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Why Bush v. Gore Still Matters in 2020

Twenty years after the Supreme Court decision known as Bush v. Gore effectively decided a presidential election, it’s back on the country’s mind. President Donald Trump, who is lagging in polls amid a surge in COVID-19 cases and refuses to commit to leaving office quietly should his bid for reelection fail, has said he believes the Supreme Court will intervene in the upcoming election to hand him a second term. He cited that role to justify rushing the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett, who was sworn in as a justice on Monday and could potentially break a 4-4 tie. Lawyers representing the president’s campaign and the Republican Party have taken to citing Bush v. Gore frequently in preelection court filings. And the case’s echoes are only underscored by the presence of three current justices — Chief Justice John Roberts, Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh — each of whom worked for the Republicans in the 2000 ballot recount battles in Florida that culminated in the historic Supreme Court decision.

Democrats got agitated this week when Kavanaugh, appointed by Trump in 2018, included a nearly page-long disquisition on Bush v. Gore in an opinion explaining his vote not to reinstate a six-day buffer after Election Day for mail-in ballots, which are expected to lean heavily Democratic, to arrive at election offices in Wisconsin. Then, only two days later, Democrats were cheered by the news that the court had let stand, at least for now, post-Election Day buffer periods in two other key swing states, Pennsylvania and North Carolina. The notion of a conservative court handing the presidency to Trump seemed that much more distant a prospect.

However, opinions by Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch appended to Wednesday’s decisions, when read together with Kavanaugh’s opinion, suggest more is afoot. Bush v. Gore is poised for a revival at the high court. That will probably occur in a different scenario than what happened in 2000. The election forecaster FiveThirtyEight projects only a 4% chance of the election being decided by a recount.

But Bush v. Gore has never been the dead letter it’s popularly perceived to be, and it could be a factor in a number of election battles this year. Before 2020, the Supreme Court had mentioned the case only once in two decades. But in the state courts and lower federal courts, it’s quietly but repeatedly taken on new roles over the years, serving to resolve everything from how ballot signatures are reviewed to the deadline for mail-in ballots to reach election officials. This election cycle, with the help of Kavanaugh, Alito and Gorsuch, as well as a welter of GOP lawyers pushing to take Bush v. Gore in a new direction, the case is undergoing a radical transformation. If completed, legal scholars believe, that transformation will have far-reaching and deleterious consequences for efforts to expand voting rights.

What Was Bush v. Gore?

By the early morning hours after Election Day 2000, it was clear that the election contest between the Republican candidate, George W. Bush, and the Democrat, Al Gore, would come down to Florida’s 25 electoral votes. With Bush up in the state by a very thin margin, Gore moved to have machine-tabulated ballots manually recounted. Weeks of legal wrangling ensued, with litigation pingponging around various Florida state courts, twice reaching the U.S. Supreme Court. Eventually, the Florida Supreme Court ordered a statewide manual recount but offered little guidance to ballot counters other than that they had to discern the “clear intent of the voter.” Many Florida counties used punch card ballots at the time, and some Floridians failed to fully punch out the paper tab, called a “chad,” leaving their votes unclear. New phrases entered the American lexicon: “hanging chads” (partially detached), “dimpled chads” (indented but not detached) and so on.

With an important mid-December deadline approaching, Bush’s lawyers asked the Supreme Court to intervene. Late on a Tuesday, just hours ahead of the deadline, the court, by a 5-4 vote, put a stop to the Florida recount, all but declaring Bush the next president. In an unsigned opinion, five of the court’s more conservative justices found that the Florida Supreme Court’s recount rules were vague and inconsistent, resulting in “arbitrary and disparate treatment” of ballots. So, for example, counters in Miami-Dade County might deem a particular hanging chad a vote for president while counters in Palm Beach County might not.

The Constitution gives broad discretion to state legislatures to decide how to appoint the electors it sends to the electoral college. The Bush v. Gore majority held that the Florida recount procedures violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which requires that the state not “value one person’s vote over that of another.” On this point there was broad agreement; two justices from the court’s liberal wing, Stephen Breyer and David Souter, largely agreed with the five conservatives.

The question remained: what to do about it? Souter and Breyer thought the U.S. Supreme Court should do what it would usually do and send the case back to the Florida Supreme Court with instructions for how to cure the problem. The five conservatives, however, decided that there wasn’t enough time left to fix the recount process and complete it. Two decades later, their reasoning remains the subject of widespread criticism. (The late Justice Antonin Scalia joined the majority opinion but privately called the equal protection rationale, “as we say in Brooklyn, a piece of shit,” according to “First,” a well regarded 2019 biography of retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.) In essence, the majority read into an earlier Florida Supreme Court ruling the suggestion that the Florida Legislature wanted the vote count finalized before the mid-December deadline.

Is Bush v. Gore Precedent?

The prevailing view has been no. In that interpretation, Bush v. Gore is a one-off that judges and lawyers are free to ignore. A binding precedent, by contrast, requires that lower courts (and the high court itself) abide by it.

Despite that view, the ruling’s influence appears to be very much alive: It has been cited in hundreds of federal and state cases, dating from the years just after the 2000 election to this week. How can these dueling interpretations coexist? Consider the most often quoted sentence in Bush v. Gore: “Our consideration is limited to the present circumstances, for the problem of equal protection in election processes generally presents many complexities.” The not-precedent camp points to the first clause as dispositive. But others insist the second clause is every bit as important as the first, and if read in that way, the sentence sounds not so much like a disavowal of future relevance as a word of caution for other judges: Don’t apply the court’s analyses in rote fashion; be sensitive to the facts of the case.

Disagreements over whether Bush v. Gore should be considered a precedent are widespread, including in federal courts. For example, judges on the federal appellate court in Cincinnati decided in 2003 that Bush v. Gore was precedent “we are bound to adhere to.” Thirteen years later, another set of judges on that same court dismissed the opinion as “non-precedential.” Still other judges split the difference, like one on the appeals court in Richmond this year, who called Bush v. Gore “of limited precedential value.”

Bush v. Gore Since Bush v. Gore

For a case that’s widely regarded as an aberration, Bush v. Gore has done all right for itself outside the U.S. Supreme Court. Not only has it been cited well over a hundred times by state supreme courts and federal courts of appeals, that tally grows to about 500 when lower courts are included — from litigation over the 2003 vote to recall California Gov. Gray Davis to this year’s court battle over felon reenfranchisement in Florida. That means there’s a chance Bush v. Gore could reprise its role this year at the center of the resolution of the presidential race, should, say, Pennsylvania become to 2020 what Florida was for 2000. (Indeed, the case has already been raised as part of the ongoing litigation about how to handle mail-in ballots in the state.)

It could also help decide the outcome of other key races, a particularly consequential possibility given that control of the Senate is at stake this year. In 2008, for example, Norm Coleman, an incumbent Republican senator from Minnesota, tried to use Bush v. Gore to challenge the process by which election officials decided whether absentee ballots were valid. He was unsuccessful, and his Democratic opponent, the comedian Al Franken, ultimately won the seat.

Over the past two decades, Bush v. Gore has evolved beyond the partisan identity it maintains in the public imagination. An examination of judicial decisions and court filings in more than 150 cases suggests its invocation won’t necessarily benefit one party or the other.

The ruling has continued to be invoked in its original context, guiding judicial oversight of ballot recounts. That makes it an inviting tool for a president who has repeatedly mused publicly about halting vote tabulations after Election Day. But the case could just as soon help speed along a recount, as the president has seen firsthand in November 2016, when Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein petitioned for a recount of votes cast in Michigan, a state Trump then appeared to have won by only a few thousand votes. Stein’s recount didn’t change the outcome, but federal judges in that case relied in part on Bush v. Gore to ensure the recount got done on time, ruling in favor of Stein’s request to waive a waiting period mandated by state law before beginning a recount. The delay, they reasoned, might prevent the state from completing the recount ahead of a key federal deadline. Once a state grants a right to a recount, a federal appeals judge wrote, “the State could not use arbitrary or unreasonable procedural rules to make that right a nullity.”

Bush v. Gore has been applied in contradictory ways in different cases, both to disqualify large numbers of ballots or to ensure that ballots aren’t arbitrarily rejected. Just after the 2018 election, for example, Florida Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson’s reelection campaign and a state Democratic Party committee filed a federal lawsuit challenging the way Florida election officials verified signatures on vote-by-mail and provisional ballots. When a state lets residents vote by mail, the campaign’s legal team argued in a filing that relied on Bush v. Gore, the Equal Protection Clause forbids the state from luring “its voters into a procedurally arbitrary vote-by-mail trap that results in their disenfranchisement.” In response to Nelson’s suit, the courts bemoaned “Florida’s lack of any standards or formal training requirements” for those who assess ballot signatures, as well as the state’s failure to notify some Floridians in time to fix improperly rejected ballots. A judge ordered the state to give those voters until 11 days after the election to submit affidavits and proof of identity so their votes would count. (Despite that interim victory, Nelson came up short and lost his seat.)

On the other side of the partisan divide, GOP lawyers this year are deploying Bush v. Gore aggressively. Attorneys for Republican legislators in North Carolina, for instance, recently argued that a state elections board plan to extend the period of time that officials could accept ballots postmarked by Election Day violated Bush v. Gore. In essence, they claimed that the case permitted their clients to use the Equal Protection Clause as a tool to reduce the number of eligible voters who got to cast a ballot. The full appeals court rejected the argument, with one of the judges in the majority calling the plaintiffs’ argument “deeply troubling.” The plaintiffs had suffered no harm, she wrote, and their sole aim was to reduce the number of eligible voters allowed to legally cast their ballot. (Three of the court’s more conservative judges wrote a dissent agreeing with the plaintiffs. On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a request to temporarily block the extension.)

There’s more of this to come. On Oct. 23, a lawsuit filed in Nevada by the Trump campaign and the state Republican Party argues that the state runs afoul of Bush v. Gore because it offers a way to challenge in-person voters but fails to offer a mechanism for challenging voters who send their ballot through the mail, a potential opening salvo in an attack on mail-in voting in an important swing state.

Bush v. Gore and the Ghost of William Rehnquist

Until recently, Bush v. Gore’s ongoing influence on federal elections has been fairly quiet, adapting to new issues of election administration in an incremental, case-by-case manner. It now seems on the verge of a metamorphosis. In recent years, Bush v. Gore — or, more precisely, a side note in it, a line of reasoning that indisputably is without precedential effect — has begun to gain currency among conservative jurists and election lawyers. In the past week, four members of the Supreme Court’s conservative wing became advocates for the cause, seeking to transform a long-marginal idea into the law of the land. Should a majority of the high court embrace the thinking, the court’s new right-leaning supermajority will have near-total power over courtroom efforts to shape federal elections — a set of circumstances that election law scholars and voting rights lawyers fear could seriously hinder efforts to expand the franchise in the United States.

Separate from the unsigned majority opinion in Bush v. Gore, the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist, joined by Scalia and Thomas, authored a concurring opinion offering “additional grounds” for putting an end to the Florida ballot recount. Ordinarily, when a state supreme court rules on an issue of state law, that state court decision can’t be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, an outgrowth of the federal system in the United States. In his concurrence, however, Rehnquist claimed to have identified an exception to this rule in the context of state laws governing presidential elections. In that context, Rehnquist wrote, the U.S. Supreme Court, in fact, could second-guess a state supreme court’s interpretation of its own state’s election law.

Rehnquist’s argument hinged on a narrow reading of the U.S. Constitution’s Presidential Electors Clause, which says, “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct,” the electors that vote for the president and vice president. In the chief justice’s view, the Constitution gave state legislatures exclusive authority to run presidential elections, and when, as in Florida in 2000, a state court (or governor) interfered in the election laws passed by the legislature, that runs afoul of the U.S. Constitution, which means that the federal Supreme Court can intervene to help preserve the state legislature’s power over how the state runs its presidential elections.

The dissenting justices expressed puzzlement and incredulity at Rehnquist’s unusual reading of the Presidential Electors Clause. By his logic, they observed, a state legislature was unconstrained by its state constitution when prescribing laws related to presidential elections. The Supreme Court’s own precedents, the late Justice John Paul Stevens wrote, rejected Rehnquist’s interpretation. “Legislature” in the Presidential Electors Clause, he wrote, meant the state legislature acting in its ordinary lawmaking capacity, subject to a gubernatorial veto and the state constitution as interpreted by the courts, not as an all-powerful synod.

This week, Rehnquist’s theory not only received the imprimatur of four sitting justices; it saw its scope expand. First, on Monday, came Kavanaugh’s riff on Bush v. Gore in his concurrence in the Wisconsin vote-by-mail extension case. It excavated Rehnquist’s theory and held it out as the correct reading of the Constitution. It was an odd place for Kavanaugh to articulate his pro-Rehnquist thesis, because, as Kavanaugh acknowledged, it was entirely irrelevant to the Wisconsin case. The Wisconsin case was appealed from a federal court, not a state court, and there’s no question the U.S. Supreme Court has the power to review the decisions of lower federal courts. Kavanaugh’s footnote suggested he was eager to convey his point of view out into the world, possibly to encourage future litigants to present the court with opportunities to elevate Rehnquist’s concurrence to the level of precedent. That signal may not be necessary. Throughout the country, Republican election lawyers are already doing just that.

No other justice joined Kavanaugh’s concurrence, but just two days later, three of them would join him in extolling the virtues of Rehnquist’s theory. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court declined to roll back similar vote-by-mail buffer periods in two other swing states, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Unlike in Wisconsin, the extensions of time were authorized by state courts relying on state law, the kind of decision over which the federal Supreme Court ordinarily has no authority. Given the partisan polarization around voting by mail this year, Democrats celebrated the outcome. The festivities, however, were muted. Accompanying each order was a lengthy statement signed by some or all of justices unhappy about the outcome — Alito, Gorsuch and Thomas — and warning that the cases might not be over yet.

Both statements declared their support for adopting Rehnquist’s Bush v. Gore concurrence and went further still, indicating that, within state government, the legislature also has exclusive control over congressional elections. (The Constitution authorizes Congress to override the legislature.) The statement written by Alito, which was appended to the Pennsylvania order, suggested that the Supreme Court might yet intervene after the election, potentially rejecting some large number of ballots that were mailed by Election Day but that arrived at election offices within the three day buffer period.

 

The more realistic reason for Bush v. Gore to alarm Democrats is that the Supreme Court’s four most conservative justices — Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Thomas — seem to be champing at the bit to cut state courts out of federal elections altogether. “Conservative judges have increasingly shown hostility to expanded voting rights, even during a pandemic,” said Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Irvine School of Law. The approach embodied in the Rehnquist concurrence, known to lawyers as the independent state legislature doctrine, is one of many tools “that is making it harder for other actors to protect voting rights.”

Can they get a fifth justice on their side? Barrett’s views aren’t yet known, but Roberts doesn’t seem eager to embrace the Rehnquist theory. This Monday, in a brief opinion, the chief justice distinguished the situation in Wisconsin, where a federal court had modified election rules, and in Pennsylvania, where the state supreme court had done so, relying on “the authority of state courts to apply their own constitutions to election regulations.”

Still, other courts are running with the interpretation favored by the four conservative justices. On Thursday, a federal appeals court voted 2-1 to order Minnesota to separate late-arriving mail-in ballots, finding that a state court-ordered buffer period was likely illegal. Their reasoning? Plucked more or less straight from Kavanaugh’s Wisconsin concurrence.

Rehnquist’s theory poses greater risks to Democrats than Republicans, at least in the near term. Over the past decade or so, Republicans have done an impressive job of taking over state legislatures. In the key swing states of North Carolina and Pennsylvania, there is a Democratic governor, a liberal majority on the state supreme court, and a Republican-controlled legislature. Biden’s lawyers surely would prefer their odds in the supreme courts of those states than in a U.S. Supreme Court that’s more conservative than it’s been in decades.

 

Right-wing militias are gearing up for an armed response on Election Day: report

According to a report from Politico, scattered right-wing militia members are looking at Election Day as a moment when they will hit the streets fully-armed in anticipation of protests over the election results.

The report notes that chatter among the groups has been building for some time and that it “has taken a darker turn in recent weeks.”

According to the report by Politico’s Tine Nguyen, “Fueled by allegations of mail-in ballot fraud, shouted from the president’s Twitter feed and conservative media outlets, a new spate of racial justice protests in places like Philadelphia and paranoia over further coronavirus restrictions, some militias have begun doomsday prepping for Election Day.”

The report goes on top note that the groups have been emboldened by the president’s recent inflammatory rhetoric with Nguyen writing, “Many of these militant groups — which often espouse anti-government, white supremacist and pro-Trump ideologies — are disconnected and diffuse, without large bases of devoted members. But researchers and government officials say they still represent an acute threat. A recent report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies found far-right extremists were behind two-thirds of reported terrorist plots and attacks in the U.S. this year. And a recent Department of Homeland Security threat assessment warned white supremacist extremists are the ‘most persistent and lethal threat in the homeland.'”

According to Graham Brookie, director of The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, “The dangerous thing about Election Day is that groups can plan for it. There will be a moment of opportunity and there will be a moment of information about who potentially wins the election or what the conversation is about the results of the election. And they’ll be looking for signals and dog whistles.”

Media Matters’ Angelo Carusone added, “Hyping warnings about potential left-wing violence is significant because that’s what we’re seeing militia groups planning around. We are seeing a similar theme in militia/extremist activity — that they’re hyperfocused on potential for left-wing groups to become violent on or after the election.”

You can read more here.

Ahead of election, governors prepare to deploy troops to cities

The Texas Army National Guard said Monday that up to 1,000 troops could be dispatched to cities across Texas ahead of the Nov. 3 election.

Brandon Jones, a spokesperson for the Guard, said the deployment is not related to the election and troops would not be stationed at polling places. He said it was a continuation of peacekeeping efforts that began during anti-police brutality protests this summer.

“The Texas Military Department was activated to provide additional support to the Department of Public Safety in the summer of 2020,” Maj. Gen. Tracy R. Norris, the adjutant general of Texas, said in a statement. “Texas Service Members continue to support [the Texas Department of Public Safety] in this capacity, guarding historical landmarks such as the Alamo and the State Capitol.”

Troops could be sent to five major cities: Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin and San Antonio, according to the San Antonio Express-News, which first reported the move. The newspaper reported that Guard members could arrive as soon as this weekend.

Gov. Greg Abbott previously activated the National Guard in late May following a series of demonstrations that erupted across Texas in response to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.

During a burial service for Floyd this summer near Houston, police asked other agencies for assistance in what they thought might be a massive gathering with protesters and counter-protesters. U.S. Customs and Border Protection planned a massive presence, including 66 paramilitary agents from CBP’s Border Patrol Tactical Unit.

Abbott’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner has not been contacted by either Abbott or the Guard about the deployment, spokesperson Mary Benton told The Texas Tribune on Tuesday.

In Dallas, Mayor Eric Johnson also was not aware of the potential deployment to his city, according to spokesperson Tristan Hallman.

Law enforcement agencies across the state have been preparing for protests or other unrest on election night. Police departments in Austin, El Paso, San Antonio and Fort Worth previously said officers were planning for demonstrations.

Separately, the FBI’s field office in Dallas warned that far-right extremists could pose a violent threat in North Texas around the election.

And federal agents within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement have been put on standby in the runup to the election, CNN reported on Monday. Customs and Border Protection has been regularly training personnel for unrest.

The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues. 

The stock market is not the economy

Whatever happens to the economy – jobs, wages, the hardships so many are facing – the stock market seems to be in a world of its own. Why?

The primary answer is simple. Stock values roughly reflect profits, especially anticipated profits. When profits are expected to rise, stock prices trend upward. 

