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Trump’s Republican National Convention was a ratings flop

President Donald Trump never ceases to be status-obsessed and often tweets that his foes and adversaries fall short when it comes to ratings, crowd size and other things he uses to measure worth. But here are some figures that Trump is unlikely to be bragging about: the higher Nielsen ratings of the recent Democratic National Convention compared to its GOP counterpart, which concluded on Thursday night with a 70-minute acceptance speech from the president.

On Friday morning, Trump tweeted that Thursday night enjoyed “great ratings.” But Trump didn’t get into specifics or discuss the higher ratings of the DNC.

The final night of the 2020 RNC, according to Los Angeles Times reporter Stephen Battaglio, had “an average audience of 21.6 million viewers” — whereas former Vice President Joe Biden’s acceptance speech at the DNC attracted 24.6 million viewers.

Battaglio also notes that the audience for Trump’s acceptance speech was “well below the 35 million TV viewers who watched him accept his party’s nomination in 2016, and will fall short of the acceptance speeches of previous Republican nominees John McCain (38.9 million viewers in 2008), Mitt Romney (30.3 million viewers in 2012) and George W. Bush (27.6 million in 2004). TV viewing for both 2020 conventions is down from four years ago, as many viewers are likely to have watched some portion of the event through online streaming platforms which are not included in the Nielsen ratings.”

One of the speakers on the third night of this year’s RNC was Vice President Mike Pence. Bloomberg News reports that Pence’s speech attracted “an estimated 17.3 million viewers,” while a speech by Sen. Kamala Harris, Biden’s running mate, on the third night of the 2020 DNC attracted 22.8 million.

The New York Times’ Michael M. Grynbaum notes that the third night of the RNC “was seen by roughly 25% fewer live viewers than the third night of the Democratic convention last week.”

Pence’s speech on Wednesday night, Grynbaum points out, was seen by fewer viewers than First Lady Melania Trump’s speech on Tuesday night — which, according to Nielsen, attracted 17.3 million viewers.

Chadwick Boseman, “Black Panther” star, dies at 43

Chadwick Boseman, star of “Black Panther,” died on Friday after a four year battle with colon cancer, his rep confirmed to Variety. He was 43.

Before he was cast as the Marvel Studios superhero, Boseman’s career first exploded with his portrayals of Black American icons Jackie Robinson (in 2013’s “42”) and James Brown (in 2014’s “Get on Up”).

Read more from Variety: Leonard Cohen fans are livid as Trump’s speech is followed by “Hallelujah” – twice

“It is with immeasurable grief that we confirm the passing of Chadwick Boseman,” said a statement posted to his Twitter feed. “It was the honor of his life to bring King T’Challa to life in Black Panther.”

“Chadwick’s passing is absolutely devastating,” said Kevin Feige, president of Marvel Studios and chief creative officer of Marvel, in a statement. “He was our T’Challa, our Black Panther, and our dear friend. Each time he stepped on set, he radiated charisma and joy, and each time he appeared on screen, he created something truly indelible. He embodied a lot of amazing people in his work, and nobody was better at bringing great men to life. He was as smart and kind and powerful and strong as any person he portrayed. Now he takes his place alongside them as an icon for the ages. The Marvel Studios family deeply mourns his loss, and we are grieving tonight with his family.”

Read more from Variety: What it’s like to see “Tenet” in a movie theater

Although Boseman never spoke publicly about his diagnosis, according the statement, he worked through his treatment for much of his career, starting when he played another Black American icon, NAACP lawyer and future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, in 2017’s “Marshall” — a year before the premiere of “Black Panther.” Boseman most recently appeared in the Spike Lee’s Vietnam War drama “Da 5 Bloods,” and this year he’s due to appear opposite Viola Davis “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” a feature adaptation of the August Wilson play, directed by George C. Wolfe.

Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige first announced that Boseman had been cast as T’Challa, a.k.a. Black Panther, on Oct. 28, 2014, at a splashy press presentation of the studio’s upcoming slate. He won wide praise for his first appearance as the character in 2016’s “Captain America: Civil War,” which only made expectations for the impending debut of “Black Panther” — the first-ever Marvel Studios movie headlined by a Black actor — that much greater.

Read more from Variety: AMC gets court permission to take over 10 theaters

He was born the youngest of three boys and raised in Anderson, South Carolina, by his mother, who worked as a nurse, and father, who worked in a textile factory. When he was a junior in high school, Boseman wrote and staged a play about the shooting death of a basketball teammate, which turned his life towards the arts. He studied directing at Howard University, where he was mentored by Phylicia Rashad.

Reaction to Boseman’s death was swift and profound. Both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidates for president and vice president, expressed their condolences on Twitter.

Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige first announced that Boseman had been cast as T’Challa, a.k.a. Black Panther, on Oct. 28, 2014, at a splashy press presentation of the studio’s upcoming slate. The actor won wide praise for his first appearance as the character in 2016’s “Captain America: Civil War,” which only made expectations for the impending debut of “Black Panther” — the first-ever Marvel Studios movie headlined by a Black actor — that much greater.

Boseman, at least outwardly, shouldered them with ease — even after the film shattered box office records when it debuted in Feb. 2018. “Black Panther” grossed over $1.3 billion worldwide, forever exposing the pernicious untruth in Hollywood that movies with predominantly Black casts won’t gross well overseas.

It’s difficult to understate the impact “Black Panther” and Boseman had on the larger culture. The film was the first superhero movie ever nominated by the Academy Awards for best picture, earning six other nominations and winning three. More to the point, as Black Panther, Boseman presented to the world an image of a powerful and thoughtful Black man who was the leader of a thriving African nation and a superhero willing to race into whatever battle he felt was worth fighting, no matter the odds.

Before “Black Panther” premiered, he was asked by Variety about the possibility of making a sequel.

“I’m enjoying this moment,” he said. “If we start talking about sequels — if we do four of them, two of them, three of them — I just want them all to be special like this one.”

Boseman is survived by his wife and family.

More to come .  .  .

Leonard Cohen’s reps say they specifically declined GOP requests to use “Hallelujah” at convention

Representatives of the late Leonard Cohen‘s estate and publishing company have both issued statements saying they declined requests for his song “Hallelujah” to be used at the Republican National Convention — even though it was played twice following the conclusion of Donald Trump‘s speech Thursday night.

The estate’s attorney made a threat of legal action as part of her statement.

Read more from Variety: Leonard Cohen fans are livid as Trump’s speech is followed by “Hallelujah” – twice

Said Michelle L. Rice, the Cohen estate’s lawyer: “We are surprised and dismayed that the RNC would proceed knowing that the Cohen Estate had specifically declined the RNC’s use request, and their rather brazen attempt to politicize and exploit in such an egregious manner ‘Hallelujah,’ one of the most important songs in the Cohen song catalogue. We are exploring our legal options.”

Rice got an extra jab in that Cohen fans will enjoy. “Had the RNC requested another song, ‘You Want it Darker,’ for which Leonard won a posthumous Grammy in 2017, we might have considered approval of that song.”

Cohen’s publishing company, Sony/ATV Music Publishing, said it, too, had been approached and then, apparently, subsequently ignored after saying no.

Confirmed Brian J. Monaco, Sony/ATV’s president and global chief marketing officer: “On the eve of the finale of the convention, representatives from the Republican National Committee contacted us regarding obtaining permission for a live performance of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah.’ We declined their request.”

The singer of the first version of “Hallelujah” that was heard, Tori Kelly, quickly took to Twitter after the conclusion of the telecast to assure upset fans that she had nothing to do with the usage of her recording — and, unlike the estate and publisher, she was apparently never approached about it.

Read more from Variety: J.K. Rowling returns Kennedy Family award following Kerry Kennedy remarks

“Seeing messages about my version of ‘Hallelujah,'” Kelly tweeted. “All i know is neither myself nor my team received a request.” (Kelly subsequently deleted her tweet, perhaps feeling heat from some Trump-supporting Twitter users unhappy that she was disavowing prior knowledge of the usage.)

Many Cohen fans were displeased when they heard Kelly’s recording of the song playing during the fireworks that capped Trump’s address — sandwiched right between “She’s a Grand Old Flag” and Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” as pyrotechnics spelled out “TRUMP” and “2020” over the Washington mall.

Said fans were even less enthused when “Hallelujah” was quickly reprised, at greater volume, in a live, operatic rendition by Christopher Macchio, adjacent to “Ave Maria,” perhaps in the belief that Cohen’s song, too, is a religious one.

As the existence of a campaign event at the White House would itself indicate, with some claiming it violated the Hatch Act, the Trump campaign has not been one to stand on ceremony. Previous entreaties from musicians to stop using their music have been ignored, so perhaps the only surprise is that the campaign even asked. Neil Young recently became the first musician to file a lawsuit against the campaign after his requests to not have his music used by Trump fell on deaf ears. The Rolling Stones recently teamed up with ASCAP and BMI to publicly remind the campaign that it needs a specific political license, not just a venue license, to use their songs.

Read more from Variety: “Big Mouth”: Ayo Edibiri to replace Jenny Slate as Missy

In contrast to the Democrats’ music-filled convention the previous week, there was almost no contemporary music of any sort played at the Republican convention before the twin “Hallelujah” airings Thursday night, which had led some observers to believe that perhaps the Trump campaign was taking more seriously musicians’ widespread objections. However, Elton John’s “I’m Still Standing” had been played earlier Thursday as walk-on music for Ivanka Trump, despite John’s previously stated dismay at Trump campaign usage.

The only non-operatic performer to appear during the GOP convention was country singer Trace Adkins, who sang “The Star Spangled Banner” live on Wednesday following vice president Mike Pence’s speech.

Trump’s missing megadonor: GOP money man missing as the president struggles in the polls

Billionaire Ronald Lauder has been a close friend of Donald Trump’s for almost 50 years, but according to a report from CNBC, he’s nowhere to be found despite the fact that he’s donated to Trump in the past. Even as Trump’s poll rankings drop, Lauder hasn’t stepped forward to help.

Lauder gave $200,000 to the Trump Victory joint fundraising committee in the summer 2019, but hasn’t given any money to any of Trump’s reelection efforts since then.

“Fundraisers and friends of the president’s have yet to hear from Lauder on whether he plans to give larger contributions to Trump’s reelection, according to people familiar with the matter, who declined to be named as these conversations were deemed private,” CNBC reports. “Eric Soufer, a spokesman for Lauder, told CNBC that the businessman is currently focused on assisting schools in Europe that have been impacted by the coronavirus pandemic.”

Read the full report over at CNBC.

 

Why police unions are not part of the American labor movement

In the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer, news reports have suggested that police unions bear some of the responsibility for the violence perpetrated against African Americans.

Critics have assailed these unions for protecting officers who have abused their authority. Derek Chauvin, the former police officer facing second-degree murder charges for Floyd’s death, had nearly 20 complaints filed against him during his career but only received two letters of reprimand.

Many people who support labor unions in principle, who view them as a countervailing force against the power of employers, have only recently come to view police unions as problematic — as entities that perpetuate a culture of racism and violence.

But this sentiment reverberates through the history of the U.S. labor movement. As a labor scholar who has written about unions for decades, I think this viewpoint can be explained by the fact that police unions differ fundamentally from almost all trade unions in America.

Foot soldiers for the status quo

For many veterans of the labor movement, police have been on the wrong side of the centuries-old struggle between workers and employers. Rather than side with other members of the working class, police have used their legal authority to protect businesses and private property, enforcing laws viewed by many as anti-union.

The strain between law enforcement and labor goes back to the origins of American unions in the mid 19th century. Workers formed unions to fight for wage increases, reduced working hours and humane working conditions.

For employers, this was an attack on the existing societal power structure. They enlisted the government as the defender of capital and property rights, and police officers were the foot soldiers who defended the status quo.

When workers managed to form unions, companies called on local police to disperse union gatherings, marches and picket lines, using violence and mass arrests to break the will of strikers.

A narrow focus

Police work is a fundamentally conservative act. And police officers tend to be politically conservative and Republican.

A poll of police conducted in September 2016 by POLICE Magazine found that 84% of officers intended to vote for Donald Trump that November. And law enforcement unions like the Fraternal Order of Police, the International Union of Police Associations and the National Border Patrol Council all endorsed Trump’s candidacy in 2016.

This contrasts sharply with the 39% share of all union voters who voted for Trump and the fact that every other union which made an endorsement supported Hillary Clinton.

Exclusively protecting the interests of their members, without consideration for other workers, also sets police unions apart from other labor groups. Yes, the first priority of any union is to fight for their members, but most other unions see that fight in the context of a larger movement that fights for all workers.

Police unions do not see themselves as part of this movement. With one exception — the International Union of Police Associations, which represents just 2.7% of American police — law enforcement unions are not affiliated with the AFL-CIO, the U.S. labor body that unites all unions.

Alternative justice system

A central concern with police unions is that they use collective bargaining to negotiate contracts that reduce police transparency and accountability. This allows officers who engage in excessive violence to avoid the consequences of their actions and remain on the job.

In a way, some police unions have created an alternative justice system that prevents police departments and municipalities from disciplining or discharging officers who have committed crimes against the people they are sworn to serve.

