Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

Back in 1968 when I was a teenaged bomb-throwing radical and I was attending another NY university, we got word that the **** was about to hit the fan at Columbia. We hastily convened a meeting of our campus antiwar group and voted to join the students at Columbia. Three hundred of us entered the 8th Avenue subway, mobbed through the exit gates and packed into next AA train, debarked at 116th and stormed toward the riot, which was already in progress. Of course we were locked out and could only observe the mayhem from behind metal fencing. It was horrendous and at one point I said, mostly to myself, "This isn't ******* real," and a woman next to me said, "Oh yes it is." And when I looked at her she had tears in her eyes and I recognized her as a girl I went to high school with! After chanting antiwar slogans for a while and watching students getting clubbed I realized I'd seen more than enough and I headed back to my dorm. It all seemed so hollow, so far removed from the real
war, the real crime. Only a few days later I headed down to Whitehall Street and was inducted into the US Army with a few hundred other draftees and I was in Vietnam by October.

Embrace The Uncertainty

As we come to the end of a difficult week, it’s becoming obvious that daily news coverage isn’t sufficient to capture what a deeply strange period we’re living through.

The former president is on criminal trial for making hush-money payments to a porn star he says he didn’t have sex with, while trying to stave off the three other criminal prosecutions he faces. At the same time, he is promising more post-election criminality if he loses in 2024, which is the very thing two of the remaining prosecutions are seeking to convict him for having done in 2020.

Not content to merely replay his first term, he is promising a second presidency that will be authoritarian to its core. It begins with the premise that he must exact retribution against all who have wronged him, including prosecuting the current president whom he falsely claims is behind his own legal turmoil. From there, he swears he will target disfavored classes of people – immigrants, the press, anyone whose fealty to him he perceives to be insufficient – abusing the powers of his office to inflict pain and suffering to the delight of his supporters. He is also determined to harness the full powers of the federal government in pursuit of personal political and private ends, even and perhaps especially if that means breaking government in the process.

In the meantime, the coverage of the current president is the same tired analysis, worn thin by overuse, and utterly oblivious to the looming authoritarian threat. Complexities like post-pandemic economic policy are reduced to a thin gruel of “inflation is bad for incumbents.” The nightmarishly difficult Israel-Palestine conflict is more easily covered as an American political story about law and order, and so campus protests are forced to stand in as a poor proxy for the actual conflict in the Middle East.

In the face of what almost certainly is a significant historical moment that is full of uncertainty and unpredictability, we grasp for ways to make sense of it all but what we grab ahold of for comfort and security is oversimplification, reductiveness, and cliches. Rather than rising to the moment, we just try to cover our eyes and soothe our souls so we can endure it. It’s a temptation that’s hard to resist.

It’s in moments like these that the overconfident diagnoses and simplistic solutions of someone like Donald Trump hold their greatest allure. He offers certainty amidst the chaos, even if he has no idea what he’s talking about and doesn’t have the skill or capability to do anything about it. He’s a chaos monster: the more of it he creates, the greater the need for the snake oil palliatives he offers. He’ll make you sick to sell you his bogus curatives.

This is all happening against the backdrop of the even bigger existential threat than Donald Trump: climate change. The environmental catastrophe already underway adds layers of uncertainty that we may have never encountered before as a species. It dwarfs our political chaos. It feeds the anxiousness that makes us seek solid ground, some permanence, a place above whatever the new high water mark may turn out to be. For many people, it’s easier to find immediate security in a Trump (even if that means drowning later) than enduring the uncertainty, trying to make sense of it all, and doing the hard work of piecing together solutions.

So don’t get too caught up in the day-to-day news. There lies madness. Embrace the uncertainty, live with the dis-ease that comes with not knowing, and forswear the cheap and easy fixes offered by tawdry figures who prey on the victims of the chaos they create.

You’re unhappy with this economy? OK, that’s your right. But you should seriously consider whether you want the available alternative.

Last November, I wrote what I thought was a modest commentary about how the Biden economy was doing remarkably well, at least by most standard macroeconomic measures, and much of the corporate media wasn’t reporting about it. Job numbers were historically high, unemployment low and the U.S. had done the best of all G-7 economies in bringing down inflation resulting from the worst pandemic years.