But that only raises a deeper question: How can profits be trending upward when jobs and wages are doing so badly?

Because of a disconnect in the American economy that began way before the pandemic – about 30 years ago. 

Before the 1980s, the main driver of profits and the stock market was economic growth. When the economy grew, profits and the stock market rose in tandem. It was a virtuous cycle: Demand for goods and services generated more jobs and higher wages, which in turn stoked demand for more goods and services. 

But since the late 1980s, the main way corporations get profits and stock prices up has been to keep payrolls down. Corporations have done whatever they can to increase profits by cutting jobs and wages. They’ve busted unions, moved to “right-to-work” states, outsourced abroad, reclassified workers as independent contractors, and turned to labor-saving automation. 

Prior to 1989, economic growth accounted for most of the stock market’s gains. Since then, most of the gains have come from money that would otherwise have gone into the pockets of workers. 

Meanwhile, corporations have used their profits and also gone deep into debt to buy back shares of their own stock, thereby pumping up share prices and creating an artificial sugar-high for the stock market.

All this has made the rich even richer. The richest 1 percent of American households own 50 percent of the value of stocks held by American households. The richest 10 percent own 92 percent.

But it’s had the opposite effect for everyone else. More and more of the total economy is going into profits and high stock prices benefiting those at the top, while less and less is going into worker wages and salaries.

America’s CEOs and billionaires are happy as ever, because more and more of their earnings come from capital gains – increases in the prices of their stock portfolios.

Meanwhile, the Fed has taken on the debts many corporations generated when they borrowed in order to buy back their shares of stock – in effect bailing them out, even as millions of Americans continue to struggle. 

So the next time you hear someone say the stock market is a reflection of the economy, tell them that’s rubbish! The real economy is jobs and wages.

Dear fellow progressives: The lesson of history is clear — vote for Joe Biden

‘Tis the season for some progressives to argue that the best way to build a progressive political movement in America is to stick it to the centrist Democrats — who have rejected progressive nominees and platforms — by voting for a third party, even in swing states.

If that helps elect what many regard as a “greater evil” Republican, some third-party supporters argue, it will radicalize significant parts of the electorate, help the third party grow, and gradually increase the prospect of victory for genuinely progressive politics.

As die-hard progressives, we strongly disagree. Few beliefs among progressives have been so thoroughly tested in empirical reality over the last 20 years — and few have been so thoroughly discredited — than the idea that running third-party candidates in swing states during close elections is a good way to build a progressive voting bloc. 

In 2000, Ralph Nader, running as a Green, received 2,882,955 votes, which was 2.74% of the popular vote. 

In 2004, Nader (running as an independent) received 465,650 votes, which was 0.38% of the popular vote. The Green Party’s candidate, David Cobb, received 119,859 votes, or 0.1% of the popular vote. 

These two candidates combined received about 20% of the votes that Nader alone received in 2000. An 80% decrease in your voting bloc is not exactly grounds for confidence that “boycotting” or “protesting” the two-party duopoly via voting for a third party in swing states is likely to expand your voting bloc. 

Why did the Nader and Green voting base fall off a cliff after 2000? The answer is obvious. In 2000, Nader was more or less open that he was intentionally trying to help get George W. Bush elected, under the (now discredited) theory that hard-right regimes somehow swell the ranks of radical voters. 

In his book “Gaming the System: Why Elections Aren’t Fair and What We Can Do About It,” William Poundstone cites a reporter who asked Nader in 2000: “You would not have a problem providing the margin of defeat for Gore?” Nader reportedly replied, “I would not at all. I’d rather have a provocateur than an anesthetizer in the White House. Remember what [Reagan secretary of the interior] James Watt did for the environmental movement? He galvanized it. Gore and his buddy Clinton are anesthetizers.”

In another instance, Nader said he’d prefer Bush over Gore because “it would mobilize us.”

In a 2000 Outside magazine article, Jay Heinrichs wrote: “When asked if someone put a gun to his head and told him to vote for either Gore or Bush, which he would choose, Nader answered without hesitation: ‘Bush. … If you want the parties to diverge from one another, have Bush win.'” And in another interview, Nader told Dana Milbank that a Bush victory would “rally the left.” Nader’s subsequent strategy of campaigning hard in swing states aligned with his theory that Bush would be preferable over Gore for progressives.

Many of Nader’s most prominent supporters in the progressive movement, including one of us (Daniel), along with Michael Moore and a dozen former “Nader’s Raiders,” urged Nader to stick to his original goal: winning 5% of the national vote, which would qualify the Greens for federal funding. 

The obvious way to do that, we said, would be for Nader to stop campaigning in swing states, and instead focus his campaign in vote-rich cities in safely red or blue states such as California, New York and Texas, where he could reach many progressive voters at once. And these voters would feel comfortable supporting the Greens under such a strategy, since most potential progressive voters did not share Nader’s view that Bush would be preferable to Gore.

But Nader chose to abandon his declared 5% strategy. Instead, he campaigned aggressively in swing states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Florida in the final days of the election, favoring fewer total votes but more votes in swing states. This was his apparently intentional strategy of trying to defeat Gore.

Nader’s desire was fulfilled. He received 97,421 votes in Florida, vastly more than Bush’s 537-vote margin of victory in the final official count in Florida, the state that tipped the election to Bush. 

Of course, not all Nader voters in Florida would have voted for Gore had Nader not run in Florida; some would have voted for Bush, and some would not have voted at all. In 2004, Nader stated that “In the year 2000, exit polls reported that 25% of my voters would have voted for Bush, 38% would have voted for Gore and the rest would not have voted at all.” If those percentages held in Florida, that would mean a net gain of 12,664 votes for Gore had Nader not run in Florida — again, far above Bush’s 537-vote margin in the state. 

Nader and many Greens fairly point out that numerous other factors led to Bush’s razor-thin victory. There was widespread, unjust disenfranchisement of minorities in Florida, which the Gore campaign did little or nothing to challenge. There was the extraordinarily weak campaign by Gore, which caused 300,000 Democrats in Florida to vote for Bush, and half of all registered Democrats in the state not to vote at all. Then there were the infamous butterfly ballots and “hanging chads.” And of course, the Supreme Court’s nakedly partisan ruling in Bush v. Gore.

Thus, Nader defenders complain, with some justice, that it’s unfair and disingenuous for Democrats to focus on him and the Greens as the single cause for Bush’s victory, given all these other factors (some of which were self-inflicted by Gore’s campaign). Of course Nader’s swing-state strategy was not the only cause of Bush’s victory, or even the main one.

But it’s at least as disingenuous for Nader and his supporters to claim — as most of them have done ever since — that their choice to campaign in swing states was not even one significant cause among others for Bush’s victory. First, it’s disingenuous because — as quoted above — Nader more or less admitted that he was intending to be one such cause, and his actions aligned with that intention perfectly. 

Second, as described above, Bush’s narrow victory in Florida resulted from multiple factors, each of which alone influenced more votes than the final margin of victory. Thus, each variable was a sufficient cause, holding the other variables constant. If you are clearly one of those sufficient factors which tipped the election to Bush — and particularly if you knew you were likely to be one such factor, and intended to be so — then pointing out all the other factors does not absolve you of your part. Nader and the Greens have refused for 20 years to take any responsibility for their intentional swing-state strategy being one factor, among others, that helped to elect Bush. This obdurate refusal to take any responsibility at all is absurd. It’s a state of denial of Trumpian proportions. 

By intentionally becoming one factor among many that led to Bush’s victory, Nader’s chosen course contributed to catastrophic results for victims of Bush’s policies in the Middle East. (This is not to let off the hook the craven presidents, Democrat and Republican, who have shrunk from “losing” Bush’s wars ever since, as previous presidents acted in Vietnam.)

Was Bush “no different” than Gore, as Nader and the Greens repeatedly claimed during the election? While it’s impossible to know if Gore would have invaded Afghanistan after 9/11, it seems exceedingly unlikely he would have used that crisis as an excuse to invade Iraq, a totally unrelated country. After all, Gore — for all his obvious faults from a progressive perspective — was not a neocon. He was not part of a movement that had been promoting the invasion of Iraq since before the election and (as we now know) started planning for it early in 2001, well before 9/11.

Bush’s Iraq war is one of the great moral stains of the 21st century. In 2006, the Lancet — one of the world’s premier medical journals — published a study estimating that the first year and a half of the Iraq War led to 654,965 excess deaths of Iraqis, and that the vast majority of those deaths were violent. In 2015, Physicians for Social Responsibility embarked on a comprehensive review of the literature, and concluded that the Iraqi death toll from our invasion had likely topped 1 million.

One team of researchers recently concluded that the global “war on terror” that Bush initiated has led to 37 million refugees across the Middle East, which is close to the entire population of Canada becoming refugees. 

Nader’s refrain that there was no significant difference between the major parties or between their two candidates in 2000 — he called them “Tweedledum and Tweedledee” — proved disastrously wrong. As did his prediction that a Bush victory would lead to a surge in progressive voting. Yes, the Republican was even worse than his Democratic opponent — far worse. And no, Bush’s aggression and domestic criminality did not “rally the left,” either in 2004 or 2008. 

On the contrary, far from helping to build a progressive voting bloc outside of the Democratic Party, Nader’s reckless strategy of running in swing states in 2000 decimated the very voting bloc he had built up across the nation. 

The numbers speak for themselves. After their 80% dip in votes in 2004, Nader and the Greens never fully recovered. They went up a bit in 2008. Nader, running as an independent again, received 739,034 votes, which was 0.56% of the popular vote. Cynthia McKinney, running as the Green Party candidate, received 161,797, which was 0.12% of the popular vote. The two candidates combined received less than a third of what Nader received in 2000.

Then in 2012, Nader didn’t run, and the total progressive non-Democrat voting bloc went back down. Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, received 469,627 votes, which was 0.36% of the popular vote. Stein went up in 2016, when she won 1,457,218 votes, which was 1.07% of the popular vote. Still, this was just about half of the votes that Nader received in 2000. 

Where is the progressive “rally” that Nader’s swing-state strategy and his preferred Bush victory was supposed to cause in 2000? In fact, there was not a rally but a free fall. Their judgment of running in swing states, risking if not favoring “the greater of two evils” to “mobilize” progressives, was horrendously misguided.

Of course, terrible judgment isn’t the only thing that keeps a progressive third party from growing. The fact is, our nation has a voting system that stacks the decks wildly in favor of the two-party system. There are many changes to our voting system that could break up the two-party duopoly, and we support all of them. 

Chief among these changes is ranked-choice voting with instant runoff (as Maine and many cities now have). This allows voters to voice their support for an alternative party, without the risk of helping to elect a greater evil. 

We should also abolish the Electoral College. Doing so would avoid the loser of the national vote from gaining power, as happened with Bush and Trump (and could happen again this year). Ending the Electoral College could also support the growth of alternative parties, as (without swing states) it would be harder for a tiny number of votes to swing an election; thus, fewer people would fear supporting an alternative party. While formally abolishing the Electoral College might be impossible politically in the short run, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact would have the same effect, and may be easier to enact. 

But we don’t have these changes yet. And in the absence of such changes, third parties in the U.S. are doomed to minor status. Except for Teddy Roosevelt in 1912 (a former Republican president), no third-party candidate has received 20% of the popular vote since 1860.

Thus, while third parties currently have almost no chance of gaining any traction in the U.S. (because of the features of our voting system mentioned above), they now always run the risk of electing greater evils. Trying to grow a third party as if desirable electoral changes were already operative — when they are not — is not merely a failure to deal with reality; it’s wildly irresponsible. 

Since 1950, the two major parties have indeed been (as Greens correctly point out) similarly deplorable in nuclear policy and the military budget. But in domestic matters, they have never truly been Tweedledum and Tweedledee. With Amy Coney Barrett now on the Supreme Court (along with the other five Republican-nominated justices), the possible overturn of Roe v. Wade is just one dramatic example.

This year — in terms of climate policy, the pandemic, racial justice and maintaining democracy — the “greater evil” is indeed vastly greater. It is reckless to risk that greater evil in the name of a strategy of growing the progressive movement that has been thoroughly disproven over the last 20 years. 

So what’s the answer for progressives who want to see a powerful progressive party in America?

The answer, by now, should be obvious. Progressives should set out to dominate the Democratic Party. A difficult struggle? Definitely. But both possible and necessary.

In 2016, Sen. Bernie Sanders did the right thing, and ran in the Democratic primary. The result? 13,210,550 votes for a candidate who was every bit as progressive as Ralph Nader; this amounted to 43.13% of the total vote in the primary. Bernie’s 2016 showing was the most votes a truly progressive candidate has ever received in a modern American election — far more than Nader’s peak of 2.8 million in 2000. 

Unlike Nader in 2000 — who never stood a chance because of our voting system, which prevents third parties from gaining any traction — Bernie had a solid chance of winning both the Democratic primary and the general election in 2016. 

Third-party progressives always say, “the Democratic Party can’t be reformed.” But Bernie’s impressive achievement in 2016 strongly contradicts that claim. He didn’t win, but he showed decisively that a grassroots insurgent movement, running on small donations without corporate or billionaire funding, can become a significant force in Democratic politics. Third-party supporters counter that the Democratic establishment squashed the Bernie movement. That’s true, but come on … no insurgency sails in without resistance. This one is far from over. 

Did Trump winning in 2016 swell the ranks of progressive voters in 2020? If anyone could “rally the left” to swell the vote, you’d think it would be Donald J. Trump. That had looked equally true in 2000 and 2004 under Bush. Instead, as we’ve seen, eight catastrophic years of Bush — including the Iraq War and universal domestic surveillance — dramatically decreased votes for a progressive candidate. And the same thing has happened under Trump. 

In the 2020 Democratic primary, Bernie received 9,680,042 votes. His fellow progressive Sen. Elizabeth Warren received 2,831,566 votes. Their combined total in 2020 was almost 700,000 fewer votes than Bernie alone received in 2016.

Bernie’s insurgent, grassroots movement rallied after eight years of Obama, a centrist Democrat, not after four years of Trump, a proto-fascist. 

Why? The answer is obvious. When a climate-denier and would-be dictator like Trump (or a warmonger like Bush) is in power, some proportion of progressives feel it’s more urgent to get him out than to get a progressive in; like most Democrats, they see a centrist like Kerry in 2004 or like Biden now as a safer bet for doing so. 

We believe the next Bernie-like progressive Democratic candidate with a chance of winning is far more likely to rise after four years of Biden than after four more years of Trump. (If there’s even a democracy after four more years of Trump!)

For a whole range of reasons — most urgently, the climate crisis, which must be turned around this decade — we need a far more progressive president in 2024 than Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. For example, we would be glad to see that challenger be Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who will turn 35 — the minimum age for becoming president — right before the 2024 election. (We’d also be thrilled if she ran for the Senate.) 

We believe young, progressive insurgents within the Democratic Party, such as the members of “the Squad” and Rep. Ro Khanna, are the future of progressive politics in America. A “protest” vote for a third party, a write-in or not voting at all fails to advance the prospects of these bold challengers. A vote for Biden (which both Bernie and AOC are urging) helps the future chances of young progressives aiming to take over the Democratic Party.

A vote for Biden is not only, crucially, a vote against Trump. It is also a vote for the inspiring possibility of a progressive challenger in 2024, who will have a much easier time gaining traction with a centrist Democrat in power over the next four years, rather than under a president who is hell-bent on destroying the Constitution and ending democracy in America.   

For all these reasons, we urge our fellow progressives in every state to join us, along with Bernie Sanders and AOC, in voting for Joe Biden. 

Why in every state and not just swing states? This is the first presidential election in American history in which the popular vote is important, as well as the Electoral College vote. That’s because it is the first time in our history when an incumbent president has vowed to contest the results, whatever they are, unless he wins. He even rammed through a last-minute appointment of an extremist Supreme Court justice in hopes of winning his challenges in the courts, even if — by an honest and complete count — he loses. 

The best hope of removing Trump from the White House is a landslide victory for Biden, both in the swing states and in the nation as a whole. 

Let’s make that happen. 

Which party wants to gerrymander Virginia? It might not be the one you think

This year, Virginia voters have the rare opportunity to lead the way on making necessary structural change to our democracy by approving Amendment One on the general election ballot. This bipartisan state constitutional amendment will create Virginia’s first redistricting commission and would prohibit partisan gerrymandering in Virginia once and for all. 

That’s the good news. The bad news is that some members of one political party have been stonewalling this progress over the last year. It’s probably not the party you think. 

Although the history of the 2010 redistricting cycle unequivocally shows that Republicans created some of the most rigged, gerrymandered maps in our nation’s history, this time it is some Virginia Democrats who have been the more recent roadblocks as Amendment One has moved toward the voters.

For context, amending Virginia’s constitution involves rigorous vetting. An identical version of the amendment must pass through both chambers of the legislature in two consecutive sessions of the General Assembly. In this case, partisan control over the House of Delegates changed hands between the two votes; Republicans held the majority before the 2019 election and Democrats afterwards.

Wouldn’t you know it: One month after Democrats won the majority — and with it, complete control over the maps that will be drawn in 2021 if no commission is enacted — some began to publicly express their displeasure over a bill they had supported and even campaigned on just a few months before. 

Let’s be very clear about the choice voters have: Citizens can have a seat at the table for the first time in Virginia’s long history, or the broken status quo stays in place. One party will have the power to draw district lines, in secret, with no transparency guidelines, or eight citizens will be invited into the process.

This Democratic majority has done impressive things on voting rights. But for some, the temptation to control the mapmaking process is apparently impossible to resist.

First, some Democrats tried to kill the amendment while no one was looking. Even though it ultimately passed again in 2020, that happened only after weeks of shameless obstructionism — a breathtaking partisan role reversal that included unexpectedly delaying committee votes and rewriting the entire thing at the 11th hour to refusing to physically give the vote tally back to the Senate as part of a shady procedural move meant to pocket-veto the measure entirely. 

Then came the not-so-secret plan to kill it at the ballot box. Since they couldn’t win in the General Assembly, some elements inside the Democratic Party of Virginia are actively telling local party committees to reject the amendment this fall. An opposition group made up of party insiders — desperate to lock themselves in power — has formed and is actively fundraising to kill Amendment One. 

Imagine the reaction of Democrats if the GOP tried even a fraction of the legal maneuvers and procedural tricks of the past few months. They would rightly cry foul and maintain that the will of the people was being subverted under the guise of whatever excuse seemed popular that week. 

This hypocrisy isn’t lost on those of us that have been fighting for fair maps — not red maps or blue maps — for the past decade. Many of those on the front lines of Virginia’s opposition have said the right thing until it was time to actually do the right thing. They had claimed that they would support different reforms. But it’s too late for that, and Democrats couldn’t pass those even with complete control. 

In reality, they’re stalling until they can draw themselves a decade of dominance. It’s wrong, and many other principled Democrats have held true and continue to support the amendment, including every member of the State Senate’s Legislative Black Caucus.

Americans of all sides want fair maps, even when partisan leaders try to hold control for themselves. Voters in Utah, Missouri, Colorado, Michigan and Ohio enacted redistricting reforms in 2018, often with 60 to 70 percent of the vote. Partisan gerrymandering is cheating. Voters know it. Now it is time for Virginians to remind their politicians that voters should choose their politicians, not the other way around.

There are national implications in this amendment vote: If Virginia Democrats kill Amendment One, they will have done serious and far-reaching damage to the voting rights struggle nationwide. They will have taken away one of the few examples in recent history where Democrats and Republicans actually worked together to “unrig” the political system. Citizens will have lost a seat at the table, and the unfair redistricting laws of Virginia’s past will remain. The wrong signal will have been sent to politicians in other states. It is time for Virginia to be on the right side of history. 