In Minneapolis, residents filed more than 2,600 misconduct complaints against police officers between 2012 and 2020. But only 12 of those grievances resulted in discipline. The most significant punishment any officer received was a 40-hour suspension.

Besides collective bargaining, police have used the political process — including candidate endorsements and lobbying — to secure local and state legislation that protects their members and quells efforts to provide greater police accountability.

Police officers are a formidable political force because they represent the principle of law and order. Candidates endorsed by the police unions can claim they are the law and order candidate. Once these candidates win office, police unions have significant leverage to lobby for policies they support or block those they oppose.

Because of this power, critics claim that police unions don’t feel accountable to the citizens they serve. An attorney who sued the Minneapolis Police Department on behalf of a Black resident who was severely beaten by police officers said that he is convinced that Minneapolis “officers think they don’t have to abide by their own training and rules when dealing with the public.”

George Floyd’s death has raised serious concerns about the current role of police and police unions in our society. Several unions have demanded that the International Union of Police Associations be expelled from the U.S. labor federation. Other unions oppose expulsion. They argue that the labor movement can have a greater impact on a police union that is inside the “House of Labor.”

In any case, there is a growing recognition that police unions differ significantly from other unions. And there is a growing acceptance that they are not part of the larger American labor movement but rather a narrowly focused group pursuing their own self-interests, often to the detriment of the nation at large.

Paul F. Clark, School Director and Professor of Labor and Employment Relations, Pennsylvania State University

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

Democrats go after top Trump officials following reports of changed CDC testing guidelines

After new reporting late Wednesday indicated that abrupt and what experts characterized as dangerously unsound changes to the CDC’s Covid-19 testing guidelines were directed by the highest levels of the Trump administration, lawmakers demanded answers and sounded alarm bells over the White House’s ongoing politicization of America’s public health agencies.

CNN and Politico both reported Wednesday that top Trump administration officials were behind the CDC’s decision to stop advising Covid-19 tests for all people who have potentially been exposed to the virus, which has infected nearly six million people and killed more than 179,000 in the United States.

The new guidelines, published on the CDC website Monday, state that people who have been in close contact with someone infected by Covid-19 “do not necessarily need a test” if they don’t show symptoms. The CDC, led by Trump appointee Dr. Robert Redfield, did not present evidence justifying the changes.

Citing an anonymous federal health official close to the decision, CNN reported that the “sudden change in federal guidelines on coronavirus testing came this week as a result of pressure from the upper ranks of the Trump administration.” CNN also first reported that Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was undergoing surgery when the CDC guidance changes were discussed by the White House coronavirus task force.

“I was under general anesthesia in the operating room and was not part of any discussion or deliberation regarding the new testing recommendations,” Fauci told CNN. “I am concerned about the interpretation of these recommendations and worried it will give people the incorrect assumption that asymptomatic spread is not of great concern. In fact it is.”

Politico confirmed CNN’s reporting on the White House officials’ push for changes to the testing guidelines.

“Top Trump administration officials involved with the White House coronavirus task force ordered the Centers for Disease Control and Protection to stop promoting coronavirus testing for most people who have been exposed to the virus but aren’t showing symptoms,” according to Politico, which cited two unnamed people with knowledge of the process.

In response to news of the central role top Trump administration officials played in directing the changes to CDC testing guidelines, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) tweeted that “we need answers.”

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) also responded to the revelations, saying that “the Trump administration doesn’t have a plan to fight Covid-19 because it’s too busy sabotaging any effort to combat the virus.”

“As a result, it’s choosing more infections, more deaths, and more economic pain,” Wyden wrote.

As Common Dreams previously reported, Trump has publicly expressed support for rolling back Covid-19 testing, falsely blaming virus screenings for the rise in positive cases across the nation.

“I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down, please,'” Trump said during a campaign rally in June. The president doubled down days later after his advisers insisted he was joking.

“I don’t kid,” Trump told reporters. “By having more tests, we find more cases.”

Washington’s Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee urged residents of his state to disregard the CDC’s latest guidance, tweeting, “If you’ve been exposed to a confirmed case, get tested” and “remain in quarantine for 14 days after exposure even if you test negative.”

“CDC’s new guidance would cause Washington to miss thousands of new cases and allow the virus to spread in our communities,” Inslee warned.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, both Democrats, also condemned the new guidelines.

“Let the doctors and scientists do their jobs. Lives are on the line,” de Blasio tweeted. “Here in New York City we will follow the actual experts’ guidelines, and not politically motivated directives.”

Deborah Burger, RN, president of National Nurses United, said in a statementWednesday that “as a nation, we should be shocked that public agencies that are supposed to be serving the public interest, whether it is regarding contagious disease epidemics, environmental protections, or workplace safety, have been defiled to meet the president’s political or personal goals.”

“The CDC, at the direction of the Trump Administration, is extending this malfeasance to all patients, and all individuals,” Burger added.

DOJ interviewed USPS board member Bill Zollars in federal fraud investigation

A recently-appointed member of the U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors has been interviewed by Department of Justice investigators, as part of a federal suit filed against his former freight company for defrauding the Pentagon of millions of dollars, court documents show.

About two weeks after Bill Zollars, the former chairman, president and CEO of YRC Worldwide, Inc., was confirmed to the USPS board by the Senate in June, the Treasury Department awarded his former company a $700 million COVID relief loan. That came from funds designated for Pentagon contractors — but Zollars’ former company, which he left in 2011, has been accused of defrauding the Pentagon during his tenure.

YRC was worth only $70 million at the time the loan was extended, and in May had warned shareholders it was in danger of going out of business.

The loan, which matures in 2024, did not come out of CARES Act funds set aside for small businesses, but from a $17 billion carve-out intended to support businesses considered crucial to national security amid the pandemic.

Treasury reportedly did not hand out any of that slice for longer than three months, largely because defense contractors “considered those terms too onerous,” industry executives and lobbyists told The Washington Post.

YRC Worldwide — which Treasury said accounts for 68% of the military’s “less-than-truckload,” or LTL, shipping services — took losses amid the economic shutdowns necessitated by the coronavirus pandemic. The company posted a first-quarter revenue loss and has laid off a number of workers. YRC also owes $825 million to multiple creditors, the Washington Post reported.

Zollars also currently sits on the board of directors for Prologis, a logistics multinational that rents industrial real estate to the Postal Service, as well as to competitors such as UPS and FedEx.

HuffPost reported Wednesday that Prologis financial documents from this spring show that Zollars has been compensated with stock shares worth more than $1 million, and that he holds options to purchase thousands more shares. Zollars’ Prologis bio says that he serves on the compensation committee.

The Trump administration has been proposing to privatize the USPS since 2018. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who like Zollars made his fortune in the freight sector, has also come under scrutiny for his millions of dollars of holdings in Postal Service competitors, in particular his old transport company — XPO Logistics, a competitor of YRC.

“The Postal Service Board of Governors should refrain from even the appearance of a conflict of interest to ensure they are not making decisions that benefit them financially, but are solely focused on improving the Postal Service for the American people,” Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., chair of the House Oversight Committee, told Salon in a statement. “All Board Members should refrain from having any financial interests with competitors of the Postal Service.”

The DOJ’s first complaint against Zollars’ former company was filed in 2008 and unsealed as amended in December of 2018. Zollars had stepped down in the interim, leaving the company in 2011.

While the complaint does not name Zollars, it lists the companies he was running — YRC Freight, Inc.; Roadway Express, Inc., and Yellow Transportation, Inc. — as the sole defendants, alleging that employees and top-level executives knowingly and systematically increased profits by manipulating weight reports to the Department of Defense.

“The Defendants’ false claims and false statements ultimately resulted in DOD paying millions of dollars more for freight shipping than it would have if the Defendants were honest,” the complaint says. “The Defendants further understood that they were cheating their customers,” it adds.

Among the counts charged are making false statements to the government and unjust enrichment, as well as breach-of-contract charges for breaking terms with the Pentagon while YRC was under Zollars’ leadership. Still, YRC got the $700 million loan from the Treasury Department this July in order to meet its obligations under its Pentagon contract. The government is suing YRC for an amount to be determined in court, and demanding a jury trial.

Despite the government’s accusations of fraud, Zollars’ bio on the Postal Service website touts his leadership at YRC:

As chairman, president and chief executive officer of YRC Worldwide, Inc., Zollars, led one of the largest and most recognizable global transportation service providers from 1999-2011. While at YRC, Zollars was a direct participant in the postal delivery process by providing consolidation and de-consolidation services on behalf of the USPS. Before that, Zollars was president of Yellow Transportation Inc., a position he accepted in 1996 as part of a major management transition for the company.

Following news of the bailout, YRC’s stock price more than doubled. In exchange for the loan, taxpayers will take a 29.6% share in the company, which earlier this year had warned investors it was in danger of going out of business.

The Treasury Department did not respond to Salon’s questions.

“Those who do business with the government must do so fairly and honestly,” Assistant Attorney General Jody Hunt of the Department of Justice’s Civil Division said in a 2018 press statement announcing the suit. “Knowingly overcharging the government is an affront to American taxpayers, and the Department of Justice will seek to ensure that those who engage in such misconduct are held accountable.”

On Aug. 19, amid national uproar about executive decisions at the Postal Service relating to election mail, a representative for Zollars asked Salon to remove its initial report on the lawsuit and loan. Salon declined, believing the report was accurate and fair.

In the email, the representative claimed that Zollars “had no involvement” with the lawsuit. Salon found a court document filed by defense attorneys for YRC that contradicts that claim, listing Zollars among a handful of YRC employees who had given oral testimony to the government.

The same day that Zollars’ representative requested the retraction, the Justice Department filed a lengthy court document opposing YRC’s objection to the magistrate judge’s decision not to dismiss the government’s case.

Zollars did not respond to Salon’s specific questions for this article.

“#Unfit” delivers a Trump diagnosis we all know and warns of dire consequences for ignoring it

Let us presume that if you intend to watch “#Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump” you probably agree with director Dan Partland’s angle. That also means nothing the firm’s experts have to say about their impressions of the man or his fitness to govern is particularly revelatory. 

Instead, think of the film as an 83-minute warning against handing another four years of the presidency to Trump, spelled out by an assortment of mental health professionals, historians, experts on authoritarianism, a former intelligence officer . . . and Lincoln Project co-founder George Conway and former Trump super pal Anthony Scaramucci.

Right about now maybe you need to hear from these people about as much as you may be hankering for another four days of the GOP’s lie-tastic tent revival.

For those who remain curious, Partland has assembled a chorus of voices to deliver their expert confirmation of an alarmingly common assessment of Trump, which essentially comes down to “woo, that bitch be cray.” Only, you know, in actual clinical terms.

“#Unfit” kicks off an assessment of Trump’s personality, and confirmation from the likes of those who were closest too him, before finding parallels between his mental health profile and that of dictators past and present. But it also functions as a defense of expertise – particularly that of the mental health professionals who have taken their concerns public.

Prominently featured is the Duty to Warn PAC’s founder John Gartner, Ph.D., a psychologist and former professor at the Johns Hopkins University Medical School who explains the meaning of his and his colleagues agreed upon diagnosis of Trump as a malignant narcissist, while defending their ethical choice to do so.

At the heart of the criticism sustained by mental health professionals like Gartner is the oft-cited American Psychiatric Association’s Goldwater Rule, which states that it is unethical for psychiatrists to give a professional opinion about public figures from whom they haven’t obtained consent and whom they haven’t examined in person.

Gartner offers his interpretation of the rule by explaining that when Goldwater was running for president in 1964, and 1,189 psychiatrists declared his unfitness for office in the defunct magazine “Fact,” they were basing their assessments on Freudian methods that have since fallen out of practice.

Little wonder there: Among some of the declarations made were, “It is apparent that Goldwater hates and fears his wife,” and “He is a mass murderer at heart,” and “He was never forgiven his father for being a Jew.”

But as Gartner explains, the current standard of diagnosis in the mental health field is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), which holds that observable behavior is more vital to a clear diagnosis than the patient interview.

Trump’s entire presidency is one long stretch of observable behavior available to be interpreted in multiple platforms, and that’s before a person digs through his tweets.

Thus by standing on the ground of the Tarasoff Rule, which imposes a duty on a therapist to warn appropriate parties when a patient may present a risk of harm to a specific person or persons, Gartner and his colleagues are emboldened to share their assessment. In this case the party in question is the American public, and the diagnosis, malignant narcissism, encompasses paranoia, antisocial personality disorder (otherwise known as psychopathy) and sadism. To which any Never Trumpers who has endured the past four years can only reply, “Um, duh-doy!”

If I’m coming across as cavalier in this review, it’s only because “#Unfit” is a work meant to confirm suspicions many of us have long stopped agonizing over. The film calculates that Trump has busted out at least 19,127 lies and false claims since his inauguration, and one look at our Twitter feeds is enough to observe the ways that he’s shattered norms and broken laws.

The Republican Convention itself contains multiple demonstrated violations of The Hatch Act. It also occurred on the heels of released findings of a bipartisan report from the Senate Intelligence Committee that confirms that Trump’s 2016 campaign did in fact work closely with the Russian government, including intelligence operatives, to sabotage that election and help him win the presidency.

