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FOCUS: The Week Ahead Will Be Unprecedented |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=40776"><span class="small">Dan Rather, Dan Rather's Facebook Page</span></a>
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Tuesday, 12 November 2019 11:51 |
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Rather writes: "We do not know what the week ahead will bring, but we do know it will be unprecedented. To be sure the specter of Nixon and Clinton hang over an impeachment process moving onto the public stage. This time, however, feels far different."
Dan Rather. (photo: Christopher Patey)
The Week Ahead Will Be Unprecedented
By Dan Rather, Dan Rather's Facebook Page
12 November 19
 e do not know what the week ahead will bring, but we do know it will be unprecedented. To be sure the specter of Nixon and Clinton hang over an impeachment process moving onto the public stage. This time, however, feels far different. This president, in rhetoric and action, has raised so many questions about his fitness for office, that the latest charge, as serious as it is, stands as but one of many potentially impeachable offenses. It is a fair assumption to conclude we do not know of many others, those hidden behind secret conversations with Putin and unreleased tax returns.
The brazenness of the President's extortion of a foreign nation, in service to his own political needs and at the expense of our national security, still strains even the extended range of what we have come to believe is possible. What has transpired since these actions were revealed, the attacks on women and men of sterling character, the hurricane of lies, the spinelessness of Republican politicians to choose country over party, suggests our dark days will continue.
In previous impeachment processes, as acrimonious as they may have been, I never had a belief that our political system was as brittle as it is now. Those were crimes of power and ego. This one puts our nation's standing and safety at risk. It involves not only the Ukraine, but Russia, always Russia.
My mood is complicated. As a reporter, this a story unlike any in our history. I hope to do it justice. As an American citizen, however, I am struck by sadness, a deep, deep sadness, that we have come to this point. In previous times, we weren't being as driven apart by social media. What will that mean for these hearings? We didn't have a political party with its own propaganda operation, like we do with the President and Fox News. We didn't have such cravenness, such widespread stink of corruption, so much platently undemocratic instincts by those who have sworn an oath to the Constitution.
Yet despite all these obstructions to the process of justice, we are where we are because brave, patriotic Americans stood up and said what the President did was wrong. They will now say so in front of cameras, and posterity. The Democrats in the House, in contrast to the President's smokescreens, have largely comported themselves with restraint and a clear sense of purpose. It will be up to them to pierce the fog of deceit and paint a narrative that shapes public opinion.
In the end, I will not underestimate my fellow Americans. My lifetime of experience has shown that ultimately the causes of justice tend to win out, even if the journey is long and circuitous. You will hear often that impeachment is a political process, and so the ultimate verdict will be up to all of us, most likely, considering the Republicans in the Senate, at the ballot box less than a year from now.
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Billionaires Fear Warren and Sanders - but They Should Fear Us All |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=9643"><span class="small">Robert Reich, Guardian UK</span></a>
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Tuesday, 12 November 2019 09:10 |
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Reich writes: "There are basically only five ways to accumulate a billion dollars, and none of them has to do with being successful in a genuinely free market."
Former Clinton labor secretary Robert Reich. (photo: Steve Russell/Toronto Star)
Billionaires Fear Warren and Sanders - but They Should Fear Us All
By Robert Reich, Guardian UK
12 November 19
Wealth tax plans make sense but proper regulation could also cut Bezos, Dimon, Cohen and Neumann down to size
 illionaires are wailing that wealth tax proposals by Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are attacks on free-market capitalism.
Warren “vilifies successful people”, says Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase.
Rubbish. There are basically only five ways to accumulate a billion dollars, and none of them has to do with being successful in a genuinely free market.
The first way is to exploit a monopoly.
Jamie Dimon is worth $1.6bn. That’s not because he succeeded under free-market capitalism. In 2008, the government bailed out JP Morgan and four other giant Wall Street banks because it considered them “too big to fail”.
That bailout is a hidden insurance policy, still in effect, with an estimated value to the big banks of $83bn a year. If JP Morgan weren’t so big and was therefore allowed to fail, Dimon would be worth far less than $1.6bn.
What about America’s much-vaulted entrepreneurs, such as Jeff Bezos?
You might say the $110bn man deserves this because he founded and built Amazon. But Amazon is a monopolist with nearly 50% of all e-commerce retail sales in America, and e-commerce is one of the biggest sectors of retail sales. In addition, Amazon’s business is protected by a slew of patents granted by the US government.
If the government enforced anti-monopoly laws, and didn’t grant Amazon such broad patents, Bezos would be worth far less.
A second way to make a billion is to get insider information unavailable to other investors.
Hedge-fund maven Steven A Cohen ($12.8bn) headed up a firm in which, according to a criminal complaint filed by the justice department, insider trading was “substantial, pervasive, and on a scale without known precedent in the hedge fund industry”. Nine of Cohen’s present or former employees pleaded guilty or were convicted. Cohen got off with a fine and changed the name of his firm.