Could Trump’s success with Cuban American voters help tip Florida his way?

With Florida again looking pivotal in the presidential race, Donald Trump and Joe Biden have found themselves revisiting a decades-old question that could decide a crucial share of votes: What to do about Cuba?

It’s a debate that many analysts thought was largely over. When President Barack Obama traveled to Havana in 2016 to “bury the Cold War” between the two countries, the tentative support of many Cuban Americans surprised even hopeful Democrats. That fall, Hillary Clinton — who had called for ending the United States economic embargo against Cuba “once and for all” — won more Cuban votes in Florida than Obama had collected in 2012.

Four years later, the Cold War is decidedly back. In a sustained barrage of punitive measures, Trump has restricted travel to the island, blocked investment and withdrawn most American diplomats from Havana. Visas for Cubans to visit or join family in the United States have been cut sharply. The administration has even begun to limit the ways Cuban Americans can send money to their relatives.

But while Cuban Americans oppose many of those specific policies, according to a survey this summer by Florida International University, two-thirds broadly support Trump’s confrontational stance toward the island’s Communist government.

“Ultimately, most Cuban Americans view logistical inconveniences as a small price to pay for freedom and accountability of a dictatorship that has oppressed its people for far too long,” said Mercedes Schlapp, a Cuban American who served in the Trump White House and is a senior adviser to the Trump campaign.

Biden argues that the president’s tough line should be judged by the results, not the rhetoric. “The administration’s approach is not working,” he said on a visit to Miami this month. “Cuba is no closer to democracy than it was four years ago.”

Yet if recent polling holds, analysts said, Trump could win 60% of the Cuban American vote — surpassing the estimated 50% to 54% he won in the 2016 election. “Trump has gone through the roof with the poll numbers from Hispanics,” the president told a group of Cuban American supporters at the White House last month. “I guess they didn’t know I love you, but I do.”

Even as the race in Florida has tightened, it remains to be seen whether the Cuba issue is still potent enough, almost 62 years after the revolution, to help swing the state and its 29 electoral votes; along with New York, Florida has the third-largest number of electoral votes, after California and Texas. The two-thirds of Cuban Americans who live in Florida account for only about 5% of its roughly 14 million voters. But their shifting views on American policy are again drawing outsize attention in a state that remains closely divided between the two parties.

“This clearly is a harder line” toward Cuba, said Guillermo Grenier, a sociologist at Florida International University who has overseen its surveys of Cuban American opinion for nearly 30 years.

To Miami’s old guard, who fled Cuba after the 1959 revolution, Obama’s attempt to promote change through closer engagement was always dangerously naive. By not conditioning his opening on human rights improvements, they argued, Obama threw then-President Raúl Castro an economic lifeline while demanding nothing in return. The regime’s continued repression of political critics thereafter was entirely predictable.

Still, Democrats were confident that Cuban American demographics were shifting their way. Whatever the recalcitrance of Cuban elders, their children and grandchildren appeared less wedded to the coercive approach that had so long failed to bring meaningful change on the island. More recent immigrants — who were generally more skeptical that the government in Cuba could be dislodged and were more connected to relatives there — also supported freer travel and closer economic ties.

So, after years of growing Cuban American support for the Democratic Party, one of the most striking results of the FIU poll was the 76% of recent Cuban immigrants who reported having registered to vote as Republicans. Only 5% of the respondents, who came to the United States between 2010 and 2015, said they had become Democrats; the rest described themselves as independents.

Even as the Democrats have gained ground, the Republican Party has been more active and better organized among Latinos in South Florida. Hard-liners on Cuba remain powerful across local Spanish-language media outlets. “For Republicans, it’s always a home game in Miami,” said Ana Sofía Pelaez, a leader of the Miami Freedom Project, a progressive Cuban group focused on social issues.

Younger, hipper Republican partisans have also begun to emerge. Among the more prominent is a kooky YouTube personality, Alexander Otaola, who left Cuba in 2003 and offers a comedic, reggaeton-infused alternative to the vitriolic talk radio that still echoes on local airwaves. Otaola has become a boisterous Trump evangelist, exhorting his audience to beware the Democrats’ “socialist” tendencies.

The biggest influencer has been Trump himself. His warnings that the Democrats will deliver America to socialism, while silly to some voters, have been repeated constantly in advertising and social-media posts that target Florida refugees from Venezuela and Nicaragua as well as Cuba. The purported threat of self-described democratic socialists like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been a staple theme of that campaign, which has established at least a notional coherence between Trump’s domestic politics and his bellicose stance toward leftist regimes in Latin America.

“They have been relentless,” said Jose Javier Rodriguez, a Democrat and Cuban-American state senator, of the “socialism” attack. “So relentless that it has been somewhat effective.”

Another big factor in Trump’s success with Cuban American voters has been his willingness to show up. Trump was mocked by some critics last month when he recalled a “beautiful” award he said he had received from veterans of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. (No such award is known to exist.) But he should hardly have to prove his loyalty to the cause. The very first stop on Trump’s first foray into presidential campaigning in 1999 was the two-room Bay of Pigs Library and Museum in Miami’s Little Havana, where he turned up with his then-girlfriend, Melania Knauss. “My policy,” he said then, “is you have to keep pressure on Castro.”

As president, Trump has tried to ratchet up that pressure. In addition to blocking tourism, investment and trade, he all but shuttered the American Embassy in Havana, citing mysterious, suspected attacks on diplomats there. Visas for Cubans to visit the United States were cut to 10,167 last year from a high of 41,001 in 2014. His administration also suspended a family reunification program that had authorized more than 125,000 Cubans to join relatives in the United States since 2007, and it sharply increased the deportation of Cuban asylum-seekers.

Cuban Americans’ response to those measures has been contradictory. In the FIU poll, 71% of the respondents said the United States’ long-running economic embargo against Cuba hasn’t worked, yet 60% said it should remain in place. Many of them also said Washington’s Cuba policy was less important to them than other issues, including the economy, health care, race relations and even China policy.

Florida Democrats admitted that they have had little success in trying to focus attention on the collateral damage to Cubans from Trump’s policies. The Democrats may have done even less to argue the Obama administration’s case that closer contact with the United States is the best way to push the Cuban government toward greater political and economic freedom for the island.

“I think a lot of Democrats have concluded that while there are strong intellectual arguments for those initiatives, politically they just don’t pay off,” said Carlos Curbelo, a former Republican congressman from Miami.

Is the pandemic making us sober up?

The early dark joke of the pandemic was that the only businesses thriving were the makers of hand sanitizer and liquor. Our collective desire to kill germs was rivaled only, it appeared, by the one to self-anesthetize. But now, months into a crisis that has gone from an optimistically described “pause” to an indefinite way of life, is it time to now settle up that tab? Or have we in fact been secretly sober all along?

In those first bewildering weeks of the virus, as my friends and I were scheduling Zoom happy hours and turning to our laptops for “quarantinis,” the evidence suggested we were right on track with everybody else. “Alcohol sales surge” pronounced a Miami Herald headline back in April. “How are Americans coping with the global coronavirus pandemic?” Reporter Don Sweeney asked. “According to alcohol industry sales figures, they’re drinking — a lot.” And in September, NPR declared alcohol sales “a bright spot in a troubled economy” as Drizly’s Liz Paquette marveled that “As we stand today, we’re up around 350 percent” in sales over the same time last year.” But those assessments may have been misleading from the beginning.

Assessing whether Americans were really drinking more is complicated by geography. Yes, online alcohol sales jumped over the springtime — and bars were mostly closed. Yet when you pull back, it doesn’t look so much like a spike as a simple shift. “Everyone keeps talking about how the is drinking up because mail orders are up,” says Sarah Hepola, author of the bestselling memoir “Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget.” “But you’re not accounting for the fact that there’s all these other revenue streams that got completely shut down. I feel like in order to take the full 360, you need a lot more data than we have right now.”

But while a worsening pandemic and looming election certainly make it feel like we’re in a sweatpants-and-Ina-Garten-sized cosmopolitans-at-10AM moment, the truth may be that it’s a fantastic time to not drink. While data collection is not exactly part of the recovery community ethos, my sober friends and family say they’ve noticed an uptick in newcomers recently. “There’s more stress and isolation,” one longtime member of Alcoholics Anonymous tells me, “which arguably is leading some people to come in to the program sooner than they might have otherwise.”

Hepola agrees. “We’re months into this and you would imagine that people are realizing, ‘Maybe drinking myself through this isn’t going to work really well.’ We don’t know when it’s going to end, and meanwhile, life does go on. Maybe wine and alcohol became the immediate crutch to deal with the fear and anxiety of the uncertainty. But what happens if you go to that repeatedly over a long amount of time is you will actually increase your fear and uncertainty, because you won’t know what you did the night before. You won’t know how you’re going to do the next day. You reach for that crutch, and it creates more brokenness.”

“There’s no question that there are people who have problems drinking, and that their drinking is up,” she says. But, she adds, “12-step recovery just got a boost into the 21st century that it wasn’t expecting to have. I think there’s a number of people that are dipping a toe into that. The 12-step meetings have never been easier to go to, in the sense that you literally click and you can hide your face and you don’t have to announce yourself. All the steps of going into a church basement, researching it on an ancient website that was never designed for the 21st century, trying to figure out where is this place — all that stuff, that was really hard.” Now it’s especially easy to have a support community, even for those who might barely get to leave the house.

And even people like me, who have no inclination to write off alcohol altogether, are finding themselves experimenting with the “sober curious” movement that was already gaining traction before the virus. This past month, aka Sober October, has been as good jumping off point as any for those inclined to not drink, without committing to never drinking.

This past year, a multitude of temptations and excuses have been cleared away. Dining out is a complicated, infrequent event. Parties don’t (or aren’t supposed to, anyway) happen. Even with the holiday season, typically the most high-achieving time of year for any drinker, barreling toward us, the incentives just aren’t in place. Where’s that awkward Thanksgiving with your racist uncle that goes more smoothly with a surreptitious shot of Jameson now? That ironman weekend of celebrations across multiple zip codes? That tipsy night out with your high school buddies after you touch down in your hometown for Christmas? They’re all gone. Might as well stick with seltzer — or any of the inventive new brands of nonalcoholic beverages like Curious Elixirs — if it’s going to be like that.

I discovered almost immediately in quarantine that I miss drinking. And when I say that I miss drinking, I mean that I miss drinking with other people. I miss the associations of it, I miss the rituals. In time, I’ve developed new habits, some of which still involve alcohol. On Friday evenings, I mix myself a simple, single margarita or Paloma as a way to signal to myself that I am, however briefly, transitioning into the weekend. I’ll have a glass of Malbec at my elbow as I putter through a rare unrushed preparation of a dinner. I’ll watch an entire movie from start to finish, and have a beer as accompaniment. But mostly, I find there’s not much point in raising a glass if there’s no one else there to click it. And while I may be mostly alone, I am not alone in that. This week, a friend invited a few of us to an early evening “Zoom happy hour.” We all talked for ages and caught up on our lives. And not a single person even bothered to drink.

This hearty cinnamon apple skillet pancake is a breeze if you use box mix

There was a diner in Louisville, Ky., located about two miles away from where I attended college, that had a default popularity with students because it was one of the few options in walking distance, from both the university and the bars, that was open 24 hours a day. 

It wasn’t amazing. Everything — the booths, the floor, the menus — always seemed mysteriously sticky despite the omnipresent “Caution: Wet Floor” sign, and there were some items on the menu that you just knew weren’t worth ordering (the open-faced turkey sandwich, for instance, was nothing more than a beige, gravy-covered lump). 

But the food was cheap and hot, and the all-day breakfast was comforting. One of the cooks, a woman in her 60s with rust-colored curls, once let me in on the secret to her pan-fried apple slices: “A hot skillet and more cinnamon than you think you need.” The key to her pancakes? 

“Just use the stuff from the box, can’t too often beat it.” 

The diner has changed hands multiple times since I went to school — it’s no longer open 24-hours a day and I couldn’t tell you what they serve these days — but I’ve spent a lot of time in my own kitchen trying to recreate the late-night meals I ate there. 

This dish is a combination of those cinnamon apples and fluffy pancakes, made by layering spiced baked apples with some boxed pancake mix that we’ve augmented with half-and-half, vanilla, eggs and cinnamon (you can obviously use a homemade batter, too; I like this recipe from Food52). The entire meal is baked in a single skillet and comes together in less than an hour, so it’s ideal for a leisurely weekend morning. 

* * *

RECIPE: Cinnamon apple skillet pancake 
Serves 4 to 6 

Ingredients

  • 2 apples — peeled, cored and thinly sliced 
  • 3 tablespoons of butter, thinly cubed 
  • 4 tablespoons of brown sugar
  • 4 teaspoons of cinnamon, divided, plus more for dusting 
  • 2 cups of pancake or baking mix (I like Bisquick, Annie’s or Bob’s Red Mill)
  • 2 cups of half-and-half or whole milk 
  • 1 tablespoon of vanilla extract
  • 2 eggs, whipped
  • Powdered sugar for dusting

1. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. In a large skillet or a Dutch oven that holds at least 4 quarts, layer the apple slices, the cubes of butter, brown sugar and 2 teaspoons of cinnamon. 

2. Allow the mixture to cook for 30 minutes, stirring once halfway through baking. 

3. Meanwhile, combine the pancake mix, half-and-half, vanilla extract, eggs and the 2 remaining teaspoons of cinnamon in a large mixing bowl. 

4. Remove the skillet from the oven and pour the batter over the apples. 

5. Return the skillet to the oven for an additional 12 to 15 minutes; it should be cooked through so that a fork or tester pulls out clean. 

6. Sprinkle the top of the pancake with powdered sugar and cinnamon to taste, and serve warm. 

5 tips for a safe Halloween during COVID-19 — and what to do if trick-or-treating is canceled

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, families have had to adjust to a number of health regulations and restrictions. Much to the dismay of millions of children, this may apply to Halloween trick-or-treating as well.

National health authorities in Canada have said Halloween trick-or-treating can go ahead, depending on local public health direction, with careful planning and preparation to minimize risks of viral transmission.

Due to local infection numbers, some cities or regions recommend skipping trick or treating.

As trick-or-treating is largely an outdoor activity, it is on the safer side of the spectrum when social distancing and mask wearing are maintained. However, many parents are reportedly feeling uncertain about trick-or-treating given the potential for increased virus transmission when collecting candy door-to-door.

A recent poll conducted by Leger and the Association for Canadian Studies suggests that 52 per cent of parents won’t let their children trick-or-treat this year.

Whether you decide to allow your child to trick-or-treat or not, it’s important to plan out how you will talk to them about this decision. Drawing on our expertise in child development and infectious disease, we’re here to help make an informed decision about Halloween this year and provide some tips for communicating your decision to your child effectively.

If trick-or-treating is a go in your family

If your family has decided to trick-or-treat or give out candy, you’ll want to sit down with your kids and lay some ground rules that take the pandemic into consideration.

Root the conversation about trick-or-treating regulations in what you know about the virus within your community. Safety varies between communities, and in areas of the country with few COVID-19 cases, the risk remains low. However, in hotspots, the risk rises.

Come up with a clear plan for children to follow so they can keep themselves and others safe when trick-or-treating. Write down or walk through what your child can expect and what is expected of them well before the night. When parents do this, children feel more comfortable and prepared, which helps them buy into the plan.

Central items this plan should include:

  1. Continue to use fabric or surgical masks. Some children may be tempted to replace fabric or surgical masks with Halloween masks, but the fabric of Halloween masks may not be sufficient to prevent viral transmission. Don’t draw on masks. Some markers or paint could have solvents that would be directly inhaled by the child. It could also be possible to inadvertently tear a disposable mask with friction.

  2. Avoid gathering at doors. Instead, think of lining up to get candy the same way most stores have set up check-out lines, with only one person at a time at the door. While some who are shelling out candy may find creative ways to create more distance between themselves and trick-or-treaters, such as sliding candy down a tube or chute, others may follow recommended practices of using tongs to distribute candy or pouring pre-packaged candy onto a tray for children to choose.

  3. Health authorities are recommending to “keep it local, keep it small,” which means staying within one’s local neighbourhood and in small trick-or-treating groups. Ideally these groups should be build around the children’s pre-existing cohorts or bubbles.

  4. Encourage children to bring — and use — hand sanitizer as they are likely to be touching their faces more than usual while adjusting their costumes.

  5. Have children wash their hands thoroughly at home before they start digging into their loot.

Although you may want to encourage your child’s independence by letting them trick-or-treat without you if it is developmentally appropriate, you also want to ensure your child has the maturity and ability to manage these added pandemic-specific suggestions.

If you don’t think your child is capable of following through with your COVID-19 Halloween plan, you may consider putting on a costume and joining them in the local tour of neighbors’ porches this year!

If trick-or-treating is a no-go

Although it may be hard to tell your child they can’t partake in trick-or-treating, an honest conversation about the specific reasons for why they can’t will help them process the information. Research shows that parents who are open to discussion and collaboration tend to be most successful in conversations with their children.

When discussing this decision with your child, tailor the details of this conversation to their age. For children under six, you may want to emphasize that this is to keep them and others safe. For children older than six, emphasize that this choice plays an active role in reducing the transmission of the virus and that missing Halloween this year is likely a one-off.

If you child indicates that they are upset or frustrated about missing out on the Halloween tradition this year, start by taking the time to listen and validate their feelings. It’s a treasured holiday for most children and it’s understandable that they feel miffed for missing out.

Be compassionate and let them know that feeling disappointed and upset is completely understandable. For instance, you could share something along the lines of: “I understand why you feel sad that you can’t trick-or-treat this year, I know how much you love that tradition.”

While it’s hard to see our children upset, it also presents an opportunity to help them learn some problem-solving skills. You can encourage them to brainstorm some options and resist the urge to find all the solutions for them. When children generate solutions to their problems, it helps give them a sense of control over the situation and an enhanced degree of satisfaction.

For example, research has shown that children are more likely to be motivated and buy into plans if they had a say in developing them. The executive functioning skills they learn through problem-solving is also good for their brain health.

Although door-to-door trick-or-treating may not be an option for your family, there are plenty of alternatives. Some ideas could include a candy scavenger hunt in the house or park, a Halloween movie night or a virtual costume show-and-tell with family and friends. And even though you aren’t trick-or-treating, you can still have fun with other Halloween traditions, like pumpkin carving and lawn decorations.

Ultimately, it will be up to parents to decide whether they are comfortable with trick-or-treating this year. If you want to take a more collaborative approach with your child, you can discuss the pros and cons of trick-or-treating and together come to a decision. This approach may be particularly important for the growth and development of older children and adolescents.

Sheri Madigan, Associate Professor, Canada Research Chair in Determinants of Child Development, Owerko Centre at the Alberta Children’s Hospital Research Institute, University of Calgary; Craig Jenne, Associate Professor, Department of Microbiology Immunology and Infectious Diseases, University of Calgary, and Rachel Eirich, Master’s student, Determinants of Child Development Lab, University of Calgary

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

Trump’s tax bills are what happens when government tries to make policy through the tax code

People tend to have one of two reactions to the revelation that President Donald Trump has paid little to no taxes in recent years: He’s either an amoral tax cheat or he’s smart.

To me, it reveals just how much is wrong with the U.S. tax code, which Congress treats as a sort of policy Swiss Army knife to deal with innumerable desired social and economic policy goals, from homeownership to protecting the Maine blueberry industry.

I teach a course on “the politics of taxes,” in which we examine how politics shapes tax policy in the United States and other countries — as well as how taxation affects politics. My students are consistently struck by the extent to which Congress uses taxes as its default go-to policy lever.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

The tax code takes over

In principle, the main function of taxation is to fund the government. But in practice, Congress also uses it to tackle challenges in virtually every policy area, from promoting conservation and charitable giving to encouraging entrepreneurship and ensuring steady business revenue.