The public and the media should be making a bigger deal about those developments than it is, and the fact that their import has been muted by collective head shaking over a party convention with no platform other than praising Trump says a great deal about the environment in which this film is debuting. Hopefully we care about these violations. Those who don’t aren’t going to be moved by this movie.

However, “#Unfit” successfully makes its case concerning why Trump’s psychological instability should be of concern to the public – you know, other than the fact that he’s channeled his sadism, sexism, racism and general violation of democratic norms into harmful policies. Once the mental health professionals have had their say, the historians step in to offer their assessment of what it means to have a malignant narcissist in charge of a nuclear arsenal or fueling nationalism and racist violence.

Experts on the cyclical rise of authoritarianism in the 20th century walk us through the steps leading up to unrest and war in prior decades to let us know how close we are to losing our democracy. Former intelligence officer Malcolm Nance is there to remind us that this man has access to our nuclear arsenal, has made antagonistic statements about leaders of other unstable governments and cozied up to murderous strongmen, and has removed the U.S. from multiple treaties designed to make us and the world safer.

Taken in that context, it’s unclear what is to be gained by having Conway characterize Trump as “a practical joke that got out of hand. That’s the problem,” or Scaramucci weigh in about what’s at stake by reminding the viewer that it doesn’t make sense to “disrupt a 243-year experiment for one dude’s personality.”  Obviously those two are present to offer some bit of levity in the midst of all these alarms going off. Then again, much of what they have to say only weakens the brew here. And a side trip about Trump’s propensity to cheat at golf comes off as a cheap swipe.

It’s not that we shouldn’t care about what the experts in “#Unfit” have to tell us – we should. We’re also so numb or set in our assessment of this administration and therefore resilient in our passion to either re-elect Trump or pry his orange corruption out of office with our vote, that I’m not sure this movie has the weight it might have had in saner administrations.

And in some respects this makes it the documentary version of a koan: if a film is dozens of mental health professionals screaming a warning about a leader’s unfitness arrives at a time when we’re submerged in multiple disasters of his making, does it make an impact, let alone any sound at all?

“#Unfit” might not be potent enough to fully indict Trump, and it could arrive too late for anyone to listen to its warning. If nothing else, though, it allows Gartner and his peers to be secure that they made their best effort. “I am more confident in my diagnosis of Donald Trump than I have been of any other diagnosis, because I have more information,” he says. That we can believe.

“#Unfit” releases in theaters and virtual cinemas on Aug. 28 before heading to on-demand platforms Sept. 1.

Amazon’s body-scanning, conversation-recording fitness band faces swift backlash for creep factor

Amazon announced on Thursday that it is releasing a new product known as Halo, a fitness band with an accompanying app that promises to provide customers with a comprehensive understanding of their health. Yet the product’s so-called features — which include taking a 3D scan of the user’s body to determine how fat they are and listening to their conversations to see how they come across to other people— have led to an online backlash, with many deriding the device as creepy.

According to its press release, the Amazon Halo will allow customers to monitor various health metrics involving their heart and exercise habits, their sleep patterns, their body fat percentage and how they can generally develop healthier life routines. To obtain accurate data about body fat percentage, Amazon Halo requires users to take scans of their body and send them to Amazon while wearing “tight, minimal clothing.” The company claims that consumers should not be worried because the photographs are deleted from the cloud after they are processed and are only stored locally on the users’ phone. Despite their assurances of privacy, the company has admitted in the past that their own employees listen to private user data, such as conversations recorded by voice-activated Alexa devices.

Amazon also claims that Halo’s “Tone” feature can analyze your vocal tone to help users figure out how they come across to others. This is because, as Amazon explains, the Halo listens to its wearer’s conversations throughout the day and records them. Indeed, the company’s press release says: “Throughout the day, [Halo] will take short samples of your speech and analyze the acoustic characteristics that represent how you sound to the people you interact with. This gives you a simple way to reflect on your interaction and communication throughout the day.”

Amazon says that Halo can do all of these things through a wearable device that customers attach to their wrists, along with the accompanying software.

Considering that this device will compile a tremendous amount of sensitive health data about its customers, as well as be able to monitor and record what you say, the news about Halo has been met with concern.

Will Ahmed, the founder and CEO of the fitness tracker WHOOP, tweeted that “it’s hard to understate how invasive it is that a Trillion dollar company wants you to wear a 24/7 wearable that intentionally records EVERYTHING you say. Re-read that and tell me it’s not a dystopian future.” Wareable, a Twitter account that focuses on wearable technology, tweeted “if you thought Alexa was creepy, try the new Amazon Halo wearable.”

Journalist Aysha Khan expressed a similar thought, writing that “wow, the new Black Mirror episode seems really creepy.” Evan Greer, deputy director of Fight for the Future, tweeted in response to one article discussing the new product that “you misspelled ‘Amazon Halo is a surveillance capitalist wet dream manifested into a wearable device.'” Journalist Kara Swisher noted on Twitter that “I usually call them all unwearables, but this is fascinating and more than a little scary: Amazon Halo wearable tracks activity, body fat, emotions.”

Even CNN Business insinuated that there is something unsettling about the new product, writing that it has already “collected mountains of data” by selling so many different products and through its virtual assistant AI technology Alexa and adding “now, it wants to creep into even more sensitive areas of its customers’ lives.”

Emily Mullin, a OneZero staff writer, writes about how North American life insurer John Hancock is working with Amazon to offer its members a free Amazon Halo device and three-year membership in return for access to their data (which they say will be used to provide rewards like discounts on premiums). Although CEO Brooks Tingle told OneZero that customers can choose not to share their data (at the expense of receiving the same perks) and that it won’t use voice tone or body fat information, Mullin notes that other insurers may “take advantage of that data.” She adds that insurance companies, which earn more money by having healthier members, could offer products like Amazon Halo to members because “they’re betting that people will make healthier choices if they know they’re being monitored.”

In its press release, Amazon claims that “privacy is foundational to Amazon Halo, and multiple layers of privacy and security are built into the service to keep data safe and in customers’ control.” When Salon reached out to Amazon, we were referred to this press release and to executives from the Future of Privacy Forum and World Privacy Forum.

This is not the only occasion in which Amazon products have been met with concerns about privacy issues. The Amazon Echo, a voice assistant, has prompted repeated surveillance and privacy concerns. The company has also been criticized for ethical concerns over its facial recognition technology Rekognition, used by law enforcement, which has been accused of racist and sexist biases in its programming. Amazon announced in June that it was imposing a one-year moratorium on allowing police forces to use that technology pending congressional legislation to address the ethical concerns.

Jim Gaffigan slams Trump on Twitter during RNC speech: “He is a fascist who has no belief in law”

Comedian Jim Gaffigan – who is well-known for his inoffensive jokes that avoid controversial topics – delivered a surprising political rant on Twitter during Trump’s finale speech at the Republican National Convention Thursday night.

Gaffigan began the rant by simply stating “RIP Truth,” and then directly confronted Trump supporters, many of which are fans of the usually apolitical comedian.

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“Look Trumpers I get it. As a kid I was a cubs fan and I know you stick by your team no matter what but he’s a traitor and a con man who doesn’t care about you,” Gaffigan wrote. “Deep down you know it. I’m sure you enjoy pissing people off but you know Trump is a liar and a criminal.”

Gaffigan’s replies were filled with fans saying he was ruining his career by speaking about politics and that they would no longer support him. In response, Gaffigan wrote: “By the way you can’t be against Cancel Culture and tell people to stay out of politics. You know that time you did a job and didn’t get paid? That’s Trump and you know it.”

He continued on, calling Jared Kushner a “douche bag” and contending that he and his wife, Ivanka Trump, do not actually represent working-class America.

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“I know you hate snobs and elites I get it but look at Ivana [sic] and that douche bag Jerod [sic]. Think they are on your side?” Gaffigan tweeted. “Do you think they’ve ever done a real days work in their lives. Wake up.”

Gaffigan also name-dropped Lou Holtz, the former Notre Dame football coach who spoke at the convention and questioned Joe Biden’s devotion to his Catholic religion.

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“F— Lou Holtz. Biden is Catholic in name only? Compared to who?” Gaffigan wrote. “How many abortions did Trump pay for? How may women has he raped? How many times did pull the s— he did in Ukraine. Wake up. He’s a crook and a con man.”

Gaffigan proceeded to comment on how Trump called Democrats like Barack Obama and Biden socialists, contending that Trump himself is a fascist.

“Please don’t buy that socialist crap either. Obviously Obama wasn’t a socialist. This is all lies to scare you and you know it,” Gaffigan tweeted. “Biden is not radical. Are you serious?”

In a second tweet, Gaffigan continued: “Remember everything Trump accuses the Democrats of he’s guilt [sic] of. Don’t let the socialist name calling distract you from the fact he is a fascist who has no belief in law.”

The comedian also mentioned Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic and several “radical” actions he has taken while president.

“You know Trump just creates enemies. You know you can’t trust him. You know he been [sic] incompetent during this crisis. You know all those people didn’t need to die,” Gaffigan tweeted. “Trump talks about the Space Program and you can’t safely go to a movie. Wake up.”

“Trump budding [sic] up with dictators is RADICAL. Trump having interfering with the justice department is RADICAL,” Gaffigan continued in another tweet. “Trump pandering to the police and army (I gave 3 raises) is RADICAL.”

Gaffigan finished his rant with three bullet points he wants his audience to remember: “If you want to sound crazy please tell me about THE DEEP STATE. To sound stupid please be against CANCEL CULTURE but then accuse anyone with an opinion of virtue signaling. Trump derangement syndrome is meant to distract from the con of Don.”

The latest “Bill & Ted” adventure is more bogus than excellent, despite some chuckles

Whoa! Bill (Alex Winter) and Ted (Keanu Reeves) are back! Sure, it seems like the two dudes from San Dimas have been lost in the Circuits of Time for three decades — they have! — and now the teens are middle aged fathers. Bogus! Or excellent?!

“Bill & Ted Face the Music” opens with a brief recap of what the guys have been up to since “Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey” back in 1991. Their band, Wyld Stallyns, did have a hit single but they also broke up. They married the Princesses, Elizabeth (Erinn Hayes) and Joanna (Jayma Mays), and each had a daughter — Thea (Samara Weaving) and Billie (Brigette Lundy-Paine). Oh, and they still need to write the song that unites the entire world and prevents time from folding in on itself. 

However, as the film opens and Wyld Stallyns are seen performing a song with a theremin, bagpipes, and throat-singing, this critical task may be next to impossible. Following a gag involving bootstrap paradoxes and causal loops, Ted admits that he is tired and thinking of selling his Les Paul. Bill, however, reminds him they have a destiny to fulfill. So, it is good that Kelly (Kristen Schaal) arrives from the future to guide the guys to San Dimas 2720 AD. 

Kelly is, it is revealed, the daughter of Rufus (George Carlin, in a holographic cameo), and her mom (Holland Taylor) is “The Great Leader,” who tells Bill and Ted they need to “save reality as we know it by uniting humanity across all time” with the song they are supposed to create. And they have only 77 minutes and 25 seconds to do this. 

Yes, it’s a flimsy plot, but “Bill & Ted Face the Music” uses it as a framework to riff on the storylines of the previous two outings. In one plotline, Bill and Ted use their time traveling phone booth to see their future selves and steal the song they must have written. (This echoes “Bogus Journey,” where the pair met their evil doubles). There is some amusement in seeing future Bill and Ted slumming at an open mic night, or as bulked up and tattooed prisoners. The whole “other us-es” gimmick feels most inspired when Bill and Ted meet themselves as old men near death. There’s a poignant, philosophical moment where wise old Ted tells his younger self, “I looked at you and saw myself.” 

But most of these encounters are silly, especially one scene set in a large mansion that features a clever musical cameo and Reeves in a rather eye-popping fat suit. “Bill & Ted Face the Music” could have milked more humor out of the guys’ travels and costumes, but it generates most of its smiles from the duo talking in sync. 

The real appeal of this installment is Thea and Billie’s excellent adventures, which take them back in time to round up a supergroup consisting of the world’s greatest musicians so they can play in their fathers’ band. Recalling the collection of historical figures from the first “Bill & Ted” film, they meet Jimi Hendrix (DazMann Still), Louis Armstrong (Jeremiah Craft), Ling Lun (Sharon Gee), and Mozart (Daniel Dorr) among others. The film has great fun when Mozart plays the piano and Hendrix accompanies him on electric guitar. 

However bodacious the Thea and Billie storyline is, “Bill & Ted Face the Music” includes a goofy subplot involving Dennis (Anthony Carrigan), a robot sent by the Great Leader to kill Bill and Ted that ends up being lame. Its main purpose is to land the major characters in Hell with the song deadline fast approaching. This extended sequence is more strained than funny until Bill and Ted’s former bandmate, Death (William Sadler), turns up. The banter between the guys and their former band mate yields a few smiles, but finesse is needed where Death’s ego is involved.

Finesse is not something this film employs much of. At times “Bill & Ted Face the Music” feels sloppy or lazy. Reeves’ expression often appears to be a scowl of incomprehension. His performance is disappointingly listless. In contrast, Winter seems to be providing most of the energy, which dampens the enjoyment of the pair reuniting. Better are Weaving and Lundy-Paine who create their own Bill-and-Ted dynamic. They could almost have their own spin-off film based on their work here. But will there be a rallying call for that? Were fans of the first two films campaigning for this three-quel?