I was careful to note that my wife and I, and members of our daughters’ generation, were still feeling economic pain around the cost of food and housing, and that many younger people felt they could not get their lives started due to student debt and high housing prices.

I got considerable grief from readers for that one, but I stand by what I wrote about the Biden administration’s active economic moves and a renewed focus on industrial policy to accomplish goals that simply cannot be left to “the marketplace.” Leaving infrastructure work to the marketplace is how America wound up with so many embarrassing airports, shaky bridges and poky, increasingly dangerous trains. There are things we must do together.

As I wrote at the time, Biden’s manufacturing plan invests in rural areas and will transform local economies:

• He’s the first president in many decades to stand with organized labor and support its fight for better wages and benefits. He continues to work on alleviating the crushing student debt that limits so many young adults’ lives. He has taken on Big Pharma, moving to lower prescription drug prices and health care costs for older Americans. He is working to stop the junk fees hidden in so many transactions. He rejoined the Paris climate accords and has done far more to address that crisis than any previous president.

The general economic news has only improved since then, including strong jobs numbers for March and April. As Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg writes, the U.S economy typically does much better when a Democrat is in the White House. Biden’s record of more than 15 million new jobs amounts to eight times as many as were created under the last three Republican presidents combined. Although inflation for consumer goods rose slightly in March, which is not good news for anyone, the Federal Reserve has done a good job in carefully bringing inflation down after the supply-chain disruptions and supermarket price hikes of the pandemic. Remember the corporate media braying endlessly about the coming recession? Well, it never came.

So here we are: The macroeconomic indicators look great, but your household budget may remain a struggle. Gas prices keep rising, but that's largely the result of decisions made in Saudi Arabia and Russia, well beyond the Biden administration’s control.

But here’s what I wasn’t thinking about enough when I wrote that earlier commentary: People in this country are kept unsettled and economically stressed by living with a threadbare social safety net, one relentlessly under attack by Republicans. When you’re living paycheck to paycheck, as a frightening number of Americans do, there is no room for higher food, housing or fuel costs. Long before either Biden or Trump occupied the White House, living costs were rapidly outpacing rising incomes. That’s a global issue, but for a wealthy nation, we have a startling amount of homelessness, partly because of the high cost of housing and partly because of that paltry social safety net.

Still, if Americans actually paid attention to how other countries are dealing with inflation, for example, they might feel a lot better about the Biden economy. For that matter, if Americans were better versed in the writings and actions of our founders, they might understand that they believed in a strong central government and sometimes held surprisingly progressive ideas about how to manage an economy.

Biden’s record of 15 million new jobs is eight times as many as under the last three Republican presidents combined. Remember the media braying endlessly about the coming recession? Well, it never came.

The economic benefits of the massive Infrastructure Bill and the strategic CHIPS Act are just now beginning to be realized, with much of the funding specifically targeted to help create jobs in rural areas of so-called red states. (The White House has an interactive map explaining all the efforts across the country.)

Those economic benefits are twofold: the immediate well-paying jobs and then, down the line, the new or rebuilt roads, bridges, airports, public transit, waterway infrastructure, broadband internet and microchip factories that will serve us for decades.

Biden’s support for unions may have influenced the historic vote to unionize at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which comes after two previous failures. That was the first time workers at a foreign-owned auto plant in the American South had voted to join a union, even after six Republican governors spoke out against the campaign.

Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan, one of the unsung heroes of the Biden team, is working to keep monopolistic companies from harming consumers and workers through price-fixing schemes, non-compete agreements and other underhanded tactics. If you didn’t catch Khan on “The Daily Show” with Jon Stewart recently, it's well worth your time.

Khan does an outstanding job of taking apart Republicans’ insincere claims about fixing the economy and supporting the working class when she explains how complex the task of protecting workers and consumers is, and how badly the FTC is outgunned by the big corporations aligned with Republicans.

So, as everybody knows — to borrow Trump’s favorite rhetorical device — the notion that Republicans do better with the economy is a worthless statement clause, one might say, in the GOP’s continuing contract on America, one that has duped people for decades by merely employing the propagandist’s trick of repetition.

But since we have more or less been promised an authoritarian economy if Trump prevails in this fall’s election, how well do those work?