All of these policies, however sound they made be individually, make the income tax system more complicated for ordinary taxpayers and creates a vast array of means by which some wealthy people can reduce their tax payments to levels that feel unfair to many voters. They also, ultimately, aren’t a very good way to reach achieve the policy’s explicit goals.

This convoluted system was thus not created in a big bang of malfeasance or ineptitude but mostly through piecemeal changes that increasingly complicated the tax code. Legislative reforms meant to simplify the tax code, such as those passed in 1986 and 2017, have accomplished little.

“The result of this process is a set of very complex provisions that appear to have no overall logic if the tax law were being designed from scratch,” as the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center put it.

This complexity has a range of negative impacts.

For example, estimates vary but most suggest taxpayers likely pay well over US$100 billion a year in time and money filing their taxes each year — known as tax compliance. The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act does not appear to have reduced compliance costs despite its emphasis on simplifying the 1040 tax form.

And it’s a lot worse than in other rich countries.

The average American spends about 13 hours filing their taxes each year, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation, compared with under an hour in the Netherlands, Japan and Estonia. In Sweden, the government fills in the tax forms automatically, and citizens can simply view and approve them — or make changes — on their cellphone.

Another result is that social welfare programs in the U.S. can be needlessly complicated.

For example, Canada provides its citizens with cheap child care simply by subsidizing it so that it costs $6 a day. Instead of offering subsidies, the U.S. supports lower- and middle-income parents mainly through the tax code with credits like the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit. But both are very complicated, poorly understood and often do not reach those who need it.

How Trump takes advantage

Complexity also means that the tax code is littered with opportunities for wealthier taxpayers like Trump to reduce their tax bill quite substantially. The perception that there are loopholes that only the rich can use leads many taxpayers to view the system as unfair.

Three of the strategies The Times reported that Trump has used to avoid taxes demonstrate this quite well.

In 2006, lawmakers wanted to promote conservation while helping farmers and ranchers, so they expanded conservation easements, in which property holders agree to not develop land in exchange for a tax deduction. Trump used this frequently abused provision to claim a $21.1 million deduction in 2015 for not developing land near his Seven Springs estate that his family wanted to use as a private retreat anyway.

Another example is how U.S. tax policy allows individuals to walk away from an investment and, if they receive nothing, declare any losses that haven’t yet been taken on their current tax return, reducing income by that amount. The policy aim here is to encourage entrepreneurship by not making business failure too onerous.

Trump used this abandonment rule in 2009 to declare more than $700 million in losses when he walked away from his Atlantic City casinos. Yet it appears he got something in exchange for walking way — stock in a new company — which means he may have technically violated the rules of that tax break.

And in 2009, Congress wanted to help businesses recover from the financial crisis so it made it easier to use the large losses that many companies were experiencing to offset income earned in prior years, which resulted in refunds for taxes already paid. This allowed Trump to claim a refund of $56.9 million he had paid in taxes in 2005 and 2006.

[Deep knowledge, daily. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter.]

The government has ways other than tax code to implement a policy with a social or economic aim, such as via regulations or spending on a new or existing government program. Lawmakers have often preferred to use the tax code because it can seem easier and avoids the political costs associated with higher taxes.

Ultimately, however, research shows using tax code is not the best way to achieve a policy’s ends.

Gary Winslett, Assistant Professor, Middlebury

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Warm up this fall with this simple salmon chowder from “The Pacific Northwest Seafood Cookbook”

Clam chowder may get all the press, but this one-pot salmon version embodies the ethos behind Pacific Northwest seafood: a stunning, soul-warming dish with the fish as the star of the show. It’s dead simple to make, but the flavors are exciting and lively. There are no tricks or trickiness to the recipe, and it works equally well with the fresh salmon called for here, canned salmon, or leftover cooked salmon. Either way, the result is a comforting, delightful soup that emphasizes the flavor of the fish.

***

Recipe: Salmon Chowder
Serves 4 to 6

  • 4 ounces bacon, chopped
  • 2 celery ribs, chopped
  • 1 leek, white parts only, chopped
  • ½ teaspoon kosher salt, plus more as needed
  • 1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
  • 2 large Yukon Gold (or similar) potatoes, diced
  • 2 cups chicken stock
  • 2 bay leaves
  • 1 sprig thyme
  • ½ pound salmon, skin and bones removed, cut into bite-sized pieces
  • 1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
  • ½ cup heavy cream
  • Zest of 1 lemon
  • ¼ cup chopped parsley

1. In a heavy pot or Dutch oven over medium heat, cook the bacon until most of the fat is rendered and the pieces begin to crisp, about 8 minutes. Add the celery, leek, and ½ teaspoon of salt, and cook, stirring occasionally, until the vegetables are soft, about 5 minutes.

2. Dust in the flour, stirring to make sure there are no clumps, then add the potatoes, stock, bay leaves, and thyme. Lower the heat and let simmer for 10 minutes. The potatoes should be starting to soften—you should be able to stab them easily with a fork. If not, keep simmering for a few more minutes.

3. Add the salmon and mustard, and let cook for 3 to 5 minutes, until the salmon is fully opaque. Turn off the heat, stir in the cream and the lemon zest, then salt to taste.

4. Garnish with parsley.

 

If you liked this recipe as much as we do, be sure to order Naomi Tommy’s “The Pacific Northwest Seafood Cookbook.”

 

Maine progressives not fooled even a little bit by Susan Collins’ cynical vote on Barrett

Progressives in Maine and across the U.S. on Tuesday urged Sen. Susan Collins’ constituents to reject her latest attempt to cast herself as a moderate Republican after the four-term senator voted against Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation. 

Collins was the only member of her party to vote against the judge’s confirmation and was one of two Republicans on Sunday to vote against advancing Barrett’s nomination to the Senate floor. But in Maine, progressive activists who have spent recent years vowing to unseat Collins in next week’s election said the senator’s actions must not be confused for a principled stand against President Donald Trump’s agenda.  

Marie Follayttar, executive director of the grassroots group Mainers for Accountable Leadership, noted that Collins made clear she has no problem with Barrett serving as a federal judge when she supported her 2017 confirmation to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals.

Collins made that vote despite the fact that Barrett had never before served as a judge, tried a case to verdict, or argued an appeal in court. While Collins has long branded herself as pro-choice, she voted for Barrett even though she has very publicly espoused anti-choice views. 

Dubbing her ‘Sidekick Sue,’ Follayttar told Common Dreams Tuesday that Collins was “given her hall pass by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell when — and only when — the votes to confirm were in and she could play the act of moderate senator from Maine.”

Follayttar and other progressives argued that Collins’ vote against Barrett on Monday night was one the Senate Republicans could afford, since every other member of the party supported sending Barrett to the Supreme Court.

Although Collins objected to the Senate vote on Barrett’s confirmation just over a week before Election Day, while early voting is already underway across the country, grassroots group Suit Up Maine tweeted that the senator “approves of Barrett’s anti-LGBTQ, anti-abortion, originalist views.”

“WE. WILL. VOTE. HER. OUT,” the organization said. 

The senator acknowledged as much on Sunday, stating, “Because this vote is occurring prior to the election, I will vote against the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett. To be clear, my vote does not reflect any conclusion that I have reached about Judge Barrett’s qualifications to serve on the Supreme Court.”

Reproductive rights group NARAL Pro-Choice America accused Collins of attempting to “rewrite history” two years after she supported the confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who had been accused of sexual assault and had also issued anti-choice rulings as a federal judge. 

“Susan Collins’ vote against Amy Barrett’s confirmation is a last-ditch effort to rewrite history and distract voters from her betrayal in voting to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court,” said NARAL President Ilyse Hogue. “Collins’ vote paved the way for cementing a right-wing majority on the Court bound and determined to gut Roe v. Wade and roll back decades of progress on reproductive freedom and women’s rights. That cannot be erased and voters will not forget.”

“Senator Collins has continued to enable Trump and McConnell’s anti-choice, anti-freedom agenda,” Hogue added. “This vote is too little, too late.”

In addition to voting for Kavanaugh, Collins has supported the confirmations of dozens of President Donald Trump’s anti-choice judiciary nominees, all while continuing to claim that she supports reproductive rights.

With Sara Gideon, the Democratic candidate running for Collins’ seat, holding only a slim lead in recent polls, progressives are hoping to counter the narrative that persists in the mainstream press regarding Collins as a moderate voice in the Republican Party, as evidenced by recent Newsweek headlines calling her “the lone Republican to oppose” Barrett and claiming she’s been “shunned by Trump” but is “standing firm” against the new justice.   

“When you look at her record: the tax giveaways, the Kavanaugh appointment, undermining the ACA — it’s clear that Susan Collins is interested in keeping her access to wealth and power in Washington, but she’s no longer interested in being our senator,” said Willy Ritch, executive director of the Maine-based grassroots group 16 Counties Coalition.

“Susan Collins keeps saying she wants us to judge her on her record,” added Ritch. “But her record shows she is loyal to Mitch McConnell and the corporate special interests that fund their campaigns, not the Mainers she claims to represent.”

Four years into a scandal-pocked presidency, “Roadkill” just seems flat

Corrupt politics, greedy public officials failing upward – it’s all so tiresome and depressing, isn’t it?

But damn if it doesn’t go down more smoothly in a British accent. Usually, I should say.

“Roadkill,” the latest “Masterpiece” limited series from Oscar-nominated screenwriter and playwright David Hare, tests that theory with prismatic tag-along through the a rocky chapter in British government minister Peter Laurence’s career. Played with a rakish confidence by Hugh Laurie, we’re introduced to Peter as he’s walking out of court, victorious in libel case alleging that he lied about an attempt to use his office for financial gain.

As soon as the politician is safely ensconced in his car he breathes a sigh of relief, making it obvious that he succeeded despite his guilt, come what may to the people harmed by his actions. What he’s guilty of, exactly, isn’t made clear at first. Made more obvious straightaway is that he has a deep bench of enemies with scores to settle and false allies who wouldn’t mind bringing him down a peg. And it’s easy to see why that is.

Laurie plays his character with a healthy dose of smugness barely masked by false humility, presenting Peter as the familiar type of political figure who comes across as an even-keeled, trustworthy man of the people skilled in the art of smiling gently in his constituents’ faces while he’s picking their pockets. In other seasons and other shows, this sort of rake is an easy charmer, a solid sell. After watching all four hours of “Roadkill,” I’m not so sure if Laurie’s efforts to channel that kind of magic works as well here.

Still, he’s a solid lead to an impressive cast that includes Helen McCrory as scheming prime minister Dawn Ellison, who posits that keeping Laurence close is better than pushing him away and therefore making him a threat to her political position. Of course, this doesn’t take into account the designs other have on shaping the government and the role a man like Peter could play in those strategies . . . if he can keep his assorted secrets hidden away.

Unfortunately for them, and for Peter, the list of those he’s wronged is quite lengthy, starting with Charmian Pepper (Sarah Greene, “Normal People”) the journalist whose reputation he ruins through chicanery; his wife Helen (Saskia Reeves), who he persuades to lie for him; his mistress Madeleine (Sidse Babett Knudsen), whose career ambitions he thwarts in order to keep her nearby. We’re not done. Peter’s overworked right-hand man oversteps his boundaries too frequently for such behavior to be accidental. Then there’s barrister who successfully defends Peter but suspects he’s actually guilty and can’t let the case go. And there are others I could mention, but that would ruin some of the miniseries’ best surprises.

Hare is equally focused on writing towards Peter’s concern over getting away with whatever he can and his inadequacy as a powermonger. What’s interesting is that this very quality enables him to float up the ladder as opposed to fighting for a toehold on every rung. Because of this “Roadkill” come across as flaccid in key points despite Laurie’s charm and his best efforts, alongside that of its stellar cast.

“Roadkill” will keenly make you aware of how much more devilish goodness existed in similarly themed series such as the British version of “House of Cards,” and how exciting it is to see a story that validates our assumptions about the soullessness of the sorts of figures who enter the viper’s pit of governance. But while it attempts to say something about the dangerousness of banal characters and the people around them, it doesn’t quite make that case in a clear and compelling away.

“Roadkill” is only as good as its performances, and to its good fortune and ours the series boasts strong turns across the board.  But in a series that takes its title from the concept of avoiding political failure it’s disconcerting to feel as if we have to work to be shocked or incensed by each of Peter’s scandals and figure out how and if each connects to others. Only after it’s all on the table does one realize that his evildoings are fairly quaint compared to the real-life dirty dealings of politicians across the pond and in our backyard.

Maybe it’s the times in which “Roadkill” is coming to us, smack in the middle of an election cycle asking voters to choose between four more years of a monstrous, destructive president or replacing him with the human version of valium. Peter’s troubles and the damage he causes are terrible in close-up, but seen through a broader lens grimed up by reality, they’re almost tolerable.

Perhaps that’s the scariest part of watching “Roadkill,” the fact that at the end of it all, even as we see Peter setting himself up for hardest falls at the expense of other people, and even as the people around him appear poised to push him over that cliff, one has to strain to care. 

“Masterpiece: Roadkill” airs on Sundays, Nov. 1-22 at 9 p.m. for  on PBS member stations.

Labor leaders propose a general strike if Trump loses but does not accept the results

In the event that President Donald Trump loses in the upcoming election but refuses to give up power, some American unions are contemplating a general strike — meaning a major strike in which a significant percentage of workers from every sector of the economy withhold their labor. 

Many analysts, psychologists, the president’s advisers and even the president himself have suggested that he will not accept the results if he loses, which could trigger a larger political crisis or unrest for those who want to force him out. Back in 2016, Trump infamously refused to accept the legitimacy of the election results if he did not win.

Historically, mass strikes have been effective means of forcing political outcomes; such labor actions can effectively shut down all economic activity, crippling business and factory owners who rely on their workers’ labor in order to profit across all sectors.

“Democracies are not, in the last analysis, protected by judges or lawyers, reporters or publishers,” the executive council of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), the largest federation of unions in the United States, declared in a resolution approved earlier this month. “The survival of democracy depends on the determination of working people to defend it. And America’s labor movement is indeed determined to defend our democratic republic.”

They added, “We are determined that the next president of the United States will be the person who is the choice of the people of these United States through the process our Constitution and laws provide.”

The resolution also warned individuals who “seek to prevent eligible voters from voting, to prevent our votes from being counted, to prevent the electors we choose from being seated, or to prevent those electors’ choice as president and vice president from being inaugurated” that “we will not let you take our democracy away from us. America’s working people are determined and prepared to defend our democracy.”

That message was reinforced on Oct. 22 in a phone call by AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka with various union leaders, according to The Guardian. During that call, Trumka reportedly explained that until the election on Nov. 3 labor leaders should focus on maximizing turnout for Trump’s opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden. If Trump loses and resists a peaceful transition, Trumka added, the AFL-CIO should then consider its options in terms of how unions can compel him to leave office.

“We believe democracy is stronger than Trump,” Michael Podhorzer, a senior adviser to Trumka, told The Guardian. “We are not looking for a fight. We want the election results to be respected. We’re getting ready if they’re not respected because of what he said. We believe this is a country where what voters say matters.” He also added that for the time being “a general strike is a slogan, not a strategy.”

It is a slogan that many American unions are starting to embrace, however. Local labor federations in Rochester, Seattle and western Massachusetts have already approved resolutions saying that they should consider a general strike if Trump steals the election or loses but refuses to step down.

So what exactly would a general strike look like? Such a thing has not happened in the United States in a very long time.

Speaking to Salon in April, labor activist Steve Early said there has never been a nationwide and comprehensive general strike in the United States, but noted that there were smaller general strikes — or at least work stoppages comparable to general strikes — in Seattle in 1919, San Francisco and Minneapolis in 1934 and Oakland in 1946.

“There are no cons—just a lot of formidable obstacles to making this happen, such as too many unions telling their members they can’t participate because they are covered by binding contractual no-strike clauses and general strike participation would expose their unions to damage suits by employers,” Early said.

Unfortunately, general strikes have often been crushed by law enforcement. For instance, the 1919 Seattle General Strike — which was prompted by Seattle businesses refusing to increase workers’ wages despite wages being kept down during World War I — ended with police officers and vigilantes rounding up the labor leaders responsible behind it. General strikes can also lead to violence, such as when police in Greece clashed with strikers in 2012 when Greek workers protested austerity measures.

While there has never been a nationwide general strike in the United States, Trump refusing to accept the results of an election defeat could be the catalyst to set a new precedent. The president has repeatedly stated that he may not accept the election results unless he is declared the winner, a prospect that has alarmed many constitutional scholars.

“History teaches that would-be dictators should be taken at their word when they declare an intent to remain in power regardless of election results,” Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe told Salon by email last year. “That’s a strong reason for patriotic citizens of all political persuasions to work toward an electoral landslide that would minimize Trump’s opportunity to cling to power. But nothing could reduce the probability of that abnormal behavior on Trump’s part to zero. If Trump refuses to leave, even judges appointed by him could well align with the legitimate winner’s predictable request for an emergency injunction to pry him from his lair in the White House.”

He added, “If Trump defies judicial orders to give up power — including the nuclear codes — there could well be a military coup, backed by tens of millions of citizens taking to the streets, leading to Trump’s forcible ouster. Failing that, there might be a massive popular uprising, backed by Fox along with the other cable networks and social media platforms, that could well erupt in terrible bloodshed. However, one defines a ‘constitutional crisis’ — a much-overused term — Trump’s refusal to abide by the electoral outcome would certainly qualify as such a crisis.”

Why the latest cyber attacks were disinformation, not voting system breaches

Two weeks before Election Day, cybersecurity threats and related disinformation originating overseas and targeting the 2020 election briefly were front-page news.

Threatening emails to voters supporting Democrats were purportedly sent by the Proud Boys, a pro-Trump white nationalist group. State voter registration databases in Alaska and Florida were purportedly breached, and videos containing non-public voter information were posted online. As federal agencies blamed Iran and Russia, an anxious electorate faced more worries.

“Sad but true, bad actors continue their attempts to undermine confidence in the election, now w/ a misleading video,” tweeted Chris Krebs, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) director, in one “Rumor Control” post on October 21. “Stay calm and vote on.”

The incidents—which were described, deconstructed, and debunked in non-technical terms in a Stanford Internet Observatory report issued two days later—came in the same week that the U.S. passed the 50 million mark for ballots already cast. The attacks may have been headline news, but they did not dent record turnout. Their false claims were swiftly outed and then drowned out by domestic noisemakers.

“Of course when it comes to spreading false information, the Russians have plenty of help from the President and his media allies,” wrote longtime journalist Nina Burleigh on Deep State blog, which monitors the world’s intelligence agencies, launching its series on foreign interference in the 2020 election.

Nonetheless, top federal officials who are allies of the president said the alleged Proud Boy emails and purloined voter registration data were concrete evidence of Russian and Iranian attempts to influence the 2020 election in its final weeks. But as news reports were filled with murky accusations, the Stanford researchers—who include some of Silicon Valley’s foremost cybersecurity experts—concluded that no election data or computer systems had been breached. Instead, the propagandists—and the researchers found no trace of Iranian involvement—fabricated content to fuel the impression that the 2020 nationwide election cannot be trusted.

“This series of events represents an active measures campaign intended to create the perception of a massive vulnerability in the U.S. election system that does not exist, and possibly to drive tension in the United States through the invocation of a well-known hate group,” the report’s summation began. “Every conclusion that the creators of these emails and video wanted Americans to leave with are false:

  • These intimidating emails were not sent by the Proud Boys
  • Voting continues to be private, safe and secure, and there is no mechanism by which an outside actor can determine the vote of an individual and later threaten them
  • The video does not portray a SQL injection attack against the Alaskan or Floridian voter registration systems
  • There is no widespread conspiracy to change election outcomes via the FWAB [overseas and military absentee ballot] system
  • Such a conspiracy could not succeed”

Another part of the analysis said, “We cannot provide independent attribution to the Islamic Republic of Iran,” which contradicted claims made by federal agencies.

