employees on the street while they profit to the tune of billions. This week, the class of investors who are so often exploited in such cons struck back and the financial world went ape shit. 

To short a stock is to essentially place a bet that its value will drop between the time you take your position and a future date. You don’t even buy the stock. The investor simply borrows the shares, which they then sell at the current market price, betting that the stock’s trading price will decline and they can purchase shares at a lower cost before the borrowed shares must be returned.

Funds with billions of dollars in assets under their management can easily engineer wealth by taking short positions on a stock even if there is no reason to believe that the price is set to decline, so long as they can convince enough investors outside of their fund that it will. If you’re big enough, simply taking that position can lead to such speculation, while large, institutional investors can also influence markets simply by moving in and out of various stocks.

During the run-up to the financial collapse of the securitized debt market that helped spawn the Great Recession, many investment banks actually advised their clients to take the opposite position that they themselves were betting, enhancing their own odds at the expense of those paying the banks’ for financial advisory services. No, it was not illegal.

Increasingly, the ever-growing industry of financial news and analysis has been a platform in which large institutions create market movement in their favor. By sending a high-ranking executive onto MSNBC, CNBC, or Fox Business to give their insight to individual investors watching at home, these institutions can influence the confidence of less savvy and informed market participants.

These influences can actually cause market reaction to produce the result they’ve bet on. Once the price begins to drop, that becomes the new story and, as nervous investors who can’t afford to take a big loss get out, the price drops further, increasing the value of their short position. This happens ALL.THE.TIME. and no one cries foul. In fact, those who engineer such manipulation are routinely hailed as geniuses.

While technology has made it even easier for such big players to dominate the market, it’s also created opportunities for individual investors to mimic such tactics, guerilla-style. Smartphone applications and other digital trading technologies have decreased former barriers that slowed the movement of small investors while social media and other digital communication systems have allowed such investors to create real-time information clearinghouses that make them less reliant on antiquated and manipulative information sources like the financial media.

Founded in 2005, Reddit is a "social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion" website. It has a decidedly low-tech look and feel but has nonetheless grown into the 7th most visited website in the United States and 17th in the world. Subreddits exist for a mind-dizzying number of topics from the ordinary to the weird, to the truly disturbing.

Its look is similar to the pre-millennium chat rooms and message boards of early internet days. Users can upvote answers and contributions which push them higher in the feed, ensuring that what are thought to be the best answers, offerings or other contributions by the largest number of users are easiest to come by. Don't know if you should buy a certain year and model vehicle? There's a subreddit for that. Did you just watch a movie, not understand the point of the ending, and want to hear what others think? You can climb down a subreddit rabbit hole for hours.

WallStreeBets is a subreddit for investors who swap everything from tips to memes. Redditers there noticed that some very big hedge funds were taking short positions on GameStop, a chain of retail stores that mostly sells new and used video games. When users started pointing out that there was no reason to do so based on the company's financials they soon determined that it was garden variety market manipulation and began promoting a massive movement to buy GameStop shares in order to drive the price back up and foil their plans.

And did it ever work! The price of shares rose nearly 2000 percent, making some Reddit investors very, very rich in a matter of a day or two, as they dumped shares that had been purchased at the unnaturally low price for an overinflated one. This sort of "frontrunning," in which a price is driven up for investor benefit, is essentially the inverse of shorting it, though they were mostly working with purchased shares rather than ones that were borrowed (which is called a put option and would be the true opposite of a short).

This created billions and billions of dollars in exposure for some very wealthy and powerful people. The Redditers then went after other similarly positioned stocks. Soon, the entire financial news media was decrying the injustice done to the poor billionaires who were being fleeced by everyday people who, it is becoming increasingly clear, the financial markets aren't meant to benefit.

Robinhood is an app owned by financial services company Robinhood Markets Inc. Founded in 2013 by Vladimir Tenev and Baiju Bhatt, who had built high-frequency trading platforms for big financial institutions, its mission was said to be to "provide everyone with access to the financial markets, not just the wealthy." Let the People Trade was another early slogan.

However, while Robinhood, a free app, makes money from interest earned on its user's cash balances and margin lending, it also makes a lot of money selling user trading info to Wall Street (aka many of the people who are currently pissed) which led to the company suspending trading on GameStop and other targeted stocks on Thursday, freezing many of its users in poor positions. It turns out, they only want users to benefit if it doesn't interfere with the winnings of its real clients, the market manipulators who buy their user data so that they can more efficiently shake money from the pockets of the little guys.

When big firms make billions on speculation, there's always someone on the other end of that bet, or, in most cases, tens of thousands of people who don't have the ability to manipulate markets. The losers might be pension funds who've invested the money that's supposed to come back to employees at retirement or a middle-class worker whose 401k holds the wrong stocks. Not to mention the managers, employees, and others who are affected when a company is tanked for sport by the uber-rich.

It's hilarious to now watch those in the ivory towers—and the so-called financial journalists who shill for them—getting all worked up and actually call for the sort of regulation they so often fight tooth and nail against if it threatens to restrain their profits in the name of market stability or fairness. Where were the handsomely-paid talking heads when GameStop stock was falling for no other reason than an apex predator spotted it in the wild and decided it was hungry for a snack? Nowhere to be found because the people who butter their bread weren't making the phones ring, and they don't pick up when the number doesn't have a 212 area code.

Wall Street has become less and less about providing liquidity for markets so that the corporations that create American jobs can grow and prosper and more and more about setting up a rigged casino, in which the wales with three commas on their net worth always get dealt a hand that's superior to the tourists gambling with money that comes from wages rather than wealth. And when someone who's not in the club figures out a way to game the gamers just once? Well, that shit has to be stopped! Remember that the next time some politician points to the stock market as an expression of the American economy.

Like the yachts, boarding schools, lear jets, and palatial mansions, that shit ain’t for you, Jack. It’s for you to look at, to lust over, and to dream about so that you’re more willing to keep getting farmed for the benefit of the one percent and the promise that someday you too might get invited into the club (spoiler alert: you won’t). 

A long time ago, people who were good enough at organizing in their head what had transpired in a blackjack game to bet according to what they believed was most likely to happen started taking such skills to places like Atlantic City and Las Vegas. If they were lucky, they got thrown out and told to never come back, while their picture was circulated to every pit boss in town. The message was the same one Wall Street is now trying to send to those who want to play on an honest table: Fuck off, peon, haven’t you heard, the house always wins.

Mitch Maley (bio) is the editor of The Bradenton Times and host of the Punk Rock Politix Channel on YouTube. You can also listen to the Punk Rock Politix Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube and other platforms.

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Forget Immigration ... For Now

by Mitch Maley On his first day in office, President Joe Biden took the very curious course of putting immigration at the very front of his priority list, with 6 of his 17 executive orders dealing with the controversial issue. The choice to immediately force action on such a polarizing subject could immediately squander any middle ground Biden inherited by way of the moderate anti-trump voter and ultimately jeopardize the success of this and other big-ticket items by uniting the right in opposition before he's taken advantage of all of the easy wins that are there for the taking.