As for the supporting cast, Schaal is underused in a role that mostly has her phoning The Great Leader and complaining, and Kid Cudi plays himself and spouts quantum physics, for what it’s worth. 

The film, ultimately, is about the song. And to its credit, “Bill & Ted Face the Music” delivers the sweet message that music has the power to unite the world in its special-effect laden mash-up finale. Now if only Bill and Ted could travel back in time and fix the problems with this new film that would be most excellent. 

At least the post-credits cookie should make fans chuckle.

“Bill & Ted Face the Music” is in theaters and available for purchase online Aug. 28.

Is 6 feet enough? Medical experts question the wisdom behind social distancing guidelines

Since the beginning of the pandemic, public officials and health agencies worldwide have recommended that the public observe a six-foot social distancing rule — keeping a minimum of six feet away from strangers in order to limit the potential for transmission of the coronavirus.  Indeed, the “six-foot rule” has become etched in the public consciousness — through signage, posters taped to restaurant walls, and verbal admonitions from law enforcement. 

Now, a new medical journal article calls into question whether six feet is really enough distance to avoid transmission of the virus. If taken seriously, such recommendations could have widespread repercussions on public health and the behavior of the everyday public.

The article, published in the medical journal BMJ, argues that, rather than applying a single consistent social distancing guideline, the public should employ different standards based on the specific details of their situations.

“Instead of single, fixed physical distance rules, we propose graded recommendations that better reflect the multiple factors that combine to determine risk,” write authors from the University of Oxford, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and St. Thomas’ Hospital. “This would provide greater protection in the highest risk settings but also greater freedom in lower risk settings, potentially enabling a return towards normality in some aspects of social and economic life.” The authors include a photo of the gas cloud from a sneeze, illustrating how it extends around 7 to 8 meters (23 feet to 26.2 feet). 

Originally, the six-foot rule was based on the belief that two meters, or six feet, was the transmission range for aerosols containing pathogens (a particle that can produce disease). Yet researchers say this may not always be true. They assert that variables such as the force with which a person exhales, the specific diseases contained within the droplets, the size of the droplets themselves, the amount of ventilation in the area where exhalation has occurred and the specific airflow patterns of those locations all impact how far an aerosol may travel in order to infect someone.

The authors then created a model which they said establishes risk levels for infection. The highest risk levels, they claim, are for people who are not wearing face coverings in areas that are poorly ventilated or indoors and well ventilated. The lowest risk levels are for anyone who is in a well ventilated, low occupancy area for short periods of time while wearing face coverings.

“Physical distancing should be seen as only one part of a wider public health approach to containing the covid-19 pandemic,” the authors conclude. “It needs to be implemented alongside combined strategies of people-air-surface-space management, including hand hygiene, cleaning, occupancy and indoor space and air managements, and appropriate protective equipment, such as masks, for the setting.”

Aerosol experts previously cast doubt on whether six feet was enough to prevent transmission, particularly in an indoor space. The New York Times published a simulation that illustrated how aerosols could, via a sneeze, spread throughout the inside of a subway car, far beyond a six-foot radius of the sneezer. 

Salon reached out to public health experts who emphasized that, as a rule, people should still try to maintain a 6 foot or 2 meter social distancing rule — even if in certain cases that might not be enough.

“The 6 foot (2 meter) rule remains a reasonable guideline,” Dr. Georges Benjamin, Executive Director of the American Public Health Association, told Salon by email. “The bulk of droplet emissions are addressed by this. Aerosols are still a problem but are addressed some by masks. This is a practical guide when possible. Mask still should always be used as part of layered protections. This is all about risk reduction. The only way to have zero risk is to not be around anyone infected.”

He added that, in order to stay safe from the novel coronavirus, people should wear a mask and wash their hands.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding, Senior Fellow at the Federation of American Scientists, expressed a similar thought to Salon by email.

“Social distancing is important still — but not foolproof,” Feigl-Ding explained. “We know with indoor aerosol transmission that it’s a real problem, since we know aerosols can be infectious and found up to 27 feet away, and [can] float [from] 20 minutes to four hours in the air.”

He argued that, in order to protect themselves, people should also ‘improve indoor ventilation and use indoor air filtration, in addition to masks.”

Dr. Russell Medford, chairman of the Center for Global Health Innovation and Global Health Crisis Coordination Center, elaborated on these observations in an email to Salon, writing that “people should closely adhere to current CDC guidelines at a minimum  (social distancing, face-masks and hand-washing) but each of us should also have situational awareness to recognize the relative risk of infection in different situations: indoor vs outdoor, crowded vs uncrowded venues, use of face-masks (or not) by others, poorly vs well-ventilated indoor spaces, prolonged vs short duration of contact.”

He added, “For example, in a higher risk situation (a crowded, poorly-ventilated indoor environment where few participants are wearing face masks), social distancing beyond six feet and minimizing your exposure time should be encouraged.”

GOP candidate John James’ companies hit with tax liens, got tax breaks for jobs they didn’t create

Companies owned by Michigan Republican Senate candidate John James have a history with tax liens in multiple states, while another got tax breaks for jobs it did not create, the Detroit Metro Times reports. 

James has worked at James Group International, which was founded by his father, since 2012 as its director of operations, and became its president in 2014. The company owns subsidiaries like Renaissance Global Logistics and Magnolia Automotive Services.

In 2014, James Group International owed $10,439 in state taxes to Mississippi, according to a lien recorded in Madison County that was reviewed by Salon. The lien was released about three months later, according to records.

The Indiana Department of Revenue also filed two tax liens against Magnolia Automotive Services, which is part of James Group International and is run by James’ brother Lorron James, last year. One lien was for $6,451 and another was for $396, according to Indiana court records reviewed by Salon. Both liens have since been resolved.

The James campaign told Salon that the $6,451 lien was produced due to a clerical error and was resolved, but provided no documentation to corroborate the claim. The campaign said the company did not receive a record of the second lien but would resolve it as necessary.

James, whose campaign has gotten a sizable financial boost from the family of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, touted his family’s company during a brief pre-taped appearance at the Republican National Convention this week when he shared his family’s journey “from slave to share cropper, from mason to entrepreneur, to the door now of the U.S. Senate.”

James, who trails first-term incumbent Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., in most recent polls, has invoked his business career since his first national television interview with “Fox & Friends,” where host Ainsley Earhardt described him as the possible “future of the GOP.”

“I got out of the military and I joined my family business, a small automotive logistics company in Detroit, and grew the company from $35 million to $137 million in revenue and added 100 jobs in Michigan and east of the Mississippi,” James said at the time.

The story of the Iraq War helicopter pilot-turned-entrepreneur drew the attention of President Donald Trump, who has twice endorsed James. “He will be a star,” Trump declared.

Another company with a history of tax liens, Motor City Express, has been reported by multiple news outlets as being part of James Group International, which the James campaign says is not the case. Salon reviewed tax liens filed against Motor City Express in Michigan’s Wayne County for $6,732 in 2012 and in Indiana for $253 that same year. The James campaign said that the company was sold in 2011 but did not provide any documentation, nor was Salon able to find a publicly available record of a sale. Asked who owns the company now, campaign spokeswoman Abby Walls replied, “not John James.”

“John James’ family business is a good community citizen that pays its taxes, works to provide good jobs with quality healthcare, and support our Michigan-made manufacturing,” Walls said in a written statement. “Through the company, John and his family have been community leaders noted for their charitable and philanthropic work in the Detroit community. They did this while Sen. Gary Peters sat in Washington and voted to raise taxes 106 times. Michigan needs more business people with the hands-on knowledge and skills it will take to help our country recover, not more failing career politicians.”

The statement came after documents published by the Detroit Metro Times earlier this week showed that Renaissance Global Logistics, where James serves as chief executive officer, received $1.75 million in tax breaks from the Michigan Economic Development Corporation (MEDC) on the condition that the company create 108 new jobs prior to James becoming CEO. Instead, the company has lost more than 30 jobs after he took over, the outlet reported, adding that the “MEDC revoked its tax-exempt status after it failed to create the jobs it promised.”

The report added that it does not appear that there was a “clawback” clause that would have required the company to pay back the taxes.

James became CEO of the company in 2015, the year of the jobs creation deadline. In February 2016, the MEDC warned that the company had 90 days to meet the condition or have its tax status revoked. The company sought an extension until the end of 2017, citing the auto industry’s struggles. But the MEDC said in a 2017 memo that the company “failed to create one-hundred eight (108) new jobs by December 31, 2015 as required per the agreement.”

Crain’s Detroit later reported that the company failed to create a singe job in Michigan during James’ tenure between 2012 and 2017.

The report appears to contradict claims made by James during his previous unsuccessful 2018 Senate bid.

“Send a job creator to Washington who understands that working-Michiganders are looking for a fair hand up, not a free handout,” he tweeted in 2017.

The campaign did not comment on the report.

Renaissance Global Logistics later received a Paycheck Protection Program loan worth between $1 million and $2 million, despite James’ vilifying government “handouts” on the campaign trail.

“We believe at West Point that you don’t lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do, which is why I’ve gotten President Trump’s endorsement,” he told Fox News in 2018. “I’ve never taken a handout a day in my life.”

(Disclosure: Salon received a PPP loan to keep our staff and independent journalism at 100%.)

Former OAN correspondent Emily Miller fired at FDA after misleading tweet during Trump’s speech

Emily Miller, gun-rights advocate and former senior correspondent for the right-wing One America News Network, has been fired from her position as assistant commissioner for media relations at the strife-torn Food and Drug Administration. Her tenure at FDA lasted all of 11 days, which to be fair is one day longer than Anthony Scaramucci lasted as White House communications director.

“Effective immediately, Emily Miller will no longer serve the FDA as the assistant commissioner for media affairs and will no longer be the official spokesperson for the agency,” FDA commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn wrote in an email, reported by Politico. “I will appoint someone to an acting role in that position in the interim.”

Miller’s ouster comes after the agency drew widespread criticism for the rollout Sunday of its emergency authorization for convalescent plasma, which was seen as politically charged and which conveyed misleading information for which Hahn apologized the following day. Miller had already been forced to correct a misleading tweet.

The FDA press release accompanied a briefing where President Trump, standing beside Hahn, touted the authorization as a “breakthrough” and made the false claim that plasma had been “proven to reduce mortality by 35%. It’s a tremendous number.”

Hahn, who echoed Trump’s point, personally apologized for his role in that press conference the following day, calling the criticism “entirely justified.” Miller, who had tweeted the same misinformation, did not apologize.

On Thursday evening, the night before she was fired, Miller again tweeted misleading information about convalescent plasma, this time from her personal account in a partisan context: Quoting Trump in real time from his acceptance speech during the Republican National Convention.

“‘Convalescent plasma will save thousands and thousands of lives.’ – Pres. Trump,” Miller wrote, tagging the tweet #COVIDー19 and #RNC2020Convention.

Hours before Miller posted that second misleading tweet, the FDA’s parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, terminated its contract with public relations consultant Wayne Pines, the New York Times reported Friday. Pines had reportedly advised Hahn earlier in the week to correct the misleading statements he made during the press conference with Trump.

“I did recommend that he correct the record,” Pines told the New York Times, but said he wasn’t told why he had been let go. “If a federal official doesn’t say something right, and chooses to clarify and say that the criticism is justified, that’s refreshing,” he added.

Politico reported that health officials had taken a dim view of Miller within days of her hiring, and said that her short stint with the department was studded with clashes over messaging.

The plasma press conference was accompanied by a news release that touted the announcement as “Another Achievement in Administration’s Fight Against Pandemic,” which appeared to prioritize political messaging over scientific information.

When veteran health reporter Julie Rovner pointed out in a tweet that the headline was unusual, Miller, who had also repeated Hahn’s inaccurate description in a tweet, asked, “How so?”

“FDA press releases don’t trumpet Administration achievements,” Rovner replied.

Miller replied: “So?”

Salon’s emailed questions regarding the role of HHS lead spokesperson Michael Caputo — a GOP operative and longtime Trump ally and Roger Stone confidant who was brought on in April, after tweeting racist attacks and politicized conspiracy theories about the pandemic — were routed by a department spokesperson directly to Caputo, who did not immediately reply.

An FDA spokesperson did not immediately reply to Salon’s questions.

Team Trump whines about “cancel culture” — but they’re the ones who want to crush free speech

If there was one major takeaway from this week’s Republican National Convention, it’s that conservatives live in mortal terror of “cancel culture,” their shiny new term for what they used to call “political correctness.” Even though Donald Trump controls the White House, conservatives control the courts and Republicans control the Senate, speaker after speaker insisted that the real power in this country belongs to a shadowy liberal elite with all-encompassing powers of censorship. 

“The goal of cancel culture is to make decent Americans live in fear of being fired, expelled, shamed, humiliated and driven from society as we know it,” pronounced Donald Trump during his interminable acceptance speech on Thursday night. “The far left wants to coerce you into saying what you know to be FALSE, and scare you out of saying what you know to be TRUE.”