Not too well, especially if we’re talking about authoritarian governments that were formerly democracies. Such economies tend to be heavily based on one or two commodities, as with Russia, whose main exports are petroleum and, I’m pretty sure, corruption. Authoritarian governments tend to manage their economies about as poorly as Republicans have in the modern era, which makes perfect sense when you consider that Republicans are not moved by expertise or evidence but by ideology, such as the thoroughly discredited idea that tax cuts for the wealthy will somehow “trickle down” to benefit the average Jane and Joe. And Republicans' fallback argument that they are better with the annual deficit or the national debt is just silly. They have made both things dramatically worse, and mostly decry the national debt so they can further slash the social safety net.

Populist autocrats have their own notions about how to run an economy, and those tend to diverge, often wildly, from what less ideological experts would do. As Max Fisher wrote in the New York Times about the economic woes of Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, these strongmen are not so strong on economics:

• They are unusually prone to creating this sort of crisis, unusually inhibited from fixing it and unusually slow to recover. They have, on average, higher rates of inflation and more artificially undervalued currencies. Their central banks are less independent, making them less capable of intervening.

Over the decades, Donald Trump has drummed into his fans’ minds the idea that he is a great businessman. By all accounts — and from every shred of evidence we have seen over the past four decades — he’s anything but. He is certainly a profligate money-burner who keeps being propped up by shady foreign banks, shadowy individuals and organizations and billionaire supporters. (Remember how Donald Trump Jr. bragged that the Trump Organization saw a lot of money pouring in from Russia?) He’s so inept at business that even his casino “empire” went under — in no small measure because he used it (as he did the presidency) to enrich himself. When Trump created a “university” and a purported charitable foundation, both were shut down and cost him millions in fines. Recently, the stock for his social media company has reportedly done so poorly that he may resort to flooding the market with more shares, screwing over the hardcore fans who jumped in with their hard-earned money to support the initial offering.

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That’s the “strongman” MAGA believers want in charge of the economy? As Salon’s Amanda Marcotte notes, “Trump supporters mistake petulance for strength.”

Several years back, I wondered whether businessmen had any business being president. The answer I was able to glean was, pretty much no.

This particular failed businessman (but world-class conman grifter and propagandist) who’s been hawking flag-embossed golden sneakers and Trump-branded Bibles and who attempted in multiple ways to overturn the last free and fair presidential election, which he still denies he lost, and who currently faces 88 felony charges, now proclaims himself immune from the rule of law and ready to be America’s first dictator.

Authoritarian economies tend to be heavily based on one or two commodities, as with Russia, whose main exports are petroleum and, I’m pretty sure, corruption.

He appears ready to follow the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which calls for replacing expert civil servants with a legion of loyalist lackeys, ditching climate science, imprisoning or expelling immigrants who are crucial to the economy, cutting taxes further and reducing Social Security and Medicaid benefits, forcing a misogynistic theocracy on a nation founded on the separation of church and state, and turning our back on historical allies around the world. Oh and, first and foremost, getting revenge on all of Trump’s enemies.

Does anyone actually think that living in that kind of country under that kind of leader would make his or her life better?

Some will claim they were doing better economically under Trump — but that’s only true in the sense that inflation was much lower, around the Federal Reserve target of 2 percent, before the pandemic hit. Trump himself seems aware, after his own fashion, that things have improved greatly under Biden. After all, he has openly wished for the U.S. economy to crash before the November election. When confronted with evidence of how well the Biden economy is doing, Trump has tried to claim that, somehow or other, it’s still his economy. Isn’t that the best compliment a political opponent can give you?

Back in 1968 when I was a teenaged bomb-throwing radical and I was attending another NY university, we got word that the **** was about to hit the fan at Columbia. We hastily convened a meeting of our campus antiwar group and voted to join the students at Columbia. Three hundred of us entered the 8th Avenue subway, mobbed through the exit gates and packed into next AA train, debarked at 116th and stormed toward the riot, which was already in progress.

[...]
I have sharp memories of the anti-Vietnam war demonstrations, in which I participated some 55 years ago.

(I didn't think our demonstrations were that wild compared to what was happening elsewhere - in [West] Berlin, for example. But in a conservative rural neighbourhood, and since I was already known as a ‘red sock’ ... )

I remember being appalled at the unnecessary carnage in Vietnam. I was incensed that the first world, white and rich, was randomly killing people in the third world, mostly non-white and poor. As an American, I felt morally complicit.