Election vulnerabilities

The emergence of foreign-based threats that triggered high-profile news coverage but apparently had little impact on election infrastructure did not escape notice.

“[I]s this all they’ve got?” wrote ElectionLawBlog founder Rick Hasen. “Why aren’t the Russians doing a better job interfering in the 2020 elections to benefit Trump?”

“The people behind this campaign were effective, however, in drawing attention to themselves and to their capability to create disinformation,” Stanford’s report said. “The rapid reaction of government and civil society to these incidents has blunted the capability of these actors to spread their false claims. Our hope is, now that the video and emails have been thoroughly debunked, that media coverage of this disinformation is measured and that future attempts to imply hacking of the voting system are not given unearned amplification or credence.”

What was notable about the Stanford Internet Observatory report was that its tone was neither alarmist nor dismissive. It was a sober assessment that threats, foreign and domestic, to disrupt the legitimacy of the 2020 election do exist. But, thus far, the foreign-based threats have not overwhelmed the system.

What was faked?

The voter data in the alleged attacks—such as partial Social Security numbers of Alaska voters—might not have come from hacking into a state voter database, as an online video claimed, for example. It could have come from stolen credit bureau data marketed on the dark web, the Stanford analysts said. What was of more concern, however, was that someone took the time to fashion that data into a falsified claim that voting infrastructure was easily breached.

“Releasing voter information and claiming it was hacked, as the newly-released video does, is not a new tactic,” the analysts said. “Early last month, for example, claims spread by Russian media outlet Kommersant reported that Michigan’s voter data was posted on a Russian hacking forum. EIP [Election Integrity Partnership] researchers verified that the data available for download matched Michigan’s public records, and state officials confirmed that the voter data is publicly available to anyone through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. Similar claims circulated recently with voter data from Florida being posted on a Russian hacking forum. Again, EIP verified that the data schema matched what is made public by the state.”

(EIP refers to the Election Integrity Partnership, a mix of academic, public and private sector institutions seeking to “detect and mitigate the impact of attempts to prevent or deter people from voting or to delegitimize election results.” The Stanford Internet Observatory is part of this consortium.)

Election administration worries

These efforts to create and spread false claims about voting and the underlying election system are in the sphere of media and partisan propaganda, which was not the same sphere as where elections are conducted. The world of running elections resembles an assembly line, where voters and ballots are methodically processed.

Since 2016, state and county election officials have taken many steps to monitor cyber attacks in real time and to harden their data and related computer systems, starting with voter registration files, said a former top state election official who spoke on background. In addition to using sensors to detect intrusions and quickly sharing activity reports with all states, access to voter data was limited, he said, even if some of that data was publicly available. Voter data was also backed up daily, he said, just as software was regularly updated with security patches.

Voter data was separated from vote-counting systems, he said. What was of more concern to him than claiming to meddle with registration data was the prospect of foreign agents infiltrating the private vendors who work for counties and states to “host and post” their election night results.

Disrupting the election night reporting is seen as a threat. Many election officials recall how the Democratic Party’s 2020 Iowa Caucus results were delayed for a day due to an app and system failure, creating much consternation including the mainstream media’s inability to explain the delay and urge the public to wait.

The New York Times recently noted that county election offices could be targets of ransomware, where systems are frozen until bounties were paid. That prospect was raised in an October 26 briefing by ex-Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff for the bipartisan National Task Force on Election Crises. Microsoft had just obtained a court order to disable a ransomware network, Chertoff said.

There are other potential worries. In many primary states debuting new voting systems before the pandemic struck in March, electronic poll books—which help voters check in at precincts—kept losing their online link to state voter databases. The spotty connectivity affected numerous California counties. Election officials in Georgia and South Carolina reported similar issues during October’s early voting. Should that issue recur or a ransomware threat emerge on November 3, the remedy would be distributing paper copies of voter rolls to precincts, experts have said.

Another point of vulnerability is the cellular modems that connect precinct ballot scanners to a central tabulator to report the election night’s vote totals. Ion Sancho, the former supervisor of elections (SOE) in Leon County, Florida, recently wrote a letter noting this concern to Florida’s SOEs and urging them to make other plans.

“[T]he ideal solution is to remove your central tabulator from the internet completely and to not use your wireless modems,” he said, saying there were other ways to report precinct results. He suggested taking photos of the cash register-like poll tape produced at the close of voting and sending that image in via text or by email, or hand-delivering the vote-counting machinery’s computer memory card.

Any national election involving 10,000 jurisdictions, hundreds of thousands of poll workers and tens of thousands of pieces of machinery will have problems. Whether those problems accelerate to affect multitudes of voters or alter the vote counts is another matter—and at the heart of assessing threats to the election’s legitimacy.

What happens inside the election infrastructure is one thing, while what is said about those procedures in the media or in political propaganda is another.

“We are now in the final stretch of the election, and tens of millions of voters have already cast their votes free from foreign interference,” CISA’s Krebs said in a “Rumor Control” video. “We remain confident that no foreign cyber actor can change your vote. And we still believe that it would be incredibly difficult for them to change the outcome of an election at the national level.”

“But that doesn’t mean various actors won’t try to introduce chaos in our elections and make sensational claims that overstate their capabilities,” he continued. “In fact, the days and weeks just before and after Election Day are the perfect time for our adversaries to launch efforts intended to undermine your confidence in the integrity of the electoral process.”

“The divisions within American society, and many others, are now so deeply ingrained that there’s no need for foreign influence in order to amplify and inflame,” noted Claire Wardle, a misinformation expert, on the national security blog Lawfare. “From the cellphone-captured footage of Americans screaming in supermarkets about masks, to family members having to disown loved ones because of outlandish beliefs, to a neutered Centers for Disease Control and Prevention whose downfall was fueled by and consequently fueled misinformation, to university lecturers terrified of being filmed by students looking for evidence of liberal bias, to a weakened news media falling almost on a daily basis in the trust ratings, the evidence of our divided society is all around us.”

In other words, voters should expect competing and even false claims about the voting experience and the election results on November 3 and in the days after. While some of those claims will be amplified by foreign adversaries, most will originate domestically, where voters will have to wait for results, assess the evidence of accurate vote counts and live with the political consequences.

The Trump Medicaid record: Big goals, yet few successes

President Donald Trump entered office seeking a massive overhaul of the Medicaid program, which had just experienced the biggest growth spurt in its 50-year history.

His administration supported repealing the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion, which has added millions of adults to the federal-state health program for lower-income Americans. He also wanted states to require certain enrollees to work. He sought to discontinue the open-ended federal funding that keeps pace with rising Medicaid enrollment and costs.

He has achieved none of these ambitious goals.

Although Congress and the courts blocked a Medicaid overhaul, the Trump administration has left its mark on the nation’s largest government-run health program as it has sought to make states more responsible for assessing its impact and improving the health of enrollees.

One notable achievement: The Trump administration pushed some states to be more aggressive in weeding out ineligible recipients — an initiative that led to a drop in enrollment of children in several states, including Missouri and Tennessee. About half of those enrolled in Medicaid are children.

A recent report from the Georgetown University Center for Children and Families found that the number of uninsured children rose by more than 700,000 to 4.4 million from 2017 through 2019. The increase of uncovered children stands out since uninsured rates typically drop during periods of economic growth, such as the one occurring from 2017 to 2019.

Advocates for the poor say the administration’s efforts contributed to an increase in the number of uninsured children, after years of decline. “The administration has not succeeded on any of its goals in any meaningful way,” said Joan Alker, executive director of the Georgetown center. “But they still have inflicted some damaging changes to the program.”

“The administration has not prioritized the health of children,” said Bruce Lesley, president of the child advocacy group First Focus on Children.

Alker attributes the rise in uninsured children to federal officials’ decision to slash outreach funding for the Obamacare insurance exchanges — through which families eligible for Medicaid are often identified — and the administration’s focus on the “public charge” rule. That provision allows the federal government to more easily deny permanent residency status, popularly known as green cards, or entry visas to applicants who use — or are deemed likely to use — publicly funded programs such as food stamps, housing assistance and Medicaid.

Medicaid officials said the increase is partly due to loss of health coverage by middle-income families who are not eligible for Medicaid. They say those families don’t qualify for government subsidies for the ACA’s marketplace plans and were forced to drop their plans because of high premiums.

But Alker said federal data suggests that families who have incomes over the 400% federal poverty level eligibility limit for subsidies (about $87,000 for a family of three) saw a slower rate of increase in the number of uninsured children as opposed to lower-income kids.

A spokesperson for the federal government’s Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services said the agency was “committed to ensuring that eligible children are enrolled and retained in coverage” and it spent $48 million in grants for outreach and enrollment effort last year.

The Trump administration opposes the ACA’s expansion of Medicaid, which provided billions in federal dollars to cover nondisabled, low-income adults. Yet seven states adopted the expansion during the past three years, including Republican-controlled Utah, Idaho, Oklahoma, Nebraska and Missouri.

Despite the aim to shrink the program, about 75 million people were enrolled in Medicaid in June 2020 — roughly the same number as in January 2017, when Trump took office.

One reason is that Medicaid enrollment soared this year following the COVID-19 outbreak as unemployment spiked to historic highs and federal stimulus money forbid states to drop anyone unless they moved out of state.

But that is far from the administration’s goal of “ushering in a new day” for Medicaid, as CMS Administrator Seema Verma said when she laid out her bold vision in a 2017 speech.

Verma acknowledged she was stepping into a hornet’s nest of entrenched stakeholders and interest groups.

“I would like to invite everybody here today who have fought the political healthcare battles over the last decade to take a deep breath, exhale and agree to reset as a group,” she said.

They didn’t. The administration’s major Medicaid changes were met with opposition from hospitals, doctors and patient advocacy groups, who feared the efforts would lead to cuts in funding or add obstacles for enrollees seeking care.

Officials spent two years seeking to allow states to require enrollees to work or volunteer as a condition for enrollment. They approved proposals from 10 states, but only Arkansas implemented the new requirement before a federal judge ruled it illegal. Arkansas’ brief experience resulted in more than 18,000 adults losing coverage.

After losing in federal district and appeals courts, the Trump administration has appealed to the Supreme Court, which will decide later this year whether to take the case.

The push for work requirements and other changes have altered the culture of Medicaid so that officials are more intent on keeping people out of the program instead of welcoming more in, said Lesley, of First Focus.

Before the pandemic, he said, the administration allowed states to add hurdles for families to get enrolled and stay enrolled, such as requiring them to more frequently recertify their income eligibility.

Aaron Yelowitz, a professor of economics at the University of Kentucky, said one of the Trump administration’s biggest impacts on Medicaid was prodding states to be more active in making sure they were covering only people who met the states’ eligibility rules. He noted the ACA gave states incentives to enroll newly eligible adults over traditional groups such as children and the disabled because the federal government paid a higher share of the cost.

Seeking flexibility for states

The administration — as well as Republicans in Congress — favored a fundamental change in how Medicaid is funded. But Congress failed to move the program to a “block grant” approach, which would have given states a set annual amount — rather than the current system that provides funding determined by how many people qualify for the program and health costs. The GOP proposal also would have allowed states more flexibility in running the operations.

Critics predicted a block grant would have cut billions in state funding and led to cuts in services and eligibility.

Once the legislative proposal was dead, the administration sought to enact the strategy via its authority to test changes in payment methods. Only one state applied — Oklahoma — and it dropped its application this year after voters passed a Medicaid expansion ballot initiative.

Verma promised to give states more flexibility in running their programs in other ways, while also holding them more accountable for care to Medicaid enrollees. CMS has approved dozens of Medicaid waivers since 2017, including allowing states to be more innovative in helping enrollees with substance abuse or addiction problems and serious mental illness. It granted more than 30 states waivers to enhance treatment options.

With Medicaid paying for more than half of all births in the United States, Verma also sought to improve oversight of prenatal and early childhood services.

While CMS has started a scorecard to track Medicaid outcomes, the data is missing for several states or outdated on several measures. For example, the low-birthweight measure is missing data from more than 20 states and no data is listed on children born with an addiction.

CMS officials said they are working to provide more updated information on its report card.

Changes implemented by the administration, officials added, have elicited more timely data from states, allowing them to spot problems quicker. For example, in September, CMS determined that many children were delayed from March through May in seeing a doctor and getting important vaccines as the pandemic took hold. CMS pushed states and health providers to remedy the problem but did not offer specific help.

Asked during a recent phone briefing with reporters about Medicaid’s legacy under her stewardship, Verma didn’t mention the expansion, work requirements or efforts to turn Medicaid into a block grant program for states.

“We have aimed to try to ensure the program is sustainable for generations to come and ensure better outcomes for those it serves,” she said.

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

The politics of cultural despair: That’s what’s killing us, not Donald Trump

The physical and moral decay of the United States and the malaise it has spawned have predictable results. We have seen in varying forms the consequences of social and political collapse during the twilight of the Greek and Roman empires, the Ottoman and Hapsburg empires, Tsarist Russia, Weimar Germany and the former Yugoslavia. Voices from the past, Aristotle, Cicero, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Joseph Roth and Milovan Djilas, warned us. But blinded by self-delusion and hubris, as if we are somehow exempt from human experience and human nature, we refuse to listen. 

The United States is a shadow of itself. It squanders its resources in futile military adventurism, a symptom of all empires in decay as they attempt to restore a lost hegemony by force. Vietnam. Afghanistan. Iraq. Syria. Libya. Tens of millions of lives wrecked. Failed states. Enraged fanatics. There are 1.8 billion Muslims in the world, 24 percent of the global population, and we have turned virtually all of them into our enemies. 

We are piling up massive deficits and neglecting our basic infrastructure, including electrical grids, roads, bridges and public transportation, to spend more on our military that all the other major powers on Earth combined. We are the world’s largest producer and exporter of arms and munitions. The virtues we argue we have a right to impose by force on others — human rights, democracy, the free market, the rule of law and personal freedoms — are mocked at home where grotesque levels of social inequality and austerity programs have impoverished most of the public, destroyed democratic institutions, including Congress, the courts and the press, and created militarized forces of internal occupation that carry out wholesale surveillance of the public, run the largest prison system in the world and gun down unarmed citizens in the streets with impunity. 

The American burlesque, darkly humorous with its absurdities of Donald Trump, fake ballot boxes, conspiracy theorists who believe the deep state and Hollywood run a massive child sex-trafficking ring, Christian fascists who place their faith in magic Jesus and teach creationism as science in our schools, 10-hour-long voting lines in states such as Georgia, militia members planning to kidnap the governors of Michigan and Virginia and start a civil war, is also ominous, especially as we ignore the accelerating ecocide.

All of our activism, protests, lobbying, petitions, appeals to the United Nations, the work of NGOs and misguided trust in liberal politicians such as Barack Obama have been accompanied by a 60 percent rise in global carbon emissions since 1990. Estimates predict another 40 percent rise in global emissions in the next decade. We are less than a decade away from carbon dioxide levels reaching 450 parts per million, the equivalent to a 2-degree Celsius average temperature rise, a global catastrophe that will make parts of the earth uninhabitable, flood coastal cities, dramatically reduce crop yields and result in suffering and death for billions of people. This is what is coming, and we can’t wish it away.

I speak to you in Troy, New York, once the second-largest producer of iron in the country after Pittsburgh. It was an industrial hub for the garment industry, a center for the production of shirts, shirtwaists, collars and cuffs, and was once home to foundries that made bells and firms that crafted precision instruments. All that is gone, of course, leaving behind the post-industrial decay, the urban blight and the shattered lives and despair that are sadly familiar in most cities in the United States. 

It is this despair that is killing us. It eats into the social fabric, rupturing social bonds, and manifests itself in an array of self-destructive and aggressive pathologies. It fosters what the anthropologist Roger Lancaster calls “poisoned solidarity,” the communal intoxication forged from the negative energies of fear, suspicion, envy and the lust for vengeance and violence. Nations in terminal decline embrace, as Sigmund Freud understood, the death instinct. No longer sustained by the comforting illusion of inevitable human progress, they lose the only antidote to nihilism. No longer able to build, they confuse destruction with creation. They descend into an atavistic savagery, something not only Freud but Joseph Conrad and Primo Levi knew lurks beneath the thin veneer of civilized society. Reason does not guide our lives. Reason, as Schopenhauer puts it, echoing Hume, is the hard-pressed servant of the will. 

“Men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked,” Freud wrote.

They are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus. Who, in the face of all his experience of life and history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion? As a rule, this cruel aggressiveness waits for some provocation or puts itself at the service of some other purpose, whose goal might also have been reached by milder measures. In circumstances that are favorable to it, when the mental counter-forces which ordinarily inhibit it are out of action, it also manifests itself spontaneously and reveals man as a savage beast to whom consideration towards his own kind is something alien.

Freud, like Primo Levi, got it. The moral life is a matter of circumstances. Moral consideration, as I saw in the wars I covered, largely disappears in moments of extremity. It is the luxury of the privileged. “Ten percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction,” Susan Sontag said. 

To survive, it was necessary, Levi wrote of life in the death camps, “to throttle all dignity and kill all conscience, to climb down into the arena as a beast against other beasts, to let oneself be guided by those unsuspected subterranean forces which sustain families and individuals in cruel times. “It was, he wrote, “a Hobbesian life,” “a continuous war of everyone against everyone.” Varlam Shalamov, imprisoned for 25 years in Stalin’s gulags, was equally pessimistic: “All human emotions — of love, friendship, envy, concern for one’s fellow man, compassion, a longing for fame, honesty — had left us with the flesh that had melted from our bodies during our long fasts. The camp was a great test of our moral strength, of our everyday morality, and 99% of us failed it. … Conditions in the camps do not permit men to remain men; that is not what camps were created for.” 

Social collapse will bring these latent pathologies to the surface.

But the fact that circumstances can reduce us to savagery does not negate the moral life. As our empire implodes, and with it social cohesion, as the earth increasingly punishes us for our refusal to honor and protect the systems that give us life, triggering a scramble for diminishing natural resources and huge climate migrations, we must face this darkness, not only around us, but within us. 

The dance macabre is already underway. Hundreds of thousands of Americans die each year from opioid overdoes, alcoholism and suicide, what sociologists calls deaths of despair. This despair fuels high rates of morbid obesity, some 40 percent of the public, gambling addictions, the pornification of the society with the ubiquitous of images of sexual sadism along with the proliferation of armed right-wing militias and nihilistic mass shootings. As despair mounts, so will these acts of self-immolation.

Those overwhelmed by despair seek magical salvation, whether in crisis cults, such as the Christian right, or demagogues such as Trump, or rage-filled militias that see violence as a cleansing agent. As long as these dark pathologies are allowed to fester and grow — and the Democratic Party has made it clear it will not enact the kinds of radical social reforms that will curb these pathologies — the United States will continue its march towards disintegration and social upheaval. Removing Trump will neither halt nor slow the descent. 

An estimated 300,000 Americans will be dead from the pandemic in December, a figure that is expected to rise to 400,000 in January. Chronic underemployment and unemployment is close to 20 percent when those who have stopped looking for work, those furloughed with no prospect of being rehired and those who work part-time but are still below the poverty line, are included in the official statistic instead of being magically erased from the unemployment rolls. Our privatized health care system, which is making record profits during the pandemic, is not designed to cope with a public health emergency. It is designed to maximize profit for its owners. There are fewer than 1 million hospital beds nationally, a result of the decades-long trend of hospital mergers and closures that have reduced access to care in communities across the nation. Cities such as Milwaukee have been forced to erect field hospitals. In states such as Mississippi there are no longer any ICU beds available. The for-profit health service did not stockpile the ventilators, masks, tests or drugs to deal with COVID-19. Why should it? That is not a route to increased revenue. And there is no substantial difference between Trump and Biden’s response to the health crisis, where 1,000 people a day are dying. 