Comprehensive immigration reform has been a third-rail issue in which both parties entrench into utterly unviable positions for the precise reason that it allows them to "stand firm" for their base and fundraise off their respective side's outrage, grateful that they won't actually have to roll up their sleeves and engage in the messy work of actually attempting to solve a politically-complicated problem. As a result, both parties end up fighting a view from the opposite side that emphasizes the most extreme positions. The left paints the right as xenophobic and racist, while the right claims the left wants completely open borders and free social welfare for anyone who crosses into our country illegally.

In reality, the big picture problem is that the path to legal immigration isn't nearly efficient enough to address the demand of both potential immigrants and those seeking to employ their labor, incentivizing the use of illegal measures that ultimately overwhelm our ability to police them. But if neither side will give enough ground to even get close to a place where earnest negotiations can actually begin, we're stuck with the de facto policy of the whole thing's fucked, so everyone just do what you're gonna do and hope you don't get caught.

That's why it's so strategically dumb for the Biden administration to start by picking a fight on an issue his party cannot win, especially when there is so much low-hanging populist fruit that can be picked first that might give them the ability to do so later. For starters, a pandemic! How about an all hands on deck approach to vaccine distribution while all of the political energy is directed on passing the stimulus checks that have broad bipartisan support? Get the coronavirus under control so that people's lives can get back to normal and they don't have to worry about dead family members, while also putting money into desperate hands that will then spend it into the economy, providing bridge momentum until a full reopening can further juice the economic engines.

If the Biden administration literally did nothing else beyond keep the lights on, end the pandemic by way of vaccinations, and at least ease a little tiny bit of the economic anxiety of the everyday Americans who've watched everyone from Fortune 500 corporations to hedge funds and Wall Street firms get more concentrated relief from the last bipartisan go-round of relief, it would likely find itself sitting on top of the world with more political capital than it could even spend in year two.

That's when Biden could go to the people, ALL of them, and say, hey, I did what I said I would, the country is in a much better place, and we're going to keep moving toward a more just and equitable society. Sure, there’d still be obstructionists and Trump-wing resistance, but he’d be able to use the bully pulpit as a highly-popular president rather than looking like a partisan looking to cash in quick before he’d accomplished anything beyond not being Donald J. Trump. Hell, Dems might even be able to hold onto the House in 2022, were they to take that approach, while the immigration as issue one path all but ensures they’ll lose it.

Instead, this is looking more like Obama's efforts to ram through healthcare reform during the narrow window in which the party controlled both chambers of Congress, at the expense of losing one of them and achieving full and utter gridlock for six more years. When examined closely, one might get the impression that the whole point is to maintain the status quo by ensuring that any moon-shot type of ambitions are dead on arrival. And at the end of the day, that’s what the Democratic donor class wants: the status quo they enjoy, with a little social justice to ease the guilt about what it all really looks like behind the curtains. 

Joe, please, instead of handing the opposition party one of the only issues that will unite Trump Republicans and Never-Trumpers so that they can beat Democrats over the head with it for the next two years, pass the stimulus checks as a stand-alone bill while you've got the votes, and get the vaccines administered in a fast, safe, and effective manner. If you screw this up, you will have squandered one of the great political opportunities is modern history.

Mitch Maley (bio) is the editor of The Bradenton Times and host of the Punk Rock Politix Channel on YouTube. You can also listen to the Punk Rock Politix Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other platforms.

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Strategy or Delusion?

by Mitch Maley — By the time Donald Trump returned to the White House from Walter Reed Medical Center, made a grand gesture of taking off his mask despite still being contagious, and was caught on video struggling to catch his breath right after resuming his "this is basically the flu" line, it seemed as if every one of the Trump 2020 train’s wheels had jumped the track. With only a month to go until the election, regaining momentum seemed implausible, at best. But this week’s campaign reboot suggests that the president is going into the final weeks of this election intent on doubling down on his 2016 strategy. Only time will tell, whether this is a brilliant tactic, the sad default of a malignant narcissist, or both.

Elected in 2016 with just 46 percent of the vote and on an Electoral College coalition that consisted of just 70,000 votes spread across Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, Trump has been unable to hit even one 50 percent approval rating since taking office nearly four years ago, and he’s been as low as 35 percent recently. As such, it’s hard to argue that he’s not the most polarizing and divisive president in modern history, if not the entire history of our nation. That said, he’s remained among the most popular presidents in terms of his approval rating with those who identify as Republicans. Because that number has dropped to just 25 percent of voters, however, it’s still problematic from a strategic standpoint, especially since his 6 percent average approval rating from Democrats is the lowest ever recorded (for perspective, an average of 14 percent of Republicans approved of the job President Obama did over his two terms).

I think we can all agree that the first debate between Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden was a shitshow wrapped in a hot mess, tossed into a dumpster fire. However, Trump made the mistake of setting the bar so low for Biden that all he had to do was appear to be conscious and he’d exceed most expectations. For his part, Trump slipped right into his usual stick of firehosing the dialog with misinformation and then interrupting his opponent incessantly. This isn’t a terrible tactic if you hold the inferior position in terms of factual accuracy and/or your opponent is just a better debater or is more informed on the issues. There were rumors that perhaps it was a deliberate tactic to play hell with Biden’s stuttering problem and you could see the former Veep closing his eyes and steadying his mind at such times, a tactic often used in those circumstances by those who suffer from the affliction.

But while that may have allowed Trump to shift away from subjects he wanted to avoid or toward others he wanted to exploit, it did not seem like it was done with a lot of situational awareness. Right now, about 31 percent of American voters identify as Democrats. As noted, 25 percent identify Republican and 40 percent claim independence, with the rest belonging to third parties. Trump’s fragile, patch-quilt 2016 victory included success among independents and even Democrats, which made up for the fact that a sizable group of Republicans refused to support their party’s nominee.

Known as the Never Trumpers, there’s scant evidence to suggest he’s won a meaningful number of them over during his first term. Polling also suggests that many more Democrats who couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Hillary Clinton or thought that she was destined to win and that they could send the party a message or deny her a popular mandate by staying home or voting third party, are poised to vote blue no matter who after four years of Trump. That means Trump will either have to do even better with the white, upper-middle-class and affluent suburban independent voters who helped him win in 2016, or expand the voting base.

Option one has likely passed him by. White suburban voters of all stripes, but particularly women, have been hurling themselves off the Trump train for months. Any chance of wooing them went out the window with his debate strategy. While his core 30 percent "I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters" bloc likely loved the schoolyard bullying tactics, female moderates and independents were revolted by what many described as petty, childish antics and a disturbing lack of basic impulse control. 