I was angry at college administrators who summoned police to clear protesters – using teargas, stun guns and mass arrests. The response only added fuel to the flames.

The anti-Vietnam war movement became fodder for rightwing politicians like Richard Nixon, demanding “law and order”. The spectacle also appalled many non-college, working-class people who viewed the students as pampered, selfish, anti-American, unpatriotic.

I vividly recall the anti war demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, and the brutality of the Chicago police and Illinois national guard – later described by the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence as a “police riot”.

As the anti-war protesters chanted “The whole world is watching”, network television conveyed the riotous scene to what seemed like the whole world.
... ... ...

“What I find most repulsive in America is not the extreme freedom reigning there,” Tocqueville wrote, “but the shortage of guarantees against tyranny.” He pointed to communities “taking justice into their own hands,” and warned that “associations of plain citizens can compose very rich, influential, and powerful bodies, in other words, aristocratic bodies.” Lamenting their intellectual conformity, Tocqueville believed that if Americans ever gave up republican government, “they will pass rapidly on to despotism,” restricting “the sphere of political rights, taking some of them away in order to entrust them to a single man.”

"This illiberalism sank roots from the time of European settlement and spread out from villages and towns to the highest levels of government."

In 1776, as British colonists in North America were contemplating how to construct a new nation, Massachusetts lawyer John Adams famously wrote to friends about the relationship between government and the law. A republic, he wrote, “is an Empire of Laws and not of Men: and therefore…that particular Arrangement…which is best calculated to Secure an exact and impartial Execution of the Laws, is the best Republic.”

In 1787 the framers of the Constitution set out to create a nation built on the rule of law. The next year, the states ratified their new framework, and in 1789, the Constitution went into effect. One of the first acts of the newly seated Congress was to establish a federal court system. The Judiciary Act of 1789 set out the different courts and their jurisdictions. And in 1868, with the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, Americans explicitly wrote into the Constitution the principle that all U.S. citizens must be equal before the law. Two years later, they established the Department of Justice to make sure that principle would be honored across the country.

In the past three years, the Biden administration has worked to confirm that the U.S. is a nation of laws. That work has borne fruit. In the past few days, several cases have jumped out in which the administration has used the law to protect ordinary Americans.

On Tuesday, April 30, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) challenged more than 300 junk patent listings for drugs that treat diabetes, asthma, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and that help people lose weight, including Ozempic. Bogus patent listings prevent generic drugs from entering the market, keeping brand-name drug prices high. The FTC gives the manufacturer 20 days to withdraw or amend the listing or certify, under penalty of perjury, that they are correct. In November the FTC successfully challenged junk patents on asthma inhalers, reducing their price to $35.

FTC chair Lina Khan said: “By challenging junk patent filings, the FTC is fighting these illegal tactics and making sure that Americans can get timely access to innovative and affordable versions of the medicines they need.”

On Thursday, May 2, Yvette Wang, the chief of staff to Guo Wengui, an exiled Chinese billionaire businessman who works with Trump associate Steve Bannon (in 2020, law enforcement officers arrested Bannon on Guo’s yacht on charges of fraud), pleaded guilty to conspiring with Guo in a massive fraud scheme that involved wire fraud and money laundering and netted more than $1 billion. Wang personally will forfeit $1.4 billion to the United States and faces up to ten years in prison. The trial for Wang and Guo is scheduled to start on May 20. Guo has pleaded not guilty.

On Friday the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged the auditing firm for Trump’s social media company and its owner with “massive fraud.” The SEC called BF Borgers a “sham audit mill” and said it “deliberately systemically failed to conduct” audits and reviews that were filed with the SEC between January 2021 and June 2023. Those reports are supposed to inform investors about the value of companies. The SEC fined the company $14 million and banned it from practicing accounting. Its owner, Benjamin Borgers, did not admit wrongdoing but accepted the judgment.

Also on Friday, the Department of Justice released a grand jury’s indictment of Representative Henry Cuellar (D-TX) and his wife, Imelda, alleging that beginning no later than 2014 and until at least November 2021, they accepted close to $600,000 in bribes from an Azerbaijani oil and gas company and a Mexican bank and then laundered the payments through Imelda’s company. In exchange, the indictment says, Cuellar agreed to adjust U.S. policy toward Azerbaijan, especially its oil industry, and to oppose laws that would curb money laundering and regulate the payday lending industry.