“We want a culture where differences of opinion and debate are encouraged, not canceled,” Ivanka Trump claimed in her introduction to her father’s speech that same night. 

During his sweaty and red-eyed speech on the first night of the convention, Donald Trump Jr. claimed that “the left” is “trying to cancel all of those founders” and that “the radical left are now coming for our freedom of speech” and “want to bully us into submission.”

On the same night, in her memorably bombastic performance, Don Jr.’s girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle also denounced “cancel culture” and declared, “They want to control what you see and think and believe so that they can control how you live.”

So what is this nefarious “cancel culture” that conservatives believe threatens the basic right to free speech guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution? 

Well, let’s talk about what conservatives don’t mean when they complain about “cancel culture.”

“Cancel culture” is not Trump sending out federal troops to tear-gas a bunch of peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square because he’s so afraid of hearing hecklers that he must silence them with violence. 

“Cancel culture” is not right-wingers running over protesters with cars, threatening them with guns or even shooting them in order to keep those protesters from using their First Amendment rights to speak out against police violence. 

“Cancel culture” is not murdering journalists to silence them. Trump has openly admired such tactics as performed by Russian President Vladimir Putin. And when Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi was “canceled” by being murdered and dismembered on the orders of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the Trump administration, which is friendly with the Saudi royals, simply shrugged it off. 

“Cancel culture” is definitely not Trump trying to cancel the votes of millions of Americans by undermining the U.S. Postal Service, just before an election in which record numbers of Americans are expected to vote by mail. Trump has been open about his belief that he should be able to cancel or declare fraudulent any votes that are cast for Joe Biden, but somehow this rejection of Americans’ most basic right is not “cancel culture”. 

Nor is it “cancel culture” when Trump undermines the post office in his crusade to punish Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos for owning the Washington Post, a newspaper Trump would like to silence for the crime of publishing unflattering stories about him and his administration 

“Cancel culture” is not Trump working with NFL owners to punish football players who speak out against police brutality by kneeling during the national anthem. 

“Cancel culture” is not Trump canceling the ability of medical experts at the FDA and CDC to speaking truthfully in public about the coronavirus, because Trump is eager to conceal the severity of the pandemic. And “cancel culture” is definitely not Trump trying to cancel as much coronavirus testing as possible, because he wants to eliminate all statistics that he feels make him look bad. 

No, when conservatives complain about “cancel culture,” they are unconcerned with the various efforts to silence scientific information or progressive opinion through violence, censorship or intimidation. If anything, the legal right to free speech is considered the problem, since allowing progressives to express their opinions perpetuates what conservatives deem to be “cancel culture.”

For instance, one of the biggest themes of the RNC was outrage at the fact that progressives are still permitted to protest in the streets, anger the speakers tried to justify by painting peaceful protesters as “rioters” and “looters.” The whining continued after the convention, as Fox News spent much of Friday morning running segments denouncing the presence of protesters outside the convention, presenting people who are exercising their free speech rights as a dangerous threat. 

Ultimately, that’s what all this right-wing moaning and groaning about “cancel culture” is really about: Fury that progressives can use their free speech rights to criticize them.

Trump warns that the left wants to “scare you out of saying what you know to be TRUE,” and the fact that he’s being vague and euphemistic about what he really means is no accident.

The president and his audience both understand what really chaps their hides here is that it has becom increasingly difficult to use racial slurs or sexually harassing comments without being called out. But if Trump came right out and said that, he’d draw more of that unpleasant criticism. So the fact that he’s speaking in code is itself proof of concept to Trump and his followers: If they were truly free, which they define as “free from all criticism ever,” they wouldn’t need to hide behind such euphemistic language. 

In one narrow sense, conservatives are right to believe that it’s getting harder for them to express their opinions and ideas — not because of actual censorship, but because of their own sense of humiliation. If you say something racist or sexist, liberals can just call you a “bigot” and there’s little you can do to stop them. 

But as with much right wing rhetoric, there’s a bait-and-switch going on. The incessant complaining about “cancel culture” at the RNC was directed towards a specific argument: If you don’t like liberals “canceling” you by beating you in arguments, protesting in the streets or calling you a racist, vote for Trump and he’ll break some heads and make them shut up.

Of course, the power that Trump could wield to stop progressives is quite literally the power of censorship, whether it’s done bluntly with clubs and tear gas or through back door channels like colluding with NFL owners to shut down the more outspoken players. So the bait is an appeals to “free speech.” but the switch is Trump’s impulse to crack down on any opinion that makes him or other conservatives uncomfortable. 

The scary thing is that this appeal could yet work. It’s true that recent years have borne witness to changing social norms. It’s a lot harder to be a bigoted jerk in public than it used to be, since more people are willing to push back against such behavior. For those who really like being jerks without getting pushback, Trump’s implicit promise that he’ll use the strong arm of the government to crush the critics still has plenty of allure. But let’s not mistake that longing for censorship to be anything like a defense of “free speech.” 

“He serially lied tonight”: Trump’s lengthy RNC speech on “mayhem” called out for false claims

President Donald Trump capped off the Republican National Convention on Thursday with a stream of false claims in front of a large, mostly maskless crowd in front of the White House.

Trump, like other Republicans who spoke during the four-day event, described a very different and much more successful presidency than the public has seen and argued that only he could put an end to the chaos happening under his watch.

The president spoke for about 70 minutes in front of a tightly-packed crowd that CNN anchor Jake Tapper described as a “potential super-spreader event.” Lacking the usual energy of his now-suspended campaign rallies, Fox News hosts panned the speech as “flat” and “far too long” and MSNBC pundits labeled it “bad” and “boring.” “This president is a serial liar, and he serially lied tonight,” said CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale. “I counted, preliminarily, more than 20 false or misleading claims.”

Trump spent much of his speech describing “mayhem” across America, much like he did during the 2016 convention. “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it,” he said in 2016. Unlike the previous speech, Trump’s comments Thursday described the country under his presidency, not Barack Obama’s.

Trump tried to blame the violence on “Democrat-run cities,” even as he took credit for Obama’s accomplishments, like passing the Veterans Choice Act, which his predecessor signed in 2014.

Trump’s claim that he alone could fix the violence was reminiscent of his 2017 inauguration vow that “this American carnage stops right here.” But Trump and other speakers described a country that has spiraled out of control since that day.

It was a message echoed throughout the night.

“Like cops across this country, we are staring down the barrel of a public safety disaster,” said Pat Lynch, president of the New York City Police Benevolent Association.

Trump attorney Rudy Giulaini spoke of “continuous riots in American cities” under Trump but claimed that current levels of civil unrest provided a “good view” of what the country would look like under Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

Biden hit back at the bizarre narrative at the convention on Thursday, questioning if Trump is “even aware he’s president.”

“These are images from Donald Trump’s America today,” he said in a statement. “The violence we’re witnessing is happening under Donald Trump. Not me. It’s getting worse, and we know why.”

Trump also tried to claim success in the fight against coronavirus and the fight for social justice in a speech that sent fact-checkers scrambling.

“For almost 10 hours this week, President Trump and his allies used the unfiltered platform of a national political convention to paint a portrait of two Americas that do not exist,” wrote Washington Post White House reporter Toluse Olorunnipa. “In one — a misrepresentation of life under Trump — the coronavirus has been conquered by presidential leadership, the economy is at its pre-pandemic levels, troops are returning home, and the president is an empathetic figure who supports immigration and would never stoke the nation’s racial grievances.”

Ivanka Trump did not fare much better on the fact-checking front, wrongly praising her father for building the “most robust testing system in the world” and mischaracterizing his use of the Defense Production Act to “produce ventilators within weeks,” and falsely claiming he cut drug prices before sharing a viral moment with her stepmother Melania Trump.

Other speakers included Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, the only Black member of Trump’s cabinet, who defended the president from charges of racism.

“President Trump does not dabble in identity politics,” Carson claimed. Trump’s rhetoric has for years been characterized as steeped in identity politics and racism, a criticism also levied at the convention itself. 

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., claimed that Democrats want to “defund the police” and “want free health care for illegal immigrants.” Democratic leaders, the Biden campaign, and the official Democratic platform all oppose these policies.

While some speakers, like Ann Dorn, the widow of fallen St. Louis Police Officer David Dorn, and the parents of slain ISIS hostage Kayla Mueller delivered emotional and powerful speeches as they spoke in support of Trump, they were largely overshadowed by speakers like Giuliani, who described the country as descending into an apocalyptic hellscape.

The night ended with a lengthy and elaborate fireworks display that spelled out “Trump 2020” on the National Mall and an unusual musical performance from a balcony at the White House.

Ethics experts said Trump’s use of the White House and federal property for a political convention was an “abomination” and likely illegal.

“It is an abuse of the power entrusted to this man, the breach of a sacred trust,” said former White House ethics chief Walter Shaub.

“Almost the entire RNC convention was a Hatch Act violation,” said former White House ethics chief Richard Painter, referring to a law that bars federal employees from engaging in political activity.

After the event was over, some attendees were confronted by protesters outside the White House fence.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and his wife were escorted by police to their hotel. At one point, an officer that was pushing protesters back with his bicycle fell over on top of Paul.

“Just got attacked by an angry mob of over 100, one block away from the White House,” Paul tweeted. “Thank you to @DCPoliceDept for literally saving our lives from a crazed mob.”

Donald Trump’s dark spectacle is just a rerun — and America’s sick of it

The party conventions are over and we can take a breather for a few days until the fall campaign begins in earnest. The next big events will be the debates between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, and I think we’ll all need to lay in a new supply of antacids and alcohol to get through those.

It’s pretty clear that Trump’s grand vision was to tape all the speeches of the Republican National Convention‘s first three nights in an empty auditorium to make his big night look bigger and better by comparison. I have no doubt he’ll be desperate to see how his night did in the ratings. If he didn’t beat Biden’s numbers he’ll be forced to call the TV ratings fake news and that will be very disappointing. He loves ratings.

Trump certainly put it all out there, staging a big partisan rally on the lawn of the White House, with all the flags in Washington as background, big screen TVs and a grand entrance from the balcony. (For a moment I thought he was planning to deliver it from there, as if he were Il Duce himself.)

The use of the people’s house for this sort of event is unprecedented but obviously Trump didn’t care about that. In fact, he seems to have taken pride in his defiance of the tradition, calling it more than a house but instead a “home,” pointing toward it and bragging at one point, “The fact is, I’m here, and they’re not.”  It was as if the White House were just another of his many properties, to be used for commercial and personal gain.

Trump knows how to bring the pomp, and the spectacle made clear why it’s unethical to use the White House or national monuments for partisan purposes. The familiar grandeur of the White House and the grounds lent an imperial majesty to the event that was frankly un-American. Let’s just say it’s kind of gross to see the White House used like one of Saddam’s palaces.

The large crowd was seated close together for hours, unmasked, shouting and chanting “Four more years” with abandon. The president could only have modeled worst leadership behavior if he’d held it inside. It’s such a childish defiance of public health guidelines. But then, the chairman of the so-called coronavirus task force was glad-handing in the mask-free crowd after his speech the night before, so this seems to be administration policy.

Throughout the RNC, when anyone bothered to mention the pandemic, which wasn’t often, they spoke as if the whole thing were in the past and America has come out the other side better than ever. So I suppose wearing masks and practicing social distancing would seem a bit contradictory, since it’s all over now. Someone needs to tell the thousands of people who are still dying from COVID each week that they can stop doing that. It’s over.

Throughout the week the themes were pretty consistent. The first was that if you knew Donald Trump like the speakers know him you’d like him a lot more. The stories they told (some of which were, um … untrue) would have been considered simple tales of ordinary kindness or good manners in anyone else, but since it’s Trump they are presented as acts of great benevolence.

The second is that he’s accomplished more in three and a half years than any president has every accomplished in two full terms. This is a ridiculous lie. The fact-checkers are probably still working overtime to correct all the dishonest and misleading claims. This is patented Trump, however, and it’s unlikely that any of his devoted voters will care whether it’s true or not.

The third theme is the one they plan to run with all the way to November, and it’s clearly the one Trump himself relishes the most: No one will be safe in Joe Biden’s America. If he wins the election you will have to run for your lives, because bad people from “Democrat-run cities” will be coming to kill you in your beds.

When you stop and think about it, this is the same line he used in 2016 about Muslims and immigrants. He obsessed over ISIS beheadings and suggested that America had to fight fire with fire. He gave lurid speech after lurid speech describing immigrants crossing the border to rape and kill “real” Americans (which of course means white people).. And you’ll recall that before the 2018 election he conjured up “caravans” full of dark-skinned “invaders” heading for the U.S. border, who were also coming to kill you in your beds.

More than anything else, including Trump’s ludicrous bragging about being a “very stable genius,” is his basic pitch. He just retools it slightly to reflect whatever is happening at the moment.

He laid it on thick in his acceptance speech, naming Kenosha, Minneapolis, Portland, Chicago and New York as examples of current violent hellscapes that will destroy America if Joe Biden has his way. He doesn’t seem to understand that most people are scratching their heads in confusion since he’s the president who is presiding over these alleged dystopian nightmares right now.