Vice President Mike Pence may have been somewhat more reserved when he employed similar tactics against Senator Kamala Harris in the Veep debate, but there was a rub. While there were only three men onstage during the presidential debate, Pence was the lone male among two females. The way he constantly interrupted, spoke over and ignored both the moderator and his opponent made for a bad look and likely reminded many female voters of the worst male figures they’ve encountered—misogynistic egomaniacs who found their thoughts cute but unnecessary and were always willing to explain things so they’d better understand. If you listened closely, you could hear more bodies hitting the ground as they hurled themselves off the Trump train.

Trump’s worst polling metrics have come on both his logistic handling of the coronavirus outbreak and whether or not he’s taken the pandemic seriously, so by the time he finally went and caught the virus himself before seemingly spreading it to dozens and dozens of other people while not exercising recommended safety precautions, too many Americans were already questioning his ability to lead for a repeat of that razor thin 2016 coalition to seem plausible. I honestly thought the election was over.

But when Trump tweeted two videos from Walter Reed, things got a little weird. If you haven’t seen them, you can watch the first one here and the second one here. The president seems humbled and a bit shaken. He’s adopted grandpa pesona that’s choc-full of folksiness, along with words and body language completely out of character with the Trump we’re used to. He was an optimistic cheerleader and, for the first time in his presidency, made no effort to divide his audience. I admittedly thought to myself, if he stays in the hospital and maintains this posture through Election Day, he could definitely pull this off.

Then Gramps got ahold of the keys to the hermetically sealed SUV and decided to spread some love to supporters waiting outside the hospital—and perhaps some COVID to staff and Secret Service forced to join him on the foolish stunt that would come to rival his infamous bible photo op taken at a church near the White House, but only after hundreds of peaceful protestors were hit with tear gas to clear the way.

Whether it was the outraged response piercing his paper-thin skin or just the effects of the cocktail of expensive, experimental drugs they were pumping into his system, Trump wound up right back on twitter playing his hit list. But things really took a hard turn on Monday night when Trump gave his first post-hospital stump speech at a rally in Sanford, FL. There were few masks and no social distancing at the massive event (Governor Ron Desantis was even caught on video high-fiving a long receiving line of attendees, then rubbing his nose in what will become a classic Flori-duh moment should he test positive). Trump—presumably hopped up on his go-to trifecta of KFC, Diet Cokes and Sudafed—was bursting with energy and bragging about the possibility that he was permanently immune to a disease he continued to downplay. If you listened closely, you could hear the bodies of even more independent suburban voters throwing themselves from the train.

Clearly, Trump does not possess the discipline to stick to a strategy—any strategy. He’s only got one act and rather than reinvent himself or even work out some new material, he’s content to play to friendly audiences who just want to hear the same tired one liners: Lock her up, Build the Wall, something, something, Benghazi! For good measure, Trump even promised a post-election surprise. Fans of democracy (the ideology not the legendary Sarasota reggae band), were up in arms the week before when Trump suggested that Attorney General William Barr should have already indicted his opponent for the "greatest political crime in the history of our country."

While a sitting president calling for the arrest of an opponent he’s losing to, just weeks before an election, does stink of banana republic (the political term for a backward country with a rudimentary political system, not the retail clothing chain that sells overpriced Gap chinos to the same voters Trump is hemorrhaging), it seems he may have been seeding his pitch. During Monday’s speech, Trump promised that Biden, Clinton and many more would be indicted … after he wins the election. Now, while adhering to an actual strategy would have been much better in terms of his chances for reelection, it’s clear he can’t do that. And since the post-COVID personality transplant only seems to have lasted a single day, doubling down might actually be his best bet.

The vote of those who pay attention and participate tends to harden at this point in a contest. Given that polling shows Trump is still losing supporters, his only chance is expanding the electorate. The challenge with that is that swing states like Florida and Wisconsin have already passed their voter registration deadline for this election. Pennsylvania and Michigan voters can only register until October 19. But there are also a lot of registered voters who don’t typically cast ballots. The numbers make it clear that a majority of current American voters are even more repelled by Trump’s policies, platform and/or personality than they were in 2016. But one metric that’s been consistently impressive for Trump has been voter enthusiasm. Those who love him, do so dearly, and the strategy between now and November 3 seems to be to get everyone of those sort out to the polls, especially the ones who didn’t vote for him in 2016.

Given the massive advantage Democrats hold in vote-by-mail requests, Trump likely only has to get within 5 percent of the total votes cast to wind up ahead on the evening of November 3. Even though there will likely be millions of votes still to be counted and it looks all but certain that Biden will have most of them just because he’s not Trump, the president has already telegraphed his next move: stop counting the votes and hope Republicans in Congress and the conservative majority on the Supreme Court can find a way to keep him in office without blood being spilled in the streets and the nation devolving into something close to a civil war.

Sure, it’s entirely possible that enough people have had enough of the Trumps that Biden will win by an unexpectedly wide margin on election night and the whole thing will be over, but the prize for that will be a cadre of NeoLiberal corporatist warmongers descending on Washington while under the delusion that they’ve earned some sort of historic mandate. I know, none of them are attractive options, but given that we’re cueing up for the final act of a year that’s been nothing short of the personification of human misery, it’s the presidential election we should expect.

Dennis “Mitch” Maley has been a journalist for more than two decades. A former Army Captain, he has a degree in government from Shippensburg University and is the author of several books, which can be found here.

[punkrockpolitix]

Sean Worsley is an Iraq War vet facing 5 years in prison for possession of legally obtained medical cannabis because the state he was driving through (Alabama) does not recognize other states’ medical cannabis laws. Alabama had, however, reformed their possession laws prior to Worsley’s arrest, but the new sentencing guidelines had not yet gone into effect. Check out the new video regarding Sean’s plight on our YouTube channel. 

[punkrockpolitix]

Trumpism and the Tyranny of the Minority

by Mitch Maley — I'm often asked why self-described patriots seem to be okay with fascism or how those who scream in defense of concepts such as liberty and freedom can fail to be troubled by our slide toward totalitarianism, but such questions seem to miss the larger point.

Trumpism isn't a new phenomenon or even unique to the man at its helm. It is simply the logical end point for the so-called Tea Party movement that has completely taken over traditional conservatism in the past decade, a movement that aims to fully impose the will of a minority, even if their views are grossly out of step with most Americans.

In that sense, 2010 was the official end of bipartisan government, the moment the opposition became the enemy. It became more dangerous to reach across the aisle than to sit on your hands and do nothing, unless you could do everything your constituents wanted. It became a zero sum game in which half a loaf of bread was worse than none at all.

Make no mistake, extremism—whether it comes from the right or the left—is always about minority rule. Otherwise, the beliefs would be mainstream. Donald Trump was only the fourth president in U.S. history to lose the popular vote and win the electoral college, and he did it with less of a share of the total vote (46.9) than any of the others. Not once during his presidency has his approval rate hit 50 percent, and it's recently been as low as 35.