Insider trading is endemic in C-suites, too. SEC researchers have found that corporate executives are twice as likely to sell their stock on the days following their own stock buyback announcements as they are in the days leading up to the announcements.
If government cracked down on insider-trading, hedge-funders and top executives wouldn’t rake in nearly as much.
A third way to make a billion is to buy off politicians.
The Trump tax cut is estimated to save Charles and the late David Koch and their Koch Industries an estimated $1bn to $1.4bn a year, not counting their tax savings on profits stored offshore and a shrunken estate tax. The Kochs and their affiliated groups spent some $20m lobbying for the Trump tax cut, including political donations. Not a bad return on investment.
If we had tough anti-corruption laws preventing political payoffs, the Kochs and other high-rollers wouldn’t get the special tax breaks and other subsidies that have ballooned their fortunes.
The fourth way to make a billion is to extort big investors.
Adam Neumann persuaded JP Morgan, SoftBank and other investors to sink hundreds of millions into WeWork, an office-sharing startup. He used some of the money to buy buildings he leased back to WeWork and to enjoy a lifestyle that included a $60m private jet. WeWork never made a nickel of profit.
A few months ago, after Neumann was forced to disclose his personal conflicts of interest, WeWork’s initial public offering fell apart and the company’s estimated value plummeted. To salvage what they could, investors paid Neumann more than $1bn to exit the board and give up his voting rights. Most other WeWork employees were left holding near-worthless stock options. Thousands were set to be laid off.
If we had tougher anti-fraud laws, Neumann and others like him wouldn’t be billionaires.
The fifth way to be a billionaire is to get the money from rich parents or relatives.
About 60% of all the wealth in America today is inherited, according to estimates by economist Thomas Piketty and his colleagues. That’s because, under US tax law – which is itself largely a product of lobbying by the wealthy – the capital gains of one generation are wiped out when those assets are transferred to the next, and the estate tax is so tiny that fewer than 0.2% of estates were subject to it last year.
If unearned income were treated the same as earned income under the tax code, America’s non-working rich wouldn’t be billionaires. And if capital gains weren’t eliminated at death, their heirs wouldn’t be, either.
Capitalism doesn’t work well with monopolies, insider-trading, political payoffs, fraud and large amounts of inherited wealth. Billionaires who don’t like Sanders and Warren’s wealth tax plans should at least support reforms that end these anti-capitalist advantages.
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Biden and Bloomberg Want Uncle Sam to Defer to Uncle Scrooge |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=48990"><span class="small">Norman Solomon, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Monday, 11 November 2019 14:04 |
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Solomon writes: "The extremely rich Americans who are now frantically trying to figure out how to intervene in the Democratic presidential campaign make me wonder how different they are from the animated character who loved frolicking in money and kissing dollar bills while counting them."
Joe Biden and Michael Bloomberg. (image: Getty/Reuters)
Biden and Bloomberg Want Uncle Sam to Defer to Uncle Scrooge
By Norman Solomon, Reader Supported News
11 November 19
 he extremely rich Americans who are now frantically trying to figure out how to intervene in the Democratic presidential campaign make me wonder how different they are from the animated character who loved frolicking in money and kissing dollar bills while counting them. If Uncle Scrooge existed as a billionaire in human form today, it’s easy to picture him aligned with fellow plutocrats against the “threat” of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
The exceedingly wealthy are usually content to stay in the shadows while their combined financial leverage and media power keep top government officials more or less in line. But the grassroots strengths of the Warren and Sanders campaigns have jolted some key oligarchs into overt action.
“At least 16 billionaires have in recent months spoken out against what they regard as the danger posed by the populist Democrats, particularly over their proposals to enact a ‘wealth tax’ on vast fortunes,” the Washington Post reported over the weekend. Many of those billionaires are “expressing concern” that the populist Democrats “will blow the election to Trump by veering too far left.”
But are those billionaires more worried about a wealth tax that will curtail vast fortunes, or about Trump winning re-election? Are we supposed to believe the far-fetched notion that voters will opt for Trump over the Democratic nominee because they don’t want billionaires to pay higher taxes?
The biggest fear among the billionaire class is not that a progressive Democratic nominee will lose against Trump. The biggest fear is that such a nominee will win — thus gaining presidential muscle to implement measures like a wealth tax that would adversely affect the outsized fortunes of the 0.1 percent.
Such fears are causing a step-up of attacks on Sanders and Warren, and even some early indications of trauma. “Piling on against the wealth tax have been corporate celebrities from Silicon Valley and Wall Street,” the Post reported on Saturday. Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg “suggested Sanders’s call to abolish billionaires could hurt philanthropies and scientific research by giving the government too much decision-making power…. Appearing on CNBC, billionaire investor Leon Cooperman choked up while discussing the impact a wealth tax could have on his family.”