Forty-eight percent of front line workers remain ineligible for sick pay. Some 43 million Americans have lost their employer-sponsored health insurance. There are 10,000 bankruptcies a day, with perhaps two-thirds of them tied to exorbitant medial costs. Food banks are overrun with tens of thousands of desperate families. Roughly 10 to 14 million renter households, or 23 to 34 million people, were behind on their rent in September. That amounts to $12 to $17 billion in unpaid rent. And that figure is expected to rise to $34 billion in past-due rent in January. The lifting of the moratorium on evictions and forecloses will mean that millions of families, many destitute, will be tossed onto the street. Hunger in U.S. households almost tripled between 2019 and August of this year, according to the Census Bureau and the Department of Agriculture. The proportion of American children who do not have enough to eat, the study found, is 14 times higher than it was last year. A study by Columbia University found that since May there are eight million more Americans who can be classified as poor. Meanwhile, the 50 richest Americans hold as much wealth as half of the United States. Millennials, some 72 million people, have 4.6 percent of U.S. wealth. 

Only one thing matters to the corporate state. It is not democracy. It is not truth. It is not the consent of the governed. It is not income inequality. It is not the surveillance state. It is not endless war. It is not jobs. It is not the climate crisis. It is the primacy of corporate power — which has extinguished our democracy, taken from us our most basic civil liberties and left most of the working class in misery — and the increase and consolidation of its wealth and power. 

Trump and Biden are repugnant figures, doddering into old age with cognitive lapses and no moral cores. Is Trump more dangerous than Biden? Yes. Is Trump more inept and more dishonest? Yes. Is Trump more of a threat to the open society? Yes. Is Biden the solution? No.

Biden cannot plausibly offer change. He can only offer more of the same. And most Americans do not want more of the same. The country’s largest voting-age bloc, the 100 million-plus citizens who out of apathy or disgust do not vote, will once again stay home. This demoralization of the electorate is by design. 

In America we are only permitted to vote against what we hate. Partisan media outlets set one group against another, a consumer version of what George Orwell in his novel “1984” called the “Two minutes of Hate.” Our opinions and prejudices are skillfully catered to and reinforced, with the aid of a detailed digital analysis of our proclivities and habits, and then sold back to us. The result, as Matt Taibbi writes, is “packaged anger just for you.” The public is unable to speak across the manufactured divide. Politics, under the assault, has atrophied into a tawdry reality show centered on manufactured political personalities. Civic discourse has been poisoned by invective and lies. Power, meanwhile, is left unexamined and unchallenged. 

Political coverage is modeled, as Taibbi points out, on sports coverage. The sets look like the sets on “Sunday NFL Countdown.” The anchor is on one side. There are four commentators, two from each team. Graphics keep us updated on the score. Political identities are reduced to easily digestible stereotypes. Tactics, strategy, image, the monthly tallies of campaign contributions and polling are endlessly examined, while real political issues are ignored. It is the language and imagery of war. 

This coverage masks the fact that on nearly all the major issues the two major political parties are in complete agreement. The deregulation of the financial industry, trade agreements, the militarization of police — the Pentagon has transferred more than $7.4 billion in excess military gear and hardware to nearly 8,000 federal and state law enforcement agencies since 1990 — the explosion in the prison population, deindustrialization, austerity, support for fracking and the fossil fuel industry, the endless wars in the Middle East, the bloated military budget, the control of elections and mass media by corporations and the wholesale government surveillance of the population — and when the government watches you 24 hours a day you cannot use the word “liberty”; this is the relationship of a master and a slave — all have bipartisan support. And for this reason, these issues are almost never discussed. 

This goal is to set demographic against demographic. This stoking of antagonism is not news. It is entertainment, driven not by journalism but marketing strategies to increase viewership and corporate sponsors. News divisions are corporate revenue streams competing against other corporate revenue streams. The template for news, as Taibbi writes in his book “Hate Inc.,” the cover of which has Sean Hannity on one side and Rachel Maddow on the other, is the simplified morality play used in professional wrestling. There are only two real political positions in the United States. You love Trump or you hate him, which comes from the playbook of professional wrestling. 

By voting for Biden and the Democratic Party you vote for something. 

You vote to endorse the humiliation of courageous women such as Anita Hill who confronted their abusers. You vote for the architects of the endless wars in the Middle East. You vote for the apartheid state in Israel. You vote for wholesale surveillance of the public by government intelligence agencies and the abolition of due process and habeas corpus. You vote for austerity programs, including the destruction of welfare and cuts to Social Security. You vote for NAFTA, free trade deals, deindustrialization, a real decline in wages, the loss of hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs and the offshoring of jobs to underpaid workers who toil in sweatshops in Mexico, China or Vietnam. You vote for the assault on teachers and public education and the transfer of federal funds to for-profit and Christian charter schools. You vote for the doubling of our prison population, the tripling and quadrupling of sentences and huge expansion of crimes meriting the death penalty. You vote for militarized police who gun down poor people of color with impunity.  You vote against the Green New Deal and immigration reform. You vote for the fracking industry. You vote for limiting a woman’s right to abortion and reproductive rights. You vote for a segregated public-school system in which the wealthy receive educational opportunities and poor people of color are denied a chance. You vote for punitive levels of student debt and the inability to free yourself of those debt obligations even if file for bankruptcy. You vote for deregulating the banking industry and the abolition of Glass-Steagall. You vote for the for-profit insurance and pharmaceutical corporations and against universal health care. You vote for defense budgets that consume more than half of all discretionary spending. You vote for the use of unlimited oligarchic and corporate money to buy our elections. You vote for a politician who during his time in the Senate abjectly served the interests of MBNA, the largest independent credit card company headquartered in Delaware, which also employed Biden’s son Hunter. 

Biden was one of the principal architects of the wars in the Middle East, where we have squandered upwards of $7 trillion and destroyed or extinguished the lives of millions of people. He is responsible for far more suffering and death at home and abroad than Trump. If we had a functioning judicial and legislative system, Biden, along with the other architects of our disastrous imperial wars, corporate plundering of the country and betrayal of the American working class, would be put on trial, not offered up as a solution to our political and economic debacle. 

The Democrats and their liberal apologists adopt tolerant positions on issues regarding race, religion, immigration, women’s rights and sexual identity and pretend this is politics. These issues are societal or ethical issues. They are important. But they are not social or political issues. The seizure of control of the economy by a class of global speculators and corporations has ruined the lives of the very groups the Democrats pretend to lift up. When Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party, for example, destroyed the old welfare system, 70 percent of the recipients were children. Those on the right of the political spectrum — and we must never forget that the positions of the Democratic Party would make it a far-right party in Europe — demonize those on the margins of society as scapegoats. The culture wars mask the reality. Both parties are full partners in the destruction of our democratic institutions. Both parties have reconfigured American society into a mafia state. It only depends on how you want it dressed up.

The power of politicians such as Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer or Mitch McConnell comes from being able to funnel corporate money to anointed candidates. In a functioning political system, one not saturated with corporate cash, they would not hold power. They have transformed what the Roman philosopher Cicero called a commonwealth, a res publica, a “public thing” or the “property of a people,” into an instrument of pillage and repression on behalf of a global corporate oligarchy. We are serfs ruled by the obscenely rich, omnipotent masters who loot the U.S. Treasury, pay little or no taxes and have perverted the judiciary, the media and the legislative branches of government to strip us of civil liberties and give them the freedom to engage in tax boycotts, financial fraud and theft.  

In the midst of the pandemic crisis, what did our ruling kleptocratic rulers do? 

They looted $4 trillion on a scale unseen since the 2008 bailout overseen by Barack Obama and Biden. They gorged and enriched themselves at our expense, while tossing crumbs out the windows of their private jets, yachts, penthouses and palatial estates to the suffering and despised masses.  

The CARES Act handed trillions in funds or tax breaks to oil companies, the airline industry, which alone got $50 billion in stimulus money, the cruise ship industry, a $170 billion windfall for the real estate industry. It handed subsidies to private equity firms, lobbying groups, whose political action committees have given $191 million in campaign contributions to politicians in the last two decades, the meat industry and corporations that have moved offshore to avoid U.S. taxes. The act allowed the largest corporations to gobble up money that was supposed to keep small businesses solvent to pay workers. It gave 80 percent of tax breaks under the stimulus package to millionaires and allowed the wealthiest to get stimulus checks that average $1.7 million. The CARES Act also authorized $454 billion for the Treasury Department’s Exchange Stabilization Fund, a massive slush fund doled out by Trump cronies to corporations that, when leveraged 10 to 1, can be used to create a staggering $4.5 trillion in assets. The act authorized the Fed to give $1.5 trillion in loans to Wall Street, which no one expects will ever be paid back. American billionaires have gotten $434 billion richer since the pandemic. Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, whose corporation Amazon paid no federal taxes last year, alone added nearly $72 billion to his personal wealth since the pandemic started. During this same time period 55 million Americans lost their jobs.

The molding of the public into warring factions works commercially. It works politically. It destroys, as it is designed to do, class solidarity. But it is a recipe for social disintegration. It propels us towards the kind of Hobbesian world Primo Levi and Sigmund Freud warned us about. I watched competing ethnic groups in the former Yugoslavia retreat into antagonistic tribes. They seized rival mass media outlets and used them to spew lies, mythological narratives exalting themselves, along with vitriol and hate against the ethnicities they demonized. This poisoned solidarity, which we are replicating, pumped out month after month in Yugoslavia, destroyed the capacity for empathy, perhaps the best definition of evil, and led to a savage fratricide.

The United States, awash in military-grade weaponry, is already plagued by an epidemic of mass shootings. There are death threats against critics of Trump, including Rep. Ilhan Omar. There was an aborted plot by 13 members of a right-wing militia group to kidnap and perhaps assassinate the governors of Michigan and Virginia and start a civil war. A Trump supporter mailed pipe bombs to prominent Democrats and CNN, an effort to decapitate the hierarchy of the Democratic Party, as well as terrorize the media outlet that is the party’s principal propaganda platform. 

The spark that usually sets such tinder ablaze is martyrdom. Aaron “Jay” Danielson, a supporter of the right-wing group Patriot Prayer, was wearing a loaded Glock pistol in a holster and had bear spray and an expandable metal baton when he was shot dead on Aug. 29, allegedly by Michael Forest Reinoehl, a supporter of antifa, in the streets of Portland. A woman in the crowd can be heard shouting after the shooting: “I am not sad that a fucking fascist died tonight.” Reinoehl was ambushed and killed by federal agents in Washington state in what appears to be an act of extrajudicial murder. Once people start being sacrificed for the cause, it takes little for demagogues to insist that self-preservation necessitates violence.

Political stagnation and corruption, along with economic and social misery, spawn what anthropologists call crisis cults — movements led by demagogues that prey on unbearable psychological and financial distress and champion violence as a form of moral purification. These crisis cults, already well established among followers of the Christian right, right-wing militia groups and many followers of Donald Trump, who look at him not as a politician but as a cult leader, peddle magical thinking and an infantilism that promises — if you surrender all autonomy — prosperity, restored national glory, a return to a mythical past, order and security. Trump is a symptom. He is not the disease. And if he leaves office far more competent and dangerous demagogues will rise, if the social conditions are not radically improved, to take his place. 

I fear we are headed towards a Christianized fascism.

The greatest moral failing of the liberal Christian church was its refusal, justified in the name of tolerance and dialogue, to denounce the followers of the Christian right as heretics. By tolerating the intolerant, it ceded religious legitimacy to an array of con artists, charlatans and demagogues and their cultish supporters. It stood by as the core Gospel message — concern for the poor and the oppressed — was perverted into a magical world where God and Jesus showered believers with material wealth and power. The white race became God’s chosen agent. Imperialism and war became divine instruments for purging the world of infidels and barbarians, evil itself. Capitalism, because God blessed the righteous with wealth and power and condemned the immoral to poverty and suffering, became shorn of its inherent cruelty and exploitation. The iconography and symbols of American nationalism became intertwined with the iconography and symbols of the Christian faith. 

The mega-pastors, narcissists who rule despotic, cult-like fiefdoms, make millions of dollars by using this heretical belief system to prey on the despair and desperation of their congregations, victims of neoliberalism and deindustrialization. These believers find in Trump, who preyed on this despair in his casinos and through his sham university, and these mega-pastors, champions of the unfettered greed, cult of masculinity, lust for violence, white supremacy, bigotry, American chauvinism, religious intolerance, anger, racism and conspiracy theories that are the core beliefs of the Christian right. 

When I wrote “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America,” I was quite serious about the term “fascists.”

Tens of millions of Americans live hermetically sealed inside the vast media and educational edifice erected by the Christian right. In this world, miracles are real, Satan, allied with liberal secular humanists and the deep state, along with Muslims, immigrants, feminists, intellectuals, artists and a host of other internal enemies, is seeking to destroy America. Trump is God’s anointed vessel to build the Christian nation and cement into place a government that instills “biblical values.” These “biblical values” include banning abortion, protecting the traditional family, turning the Ten Commandments into secular law, crushing “infidels,” especially Muslims, indoctrinating children in schools with “biblical” teachings and thwarting sexual license, which includes any sexual relationship other than marriage between a man and a woman. Trump is routinely compared by evangelical leaders to the biblical king Cyrus, who rebuilt the temple in Jerusalem and restored the Jews to the city. 

Trump has filled his ideological void with Christian fascism. He has elevated members of the Christian right to prominent positions, including Mike Pence to the vice presidency, Mike Pompeo to secretary of state, Betsy DeVos to secretary of education, Ben Carson to secretary of housing and urban development, William Barr to attorney general, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court and the televangelist Paula White to his Faith and Opportunities Initiative. More importantly, Trump has handed the Christian right veto and appointment power over key positions in government, especially in the federal courts. He has installed 133 district court judges out of 677 total, 50 appeals court judges out of 179 total, and with the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett, three U.S. Supreme Court justices out of nine. This is 19 percent of the federal trial judges currently in service. Nearly all of the extremists who make up the judicial appointees have been rated as unqualified by the American Bar Association, the country’s largest nonpartisan coalition of lawyers. 

Trump has adopted the Islamophobia of the Christian fascists. He has banned Muslim immigrants and rolled back civil rights legislation. He has made war on reproductive rights by restricting abortion and defunding Planned Parenthood. He has stripped away LGBTQ rights. He has ripped down the firewall between church and state by revoking the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits churches, which are tax-exempt, from endorsing political candidates. His appointees, including Pence, Pompeo and DeVos, routinely use biblical strictures to justify an array of policy decisions including environmental deregulation, war, tax cuts and the replacement of public schools with charter schools, an action that permits the transfer of federal education funds to private “Christian” schools. At the same time, they are building paramilitary organizations, not only through ad hoc militias but through mercenary groups of private contractors controlled by figures such as Erik Prince, the brother of Betsy DeVos and the former CEO of Blackwater, now called Xe.

I studied ethics at Harvard Divinity School with James Luther Adams, who had been in Germany in 1935 and 1936. Adams witnessed the rise there of the so-called German Christian Church, which was pro-Nazi. He warned us about the disturbing parallels between the German Christian Church and the Christian right. Adolf Hitler was in the eyes of the German Christian Church a volk messiah and an instrument of God — a view similar to the one held today about Trump by many of his white evangelical supporters. Those demonized for Germany’s economic collapse, especially Jews and communists, were agents of Satan. Fascism, Adams told us, always cloaked itself in a nation’s most cherished symbols and rhetoric. Fascism would come to America not in the guise of stiff-armed, marching brownshirts and Nazi swastikas but in mass recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance, the biblical sanctification of the state and the sacralization of American militarism. Adams was the first person I heard label the extremists of the Christian right as fascists. Liberals, he warned, as in Nazi Germany, were blind to the tragic dimension of history and radical evil. They would not react until it was too late.

Trump’s legacy will, I fear, be the empowerment of the Christian fascists. They are what comes next. Noam Chomsky, for this reason, is right when he warns that Pence is more dangerous than Trump. For decades the Christian fascists have been organizing to take power. They have built infrastructures and organizations, including lobbying groups, schools, colleges and law schools, as well as media platforms, to prepare. They have seeded their cadre into positions of power. We on the left, meanwhile, have seen our institutions and organizations destroyed or corrupted by corporate power and been seduced by the boutique activism of identity politics. FRC Action, the legislative affiliate of the Family Research Council, already gives 245 members of Congress a 100 percent approval rating for supporting legislation that is backed by the Christian right. 

Christian fascism is an emotional life raft for tens of millions of Americans. It is impervious to science and verifiable fact. The Christian fascists, by choice, have severed themselves from rational thought and the secular society that almost destroyed them and their families and thrust them into deep despair. We will not placate or disarm this movement, bent on our destruction, by attempting to claim that we, too, have Christian “values.” This appeal only strengthens the legitimacy of the Christian fascists and weakens our own. These dispossessed people will either be reintegrated into the economy and the society and their shattered social bonds mended, or the movement will grow more virulent and more powerful.

The Christian right is determined to keep the public focus on societal or ethical as opposed to economic issues. The corporate media, whether it supported or opposed the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, almost exclusively discussed her opposition to abortion and membership in People of Praise, a far-right Catholic sect that practices “speaking in tongues.” What our corporate masters, along with the Christian fascists, do not want examined is Barrett’s subservience to corporate power, her hostility to workers, civil liberties, unions and environmental regulations. Since the Democratic Party is beholden to the same donor class as the Republican Party, and since the media long ago substituted the culture wars for politics, the most ominous threat posed by Barrett and the Christian right is ignored.

The road to despotism is always paved with righteousness.

All fascist movements paper over their squalid belief systems with the veneer of morality. They mouth pieties about restoring law and order, right and wrong, the sanctity of life, civic and family virtues, patriotism and tradition to mask their dismantling of the open society and silencing and persecution of those who dissent. The Christian right, awash in money from corporations that understand their political intent, will use any tool, no matter how devious, from right-wing armed militias to the invalidation of ballots, to block Biden and Democratic candidates from assuming office.

Capitalism, driven by the obsession to maximize profit and reduce the cost of production by slashing worker’s rights and wages, is antithetical to the Christian Gospel, as well as the Enlightenment ethic of Immanuel Kant. But capitalism, in the hands of the Christian fascists, has become sacralized in the form of the Prosperity Gospel, the belief that Jesus came to minister to our material needs, blessing believers with wealth and power. The Prosperity Gospel is an ideological cover for the slow-motion corporate coup d’état. This is why large corporations such as Tyson Foods, which places Christian right chaplains in its plants, Purdue, Walmart and Sam’s Warehouse, along with many other corporations, pour money into the movement and its institutions such as Liberty University and Patrick Henry Law School. This is why corporations gave millions to groups such as the Judicial Crisis Network and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to campaign for Barrett’s confirmation. Barrett has ruled to cheat gig workers out of overtime, green light fossil fuel extraction and pollution, gut Obamacare and strip consumers of protection from corporate fraud. As a circuit court judge, Barrett heard at least 55 cases in which citizens challenged corporate abuse and fraud. She ruled in favor of corporations 76 percent of the time.