I point this out because to hear his supporters tell it, they are part of a silent majority, despite what the math tells us. However, minority rule has been at the core of this movement from the beginning—at least for its architects. From restrictive voting laws clearly meant to suppress opposition turnout (including the current misinformation campaign on vote by mail) to packing the courts with judges that hold views grossly out of step with the majority of Americans and seeking to subvert the Supreme Court decision on a woman's right to choose with laws meant to curtail the ability of women to access abortion under bogus pretenses, the right-wing platform has increasingly become about a minority of people imposing their beliefs on a majority who find them objectionable.

Sure, there are memes, slogans and talking points that attempt to rationalize things like voter ID laws, limitations on early voting, requiring OBGYNs to have admitting privileges near their clinics or that the clinics to be expensively retrofitted to meet arbitrary codes, and on and on across a broad spectrum of issues, but when you read the literature of the think tanks and policy groups that craft such legislation, their objective is clear: How do we get what we want, without the power of the majority behind us?

One way is to argue that the rules favor the minority view, which is why there are always so many lay constitutional scholars ready to tell us how things like universal health care, mask mandates during a pandemic, sensible environmental regulation and other policies favored by a majority of Americans run afoul of the founder's intent, even if those same experts fail to find their voice each time this president tramples on the Constitution on behalf of something they agree with.

But gerrymandering districts so that you can keep at least part of Congress under your control despite getting less total Congressional votes cycle after cycle, or packing courts with sympathetic judges who might uphold the unconstitutional laws you are able to get passed is part of the kind of long game most people don't have patience for. In the end, if you want to see your country look exactly the way you want—and most of your fellow Americans do not share your vision—there is only one route: ceding power to a totalitarian dictator who has been able to turn minority support into presidential power and is willing to dance to any song his supporters play, so long as they provide the means for him to remain in power—legitimately or otherwise.

It is in this effort that fascism becomes quite useful, for it allows the minority to actually claim defense of our freedoms against an enemy that can now be identified as the other, an outsider group who they don't need to count among their numbers, as those people are now the enemy, making for a false reality in which they are no longer a minority but rather a majority of real Americans who love their country and are therefore intent on stopping the evil others at all costs.

Fascism is, at its core, not an ideology. Most simply put, it is an attack from the right on the left, on the basis that the central tenets of liberalism represent a constant threat of socialist takeover that is always close to being upon us. Draped in nationalism and an appeal to a brand of inherent righteousness most commonly found in religious movements, it should be no surprise that its adherents often espouse rhetoric that is just as dogmatic and evangelical.

Conversely, socialism is, in many ways, a similar attack on the perceived inherent evils of capitalism. Like fascist revolutions, socialist ones routinely justify violent insurrection, theft and even the execution of those who do not bend their knee, as necessary nearly to the point of being benevolent—regardless of the majority's will. One need not look further than the recent upheaval in Seattle, where a group of left-wing radicals vandalized private property while occupying six city blocks and making ridiculous demands until eventually devolving into the deadly chaos of a miniature failed state. The means to take power already exist through democratic channels, but because a majority is needed to seize it, the malcontent convince themselves that such a system is inherently corrupt to the degree that such criminal reappropriations are not only justified but completely necessary in order to force their minority view on the rest of the community who so desperately needs to live by it, even if they don’t realize it yet.

What the extreme left and extreme right have in common is an unwavering belief that there is but one way to do things—theirs. The big difference, however, is that while the extreme left doesn't even like the Democratic Party, even the progressive left is but a fringe force in a party almost wholly controlled by right of center NeoLiberals who drape themselves in progressive slogans, while remaining contemptuous of progressive politics.

Meanwhile, the Tea Party movement has, in just 10 years, completely vanquished the NeoConservative forces that preceded it as the power center of the Republican Party. Trump's election in 2016 signaled the passing of the torch, or rather it being pried from the cold, dead hands of the House of Bush. The extreme right, very much unlike the extreme left, is in control, with both the White House and the Senate under its wing. Those who haven't bent their knee in fealty to Trump and his tribe like former NeoCon stalwarts Lindsey Graham, Nikki Haley and Mitch McConnell have, have either been marooned in a political no man’s land (Mitt Romney) or have gotten out.

What's left of the NeoConservative Republicans is now part of team Biden, seeing far more commonality with the NeoLiberals than Trump's crowd. That should be no surprise. The majority of Democrats and Republicans of 2000-2010 disagreed on little when it came down to brass tacks. Sure, they dangled identity politics, social issues and class warfare as red meat for the crowd, but when it came to Wall Street, globalization, bad trade deals and forever wars, they had much in common and were happy to divy the loot.

Of course, if you're a Trump supporter, you might be inclined to think something totally different. To hear his campaign frame the 2020 election, he's not running against the guy who wrote the crime bill, voted for every war and military spending bill ever put before him and routinely worked across the aisle to make deals. No, they're running against Antifa, AOC, looters in Portland and the impending socialist revolution that will always be on the verge of taking over, lest Donald J. Trump protects us.

Why? Because there's not a very sound argument for minority rule or trading democracy for autocracy to get it, unless the wolves are at the door and your only choices are giving up your freedoms or being eaten alive. For many Trump supporters, the constant rhetoric and propaganda has led them to a place where they truly believe there's that much at stake in November. It doesn't matter that the streets were peaceful when he took office or that Americans have never been as divided as they have become under his rule, at least since the Civil War. That's not because of his actions. In their minds, it's in spite of them. If Biden were to win, every American city would be overtaken by violent leftists, AOC and the Squad would be pulling his strings, and their country would become unrecognizable. Of course they would hand over any power needed to the one man who could save them from such horrors.

For the rest of us, the country has already become unrecognizable since 2016, and in the worst way possible. We're living their nightmare and the notion that four more years of Trump (or perhaps more, given his regular references to deserving a third term) might indeed see the United States slide into a totalitarian autocracy in which dissenters or even those deemed insufficiently enthusiastic about Dear Leader could be sent off to the gulags seems all too possible. The only thing that remains certain is that it won't be over on November 3, no matter who wins. America is at the crossroads of a cultural reckoning, and it will take more than just a presidential election for it to fully play out.

Dennis “Mitch” Maley has been a journalist for more than two decades. A former Army Captain, he has a degree in government from Shippensburg University and is the author of several books, which can be found here.

[punkrockpolitix]

A Bad Week in the Oval Office

by Mitch Maley — So it’s been a rough week for Donald Trump. First, The Atlantic published a story quoting senior administration officials who claimed the president had called U.S. soldiers “losers” and “suckers.” Then, famed Watergate journalist Bob Woodward released audio tapes of Trump admitting he’d deliberately misled the American people regarding the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic during its early stages. Will any of this matter as a nation divided prepares to cast votes in what could be one of the most consequential elections in American history?