If there’s any single individual in power who is inciting violence in the streets, it’s President Donald Trump. And he’s doing it for purely political reasons, as his almost-former presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway helpfully explained at this same convention: “The more chaos and anarchy and vandalism and violence reigns, the better it is for the very clear choice on who’s best on public safety and law and order,”

Conway is right. But she’s making the argument for Joe Biden. Trump is making everything worse.

Nonetheless, he and his campaign have decided that they can peel off some of those famous “suburban housewives” by pulling the old scare tactic one more time. As usual, some Democrats are getting nervous that it might work.

Anything’s possible. But Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight has pointed out that part of the reason the polling has shifted a bit on Black Lives Matter protests has more to do with Trump not stirring the pot as much during the last six weeks or so:

He’s back at it now. With the events in Kenosha, in which police shot another black man and then one of Trump’s fans shot three protesters, killing two of them, it’s not clear to me that Americans will see Joe Biden as the real threat.

Indeed, if there is a threat that people may be coming to kill us in our beds, that threat isn’t coming from Black Lives Matter protesters. It’s coming from right-wing extremists, whom Trump has refused to acknowledge or discuss, and who he has been inciting to violence for years now.

As this former DHS official who worked on domestic terrorism says, “We are less safe today because of his leadership. We will continue to be less safe as long as he is in control.”

On Thursday night, Americans heard more of the same old fear-mongering. But after watching him in action all summer long, it seems likely that most Americans understand that the only thing they have to fear is Trump himself.  

What the Kenosha shooter tells us about Donald Trump’s America

Events this week in Kenosha, Wisconsin, are no surprise. They follow an all-too familiar social script in America.

On Wednesday, a 17-year-old  named Kyle Rittenhouse traveled to Kenosha, Wisconsin from his home in Antioch, Illinois, not far away. Rittenhouse did this in response to online appeals from a right-wing militia group to “protect” businesses, property and lives in Kenosha from “rioters.” In reality, the protests in Kenosha over the last week have come in response to the shooting of Jacob Blake, a black man who was unarmed and shot seven times in front of his children. Blake is reportedly now paralyzed and handcuffed to a hospital bed. There are credible reports that at least some of the violence in Kenosha has been committed by white supremacists or other right-wing agitators who are trying to discredit and undermine peaceful protests against police brutality and other forms of social injustice.

Rittenhouse was armed with an AR-15 military-style rifle. Under the laws of Illinois, where he lives, Rittenhouse is too young to own such a weapon. He also violated the law by traveling across state lines with a firearm.

As shown by his Facebook page and other social media, Rittenhouse was obsessed with guns and the police. He also supports the Blue Lives Matter movement — an implicitly racist response to the human and civil rights campaign Black Lives Matter.

Rittenhouse is also an ardent Trump supporter. There is evidence that he was in the front row at a Trump rally in Des Moines, Iowa. 

Vice interviewed several former high school classmates of Rittenhouse and they describe a young person indoctrinated by the right-wing media machine:

Kyle Rittenhouse loved cops, guns, President Trump, and “triggering the libs,” according to some of his former classmates at Lakes Community High School in Lake County, Illinois. His clothes were often branded with pro-police slogans, and he carried a Blue Lives Matter phone case, one student said.

Some of his classmates joked that he’d be a mass shooter one day. “I personally believe he went to Wisconsin with the intent to kill,” said one former classmate, who asked not to be identified out of fear for their safety….

Rittenhouse was also known as a “ride or die” Trump supporter. “If you said anything bad about Trump, he’d threaten you,” Joe said. In January, Rittenhouse even traveled to Iowa, where he had front row seats at a Trump rally, Buzzfeed reported. “Kyle was the type of kid to wear a MAGA hat or other apparel just for attention, or to “trigger” people,” Joe added.

Another one of Rittenhouse’s classmates said he used to refer to the school, located in a Chicago suburb, as “libtard af.”

“Kyle was kind of shy from what I remember, but he was definitely in your face and pushed his views hella,” they said. “Like one of those kids that liked ‘triggering libtards.'”

In Kenosha, Rittenhouse wandered through the crowds of protesters and sought to ingratiate himself with local police officers and other law enforcement. They appeared to be receptive to Rittenhouse’s overtures. As police have consistently done when white right-wing militias and other white right-wing extremists have appeared at protests against police brutality or the Trump regime, local cops evidently viewed Kyle Rittenhouse as one of the “good guys.”

Later in the evening, Kyle Rittenhouse allegedly shot and killed two protesters, and injured another, in a series of confrontations whose precise details remain unclear. It appears from video collected by the New York Times that the second and third shootings occurred as people tried to detain him for having initially shot a man in the head, killing him.

After these shootings, Rittenhouse ran away and apparently trying to surrender to police, who ignored him. He then escaped to his mother’s home in Illinois, where he was arrested on Thursday by local law enforcement.

Rittenhouse’s right-wing defenders are predictably claiming that his actions were all in “self-defense.” As legal experts have pointed out, Rittenhouse acted in a premeditated manner by going to Kenosha with a high-powered rifle and looking for trouble. Any such claim of self-defense is highly dubious.

Can you imagine what would have happened if Kyle Rittenhouse were Black or brown or Muslim? Again, the script is well-worn and obvious, but its truth must still be highlighted because of what it says about the color line and justice in America. In that scenario, the mainstream media, (white) politicians and others would of course be summoning a great moral panic about “bad culture” and “terrorism” and “social pathologies.”

With Kyle Rittenhouse there will be no such breathless news coverage with its questions such as:

  1. Who, how and what is radicalizing white men to commit such acts of domestic terrorism and mass shootings?
  2. What is Donald Trump’s role in encouraging political and other violence by white men and boys? What of Fox News and the broader right-wing echo chamber?
  3. Is something wrong with the white family? Why are their sons and men so violent?
  4. What should law enforcement and white politicians do about white crime?
  5. Where are the white fathers in the white home?
  6. When will white leadership step up and stop white right-wing domestic terrorism?
  7. Is white American culture pathological? Why are white people so violent?

There are other parts of this cultural script as well.

When innocent Black and brown people are killed by police or white vigilantes, every part of their lives is publicly scrutinized in order to make them, the victims, responsible for their own murders.

Kyle Rittenhouse will be humanized and depicted as a tragic soul. Perhaps as a cherubic innocent or a “good kid” who somehow went wrong despite his parents’ best efforts. There will be calls for empathy and sympathy because Rittenhouse is “just a child” and we should respect his and the family’s privacy during this horrible time.

Trayvon Martin was 17 years old, the same age as Rittenhouse is now, when he was killed. Tamir Rice was only 12. Black children and other young people are seen, in the white gaze, as somehow always being “adults.”

The “adultification” of Black children and the infantilizing of white men — Donald Trump’s adult sons are frequently described by the news media as “kids” or “boys” — is one of the most obvious and insidious ways through which white privilege works in America for the purposes of legitimizing police and other violence against innocent people.

As I wrote here at Salon in 2015:

When a white person commits an act of mass violence he or she is “a lone gunman,” “mentally ill” or “disturbed.” White men commit a disproportionate percentage of the mass shootings and domestic terrorism in the United States. Yet their actions are never taken to be reflective of white men as a group. The mere suggestion of this basic fact is met with outrage by Republicans and the right-wing news entertainment complex. However, when an “Arab” or a “Muslim” commits a crime, said event is processed by the White Gaze as an indictment of an entire population and to summon the bogeyman of “Muslim terrorism.” In all, whiteness is freedom from collective responsibility and indictment; to be the Other is an a priori assumption where the actions of one non-white person means that all members of the group should be punished and made suspect.

Kyle Rittenhouse‘s apparent vigilantism and political violence are the logical and predictable result of the energies summoned up by Donald Trump and his agents.

Trump, his regime and their compliant news media have repeatedly depicted nonwhite people, Democrats, liberals, progressives, Black Lives Matter supporters, anti-fascists and the majority of Americans who oppose him as un-American “terrorists” who should be destroyed.

Trump, the Republican Party, and their media use “stochastic terrorism” to encourage such violence while denying responsibility for what follows.

The shootings in Kenosha occurred simultaneously with this week’s ghoulish, racist, lie-filled, death-cult celebration at the Republican National Convention, which should be no surprise. Kyle Rittenhouse may have imagined himself to be a great soldier in Trump’s personal army as he waded through a sea of “evildoers.”

New York Magazine’s Eric Levitz describes this dangerous situation:

Before Trump’s emergence, some of the most powerful interest groups within the GOP coalition already viewed the Democratic Party as a threat so catastrophic the imperative of keeping it away from power would justify most any means of resistance.

Trump has certainly cultivated his party’s authoritarian elements more energetically — and delegitimized his opposition more shamelessly — than any other 2016 presidential candidate was liable to do. But regardless, the basic fact remains that the GOP is — and has been — dominated by a movement that sees the Democratic Party as an internal enemy of the United States and any election that a Democratic president wins as illegitimate by definition

In sum, Kyle Rittenhouse channeled the juvenile, lethal, immature and simple-minded masculine fantasies of fascism — and he represents a broader cultural and political crisis in America in other ways as well.

Rittenhouse’s apparent shooting spree in Kenosha exemplifies the way that Donald Trump has served as a type of permission function for the darkest forces in American society by continually encouraging violent and other anti-social behavior by his followers. It would seem that Kyle Rittenhouse was listening closely.

As the United States further succumbs to Trump’s neofascist authoritarian movement, historian Timothy Snyder’s warnings about paramilitaries and police become even more ominous. He wrote this in his recent book “On Tyranny”:

Be wary of paramilitaries. When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching around with torches and pictures of a Leader, the end is nigh. When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come.

Kyle Rittenhouse is only 17, but that too is instructive. He is an example of how the average age of right-wing extremists is decreasing. The Southern Poverty Law Center reports that recent incidents of far-right violence have involved perpetrators with an average age of about 26, “markedly younger than white supremacist killers who came before them.” As with radical Islamic terrorist groups like ISIS and al-Qaida, social media and other online technologies are being used to radicalize (white) right-wing extremists in the Age of Trump.

Christian Picciolini, a former extremist and the founder of the global disengagement network called the Free Radicals Project, explained this process of radicalization to Salon via email:

The pressure cooker America is dealing with today is the culmination of 400 years of human rights violations by white supremacists against marginalized and disenfranchised American people being swept under the rug. To top it off, for the last four years we have an administration that is working against any progress that has been made toward equity and a dialogue of progress, in many cases putting forth outright white nationalist policies in the face of that progress. Now, we’re facing a dire multi-layered situation with protests against those racist policies and the killing of unarmed black Americans, a heated election coming up, mass job loss and economic hardship, and a pandemic with no real end in sight.

All this uncertainty and raw emotion and fear, not to mention the plethora of guns and vigilantism occurring on the streets, plus the propaganda, fake news, and misinformation radicalizing people who are spending most of their time online these days, I fear we are in a critical juncture for the future of our nation.

As Election Day 2020 approaches, there will be more political violence by right-wing extremists. Such violence will be committed by random individuals, as well as coordinated by militias and other paramilitary groups. The goal will be to create widespread mayhem and upheaval in order to keep Donald Trump’s white supremacist, authoritarian regime in power indefinitely.

Even if Trump is defeated on Election Day and leaves office peacefully in January, his foot soldiers and other fanatics will not go away. They will fight a rearguard action against Joe Biden’s administration and the multiracial democracy it represents. Kyle Rittenhouse’s alleged actions are another warning of what awaits us in the months and years ahead, a reality for which most Americans are not prepared. Whether Donald Trump wins or loses in November, his most extreme loyalists will still be with us, seeking to exact revenge and make Trump’s nightmarish vision of America into reality.

Republican leaders threaten to freeze property tax revenues for cities that cut police budgets

Gov. Greg Abbott and top Texas leaders announced Tuesday that they will push for legislation next year that would freeze property tax revenues for cities that cut police budgets, just days after the Austin City Council approved a budget that will cut police funding by one-third and reinvest money in social services.

The proposal sets up what is expected to be a fight in the 2021 Texas Legislature over what police reform should look like following the in-custody death of George Floyd that reignited a national movement against police brutality and racial injustice.

“Any city in the state of Texas that defunds law enforcement will have their property tax revenue frozen as of that time,” Abbott said in Fort Worth, where the press conference was held. “This will be an effective tool that effectively will prevent cities from being able to reduce funding support for law enforcement agencies.”

The death of Floyd, a Black man who died after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for nearly eight minutes, has spurred protests against police brutality and calls to reduce police funding across the state and country. Police reform advocates are pushing cities to reallocate police funds to areas like housing, social services and public spaces.

Texas’ four largest cities — Austin, Dallas, Houston and San Antonio — each spent more than a third of their general funds on their police departments in their respective 2020 fiscal years. But on Thursday, Austin became the first major Texas city to cut its police department’s budget, shifting $150 million to other services. The city council approved the measure after Austin’s police department faced months of criticism over the killing of an unarmed Black and Hispanic man, the use of force against anti-police brutality protesters and the investigation of a demonstrator’s fatal shooting by another citizen. The move quickly drew outcry from Texas Republican leaders and prompted Tuesday’s press conference.

“If we have police brutality, we don’t need fewer police, we need less police brutality, and so we need to take action, whether it be as a Legislature or in police departments or whatever the case may be,” Abbott said. “We do need to take action to ensure that law enforcement officers are trained in ways in which they will not engage in police brutality.”