Our corporate masters do not care about abortion, gun rights or the sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman. But like the German industrialists who backed the Nazi Party, they know that the Christian right will give an ideological veneer to ruthless corporate tyranny. These oligarchs view the Christian fascists the same way the German industrialists viewed the Nazis, as buffoons. They are aware that the Christian fascists will trash what is left of our anemic democracy and the natural ecosystem. But they also know they will make huge profits in the process and the rights of workers and citizens will be ruthlessly suppressed.

If you are poor, if you lack proper medical care, if you are paid substandard wages, if you are trapped in the lower class, if you are a victim of police violence, this is because, according to the Prosperity Gospel, you are not a good Christian. In this belief system you deserve what you get. There is nothing wrong, these homegrown fascists preach, with the structures or systems of power. Like all totalitarian movements, followers are seduced into calling for their own enslavement.

As the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels understood: “The best propaganda is that which, as it were, works invisibly, penetrates the whole of life without the public having any knowledge of the propagandistic initiative.” 

The tinder that could ignite violent conflagrations lies ominously stacked around us. It may be triggered by Trump’s defeat in the election. Millions of disenfranchised white Americans, who see no way out of their economic and social misery, struggling with an emotional void, are seething with rage against a corrupt ruling class and bankrupt liberal elite that betrayed them. They are tired of the political stagnation, grotesque, mounting social inequality and the punishing fallout from the pandemic. Millions more alienated young men and women, also locked out of the economy and with no realistic prospect for advancement or integration, gripped by the same emotional void, have harnessed their fury in the name of tearing down the governing structures and anti-fascism. These polarized extremes are inching closer and closer to violence. 

There are three options: reform, which, given the decay in the American body politic, is impossible, revolution or tyranny.

If the corporate state is not overthrown, then America will soon become a naked police state where any opposition, however tepid, will be silenced with draconian censorship or force. Police in cities around the country have already thwarted the reporting by dozens of journalists covering the protests through physical force, arrests, tear gas, rubber bullets and pepper spray. This will become normalized. The huge social divides, often built around race, will be used by the Christian fascists to set neighbor against neighbor. Armed Christian patriots will attack those groups blamed for social collapse. Dissent, even nonviolent dissent, will become treason.

Peter Drucker observed that Nazism succeeded not because people believed in its fantastic promises, but in spite of them. Nazi absurdities, he pointed out, had been “witnessed by a hostile press, a hostile radio, a hostile cinema, a hostile church, and a hostile government which untiringly pointed out the Nazi lies, the Nazi inconsistency, the unattainability of their promises, and the dangers and folly of their course.” Nobody, he noted, “would have been a Nazi if rational belief in the Nazi promises had been a prerequisite.” The poet, playwright and socialist revolutionary Ernst Toller, who was forced into exile and stripped of his citizenship when the Nazis took power in 1933, wrote in his autobiography: “The people are tired of reason, tired of thought and reflection. They ask, what has reason done in the last few years, what good have insights and knowledge done us.” After Toller committed suicide in 1939, W.H. Auden in his poem “In Memory of Ernst Toller” wrote:

We are lived by powers we pretend to understand:
They arrange our loves; it is they who direct at the end
The enemy bullet, the sickness, or even our hand.

Once the internal enemies are purged from the nation, we are promised, America will recover its lost glory, except that once one enemy is obliterated another takes its place. Crisis cults require a steady escalation of conflict and a steady stream of victims. Every new crisis becomes more urgent and more extreme than the last. This is what made the war in the former Yugoslavia inevitable. Once one stage of conflict reaches a crescendo it loses its efficacy. It must be replaced by ever more brutal and deadly confrontations. It is what Ernst Jünger called a “feast of death.”

These crisis cults are, as Drucker understood, irrational and schizophrenic. They have no coherent ideology. They turn morality upside down. They appeal exclusively to emotions. Burlesque and spectacle become politics. Depravity becomes morality. Atrocities and murder, as the federal marshals who wantonly gunned down the antifa activist Michael Forest Reinoehl in Washington State illustrated, become heroism. Crime and fraud become justice. Greed and nepotism become civic virtues. 

What these crisis cults stand for today, they condemn tomorrow. There is no ideological consistency. There is only emotional consistency. At the height of the reign of terror on May 6, 1794, during the French Revolution, Maximilien Robespierre announced that the Committee for Public Safety now recognized the existence of God. The French revolutionaries, fanatical atheists who had desecrated churches and confiscated church property, murdered hundreds of priests and forced another 30,000 into exile, instantly reversed themselves to send to the guillotine those who disparaged religion. In the end, exhausted by the moral confusion and internal contradictions, these crisis cults yearn for self-annihilation.

The ruling elites will no more restore these ruptured social bonds and address the deep despair that grips America than they will respond to the climate emergency. As the country unravels, they will reach for the familiar tools of state repression and the ideological prop provided by Christian fascism.

It is up to us to carry out sustained acts of nonviolent, mass resistance. If we mobilize in large and small ways to fight for an open society, to create communities that, as Vaclav Havel wrote “live in truth,” we hold out the possibility of pushing back against these crisis cults, holding at bay the brutality that accompanies social upheaval, as well as slowing and disrupting the march towards ecocide. This requires us to acknowledge that our systems of governance are incapable of being reformed. No one in power will save us. No one but us will stand up for the vulnerable, the demonized and the earth itself. All we do must have the single aim of crippling the power of the ruling elites in the hopes of new systems of governance that can implement the radical reforms to save us and our world. 

The most difficult existential dilemma we face is to at once acknowledge the bleakness before us and act, to refuse to succumb to cynicism and despair. And we will only do this through faith, the faith that the good draws to it the good, that all acts that nurture and protect life have an intrinsic power, even if the empirical evidence shows that things are getting worse. We will find our freedom, our autonomy, our meaning and our social bonds among those who also resist, and this will allow us to endure, and maybe even triumph. 

How Donald Trump is undermining the will of the American people

Bill Finkle will brave COVID-19 and drive around Kansas City all day on November 3 giving free rides to seniors who need a lift to the polls.

Finkle passionately believes both in giving citizens every opportunity to vote and in properly counting every ballot cast.

Yet while ordinary citizens like him risk their very lives to keep democracy running, notorious liar Donald Trump pursues an unprecedented campaign to undermine the will of the people in an attempt to steal a second term.

“You can’t put anything past him,” noted Finkle, 73, treasurer of the Steelworkers Organization of Retirees (SOAR) Chapter 34-3 and vice president of the Missouri Alliance for Retired Americans.

“He’s trying to throw democracy right down the drain,” said Finkle, who joined the Marines at 18 and spent three years defending the Constitution that Trump disgraces. “If that happens, God help us.”

Trump began plotting his heist months ago as the COVID-19 pandemic fueled unprecedented demand for mail-in ballots from Americans worried about contracting the coronavirus at crowded polling places.

Any other president would have used his office to expand mail-in balloting and ensure that all voters have their voices heard. Mail-in ballots are a practical and secure form of voting that members of the armed forces, homebound seniors and Americans living overseas all relied on for decades, without controversy, until Trump manufactured one.

Because he fears Americans’ wrath after bungling the nation’s pandemic response and sending the economy into a nosedive, Trump resolved to disenfranchise—to silence—those he suspected would hold him accountable for his failures.

He tried to destroy the U.S. Postal Service to thwart the delivery of mail-in ballots. And he repeatedly went to court to disenfranchise Americans who voted remotely, even though he hypocritically cast his own ballot by mail.

“It’s just something for him to say to discredit the election,” Ben Armstrong, a trustee for United Steelworkers (USW) Local 377, said of Trump’s groundless claims about a “rigged” outcome.

“That way, if he loses, he’ll have something to take to the Supreme Court. I do believe that if he were ahead in the polls, it would never be an issue,” explained Armstrong, whose work at International Paper in Georgetown, South Carolina, includes making ballot stock for elections.

Just one week before the election, with the help of his Republican cronies who control the Senate, Trump rammed through Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the court. That cements the court’s right-wing majority and boosts his chances of winning future election-related disputes, including those concerning mail-in votes.

Because of a 4-4 deadlock on October 19, the court let stand Pennsylvania’s decision to count ballots that counties receive up to three days after the election.

But while the court refuses to do so now, Trump’s allies want the justices to reconsider the case after November 3, hoping Barrett will provide the swing vote for undermining Pennsylvanians whose ballots arrive late through no fault of their own.

At stake are thousands of critical votes in a battleground state—as well as the integrity of the entire election.

“I don’t see how you can uphold democracy if you don’t count every vote,” observed Armstrong, who hopes Democratic challenger Joe Biden will win by such a large margin that it would be pointless for Trump to challenge the results.

But it isn’t just Trump’s efforts to disenfranchise voters that threaten democracy.

His relentless demonization of critics and refusal to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, if he loses, whipped his base into a frenzy.

Now, election officials across the country fear that Trump’s supporters will harass voters or incite violence at polling places, just as they already disrupted early voting in Virginia. Instead of encouraging peaceful voting, as a president committed to justice would do, Trump urged his supporters to join an “army” of poll watchers to loom over polling places.

The fear of intimidation and violence could prompt still more Americans to skip voting and let Trump cheat his way to another term.

But while Trump resorts to despicable tactics to suppress turnout—a sure sign he grasps the groundswell of support for Biden—many everyday citizens will do their part to ensure fellow Americans get to the polls and vote safely.

Gary Gaines—a SOAR member, U.S. Steel retiree and former police officer—volunteered to serve as a judge of elections in Granite City, Illinois, specifically to prevent voter intimidation.

“I don’t want anybody to be pulling shenanigans. I even told the county clerk, ‘If you have a polling place that you think is going to be a problem, I am willing to go there.’ I’m a real believer in fairness,” Gaines said, predicting that Trump would be an even greater danger during a second and final term.

A growing number of Americans, including swing voters, support Biden because they want a president who will not only fight the pandemic but heal racial wounds, strive for national unity and build an economy that works for all.

And based on the number of people he sees waiting in line for early voting, Finkle believes that Biden will win by a considerable margin.

His greatest fear is that Trump will file a blizzard of post-election lawsuits and try to place the outcome in the hands of the Supreme Court.

If that happens, the votes of a few right-wing justices, rather than the ballots cast by millions of Americans, could potentially decide the winner. That, Finkle said, would be another blow to freedom that Americans must vigorously oppose.

“That wouldn’t be right,” he said. “Every vote counts.”

From “The Crown” to an animated WWII series, here’s what’s new on Netflix in November

Perhaps one of the most talked-about arrivals to Netflix this November is one that I’m not sure I can recommend watching. Per Netflix, “Hillbilly Elegy,” which is based on J.D. Vance’s 2016 book of the same name, follows “A Yale Law student [who is] drawn back to his Appalachian hometown” where he  “reflects on his family’s history and his own future.” 

But the memoir itself capitalized on anxieties about Trump’s 2016 ascendency, and promised its readers  the background needed to understand what the  “white, working-class Trump voter” was thinking. As Salon’s Erin Keane wrote, Vance’s framing of the story tells people who don’t know much about Eastern Kentucky or Appalachia what they think they already know. 

“That the addiction and abuse and poverty that shaped his family are part of a stubbornly ingrained cultural lineage passed down through generations, and that’s what keeps the people of Appalachia (a very large geographical area, mind you) poor and under-educated, even lawless and violent,” Keane wrote. 

She continued: “And what’s more, largely content to stay that way despite their anger, though exceptional individuals can overcome these innate cultural deficits. His overarching themes point to an attitude adjustment as the solution: poor people wouldn’t have to stay poor, with all the social problems that can accompany poverty, if they could decide they didn’t want to act like poor people anymore.” 

It’s a tired and tone-deaf “pull yourself up from your bootstraps” narrative that largely ignores the societal hardships faced by many in Appalachia — opioid addiction, lack of access to professional and educational resources, poverty. Will the film break form from the memoir and offer more nuance? It remains to be seen.

But if you want an engaging documentary that tells a fuller story of Appalachia, pop over to Hulu and check out Ashley York’s “Hillbilly,” an immersive exploration the evolution of the uneducated, promiscuous “hillbilly'” stereotype in media and culture, linking it with corporate exploitation of Appalachia’s natural resources. 

On Netflix, consider “Big Stone Gap,” a 2015 film that, as acclaimed Kentucky writer Silas House wrote for Salon, finally “showed Appalachia as a place of both diversity and intelligence,” something that flies in the face of  “Hillbilly Elegy”-esque portrayals. 

House wrote that the film features “Ashley Judd as a middle-aged Appalachian woman whose quiet life is disrupted by a death and a sudden revelation. The film features an African-American woman who is neither servant nor Magic Negro, a gay man who is not ostracized once he comes out, and a main character who is not only Italian, but also intelligent and even bilingual.” 

This month also brings other diverse entertainment from the platform — from an adult animated series set in WWII, to Sophia Loren’s return to the screen, to the start of Christmas streaming.

Check out our picks below: 

“Love & Anarchy,” Nov. 4

This eight-part romantic comedy series, which is a Swedish import, features Sofie, a career-driven consultant and married mother of two. She is assigned to modernize an old publishing house, and while there, she meets Max, a flirtatious young IT tech. Sofie and Max begin a secret game wherein they challenge each other to do things that question modern day life. It starts innocently enough, but as the game gets more and more daring the consequences grow beyond proportions.

“Citation,” Nov. 6

Based on true events, this Netflix film follows a bright Nigerian student who takes on the academic establishment when she reports that a beloved professor at the university attempted to rape her. It stars Temi Otedola, Jimmy Jean-Louis, and Joke Silva. 

“The Endless Trench,” Nov. 6

This Spanish-language film — the first from the producers and directors of “HANDIA” — is based on the incredible true story of Higinio Blanco, a mole from the Spanish Civil War who locks himself in his own home for fear of retribution. He spent 33 years there. Now that’s sheltering in place.

“The Liberator,” Nov. 11

From Jeb Stuart and A+E Studios, this WWII series is based on the book, “The Liberator: One World War II Soldier’s 500 Day Odyssey,” by Alex Kershaw. It follows a young military captain as he returns to the battlefield after an encounter with enemy forces nearly kills him. What sets it apart is its animation style, which is reminiscent of rotoscoping.

“Trial 4,” Nov. 11 

This Netflix documentary tells the story of Sean Ellis, a Boston man who was charged with armed robbery and the first-degree murder of Boston Police detective John Mulligan in 1993. Though he always maintained his innocence, Ellis was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison in 1995 during his third trial after the first two resulted in hung juries.

The documentary opens as Ellis is out on bail in present-day, awaiting his fourth trial — “Trial 4” — on the murder charges. 

“The Life Ahead,” Nov. 13

Based on the international best-seller by Romain Gary, Sophia Loren stars as a Holocaust Survivor and former prostitute who takes in the Senegalese orphan who recently robbed her. Together, they form a small, but strong, family unit. 

The film is directed by Loren’s son, Edoardo Ponti, and is set in one of the hubs of the Euro-Mediterranean migrant crisis. 

“The Crown” Season 4, Nov. 15

This season of Netflix’s beloved period drama opens in the 1980s as Diana Spencer (Emma Corrin) enters the life of Prince Charles (Josh O’Connor) and Queen Elizabeth (Olivia Colman). Meeting the parents is never particularly easy, but in this case there’s immediate tension between Diana and the Queen, while the monarch’s tumultuous relationship with Margaret Thatcher (Gillian Anderson) also enters the political spotlight. 

“We Are the Champions,” Nov. 17

Rainn Wilson narrates and executive produces this series, which goes deep into some of quirkiest competitions on the face of the earth, including cheese rolling, chili eating, fantasy hair styling, yo-yo, dog dancing, and frog jumping. Mark Twain would be proud.

“If Anything Happens I Love You,” Nov. 19

Have your hanky handy. In this animated short, a grieving mother and father are visited by shadows of themselves and their deceased young daughter, all depicted through haunting hand-drawn, black-and-white illustrations. The film was created by an all-female animation team, supervised by Youngran Nho and executive produced by Laura Dern. 

“The Christmas Chronicles: Part Two,” Nov. 25

It’s been two years since siblings Kate (Darby Camp) and Teddy Pierce (Judah Lewis) saved Christmas, and a lot has changed. After becoming separated from her mother and mother’s new boyfriend while on vacation in Cancun, she mysteriously ends up in Santa’s Village, where she helps Santa (Kurt Russell) and Mrs. Claus (Goldie Hawn) fight back against Belsnickel, a mysterious troublemaker who threatens the future of the North Pole. At this point, sexy Santa has become a Christmas tradition. What else is your family going to watch?

“Dance Dreams: Hot Chocolate Nutcracker,” Nov. 27

This Shondaland production follows acclaimed entertainer and choreographer Debbie Allen as she prepares her group of dancers for their annual production of “Hot Chocolate Nutcracker,” a vivid re-imagining of Tchaikovsky’s holiday classic “The Nutcracker.”

Here’s the full list of everything coming to the platform this month: 

Nov. 1
“M’entends-tu? / Can You Hear Me?”
“60 Days In” Season 5
“A Clockwork Orange”
“Boyz n the Hood”
“Casper”
“Christmas Break-In”
“Dawson’s Creek” Seasons 1-6
“Easy A”
“Elf Pets: A Fox Cub’s Christmas Tale”
“Elf Pets: Santa’s Reindeer Rescue”
“Elliot the Littlest Reindeer”
“Forged in Fire” Season 6
“Jumping the Broom”
“Knock Knock”
“Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath” Seasons 1-3
“Little Monsters”
“Mile 22”
“Ocean’s Eleven”
“Paul Blart: Mall Cop”
“Piercing”
“Platoon”
“School Daze”
“Snowden”
“The Garfield Show” Season 3
“The Impossible”
“The Indian in the Cupboard”
“The Next Karate Kid”
“Wheels of Fortune”
“Yes Man”

Nov. 2
“Prospect”

Nov. 3
“Felix Lobrecht: Hype”
“Mother”

Nov. 4
“A Christmas Catch”
“Christmas With A Prince”
“Love and Anarchy”

Nov. 5
“A New York Christmas Wedding”
“Carmel: Who Killed Maria Marta?”
“Midnight At The Magnolia”
“Operation Christmas Drop”
“Paranormal”

Nov. 6
“Citation”
“Country Ever After”
“La trinchera infinita / The Endless Trench”
“The Late Bloomer”

Nov. 9
“Undercover” Season 2

Nov. 10
“Dash & Lily”
“Trash Truck”

Nov. 11
“Aunty Donna’s Big Ol’ House of Fun”
“The Liberator”
“Nasce uma Rainha / A Queen Is Born”
“What We Wanted”

Nov. 12
“Fruitvale Station”
“Graceful Friends”
“Ludo”
“Prom Night”

Nov. 13
“American Horror Story: 1984”
“Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey”
“The Life Ahead”
“The Minions of Midas”

Nov. 15
“A Very Country Christmas”
“America’s Next Top Model” Seasons 19 & 20
“Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2”
“The Crown” Season 4
“Hometown Holiday”
“Survivor” Seasons 20 & 28
“V for Vendetta”

Nov. 16
“Loving”
“Whose Streets?”

Nov. 17
“The Boss Baby: Back in Business” Season 4
“We Are the Champions”

Nov. 18
“El sabor de las margaritas / Bitter Daisies” Season 2
“Holiday Home Makeover with Mr. Christmas”

Nov. 19
“The Princess Switch: Switched Again”

Nov. 20
“Alien Xmas”
“Flavorful Origins: Gansu Cuisine”
“If Anything Happens I Love You”
“Voices of Fire”

Nov. 22
“Dolly Parton’s Christmas on the Square”
“Machete Kills”

Nov. 23
“Hard Kill”
“Shawn Mendes: In Wonder”

Nov. 24
“Dragons: Rescue Riders: Huttsgalor Holiday”
“El Cuaderno de Tomy / Notes for My Son”
“Hillbilly Elegy”
“Wonderoos”

Nov. 25
“The Christmas Chronicles: Part Two”
“Great Pretender” Season 2

Nov. 26
“Larry the Cable Guy: Remain Seated”
“Mosul”

Nov. 27
“A Go! Go! Cory Carson Christmas”
“The Call”
“Dance Dreams: Hot Chocolate Nutcracker”
“Don’t Listen”
“Sugar Rush Christmas” Season 2
“Überweihnachten / Over Christmas”
“Virgin River” Season 2
“La Belva / The Beast”

Nov. 28
“The Uncanny Counter”

Nov. 29
“Wonderoos: Holiday Holiday!”