While the mainstream media made much of President Trump's reported disparagement of military personnel while visiting France, the story seemed to have little impact on average voters. Those who support Trump blindly once again contorted themselves into ridiculous positions in order to defend the president, claiming that he'd never say such things about American soldiers. Some even went so far as to highlight the fact that former White House national security adviser John Bolton, who was also on the trip, said he hadn't heard President Trump refer to American soldiers buried at a French cemetery as "losers" and "suckers."

Yes, that's the same John Bolton Trump’s supporters told us not to believe when, in his recent memoir, he claimed the president had requested Chinese help in the upcoming election, encouraged Chinese President Xi Jinping to continue building concentration camps for Uyghur Muslims, offered to help Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan with a Justice Department investigation, didn't like the sanctions on Russia (which he mistakenly thought contained Finland), and wanted Attorney General William Barr to go after journalists who were unkind to the president, having them serve time while being forced to give up their sources.

"I didn't hear that," Bolton told The New York Times, regarding the derogatory statements on soldier. "I'm not saying he didn't say them later in the day or another time, but I was there for that discussion." Yes, that was all the proof they needed, a man they'd just pronounced untrustworthy announcing that if such statements were made, he wasn't within earshot. That and the fact that the Atlantic article used "anonymous" sources.

From many of the comments I've seen, it's clear that most everyday citizens don't understand what an "anonymous source" really is. No, such statements do not come by way of an unsigned letter with no return address or a phone call using voice altering software. It simply means the journalist and publication used vetted quotes or other information from a verified source and allowed them to be published without attribution to the person by name.

This is always the less prefered option of any publication because attributed information carries more weight. However, there are many good reasons a publication will use such information without attribution, the most common being a legitimate fear of professional retribution for sharing potentially damaging information on an employer or other person or institution capable of acting punitively toward the source.

That said, there's plenty of reason to question the motive and timing of that particular article, starting with its author. Journalist Jeffrey Goldberg has been a longtime proponent of the military industrial complex, pushing NeoCon talking points into the news cycle on everything from patently false information used to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq to later pushing for a strike on Iran. This makes the anonymous sourcing weaker by association. The almost immediate release of related attack ads from NeoCon groups like Votevets and the Lincoln Project also send up red flags for a 30-month old story released just before an election.

That said, sources for other publications quickly confirmed the veracity of the statements. Even Fox News had to backpedal on its initial defense of the president when the network's national security correspondent claimed that not only had two former senior officials in the administration confirmed to her the comments in question but that one said that when the President spoke about the Vietnam War, which he avoided by claiming a very questionable medical condition, he said, "It was a stupid war. Anyone who went was a sucker." The same official said that when speaking about American veterans, the president once said, "What's in it for them? They don't make any money." In the words of that official, "It was a character flaw of the President. He could not understand why someone would die for their country, not worth it."

But let's face it. For Trump supporters, it's always going to be fake news when an article claims he's anything short of the second coming. Meanwhile, for those who haven't drank the Kool-Aid, it was just par for the course. Whether or not Trump used those exact words, he's expressed similar sentiments so often that there would be nothing revealing in knowing that he tended to make such statements behind closed doors and away from the cameras and microphones. I mean this was the guy who, despite having dodged service in Vietnam by claiming shin splints, said that John McCain wasn't a war hero for serving five years in a Hanoi prison camp, just a guy who got captured by the enemy.

The Atlantic article also mentioned the late McCain with Goldberg claiming that three sources told him that following McCain's 2018 death, Trump told senior staff, "We’re not going to support that loser’s funeral," and, when he saw flags lowered to half-mast, said, "What the fuck are we doing that for? Guy was a fucking loser." Trump disputed those allegations, claiming he'd never called McCain a loser, only there's video of the president calling him just that 2015 Family Leadership Summit. AND he literally retweeted a headline that same day that read "Donald Trump: John McCain Is ‘A Loser.’" Again, you'd have to have the Trump Kool-Aid flowing coldly through your veins to assert that it would be preposterous to believe that the president might turn it up a notch or two in private, but that's where we're at in the Trump presidency.

Meanwhile, Trump supporters seem equally unfazed by the crisp, crystal-clear audio recordings of the president telling Bob Woodward that he willfully lied to the American people at the onset of the Coronavirus pandemic, downplaying its potential lethality and withholding vital information as to how it was believed to be transmitted in order to keep Wall Street calm and the economy rolling during an election year. The difference between this and the distasteful comments about the men and women who serve our country, of course, is that as President of the United States, the potential impact of sewing this kind of disinformation can be directly measured in American lives.

An earlier analysis by Columbia University found that if the U.S. had gone into a shutdown just one week earlier (March 8 instead of the 15th), 36,000 deaths could have been prevented. Yet Trump told Woodward how deadly the disease was, explaining that it was many times more fatal than flu and was capable of airborne transmission way back on February 7, despite continuing for weeks to tell the American people that the virus was no big deal an would magically disappear! Not only does this provide further proof that Trump willfully decided to go against the best available scientific information, but his flippant dismissal of the impending danger can be said to have birthed the COVID-is-a-hoax conspiracy mindset driven almost exclusively by MAGA hat-wearing Trump supporters, compounding the effects of his early inaction even once mitigation efforts were finally put in place. And let’s also not fail to recognize that by holding onto all of this audio while Americans died just so that he could use it to sell more copies of his timed-for-the-election season book, there’s blood on Woodward’s hands as well. 

Will any of this matter to Trump's supporters? Of course not. As I've said before, the social cost of supporting a man like Donald Trump has been far too high for even otherwise reasonable minds to transcend the cognitive dissonance that accompanies being confronted even with the most irrefutable evidence that he's a failed leader, an immoral narcissist incapable of selflessly serving his nation because he cannot view any crisis or cause other than through the narrow lense of its benefit or price to him personally. Ironically, the more that is revealed, the further invested they become. For proof, simply go to your favorite Trump-supporting family member's Facebook page anytime a story like one of these is dominating the news cycle and you'll find an inordinate amount of posts linked to articles about "the radical left," "socialism," Nancy Pelosi's hair salon debacle, Joe Biden's hair sniffing, or Trump rising in a poll among some voter group. Because when you're supporting someone like Trump, it requires constant self-reminders that there must be some greater evil out there, some existential threat that makes an otherwise shameful association not only acceptable but downright necessary.

As for that small sliver of moderate, suburban voters who will likely decide this election by determining whether or not lower taxes on the affluent (and the recent promise of more to come if he's reelected) is worth the embarrassment of pulling the lever for such a man, only time will tell whether this continued onslaught of reasons not to trust him with the fate of the nation will turn the tide come November. But for a man who lost the popular vote by more than three million last time around, while his Electoral College victory was held together by less than 80,000 votes across three swing states before he mismanaged a pandemic that has killed more Americans than every war since Korea combined while sending millions more into financial peril, these recent scandals certainly don't help his chances.