Sanders often points to the fact that just three individuals — Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett — own as much wealth as the entire bottom half of the U.S. population. Gates has publicly denounced Warren’s proposal for a wealth tax. It shouldn’t surprise us now to learn that earlier this year Bezos urged Bloomberg to run for president. We might call it ruling-class unity — which is a point that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez quickly made while campaigning alongside Sanders in Iowa when the news broke.
“Of course!” AOC told a Des Moines Register reporter. “They’ve got class solidarity. The billionaires are looking out for each other. They’re willing to transcend difference and background and even politics. The fact that Bill Gates seems more willing to vote for Donald Trump than anyone else tells you everything you need to know about how far they’re willing to go to protect their excess, at the cost to everyday Americans.”
Moments later, Sanders joked: “Jeff Bezos, worth $150 billion, supporting Mike Bloomberg, who’s worth only $50 billion — that’s real class solidarity.” And Sanders tied in the climate emergency: “When you talk about class warfare within the context of climate change, like Alexandria was just saying, the fossil fuels industry makes billions [and] billions of dollars in profits every single year, and the people who suffer the most are often lowest-income people. But it’s not just low-income people. Family farmers in Iowa and agriculture in Iowa is going to be suffering.”
News of Bloomberg’s looming entry into the Democratic presidential race elicited mass-media awe because of his wealth. A Republican until 2007, Bloomberg didn’t become a registered Democrat until October 2018. His record as New York City’s mayor included hostility toward labor unions in the public sector, support for police use of stop-and-frisk targeting racial minorities, and vocal antipathy toward the Obama administration’s minimal Dodd-Frank regulation of the financial industry. Bloomberg is a mismatch with most Democrats.
For most of this year, Biden seemed the best bet for moguls like Bloomberg. But confidence receded as the Biden for President campaign lost ground — not only because of his continuing “gaffs” and stumbling syntax but also because more information kept surfacing about his actual record while in the Senate from 1973 through 2008.
Further erosion of support for Biden can be expected due to a pair of powerful articles in the current issue of The Nation magazine. An “anti-endorsement” editorial summarizes his career as a servant of establishment power, concluding: “On issue after issue, Biden’s candidacy offers Trump a unique opportunity to muddy what should be a devastatingly clear choice. The Nation therefore calls on Biden to put service to country above personal ambition and withdraw from the race.” And an investigative piece breaks new ground in documenting how Biden and his immediate family have been enmeshed in scarcely legal conflicts of interest and pay-to-play corruption for several decades.
These days, for billionaires trying to line up a new Democratic president, good help is hard to find. Biden is willing as ever but perhaps not able. In effect, seeing Biden falter, Bloomberg is on the verge of cutting out the middleman. At this point, why hope that activation of pro-Biden Super PACs will be sufficient, when Bloomberg can step in and hugely outspend everyone out of his own pocket?
But even if it turns out that Biden has outlived his usefulness to the billionaire class, no one should doubt his unwavering loyalty. Biden offered reassurance during a speech at the Brookings Institution last year. “I love Bernie, but I’m not Bernie Sanders,” he said. “I don’t think 500 billionaires are the reason why we’re in trouble … The folks at the top aren’t bad guys.”
The first chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court would have agreed. John Jay liked to say: “Those who own the country ought to govern it.” Now, the rhetoric is quite different. But the reality is up for grabs in the realm we call politics.
Norman Solomon is co-founder and national coordinator of RootsAction.org. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 Democratic National Convention and is currently a coordinator of the relaunched independent Bernie Delegates Network. Solomon is the author of a dozen books, including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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RSN: WTF Is That Red Scare Loyalty Oath in My Candidate Packet? |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=33196"><span class="small">Angela Watters, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Monday, 11 November 2019 12:00 |
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Watters writes: "If we were living in an alternative history like the one in HBO's 'Watchmen,' a world in which white supremacy, not democracy, was the enemy, maybe I'd sign the state of Illinois's anachronistic loyalty oath. But I did not."
Senator Joseph R. McCarthy waves a document while discussing Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson with the Illinois 'Loyalty Oath' superimposed on the podium. (image: Angela Watters/RSN/Gettman/Getty Images)
ALSO SEE: Part One: How to Run for Public Office - for Those Who Score Low
on the Narcissism Scale
ALSO SEE: Part Three: How to Not Go Nuts When Running for Public Office?
WTF Is That Red Scare Loyalty Oath in My Candidate Packet?
By Angela Watters, Reader Supported News
11 November 19
If you don’t think you are better than everyone around you and you don’t think you have what it takes to save the world, this series about running for office is for you.