Nov. 30
“The 2nd”
“A Love So Beautiful”
“Finding Agnes”
“RUST CREEK”
“Spookley and the Christmas Kittens”

On Ice Cube, Donald Trump, and the question of what my vote is really worth

Recently after a long night and a minimal amount of sleep, I rolled out of bed and opened Twitter just to see if the world was still here, and saw Ice Cube trending. The actor and hip hop icon posted a video revealing that he’s met with Republicans about his Contract with Black America that came off as a soft Donald Trump endorsement. 

That didn’t go over well on Twitter, where he was called everything from a sell-out to an Uncle Tom. Last weekend Ice Cube appeared on Fox News to talk to Chris Wallace about why he’s working with Trump on the president’s “Platinum Plan” for Black Americans, claiming, “They listened, heard what I had to say, pumped up their plan and presented it to the people.”

I watched Ice Cube’s video and listened to him explaining his contract. Maybe the Trump years have been good to celebrities like him financially; maybe their tax bills are $750 and they would enjoy four more years of that. It’s not strange for rich rappers, or rich Black people in general, to support Republicans for financial reasons. But Trump hasn’t even looked out for his own base, so why would he care about Black people who almost universally don’t support him?

I didn’t give it much thought beyond that. I never asked Ice Cube to negotiate a contract on my behalf — I have agents and lawyers for that. And I’ve never once walked into a voting booth, scratched my head and thought, “I wonder what Ice Cube would want me to do?”

RELATED: Are 50 Cent, Ice Cube and young Black men enabling Trump’s re-election? Not exactly

But Ice Cube proved impossible to ignore in the days following his announcement. No, he didn’t drop a Mitch McConnell freestyle or wear a MAGA hat, but his name kept popping up in the feeds of prominent voices denouncing his support for Trump and the Black men who would supposedly follow his lead. It’s funny that every time a Black man says or does something selfish or stupid, he’s automatically made out to be the spokesperson for every Black man on the planet. Are we considered incapable of supporting a presidential candidate without checking in with a middle-aged rapper — or a celebrity sneaker designer, for that matter — first?

I wanted to throw my phone through the drywall, patch the hole with the phone still inside, then head to the pumpkin patch for fresh cider. But I kept scrolling and reading, growing more disappointed with posts insinuating that Black men were somehow responsible for elevating Trump, as if his “law and order” rants don’t empower the very police officers who kill Black men almost daily. 

According to a recent Gallup poll, Trump’s approval rate with Black men is 19% compared to 11% with Black women. Can we all agree that Trump doesn’t really have Black support? By focusing on that difference in support among a small section of Black men and women, we are losing focus on what really matters: working together to get this guy as far away from the White House as possible. 

President Barack Obama was the first person I ever voted for. I woke up early that day and proudly stood on line, anxious to cast my ballot for the first politician to speak directly to me. I had been old enough to vote for John Kerry in 2004, or Al Gore in 2000, but I didn’t feel people like me — Black people living in poverty in the inner cities — were part of their plans. I’m sure Gore and Kerry meant well, but their rhetoric didn’t motivate me, so I sat out. Gore and Kerry both carried Maryland anyway, and George W. Bush still ended up in the White House both times, leading us into a pointless deadly war that claimed thousands of lives and is still killing people today. So “my vote don’t count” rolled off of my tongue so often you would’ve thought I was paid every time I said it. I was young and naive at the time, but I bet millions have felt the same, and some live in states where their votes collectively could have changed an electoral college outcome.

I know now that a vote has worth. A vote can be worth so much, the lack of it can cost human lives. But this year, we have the perfect opportunity to make our same mistakes all over again. Beyond all of the racist, sexist, idiotic things our current president has done, his mishandling of COVID-19 has led to more than 222,000 deaths in the U.S. so far, and we’re still counting. All of the infighting among Black Americans over the polls and celebrity endorsements is an illusion that dilutes our focus on Trump’s trail of lies, broken promises and failures.

With all that in mind, the idea of Ice Cube partnering with the Trump administration just seems silly. I’m old enough to remember the Ice Cube who once rapped: 

But welcome to McDonald’s; “may I take your order, please?”
Gotta serve ya food that might give you cancer
‘Cause my son doesn’t take no for an answer
Now I pay taxes that you never give me back
What about diapers, bottles, and Similac?
Do I have to sell me a whole lotta crack
For decent shelter and clothes on my back?
Or should I just wait for help from Bush?
Or Jesse Jackson, and Operation PUSH?
If you ask me the whole thing needs a douche

That was from his 1991 song “A Bird in the Hand,” a track that acknowledged the limited options facing many Black Americans and spit real truisms on how the left and the right have abandoned our communities. As my grandma would say, “Right wing, left wing, they both belong to the same bird.”

Like me, Cube has changed his mind about politics over time. He gravitated toward the money, which, as I stated, rich people tend to do. But I refuse to believe without evidence that a critical mass of Black people were waiting for Ice Cube to speak up about this election before they decided how to vote. 

This election shouldn’t be about wealthy celebrities hogging media attention, anyway. This election is about selecting leadership that won’t dance and joke on stage while hundreds of thousands die, hide valuable information, coddle white supremacists, party with sex offenders, boast about grabbing women’s genitals, or fire paper towel jump-shots at hurricane survivors. 

During a recent virtual classroom visit, an 18-year-old student asked me why he should vote. 

“What’s the difference between Trump and Biden?” he asked. “Like for real.” 

“Biden may not be the perfect candidate,” I said. “But you have a choice. In life, we make decisions all of the time. I hate spaghetti and I hate turkey meatloaf; however, if I’m hungry and they are my only two options, then meatloaf it is. Every decision isn’t gonna leave you 100 percent satisfied, but that doesn’t make you exempt from making the tough choices.” 

I then told the kid to ignore the useless noise from all the personalities — from Twitter-verified pundits to Facebook weirdos to celebrities like Ice Cube — who don’t come through his neighborhood to offer real help, who can’t understand his current reality, but are trying to sway his vote now for their own reasons. I told him I’d never tell him who to vote for, but to remember these used to be choices only rich white men were allowed to make. Our ancestors fought hard for our right to vote.

“So, Biden is a broken arm to me. Trump is a broken spine, broken neck and four broken limbs,” I said in closing. In that case, I told him, “not voting is death.”

Which would you choose?

Trump asserts dictatorial power over top government employees

In a major power grab, Donald Trump signed an executive order on Oct. 21 that asserts he has vast new authority to punish federal employees with demotions or firing without cause. It’s a Trumpian assertion of a right to cronyism and personal fealty to him.

This executive order purports to grant Trump dictatorial-like power over thousands of career federal managers and executives. They are now at risk of losing their jobs and careers unless they blindly follow Trump’s agenda with abject loyalty to his whims.

This Executive Order on Creating Schedule F In The Excepted Service, if allowed to stand, largely will overturn an 1883 law that was passed to reduce corruption among federal government executives by creating a career civil service based on documented merit. The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act, passed in 1883 in the unexpected presidency of Chester A. Arthur, covers most federal employees, who earn promotion via competitive exams.

Instead of patronage positions, these civil servants are protected from demotion or firing for political reasons, though they can be disciplined for serious misconduct.

In effect, this would extend the rules governing the roughly 4,000 political appointees each president is entitled to hire — people who serve at the “pleasure of the president” — to apolitical career managers and executives.

The executive order states “faithful execution of the law requires that the President have appropriate management oversight regarding this select cadre of professionals.”

In common language, this means Trump claims the ability to fire career public servants via Tweet. His executive order ignores 137 years of law and personnel regulations, allowing him to run roughshod over job protections for career government employees. Under the order, he can fire them on a whim.

Who is affected

One of the most prominent federal employees affected by this change is Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert. Trump first admired Fauci then called him an “idiot” and said last week he would fire him except for the political uproar it would cause. The order also covers officials, scientists and staff of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

This creation of “Schedule F” employees effectively gives the president the power to fire any current employees working in the broad categories as managers and executives covered by his order. He can treat them the same as private-sector workers whose employment, absent a personal or union contract, is “at-will.”

Federal employee unions promptly denounced the order even though it is aimed at management, not line workers. Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) said he will develop legislation that would restore protections for federal employees. Boyd, whose district is in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, represents more federal workers than any other member of Congress.

If Trump’s order stands it would be a major expansion of presidential power. Under threat of loss of employment and reduced or no retirement benefits, department heads might bend to Trump’s mercurial whims. Any department head who pushes back would be subject to immediate discharge even if Trump’s instructions were illegal.

The long-term consequences for our government would be disastrous. Many civil servants took federal jobs because they favored stable employment and a focus on their professional interests. Removing that security would make recruiting talent more costly and less successful. And for what? To satisfy the petulance of Donald Trump?

Whitlock case relevant

Trump acted just as DCReport published its investigation into the firing of Warren S. Whitlock, one of the highest-ranking civilians in the U.S. Army. Part One Why This Man Lost His Top Pentagon Civilian Job and Part Two Out On The Street After Two Secret And Illegal Investigations detailed the racism and machinations behind the removal of Whitlock, an equal opportunity and diversity specialist with a track record of successful changes to discriminatory government actions and policies. The broader impact was explained in Racism In The Pentagon And Higher.

In the Whitlock case, there is clear evidence of discrimination and unlawful termination. In future cases any possible protection someone like Whitlock may assert will not exist if Trump’s executive order stands. Trump and the department heads he names will not need any reason whatsoever to fire anyone who is re-classified as an at-will worker.

“You’re fired!” is of course the signature line of Trump’s faux reality television shows that made him famous. Those who watched carefully noticed he sometimes fired the best performing person and praised those whose performance made them likely candidates for leaving the show. Not aired were scenes in which he demeaned people, ogled women including making one twirl for him, and engaged in other boorish sexist behavior.

The executive order reclassified many federal employees from regular civil service status to “excepted service” status if they are involved in policy-determining, policymaking or policy-advocating.

It’s difficult, having studied the man for 32 years, to imagine a federal Qualifications Review Board would accept Trump a senior executive service member.

Political termites

A related strategy Trump undertook in 2017 to impose his will on career civil servants was detailed in my 2018 book It’s Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America. Trump put in key management positions, the very lobbyists and executives who had worked against those agencies, contradicting his campaign promise to “drain the swamp” of special interests. Because they eat away at the substance of our federal government silently and generally unseen by the public I called those appointees “political termites.”

This newest power grab by Trump is more of the same with a major addition. People who never signed up for tenuous employment at the pleasure of the president would become at-will employees with no job security.

This is exactly what the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act was supposed to prevent. That law was enacted when Vice President Chester Arthur unexpectedly became president after the assassination of James A. Garfield just six months into his term in 1881.

President Arthur had been a major gear in the corrupt Tammany Hall political machine in New York. His cronies scurried down to Washington licking their chops at all the graft they anticipated. To their shock, Arthur told his longtime pals to never again darken the White House. Arthur promised to run a clean administration, which he did, abandoning the old “spoils” system of hiring cronies and party loyalists and embracing the creation of our merit-based federal civil service.

Trump’s executive order will certainly be challenged in federal court. But unless and until some judge blocks it, this executive order is in effect.

Texas hits record high for early voting turnout

Texas hit another voting milestone Monday as the percent of registered voters who have cast ballots early surpassed the total early voting turnout from any other presidential election — even though the state has four more days of early voting left.

In all, 46% of Texas registered voters voted early through Monday, according to numbers released Tuesday by the Texas secretary of state. In 2016, the previous high-water mark, 43.5% of registered voters cast ballots during the entire early voting period. More than 85% of ballots have been cast in person.

The raw total of votes cast through Monday was 7.8 million, 1.2 million more than the 6.6 million who cast ballots early in all of 2016 and 87% of the total number of votes cast in the state during the last presidential election. There are 1.8 million more registered voters in Texas than in 2016, a 12.3% increase. But the percentage turnout indicates that population increases alone can’t account for the high number of early voters in the state.

The reasons could be myriad. For one, Gov. Greg Abbott extended the early voting period by six days this year in hopes of alleviating crowding at the polls and slowing the spread of the coronavirus. Texas has had 14 days of early voting so far and has four days left; early voting in 2012 and in 2016 each had 12 days. In addition, voters’ habits in Texas have been shifting for years as more voters choose to vote early rather than on Election Day. In 2016, 73% of voters cast their ballots early and 26% voted on Election Day.

But also many candidates and parties have reported high energy among voters as President Donald Trump inspires passions on both sides and Texas appears unusually competitive up and down the ballot.

In some counties, early voting turnout is far outpacing voter registration growth.

Denton County in North Texas, for instance, has gained over 100,000 registered voters — an increase of 21.6% — since 2016. Denton voters cast 224,084 total early votes in 2016 and 314,059 early votes through Monday in 2020, a 40.2% increase, suggesting that there was still a surge in turnout when accounting for registration growth.

Other suburban counties like Hays and Williamson in the Austin area also saw increases in turnout that surpassed increases in voter registration. Voter registration in Hays County has grown by 26% since 2016, while its number of early votes increased by 42.9%.

Many other large urban counties, including Dallas, Harris, Bexar, and Travis, also had turnout gains outpace increases in registration, though not as large as the more suburban counties such as Hays and Denton.

The fast-growing suburbs are widely considered key battlegrounds in Texas this year. They have traditionally voted Republican in presidential races, but results from the 2018 elections as well as polls have suggested that Democrats could narrow past margins or flip certain counties blue this year.

Early voting in the state began Oct. 13 and runs until Friday. Election Day is Nov. 3.

Disclosure: The Texas secretary of state’s office has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues. 

A Wall Street tax that could lift many out of poverty already exists — it’s just not being collected

Imagine if there were a tiny tax that Wall Street traders were required to pay on every stock trade. Enacting such a thing might sound like a long and difficult political fight against a moneyed caste. Yet astonishingly, it turns out that it already exists in the state of New York — it’s just not being collected. To the contrary: Wall Street is being refunded the tax money.

That’s particularly ironic right now, when many economists and pundits have astutely noted that Wall Street bankers and investors are making out quite well while the rest of us aren’t. The fortunes of billionaires in the United States have increased precipitously in the past eight months, while wages have stagnated for the vast majority and poverty has risen.

The City of New York, the largest and densest in the state, has a particular concentration of poverty that could be alleviated if this peculiar tax rebate were merely reversed. Given that federal relief from the Trump administration has been scant, ending the tax rebate seems like shrewd politics. And progressives are starting to bring attention to it.

The Stock Transfer Tax and its discontents

Since 1981, the State of New York has been rebating back to Wall Street billions of dollars from the state’s Stock Transfer Tax, first enacted by Albany Republicans in 1905 who needed to close a budget gap in an era when trust-busting was in the air. 

Assemblyman Phil Steck has been leading the charge to stop sending the revenue back to Wall Street from the minuscule transaction tax. Such an act could net the state up to $19 billion a year. 

While $19 billion is well shy of the $50 billion in pandemic aid that New York State, New York City, and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority require, progressives say it’s a down payment on a long overdue realignment. 

“The tax is in sum and substance one quarter of one percent, it’s nothing . . . and according to data from Tax and Finance it was $1.6 billion in June alone,” Mr. Steck said during a phone interview. “The present circumstances demand it . . .Teachers are being laid off . . .grant-based programs have been withheld. Upstate some of our education funding is all grant-based.”

Steck continued: “In the last ten years, we have given up $138 billion.  It is the classic race to the bottom. The whole public sector has been starved. It all starts with Reagan and the anti-tax thing and the idea that government is bloated yet huge private corporations have as much bureaucracy as government.”

So, just what are the lost opportunity costs of forking over that much tax revenue back to the very same sector of the economy that’s been gorging itself for decades even as so many were struggling?

“Most of our great water and sewer infrastructure was built with federal aid,” explained Steck. “But as we kept spending more and more on the military that aid stopped and at that point the states had a choice; either the states raised taxes or let it go to hell. What did they do? They let it go to hell, and that’s why are infrastructure ratings are so poor in terms of the quality of roads and bridges.”

The case for ending the rebating of the stock transaction tax back to Wall Street got much stronger with the October 22 report for New York State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli, which noted that the “securities industry saw its pretax profits reach $27.6 billion in the first six months of 2020, an 82 percent increase over the same period last year.”

James Henry is a New York based economist and lawyer who is a senior advisor with the international Tax Justice Network. Henry says that if the rebate ends, the stock transfer tax would greatly help abate the poverty caused by the pandemic.

“New York has a chance to set an example for the world and that is a very painless tax that is highly concentrated a very, very wealthy people and institutions that can be used for many ongoing needs,” Henry told Salon. “Now, we have an emergency that is affecting everybody and we are acutely aware of the fiscal crisis — and that I think is going to make it finally possible to get lots of different jurisdictions to work together and to implement such a thing — but even then it is not a done deal because Wall Street is fiercely opposed to setting this precedent.”

Henry said such taxes on financial transactions are very common around the world.  “Two weeks ago, Spain implemented a stock transfer tax. The EU [European Union] is about to adopt a tax between 0.1 and 0.2 percent. They are debating this on all European exchanges. Even Kenya has adopted a financial transaction tax…and they are raising more money than they expected.”

If not now, when?

“At no other time in recent history would there be less of a basis for opposition to a stock transfer tax when the mass of the population, so called Main Street, is in such deep economic difficulty with very little prospect of getting out of it soon and a major likelihood it is about to get worse,” says Richard D. Wolff, a professor emeritus of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Wolff said he first encountered the concept of the stock transfer tax when he was a student getting his doctorate in economics and took a class from James Tobin who championed the concept and went on to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.

“In Europe it is stilled called the Tobin Tax,” said Wolff. “He  [James Tobin] was a Kennedy liberal, no radical, not by a long shot. A smidge to the left of Biden.”

Today, opponents of ending the rebate raise the specter that Wall Street firms will leave New York.

Back in March of 1905, before the tax was enacted, the New York Times raised the same concern, warning the levy would send the captains of high finance fleeing for Philadelphia and Chicago leaving New York to the fate of “Medieval cities, which fell out of the course of modern commerce.”

By July 1905, with the Stock Transfer Tax on the books, the Times was singing a much different tune. Then, they observed that it had “no traceable” impact on Wall Street and was actually working. “It is sad to recall the prophecies thus falsified,” opined the Times.

The London Stock Exchange has had such a stock transfer tax since 1694, despite perennial complaints from the investor class.

Stock transfer boosters say the revenue realized from it is only one of many benefits.

“It does discourage day traders,” Steck told the Corporate Crime Reporter. “And day trading is not considered beneficial for economic reasons. It’s more like gambling. In Hong Kong, for example, they have a financial transaction tax. And as a result, they have less of that type of frequent trading behavior than we have here in this country.”

As Henry sees it, resuming the collection of the Stock Transfer Tax in New York is just one item on a tax reform agenda which needs to include addressing nationally the huge Trump-McConnell 2017 tax cut which “basically failed to tax the $2.6 trillion U.S. multinationals had accumulated offshore for 20 years.”

Henry continued. “U.S. multinationals have been basically parking their intellectual property, their software, their patents in offshore havens and not paying any taxes on the royalties that they pay themselves tax free.