Dennis “Mitch” Maley has been a journalist for more than two decades. A former Army Captain, he has a degree in government from Shippensburg University and is the author of several books, which can be found here.

#trump is a threat to democracy #losers and suckers #covid-19 #trump knew

[punkrockpolitix]

US Postal Service: A Manufactured Crisis?

by Mitch Maley — The financial woes of the United States Postal Service came back into the spotlight recently, as part of the controversy over vote-by-mail and whether the federal service was being deliberately denied COVID-related relief funding in order to ensure that broad-scale mail-in-voting—which President Donald Trump has alleged to be rife with fraud, though there's no evidence suggesting that is the case—would be greatly hampered. But why is the postal service doing so poorly? The answer is more complicated than you might think.

The popular narrative from those who seem to be cheering the service's demise is that it's simply a matter of creative destruction, the economic term for when a new technology replaces an old one. Email, the story goes, has replaced snail mail and, as a result, the service is going broke. I guess this seems like a plausible narrative if you don't know how the federal service operates. In actuality, technology has been something of a wash. Stamps haven't been a big source of revenue is a long time, but the massive increase in online shopping has seen package delivery surge.

So why has the agency been hemorrhaging money for more than a decade? President Trump claims its inefficiency, along with being taken advantage of by companies like Amazon, whose owner Jeff Bezos also owns the Washington Post and has been targeted for ridicule by the president for what he sees as unfair coverage of the White House. A viral Facebook post, however, claims that "The Postal Service is not losing money because of Amazon. It’s losing money because in 2006, the Republican-led Congress passed a law forcing it to prepay its pensions for 75 years, which no other corporation does. This was meant to bankrupt it so its business could be privatized for profit. Without this law, the Postal Service would be turning a profit."

That's not exactly true, either, but it's close. In reality, the 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, which was the agency's first major overhaul since 1970, required the USPS to prefund retiree health benefits for 50 years. And it wasn't really the lame duck Congress that tucked it in, so much as President Bush, who threatened to veto the massive piece of legislation if it did not include the health care prefunding, which assumes that every employee in the agency will stay on until they retire and then live to collect a pension. The requirement further burdened the agency with 10 years of statutorily-mandated payments of about $5.5 billion each year from 2007 to 2017, which of course wound up including a massive economic downturn in which the service did less shipping business than usual. 

As a result of all this, the US Postal Service has, on paper at least, lost money for 13 consecutive years and began defaulting on its future healthcare obligation payments in 2012 because not having done so would have meant the agency "would not have been able to pay our employees, our suppliers, or deliver the mail" according to a USPS fact sheet. A majority of those losses have indeed stemmed from the prefunding requirement. For example, in 2019, 83 percent of the $8.8 billion the USPA lost came from payments into its retiree pension fund and retiree health benefits fund. 

It's important to understand that no other government entity, or private-sector corporation for that matter, has that rigid of an obligation. Federal agencies all operate on a pay-as-you-go basis, as do about 2/3 of private sector corporations. The USPS's advance funding requirement places a financial burden of about $6.6 billion on postal service that would not exist if they followed a pay-as-you-go approach. The progressive Institute for Policy Studies found that if the costs of the retiree health care mandate was removed from the agency's financial statements, the Postal Service would've actually reported operating profits from 2013 through 2018.

And it's not just paying the prefunding requirement that's hurting the agency. The obligation has also impacted its ability to modernize by making strategic capital investments, which has cut another leg out from under its proverbial table—one that ending the pre-funding requirement alone would not fix at this point. So, what should be done?

For starters, it's important to understand that the United States Postal Service is just that, a service provided to taxpayers, not a for-profit business. It has the mandate of delivering mail to every address in the United States, which is something private-sector shipping companies like UPS and Fedex do not do. In fact, such companies routinely use the US Postal Service for many of their deliveries, passing on an upcharge to consumers. The postal service is also an economic generator in the sense that its function helps to create a lot of economic activity that then goes on to create separate tax revenue for the government. So, looking solely at its bottom line doesn't give the full picture in terms of its economic value to our broader economy or the US Treasury.

More importantly, if it went away, shipping costs would surely spike drastically and would no longer be uniform across the country, the way they are with the US Postal Service. It stands to reason that a lot of business would no longer be cost effective in terms of meeting demand at a viable price point. So while it might be good for a few private carriers who corner the market, it would be sure to have a negative net impact on the economy as a whole, including tax receipts. 

By making a few key changes, the agency would almost surely be able to regain its financial footing, the first of which would obviously be eliminating the absurd prefunding requirements. Integrating its health care benefits with Medicare by requiring retirees with federal employee health benefits to enroll in Medicare parts A and B at age 65 would also help. Another idea that has been floated is eliminating the requirement that the agency invest solely in U.S. Treasury bills and allowing for other comparably-safe investments with better returns. 

Postal banking is another idea that's been proposed. The post office already sells money orders and prepaid cards and up until the 1960s, it also offered basic banking services, including check cashing and checking/savings accounts. This idea would not only give the agency another revenue stream but would also help communities that are underserved in terms of banking see that less of their people are fleeced by low-end, high-fee money stores.  

So, no, the postal service isn't an antiquated dinosaur that's destined for the dust bin. It's an essential service that benefits individuals as well as the American economy at large. As such, it would be an enormous mistake for Americans to accept its unnecessary and indeed engineered demise just so that a handful of companies can increase profits for their shareholders.

For more, check out this video on our YouTube channel.

Dennis “Mitch” Maley has been a journalist for more than two decades. A former Army Captain, he has a degree in government from Shippensburg University and is the author of several books, which can be found here.

#USPS #mail in voting #postalproud #mail in ballots

[punkrockpolitix]

Strap in for an Ugly Ride

by Mitch Maley — This week, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden did the most Joe Biden thing left to do in announcing that centrist NeoLiberal Senator Kamala Harris would be his running mate. The establishment left swooned and suburban liberals rejoiced, while the lunatic right clutched their collective pearls at such a “radical” choice. Meanwhile, the rest of us yawned as the stage was set for an absurd, bizarro world, alternative-reality election that will take place in the midst of the most unstable American society in modern history.

The chaos created by the 45th President of the United States has a way of wearing the reasonable mind rather thin. After all, who aside from the angry mobs of nativists does not long for a return to the normalcy of the early aughts when all we had to worry about was forever wars in the Middle East, an infinitely-expanding wealth gap, 50 million Americans without healthcare, and trade policies that had hollowed out the middle class. Sure, the children of white collar elites would continue to thrive (so long as they could avoid pill mills and heroin needles). Meanwhile, the offspring of former factory workers who couldn't afford an increasingly cost-prohibitive college education would toil in Amazon warehouses with few benefits and no shot at the kind of modest defined-benefit pensions that had allowed their parents to enjoy some modicum of prosperity in their twilight years and increasingly gloomier chances of even enjoying the social security payments that have kept millions more from abject poverty once their working days were behind them, but that was certainly a little easier to swallow than 2020 has thus far been.