How to Run for Public Office, for Those Who Score Low on the Narcissism Scale – Part Two
 f we were living in an alternative history like the one in HBO’s “Watchmen,” a world in which white supremacy, not democracy, was the enemy, maybe I’d sign the state of Illinois’s anachronistic loyalty oath. But I did not. It’s been illegal since 1969, so they make it optional. Why, when we have a Major League Baseball Umpire threatening to overthrow the government with an AR-15 if Congress goes through with its constitutional authority to impeach the president, is the state of Illinois still worried about the spread of communism?
The origin of this loyalty oath can be traced back to a Democratic downstate Illinois House representative from Anna, Illinois. A-N-N-A has the dubious distinction of being a Sundown Town with one of the catchiest and most racist acronyms for historically “white only” towns in the Midwest. “Ain’t No [N-words] Allowed,” is the town from which Mr. Clyde C. Choate hailed. “Sundown Town” refers to a town in which African-Americans faced threats of violence if they remained there after dark. Within a year of moving to the region, I'd been told of the acronym in hushed tones by both Black and White folks. After Choate singlehandedly destroyed a German tanker with a bazooka in WWII, the man ran for the state house and won. During his thirty-year tenure in office he both investigated the University of Chicago and Roosevelt College for Sedition and initiated the aforementioned loyalty oath. Still known today as the “Guardian Angel of Southern Illinois,” the man has a mental hospital named after him.
It’s my understanding that Choate’s idiosyncratic “Loyalty Oath” is a Red Scare relic that’s never been flushed out of Illinois political campaigning, and it’s intimidating as hell. Not even Joseph McCarthy’s home state of Wisconsin uses one. But if a so-called Blue State puts this bullshit in your candidate packet or makes you swear an oath as an anti-subversive, I can’t even imagine what Red State candidates are asked to sign and notarize. You don’t have to sign it, and if you live in Illinois and decide to run for public office, you shouldn’t.
The rest of the candidate packet is pretty straightforward: A statement of candidacy, which asks for basic residency information, your intended office, and party affiliation if necessary. In Illinois, school boards and many mayoral races are non-partisan. A financial statement of interest form, which essentially asks whether you have a business contract with the government entity for which you intend to serve. Then there’s the form that takes the most actual work: the petition. You should make several copies immediately. The petitions are where the long road toward winning your election actually begins.
In Illinois, you are given a time frame for petition circulation – no more than ninety days before the filing deadline. This is your chance to build your team, to prepare them for the more challenging period six weeks before the election, and to remind them that they will have a nice break between these more intense periods.
The number of signatures you will need to collect will vary (I needed 50), but one thing is certain, don’t try to collect them on your own. Your petition gatherers will serve as the skeleton crew of your future campaign team. Don’t be afraid to approach close friends and family and acquaintances with similar interests. In my case, I approached other parents with children in the school district. Having friends circulate petitions for you makes them part of the process. It may be a good idea to pass out more copies to get more signatures than you need, just to get your name out there.
Once your petitions are collected, signed, and notarized by the distributor, it’s time to make copies and prepare to be the first person at the courthouse on the filing deadline. Ballot order matters, and in Illinois, ballot order is determined by the order in which your packet was received. If you arrive at the same time as another candidate, ballot order is determined by a lottery or drawing. A study of California city council and school board races showed that “being listed first on the ballot increases a candidate’s likelihood of winning office by about five percentage points.” If being timely with your election packet can increase your chances of success in your state, I urge you to be the first to file. Some states randomize order or determine the order by lot, so check on your state’s election website to learn more about how your state determines ballot order.
You don’t have to be a genius to run for public office, just look at Donald Trump. He did it, and you know to the core of your being that even a misogynist dickhead from your office would do a better job than Trump. What Trump illustrates is that you don’t even have to have special expertise to run for office and win. Good elected officials hire the best public servants they can find to run the show. Great elected officials listen to the advice of experts and weigh that advice against the concerns of constituents to make the best possible decisions for the community. We need more smart, thoughtful, regular folks in public office – not more grandstanders and blowhards. Take that leap and file.
Next: Part Three: How to Survive the Long Wait Between Filing and Campaigning, AKA Fundraise, Meditate and Repeat
Angela Watters is the Managing Editor for Reader Supported News. She was elected to the school board in her town in April of this year.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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n October 27TH, we marked one year since the worst antisemitic attack in our country’s history, when a white nationalist walked into the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and murdered 11 people and injured six others. The murderer acted on a twisted belief that Jews were part of a nefarious plot to undermine white America—a plot to assist in the “invasion” of the United States by a caravan of migrants from Latin America. This vicious lie about an “invasion” had been repeated endlessly in right-wing media, on Fox News, across the internet, and, most disgracefully, by the president of the United States. 