Last week, the Texas Legislative Black Caucus unveiled provisions they plan to include in a George Floyd Act when the legislative session begins in January. The proposals included some related directly to Floyd, like banning chokeholds and requiring officers to intervene if another officer is using excessive force. But it also revived efforts that have previously failed at the Capitol after facing opposition from police unions. One such measure would be to end arrests for criminal violations that at most would result in a fine, like theft under $100.

While Abbott has mentioned potential proposals following Floyd’s death, they have mostly fallen in line with what police unions also support, like increased training. But the item Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said would be a priority in the Senate is to ensure police funding is not diminished.

Abbott was joined in the press conference by Patrick, Texas House Speaker Dennis Bonnen, several Republican North Texas lawmakers and Fort Worth Mayor Betsy Price. During the press conference, Abbott made a reference to a report from The Wall Street Journal that showed increases in homicides and robberies in Austin this year. The report lists Austin and Fort Worth, the city Abbott praised for its public safety policies, as both showing high increases in the percentage of murders from this year to last — city crime data reveal those percentages amount for nine more murders in Austin this year compared to 2019 and 13 in Fort Worth.

Experts have pointed out that crime rates are nowhere near the high levels of two decades ago. An analysis of the University of Pennsylvania shows a marginal increase in violent crimes compared to previous five years in Austin.

During the press conference, Bonnen, who is not returning to the legislature in 2021, criticized Austin Mayor Steve Adler for opposing police funding cuts in previous years during property tax debates, only to support it now.

“It is not acceptable,” Bonnen said. “Law enforcement is not a tool of political agendas and I would ask the city of Austin to stop using them as one.”

Austin City Council member Greg Casar said in a statement that the council was following what Austin residents wanted, and said Abbott, instead of supporting police reforms proposed in the Black caucus’ George Floyd Act, relied on fear-mongering.

“The message from the tens of thousands of Austinites who made their voices heard in this year’s budget process was clear: We must decrease our over-reliance on police to handle all of our complex public safety challenges and instead reinvest in domestic violence shelters, mental health first responders, and more,” Casar said.

Other major Texas cities are also weighing police budgets, now with Abbott’s proposal in mind. San Antonio’s proposed budget for 2021 increases overall police funding by $8 million, but cuts overtime and funds health and violence prevention programs. In Dallas, the proposed 2021 budget includes a minor increase in police funding, and $3.2 million for safety net resources. Both cities are scheduled to approve their budgets in September.

The Houston City Council approved a minor funding increase to its police department in June, but an amendment that tried to redistribute some of the money to other areas, like the police oversight board and loans for businesses owned by Black and brown people, was rejected.

In Fort Worth, where Abbott’s press conference was held, voters supported renewing the half-cent sales tax that funds at least 24% of the city police department’s budget in July. According to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the city is considering a proposal to redirect some funds within their Police Department to expand their mental health team, increase funding to nonprofits and creating a civilian response program.

Abbott said Tuesday’s press conference was held in Fort Worth because “Fort Worth is doing it right” in terms of investing in police and public safety. While Abbott mentioned Floyd’s death in Minneapolis, there was no mention during the conference of Atatiana Jefferson, or other high-profile Texas police killings of Black residents. Jefferson, a 28-year-old Black woman, was killed last year after a Fort Worth police officer shot into her home during a welfare check. The former officer, Aaron Dean, has been indicted on a murder charge.

Advocates have argued that while police departments receive a large portion of city funds, safety net programs remain underfunded and Black and brown communities are disproportionately affected by unemployment, lack of adequate housing and poverty. In 2018, 19.6% of Black Texans lived below the poverty line, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, compared with 20.9% of Hispanic Texans and 8.5% of non-Hispanic white Texans.

“The only way that you’re going to prevent crime is by addressing the root causes of crime, and the main one is poverty,” said Nora Soto, co-founder of Our City Our Future in Dallas. “Police have acted as a poverty patrol. They’re criminalizing poor people.”

Police unions explain that law enforcement is expensive and involves a wide range of responsibilities, which include everything from responding to potentially dangerous emergency 911 calls to attending monthly neighborhood meetings.

“Just because of the sheer volume of tasks that we are responsible for dealing with, public safety is going to be the most expensive part of a city budget across the board. That’s really just demand,” said Jennifer Szimanski, public affairs coordinator for the Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas.

Disclosure: Steve Adler is a former Texas Tribune board chairman and has been a financial supporter of the 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. 

Robert Reich on the Post Office crisis to come

It’s no secret Donald Trump will do anything to hold on to power. His latest strategy is to sabotage the United States Postal Service, courtesy of his handpicked Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. 

A Republican mega donor with no postal experience, DeJoy instituted sweeping measures that have caused massive mail delays across the country. As national outrage reached a fever pitch, DeJoy announced he would delay policy changes that slow down mail delivery, until after the election. 

But the USPS is still very much under attack.

DeJoy’s statement is nothing more than empty rhetoric. He didn’t even list which policies he would postpone. One of the few policies he did mention was overtime pay, which he said would be paid “as needed,” but guess who decides what’s needed? He does.

DeJoy also needs to repair the damage he’s already done. He told House Speaker Nancy Pelosi he has “no intention” of replacing removed mailboxes and sorting machines, and instructed USPS employees to not reconnect or reinstall the sorting machines.

And nothing is forcing DeJoy to follow through even on his weak promises. If the past three and a half years have shown us anything, it’s that we can never count on Trump officials to follow through on their promises.

Trump openly admitted he was sabotaging the post office to stop people from voting. Now his political stooge postmaster general is basically saying “trust me.”

Sorry, Mr. DeJoy, we don’t trust you.

Congress must step in and do four things to protect the Postal Service and the integrity of mail-in voting before it’s too late:

1. Provide needed funding for the Postal Service in the next COVID-19 relief bill.

2. Force DeJoy to repair all the damage he’s already caused, returning the USPS back to full capacity.

3. Fully investigate DeJoy’s conflicts of interest. DeJoy still has at least a $30 million stake in his former company XPO Logistics, which directly competes with the Postal Service — putting him in a position to profit directly from any loss of Postal Service customers.

4. Pass legislation specifically blocking the Postal Service from instituting any changes that would slow mail delivery in the lead-up to November. 

Trump and DeJoy will stop at nothing to sabotage the USPS and steal the election — and there’s no telling the damage Trump will wreak if he’s able to swindle a second term. 

Call your members of Congress at (202) 224-3121 and demand your representatives take these urgent steps to save the USPS and protect the election. The stakes couldn’t be higher.

Despite DNC focus on winning “Biden Republicans,” poll suggests beating Trump is about Dem turnout

Progressives are raising alarm over new poll results from CBS News out Tuesday, which suggest  the Democratic Party’s courting of moderate so-called “Biden Republicans” while sidelining popular progressive proposals and voices has not so far resulted in a groundswell of support for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden from disaffected GOP voters.

In a poll taken between August 20 and 22, after the Democratic National Convention wrapped up last week, CBS found that just 5% of self-identified Republicans said they plan to vote for Biden in the November election; 93% said they were planning to vote for President Donald Trump.

The president also led by 10 percentage points among Independent voters, who make up a plurality of U.S. voters. 

Justice Democrats spokesperson Waleed Shahid tweeted that the poll showed an “interesting dynamic” following a national convention at which the party gave more speaking time to anti-Trump Republicans including former Ohio Gov. John Kasich and former Secretary of State Colin Powell than they did to popular progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), as well as largely ignoring a number of key progressive policy proposals.

Biden’s support within the GOP is now lower than the number of Republicans who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, according to the CBS poll, as well as those who voted for former President Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. 

CBS also asked moderates and conservatives if they would “ever consider voting for Joe Biden.” Just 7% of moderates and 4% of conservatives said yes, while 77% and 95%, respectively, replied, “No, I never would.” 

Journalist David Sirota, who served as a speechwriter and adviser for Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign, expressed relief that Biden maintained an overall lead in the poll, with 52% of respondents saying they planned to vote for the former vice president and 42% reporting they would vote for Trump if the election were held right now. 

But he noted Trump’s “disturbingly big lead among Independents” and called on the party to rely not on support from anti-Trump Republicans and Independents but rather to focus on appealing to Democratic voters, including those who may not ordinarily vote. 

“Defeating Trump is all about Democratic turnout,” tweeted Sirota. “Biden’s support among Independents in this new CBS poll [is] not good. That’s really concerning.”

The Democratic Party garnered criticism from progressives last week for its centrist messaging at the convention. In the final party platform, the Democratic National Committee quietly removed an amendment calling for an end to federal subsidies for fossil fuel companies, resulting in a climate platform further to the right than the ones both Biden and vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris ran on during the Democratic primary.

The convention left Ocasio-Cortez with the impression that as a “young, progressive Latina…I was not the target audience of this convention. The target audience for this convention was white moderates who aren’t sure who they’re voting for in November.”

“I think we could have done more to rally turnout enthusiasm from our party’s base,” the congresswoman wrote on Instagram after the convention. 

Despite the popularity of Medicare for All among Democrats and Independents—who support the proposal at a rate of 75% and 52%, respectively, according to a Morning Consult/Politico poll taken in April—the policy is mentioned in the Democratic platform only once, with the DNC conceding that it “welcomes advocates” who support Medicare for All.  

The corporate media encouraged the Democrats to reject the party’s so-called “left-leaning brand,” with the New York Times suggesting Biden “inspire defections from college-educated suburban voters—especially women—who had been core Republican voters for decades and offer conservative-leaning voters a sober, reassuring alternative to a chaotic president” while focusing on a vague set of “kitchen table issues”—not including, ostensibly, the struggles the for-profit healthcare industry creates for American families and the climate crisis, which a rising number of Americans are concerned about, according to a recent Stanford University study. 

As Ari Paul wrote at Common Dreams on Tuesday, other outlets have praised the Democrats in recent days for steering “clear of the most far-reaching progressive demands” and building “a centrist coalition in favor of political sanity.”

But the recent CBS poll revealed an error in the Democratic establishment’s judgement, suggested Nina Turner, who served as national co-chair for Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign.

At Common Dreams on Tuesday, Patriotic Millionaires board chair Morris Pearl wrote that while the Democratic Party has thus far “failed to meet the 2020 moment…with the election on the horizon, there’s still time to course-correct.”

“Reversing some of the most egregious legislation of the Trump administration, like the 2017 tax cuts that amounted to a $1.7 trillion giveaway to the top one percent, is a start,” wrote Pearl. “And the Democratic platform endorses this. But simply repealing whatever Trump has done is not a positive vision for the future. If ever there was a time to get behind big, bold economic policy ideas like the Green New Deal or a wealth tax, now is the time.”

Courts across the world agree: The gig economy is paving the road to serfdom

The tech industry buzzword “gig” has distracted society from important questions about the gig economy that are surprisingly traditional: whether a business has employees or contractors, and how it can avoid payroll taxes and legal liability. Countless Silicon Valley business models have been built under the guise of gigs, Uber and Lyft two of the best known cases, which is ironic considering that for all of their high-tech pretensions, at the core both are taxi and food delivery services. But with state governments like California facing increasing revenue shortfalls and an estimated 57 million gig workers in the United States noting a lack of employer protections and fair wages, the matter has shifted to the courts.

Uber and Lyft now find themselves at the center of years-long legal disputes on this question. Court challenges, however, are now extending beyond these two companies.

Over the past 40 years, the rise of neoliberalism has enabled employers to tilt the terms of our capitalist economies heavily toward capital and away from labor, via the evisceration of unions, the deconstruction of the welfare state, and the privatization of public services. The growing use of the independent contractor classification represents the latest attempt to exploit and amplify this power imbalance. The exploitation of this labor loophole is symptomatic of the rise of what author Albena Azmanova has called “precarity capitalism” in her new book, Capitalism on Edge, a condition that Professor James Galbraith has described as “a minority ensconced in a diminishing set of safe career paths or sufficient wealth not to bother worrying about [economic insecurity], and a majority living in persistent anxiety over the costs of health, housing, education, the quality of public services and other formerly ordinary attributes of middle-class life.” What makes this trend particularly galling is that the main economic drivers of this transition to serfdom fancy themselves as enlightened, socially “woke” corporations, be they Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, or Amazon, but in fact all embrace employment practices more evocative of the 19th-century robber barons.

As the protections governing the traditional employer-employee relationship have been increasingly subverted, workers have responded by turning to the courts to rectify this loophole that has allowed their employment conditions to become a form of indentured servitude. And the courts are largely ruling in their favor. A California superior court judge has recently denied injunctive relief to both Uber and Lyft, which means that they will be forced to comply with earlier rulings, and a California state statute, that mandated them to reclassify their workers as employees (although the original August 20 deadline has now been extended until October so that the companies’ full appeal can be considered by the California Court of Appeals). The original California ruling confirms a similar ruling made by a New York federal judge in July.

These are also consistent with a growing number of decisions in other countries, such as the UK, where Uber is now appealing a lower court ruling that its drivers should be classified as employees “entitled to employment protections such as a minimum wage and holiday pay,” and in Canada, where the country’s Supreme Court has recently ruled that Uber drivers were entitled to sue for traditional benefits and vacation pay.