Sure, automation had already begun eating away at more jobs than even offshoring had, we'd done nothing to address the climate crisis beyond symbolic, feel-good policies that avoided pissing off the wrong special interests, and the only amber waves of economic growth in the past 30 years had been driven by engineered bubbles. So what? Wall Street was happy (the stock market tripled under Obama) even if the big party was being floated by artificially-cheap credit, and besides, we could all go to sleep each night relatively certain that we wouldn't face a zombie apocalypse type situation on any given morning which is more than you can say about our current situation.

But let's not forget where things had gotten by 2016 when populist spasms on both sides of the ideological spectrum saw our traditional two party-driven political process totally upended. Harnessing the power of the internet had been largely responsible for President Obama successfully splintering the Democratic establishment in 2008, but let's not over-romanticize the grass or the roots. Obama was the product of an inter-party schism that saw a large number of career Dems break from the Clinton dynasty and its requirement for complete fealty to the party's grudge-bearing first family.

Obama was not an anomaly. He was Wall Street approved, Bilderberg-blessed and mainstream media anointed because, regardless of what others projected upon him, he was a typical center-right Dem who wouldn't rock any of those boats. Yes, the right labeled him a dangerously-radical liberal, but those who paid attention in the 2008 primary will recall that the actual semi-progressive candidate, Congressman Dennis Kucinich, had to be actively cropped out of the debates in order for that narrative to take hold. After all, it wouldn't do to have Kucinich onstage talking about Medicare for All and explaining how to get out of Iraq tomorrow any more than it would do for Ron Paul to be onstage in Republican debates calling out the NeoCon likes of Mitt Romney and John McCain.

Under Obama, the war machine kept rolling, taxes remained at historic lows, deportations skyrocketed and we expanded warrantless surveillance and other Big Brother police state tactics, including sending "surplus" tanks and other military armament to your local police forces. In other words, most of the things liberals hated most about the Bush era continued only they didn't hate them as much anymore. That said, institutional norms remained in place, our allies were quite happy and Americans, or at least those who weren't driven mad by the thought of someone with brown skin holding the highest public office, could hold their heads high knowing that they had an intelligent and articulate statesman at the helm who wouldn't embarrass them with Bush's tangled English or Clinton's infidelities. He was a family man who loved his wife and children and treated even his most vile-mouthed opponents with the courtesies of polite society. Yes, it's easy to grow nostalgic for such normalcy in the age of Trump.

However, years of bailing out Wall Street banksters who'd crashed the economy, allowing hedge fund managers to pay lower tax rates than teachers and failed companies to hand out huge bonuses often paid for by the taxpayers themselves took its toll. Millions of Americans who'd seen their homes foreclosed upon were scolded for buying into the worthless products being pushed by those same banksters—reverse mortgages, sub-prime interest-only loans, etc.—and lectured about "personal responsibility" and the "moral hazard" of bailing them out, even as those same fat cats who'd been rescued themselves swooped in to buy up all of those empty houses for cheaply-borrowed pennies on the dollars in order to make money hand over fist renting them back to the creditless schmoes who'd been kicked to the curb. It turns out a lot of people were fed up.

Enter Bernie Sanders and Donald J. Trump, two men, as different as can be, who nonetheless each managed to harness enough of the sometimes dangerous power of populist anger to finally upset the apple cart that had been two-party politics. While their platforms were radically different, the essential nature of their messaging was the same: you're getting screwed and have been for a long time. Their message was particularly well-received by working-class whites in formerly industrial states who'd been ignored by both parties for decades, beyond rhetoric from the right about it being the fault of illegal immigrants and rhetoric from the left about educational programs that would retrain the working class for the jobs of tomorrow. Regardless of whether they believed in or even understood the solutions either candidate was offering didn't matter so much as someone at last acknowledging that the reality they'd been experiencing actually existed.

The Clinton machine, with the DNC's foot on the scale and the MSM distorting perception, was able to (barely) keep Sanders at bay. Meanwhile, the GOP may have been able to do the same had it not been for the sheer giddiness of legacy media outlets like WAPO, the New York Times, MSNBC and CNN for what they saw as the death of the modern Republican party should it actually nominate a crass, foul-mouthed blowhard of a third-rate reality TV star (who'd until recently been a Democrat) for President. Make no mistake, Clinton's people desperately wanted to take on Trump, believing it amounted to not only an easy win, but a path toward retaking Congress, despite having been gerrymandered out of contention (for those of you who came to politics late, the GOP's electoral success in 2010, saw them take over a majority of state legislatures just ahead of the once-every-decade reapportionment that follows a census, allowing the party to gerrymander Congressional districts to such a degree that Democrats could not gain ground, despite regularly receiving millions more total Congressional votes than Republicans each cycle).

Everyone inside the beltway was caught sleeping in 2016. The Republican establishment never saw Trump coming and didn't know what to do with him when he arrived. Remember how sad Jeb Bush seemed in the debates? Remember how ineffective Marco Rubio was when he tried to sink to Trump's name calling? By the same token, the Democrats were so tone-deaf as to who Bernie was appealing to (far more aging New Dealers and working-class labor Democrats than the teen radicals they imagined) that they actually thought making trans-bathroom laws a wedge issue would drive turnout for their side. Imagine living in Michigan and working the counter at a Dollar General because the stamping factory you used to work at moved to Mexico, wondering whether your kid's rehab from Oxycodone would finally stick this time while being told that the real fight to be won was about where the gender fluid would take a leak.

That's not to say that trans rights aren't a worthy issue, so much as to point out how out of touch you would have had to have been to think it was a winning one in that moment of time. And if you think there was something more altruistic behind it, ask yourself how much energy has been expanded by the party on the same subject since. Like abortion-related ballot referendums used by Republicans to drive evangelicals to the polls, out-of-touch Beltway Dems thought that identity politics was the path to uniting the left-wing of their party and getting the Bernie crowd to turnout for Hillary, even after the DNC got caught smoothing her path to victory. After all, the donor class Dems never mind looking woke, especially if it prevents them from having to get behind things like a living minimum wage that might actually mean less coins falling into their coffers. And that my friends is what created the relatively small yet curious "I voted for Bernie in the primary and Trump in the general" demographic, not sexism, spite or misogyny.

Fast-forward to 2020 and Bernie is finally poised to emerge as the resistance candidate. Despite the MSM again selling alternative facts that kept explaining away his success, his path to the nomination looked inevitable until the Democratic establishment again intervened, this time with Obama in the role of Clintonesque king maker, convincing moderate establishment favorites Pete Buttiegeg and Amy Klobuchar to take one for the team ahead of Super Tuesday so that a path could be cleared for a sputtering Biden campaign to claim the nomination. For his part, Biden's 40-year record is as right of center as a Democrat can be without going full Joe Lieberman, so the remaining question was how not to repeat 2016 in alienating so much of the left-wing as to ensure Trump another four years.