On Friday, at former president Trump’s fraud trial for interfering in the 2016 election by paying $130,000 to buy the silence of adult film actress Stormy Daniels and falsifying business records to hide the payment, former White House aide Hope Hicks established that Trump had indeed intended to silence Daniels in order to stop voters from hearing her information before the election. Appearing reluctant to testify against Trump, Hicks nonetheless described a conversation with Trump in 2018, after Daniels’s story became public. Trump told her that “it was better to be dealing with it now, and it would have been bad to have that story come out before the election.”

The rule of law protects ordinary Americans and defends their right to elect a government of their choice. But in 2024, it is under attack.

Trump continues to insist that the stories about his extramarital affairs are false, but his main strategy for addressing his many legal troubles is to insist that the justice system is rigged against him. This continues a pattern he began as soon as he took office, when he unsuccessfully pressured FBI director James Comey to drop the investigation into his 2016 campaign’s interaction with Russian operatives. Although FBI directors are supposed to be virtually untouchable during their ten-year term, Trump fired Comey and then spent the rest of his term accusing the FBI of persecuting him.

That attack on our judicial system expanded to sweep in all the judges who ruled against his campaign operatives and his extremist policies on immigration. He called the courts a “joke” and a “laughingstock” and attacked the Justice Department as a whole and judges personally.

Those attacks increased after Trump left office and was indicted for his efforts to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election. An analysis by NBC News of more than 14,000 Trump posts and reposts from April 2022 to January 6, 2024, showed that in some periods he attacked the judicial system more than he promoted his campaign. He aimed his attacks most often at special counsel Jack Smith, as well as New York attorney general Letitia James; Judge Arthur Engoron, who presided over Trump’s Manhattan fraud trial; Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg; and Fulton County, Georgia, district attorney Fani Willis—all of whom are in charge of cases against Trump.

Reporters Dareh Gregorian and Jasmine Cui wrote: “The posts generally portray Trump as the victim of a Democratic scheme designed to derail his presidential bid, with an array of judges and prosecutors working against him at the behest of President Joe Biden, and all part of a partisan ‘witch hunt,’ a term he used about 250 times during that time period.”

At a meeting for donors at Mar-a-Lago Saturday, Trump complained about the criminal charges against him, calling Jack Smith a “f**king a**hole,” and accused President Joe Biden of running a “Gestapo administration,” a reference to the German secret police that crushed opposition and rounded up Jews, Roma, LGBT individuals, and other targeted groups during World War II.

Trump has vowed to take control of the Justice Department and make it serve his interests. Chris Geidner of Law Dork noted today that the federal courts already favor Republicans, and a second Trump presidency would allow him to fill multiple court vacancies, probably including some on the Supreme Court, with his extremists. They would cement the ideology of MAGA Republicans into our laws for the foreseeable future.

Trump’s war on the Department of Justice over his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election has already progressed into an attempt to delegitimize the results of the 2024 election, suggesting he does not believe he will win in a free and fair election.

Yesterday, Charlie Spies, the Republican Party’s top lawyer, resigned after Trump turned on him for his public statements that the 2020 election was not stolen. Spies was one of three lawyers the Trump team hired in March after it took over the Republican National Committee (RNC). An establishment Republican lawyer, Spies was paired with MAGA lawyer and former right-wing One America News Network anchor Christina Bobb to oversee the RNC’s so-called election integrity unit. Now Spies is out and Bobb, who has been indicted for election fraud for her participation in the attempt to overthrow the 2020 election, remains.

In an astonishing exchange on Meet the Press this morning, Senator Tim Scott (R-SC), who is angling to become Trump’s vice presidential pick, refused six times to say he would accept the results of the 2024 election if Trump didn’t win. Host Kristen Welker asked: “Will you commit to accepting the election results of 2024?” Scott responded: “At the end of the day, the 47th president of the United States will be President Donald Trump.” Welker followed up: “Yes or no, will you accept the election results of 2024 no matter who wins?” Scott answered: “That is my statement.”

When Welker continued to push the question, Scott accused NBC of working for the “Democrat Party” but refused ever to agree to the peaceful transition of power, which, as Welker noted, is the hallmark of the democratic republic people like John Adams established in 1789.