Equally striking is some of the sharp language deployed in these proceedings against the practices. In the judgments, the courts explicitly highlighted the massive imbalance in the so-called “contractor” relationship between the companies and their respective workforces, which invalidates any notion of the “contractors” being genuinely independent. In the Canadian case, Uber Technologies Inc. v. Heller, the Supreme Court specifically cited the inequality of bargaining power between the plaintiff and Uber, noting that driver David Heller was in fact powerless to negotiate any of its terms of his engagement with the company (which largely invalidated the notion that he was an independent contractor as Uber alleged). Likewise, in the UK Court of Appeals case, Uber BV v. Aslam, the judges noted that Uber’s “drivers do not market themselves to the world in general; rather, they are recruited by Uber to work as integral components of its organization.” In other words, Uber exercises full control over them as employees, but it attempts to escape its obligations by designating the drivers as independent contractors. Consequently, the UK Court of Appeal characterized Uber’s description of the work relationship “a sham.”

The success of these legal cases has encouraged further challenges: DoorDash, “the US market leader in food delivery,” is now being faced with a preliminary injunction by San Francisco’s district attorney to “force the company to reclassify its workers as employees,” reports the Financial Times.

Displaying Leona Helmsley-like contempt for the rulings, Uber and Lyft are both threatening to suspend their service if they have to reclassify their drivers as employees. This of course is as flimsy a threat as could be imagined: how many publicly traded Fortune 500 companies would dare to tell stockholders that they plan to cut themselves off from revenue as part of their business strategy, especially if the long-term goal is to use their “contractors” to establish a consumer base, while they work to perfect the robotic technology that ultimately enables the company to replace them with self-driving cars (a strategy that is hard to execute if the companies threaten to shut down their operations whenever they encounter a law they don’t like)? That is their only plausible path to profitability in the longer term, assuming, of course, that the self-driving cars fully develop the capacity to recognize a pedestrian, so that they don’t kill them.

In fact, both companies are hemorrhaging cash even as they operate with the existing legal loopholes. Meanwhile, their interim strategy is to make their exploitation legal for as long as possible: In addition to the shutdown threats, they are deploying considerable sums to have the California statute overturned via a ballot measure, Proposition 22. The state of California estimates that it is missing $7 billion a year in lost payroll taxes from the gig economy.

But the fact is that the companies’ business models have been unsustainable by any measure, even before their abusive labor practices were challenged in the courts. Since inception, both have survived by virtue of an ongoing high IPO bubble that has infused them with cash to staunch the red ink. It’s a form of “Ponzi finance,” a condition that economist Hyman Minsky defined as “the cash flows from operations… [being insufficient] to fulfill either the repayment of… [principal] or the interest due on outstanding debts by their cash flows from operations.”

As a letter writer to the Financial Times observed, the IPO bubbles that sustain these Ponzi schemes are predicated on “a cynical assumption that… [these companies] will be allowed to expand… [their] drove of cyber serfs.” Absent that assumption, the reality is dire. As the analyst Hubert Horan has highlighted: “Uber has now lost $23.2 billion in the past four and a half years.” Horan also notes that the company has higher operating costs than the taxi companies it is seeking to displace. In other words, without illegal exploitation models, the rate of financial losses would far exceed their ability to raise cash from the credulous finance and investment world.

Attempts to circumvent existing employment law protections simply constitute a form of social dumping, even as Uber’s CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, decried the lack of flexibility in current labor law as denying workers the freedoms to choose the way they work and when they do it. Khosrowshahi asserted this in a recent New York Times op-ed, and went on to argue that pay versus benefits was a “false choice.”

Uber’s CEO is right, but not in the way he argues. In a genuinely independent contractor relationship, the quid pro quo is higher pay as an offset to the lack of paid benefits. But companies in the gig economy generally don’t operate this way: Uber and Lyft pay minimum wages that in many instances compel employees to work 70-80 hours per week to make a living. That considerably impinges on the contractor’s supposed work-time flexibility, as well as rendering it virtually impossible to afford decent benefits, such as adequate health insurance, let alone sick pay or vacation leave. In the words of a recent report of the National Labor Relations Board’s Office of the General Counsel (NLRB GC), “Uber drivers—who earn about $9–$10 an hour—can’t expand revenues because they can’t control prices or expand their customer base—the only thing they can do is drive more hours.”

The NLRB report also noted that any “boost” to the drivers’ earnings “is minimal and stalls out after about two years.” While they are called “independent contractors,” their independence is illusory because the so-called “entrepreneurs” in reality “do not even have basic control over how they deliver rides… [and] are ‘supervised’ by semi-automated and algorithmic systems that track their acceptance rates, time on trips, speed, customer ratings, and other factors, and drivers can be ‘deactivated’ based on these factors.” That’s not a co-equal work relationship between an employer and an independent contractor; it’s more a form of indentured servitude.

In other words, the courts’ legal clarification accords with the underlying reality.

This strengthens the case for a robust social welfare system, notably something like Medicare for All. A publicly funded single-payer system would not only alleviate a major source of economic insecurity for workers, but also ensure that employers don’t have to weigh the cost of providing health care to their employees as a condition of doing business in the United States (a factor that puts them at a disadvantage relative to global competitors).

That consideration aside, COVID-19 has created a situation in which many of the extolled benefits of the gig economy, such as working from home or choosing one’s hours of employment, are gradually being imported into a multiplicity of jobs, without subverting the protections and benefits afforded by traditional employment practices. To be sure, many of these jobs will ultimately revert to office environments, but a recent report from the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research persuasively argues that working from home and other such features of the gig economy are likely to be expanded in other businesses that are not reliant on a medieval labor model to sustain profitability.

Happily, our courts are finally beginning to draw a line to limit such egregious practices. The next steps must go beyond the efforts of individual states. The federal government ought to establish a national framework to wipe out these evasions once and for all and to rebuild the rights and protections that used to characterize our economy in more civilized times.

Republicans are now spinning a conspiracy theory that Democrats are behind the mail slowdown

In what were supposed to be his concluding comments after all the senators spoke during a hearing with Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, Senate Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee Chair Ron Johnson (R-WI) claimed there was an orchestrated campaign by Democrats to make the Post Office look worse than it is.

Thanking the controversial Donald Trump appointee for “subjecting” himself to oversight in the form of questions from the bi-partisan panel of senators by Zoom, Johnson then used his time to undermine many of the complaints the lawmakers had just made.

“As I stated, there’s no doubt there have been some unusual delays, COVID, some operational changes,” Johnson remarked. “As I check with our constituent service folks, what they are also finding is the high volume of calls concerning postal complaints, the vast majority seemed very highly scripted, like this could be a very well organized effort which doesn’t surprise me in the slightest.”

“There are fund-raising emails from Senate candidates, the democratic Senatorial committee dating back as far as April complaining about this postal issue,” he continued. “I have no doubt the Democrats are ginning up these issues and problems up into something it’s not. A very false narrative, as I said, designed to extract a political advantage.”

‘Mr. Postmaster General, I’m very sorry that you are on the targeting end of this political hit piece.” he added.

Watch below:

Steve Bannon’s downfall looks really bad for Bill Barr and Donald Trump Jr.

With the arrest of Steve Bannon — the president’s former campaign chair and White House strategist — and a group of his allies on Thursday, the world received confirmation of what many have long said about the conservative movement: The right-wing, ethnonationalist, populist rhetoric is often little more than a scam to win support from the masses to fund the desires of elites.

At least, that’s the narrative told in the indictment of Bannon and others leading “We Build the Wall, Inc.” — an organization that raised money from private donors, supposedly to build parts of President Donald Trump’s border wall. (Don’t ask about the fact that Mexico was supposed to pay for the wall.) According to federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, despite, Bannon’s claim that the organization was run entirely by volunteers, he and his allies was cashing in.

“While repeatedly assuring donors that Brian Kolfage, the founder and public face of We Build the Wall, would not be paid a cent, the defendants secretly schemed to pass hundreds of thousands of dollars to Kolfage, which he used to fund his lavish lifestyle,” said Acting U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss.

Bannon, on the other hand, “through a non-profit organization under his control (‘Non-Profit-1’), received over $1 million from We Build the Wall, at least some of which [Bannon] used to cover hundreds of thousands of dollars in [Bannon’s] personal expenses,” SDNY said. Bannon is fighting the charges, pleading not guilty in court on Thursday.

Bannon and Kolfage, along with Timothy Shea and Andrew Badolato, were charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering.

But it’s not just the people named in the indictment who come off looking worse.

Attorney General Bill Barr’s already tarnished reputation took another substantial hit with the announcement because it reframed actions he took two months ago. In June, Barr sought to remove Geoffrey Berman, who has been the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York. But he did so in a clumsy and corrupt fashion. He met with Berman privately and tried to pressure him out of a job. When Berman refused, Barr simply announced that Berman would be stepping down, to be replaced immediately by another prosecutor from outside the office while a permanent successor could be confirmed.

Berman quickly refuted Barr’s claim, publicly stating that he did not intend to leave. This started a brief struggle until Barr caved somewhat on his demands. He still had Berman removed, but he permitted Strauss, Berman’s deputy, to take his role. She is now serving in an acting capacity, and she oversaw the indictment filed against Bannon and the others.

The episode created a sharp backlash, because there seemed to be no above-board explanation for Barr’s actions. Barr might have had legitimate reasons to replace Berman with another appointee, but there was no clear reason why Berman should leave before that person was appointed. And Barr might have had reason to fire Berman, but there’s no clear reason why Strauss wouldn’t take over in his stead — which is how succession in these offices typically functions. And there was no good reason at all why Barr should lie about Berman voluntarily stepping down — it was just an aggressive power play.

These facts all pointed to a clear conclusion: Barr had a corrupt reason for wanting to oust Berman and replace him with a hand-picked successor. In a public statement and in testimony to Congress, Berman made clear what a plausible motive would be: Replacing him with anybody but Strauss would likely impede the office’s ongoing investigations.

We now know that the case again Bannon and “We Build the Wall, Inc.” was among the cases that likely would have been slowed down. Barr has admitted he knew about the case months ago. And it’s quite clear why Barr, an unabashed partisan, would want to slow it down. Indicting yet another of the president’s allies — and his second campaign manager — surely reflects badly on Trump. It’s especially bad because the allegations involve fleecing Trump’s supporters for venal reasons, which may hit close to home for those feeling let down by his presidency heading into the November election.

It’s possible there were other investigations Barr was looking to stop as well. And it’s possible, of course, that he wasn’t trying to delay this investigation at all. But that’s precisely why Barr’s hamfisted control of the Justice Department, and his complete lack of interest in even acting like a straight shooter, is so destructive for him and the country as a whole. It makes it impossible for Americans to be confident that he’s performing his job in good faith, rather than trying to protect the president’s friends and go after his enemies.

Donald Trump Jr., too, comes off looking a lot worse out of Bannon’s scandal, because he openly endorsed the project. In a quote featured on the organization’s website, he said:

This is private enterprise at its finest. Doing it better, faster, cheaper than anything else and what you guys are doing is pretty amazing. It started from a grassroots effort and it’s doing some wonderful things for an important issue.

After the indictment became public on Thursday, the Trump Organization put out a statement to the New York Times trying to distance himself from the project:

Don gave one speech at a single We Build the Wall event over a year ago with a group of angel moms and, besides that, has no involvement with their organization. He never gave them permission to use him as a testimonial on their website and was unaware they included him as one until today’s media reports about it. His previous praise of the group was based on what he was led to believe about their supposed intention to help build the wall on our southern border and if he and others were deceived, the group deserves to be held accountable for their actions.

The statement appears to admit that when Trump Jr. said the group was “private enterprise at its finest” that does work “better, faster, cheaper” than others and is “amazing,” he had no idea what he was talking about.

But the HuffPost reported that the ties between Trump Jr. and We Build the Wall, Inc. may be more significant than the statement suggested:

As part of a fundraising promotion, We Build the Wall offered free, autographed copies of Trump Jr.’s book, “Triggered,” to people donating at least $75. And Instagram posts from Kolfage and We Build the Wall suggest Trump Jr. directly interacted with the group again in November.
“[We Build the Wall representative] FOREMAN MIKE will be in Florida TOMORROW with Donald Trump Jr. at Sandestin Golf and Beach Resort!” the organization announced in a post on Nov. 7. The next day, Kolfage posted a photo of himself with a small group of people including Trump Jr. and “Foreman Mike.”

There’s some evidence, too, that the president was backing the project before its downfall, but its thinner.

In a Jan. 25, 2019 New York Times article on Kris Kobach that discussed the project, reporter Stephanie Saul wrote:

President Trump gave the undertaking his “blessing” in a telephone conversation Wednesday night, according to Mr. Kobach.

The White House press office did not respond to requests for comment.

Trump avoided going on the record, which now looks wise.

After the indictment came out, Trump’s defenders pointed to a recent tweet of his distancing himself from the project:

However, this tweet emerged after Barr was aware of the investigation into the Bannon, so Trump was likely aware of it, too. And the president’s fans had already donated millions to the project, some of whom were likely encouraged by the fact that the Trump’s own son had endorsed it.