Then, like a gift from the political gods, Trump began shooting himself in the foot so frequently in his responses to the pandemic and civil unrest that his approval rating—which has never even hit 50 percent even once during his presidency (not surprising considering he won the White House with a smaller share of the vote than either Romney or John Kerry managed in losing)—sunk to a pathetic 35 percent, convincing the NeoLiberal bosses that it was no longer necessary to kiss any rings on the far left. Bernie, Elizabeth Warren and even Tulsi Gabbard and AOC had already bent a knee to Uncle Joe, imploring their supporters to vote blue no matter who, so why not instead go after the moderate Republicans and Bush-era Never Trumpers whose ideology make the Democratic donor class feel much more comfortable than the progressive left’s anyway?

Enter Kamala Harris, who, to the Democratic donor class at least, signals nothing less than a female Barack Obama. And they’re not exactly wrong in that she’s a highly-articulate, ideologically-flexible politician capable of putting a friendly, progressive veneer on the modern NeoLiberal platform. That’s probably why the left-leaning corporate media outlets tried so hard to give her a push in the primary, even though voters simply didn’t find her to be a compelling candidate. Despite a healthy fundraising machine and the focused attention of MSNBC and CNN, Harris didn’t even make it to Iowa, dropping out ahead of what surely would have been a bottom tier finish in her home state of California. In that sense, it’s hard to see what she brings to the ticket in terms of electoral success. Fortunately, she won’t have to deliver her home state, but while much has been made of the fact that she’s the first woman of color to be on a major party ticket, it’s worth noting that there’s little to suggest she’ll help turn out the African American vote as most polls had her fourth of fifth even among black voters, who preferred Biden, Warren and even Sanders over the Senator from California.

As long as we’re on the subject of Harris’s race, however, it’s worth noting that the we're-not-racist right immediately went down the rabbit hole with birther conspiracies disgustingly-similar to those used against Obama that, within moments of the announcement, were used to question her eligibility to ascend to the presidency and fear monger that it was all a plan to install Nancy Pelosi when an aging Biden stepped down soon after being elected. Harris was born in the United States and, furthermore, born to two U.S. citizens. Her eligibility shouldn’t be in question to anyone who’s taken a junior high civics class, yet from what we’ve seen already, I’m sure it won’t be long until someone asks to see her birth certificate.

That said, despite the RNC's painting Harris as the most radical choice possible, her politics are no more progressive than Biden's, as evidenced by the two articles in the Wall Street Journal about Wall Street “breathing a sigh of relief” at her selection. In fact, one of the audition rounds for the veepstakes included hosting a Biden fundraiser and insiders have suggested that it was deep-pocketed Obama donors and not Uncle Joe himself who put her over the top. In Harris, the NeoLiberal establishment has all but cordoned off the progressive wing of the party, perhaps for a decade to come. Like Obama, she allows them to market a progressive package to make affluent suburban liberals feel good without making Wall Street, Big Pharma, Big Tech, or the military industrial complex the least bit nervous. In fact, in a communication to investors, Goldman Sachs essentially said that even if it means the Trump tax cuts go away, the stability and predictability of a Biden administration would be at least as good for the 1 percent's bottom line.

To hear the Trump campaign tell it, however, Biden's selection of Harris is nothing less than a signal that, in his cognitive decline, Sleepy Joe has acquiesced to becoming nothing more than a puppet for far left radicals like Bernie, AOC and the rest of The Squad. In their narrative, if elected, he’d be doing the bidding of Antifa, while doing away with everything from God and religion to guns and even the suburbs, and the dangerously radical Harris is only further proof of that. In one of their weirdest turns yet, the Trump campaign is literally showing clips of what America has become under Trump himself and warning that this is what will happen if Biden is elected and only by reelecting the man that brought it to you in the first place and has failed to end it by uniting the country (or even trying) can you stop our present from becoming our future. When taken literally, it is a message that says the world I brought you is the world my opponent will bring you and the only way you can stop that from happening is by keeping the guy who brought it to you! If that doesn't make sense, congratulations, you're not an imbecile.

However, if you buy the narrative that the radical left has taken over the Democratic Party then I'm sorry to report that such may not be the case. Biden-Harris is literally the most Law & Order ticket I can imagine either party fielding. It’s the guy who brought us the Crime Bill, supported the private prison industrial complex and paved a smooth road for Clarence Thomas paired with the AG who wanted to jail young single mothers whose kids missed too much school, blocked access to DNA evidence of the wrongfully convicted, supported marijuana criminalization and pretty much accumulated the least progressive record any prosecutor could ever hope for. 

So no, Harris's pick wasn't to appease the progressive left. It was a middle finger to them, just like the initial convention lineup which didn't even feature AOC or Andrew Yang, the two stars of that set. Meanwhile, NeoCon warmonger John “life starts at the first heartbeat” Kasich is in primetime, along with Jeb Bush acolyte Anna Navarro. AOC finally got space for a 60-second pre-recorded (read vetted) afternoon spot, and the Yang Gang was able to kick and scream until their candidate was given a low-billing slot as well. In other words, if you don’t see that the progressive left is not only not running the show at the DNC but is all but powerless in the party’s politics, you’re simply not paying attention.

Why are NeoLiberals more interested in Bush-era Republicans than the media rock stars on the left who seemingly hold the future votes of the party in their hands? Simple, there's less of a difference in platforms, which means unlike working with the left, they don't really have to give anything up to court NeoCons. That’s because the age of Trump has seen those Republicans give up on social issues they never actually cared that much about from gay marriage to abortion in exchange for a seat at the table on the issues they do—things like energy policy, deregulation, aggressive foreign policy and, above all, jockeying their snoots into the trough of money that the winning team gets to eat from.

Excited because a Black Lives Matter protester is going to Congress? Slow down, Ace, as the hallowed halls are also about to get their first QAnon member. We've reached peak lunacy under Trump, this much is true, but the wheel has spun back to same old song and dance, remixed for 2020. The American empire is falling apart and one side is offering four more years of the lunatic king, while the other is betting that such a thought will scare voters enough to accept the same brand of politics that brought us that President in the first place. All that remains to be seen in whether Dems finally got the calculus correct. Are progressives so infuriated by life under Trump that they'll vote blue no matter who, or have they picked off enough white suburban Republican women for it not to even matter? We'll find out, though likely not until weeks after November 2, assuming we aren't fighting each other in the streets by then.

Dennis “Mitch” Maley has been a journalist for more than two decades. A former Army Captain, he has a degree in government from Shippensburg University and is the author of several books, which can be found here. 

#biden2020 #kamala harris #bernie or bust #aoc #nevertrump