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America’s death march: Whoever wins, this election won’t save us

The terminal decline of the United States will not be solved by elections. The political rot and depravity will continue to eat away at the soul of the nation, spawning what anthropologists call crisis cults — movements led by demagogues that prey on an unbearable psychological and financial distress. These crisis cults, already well established among followers of the Christian right and Donald Trump, peddle magical thinking and an infantilism that promises — in exchange for all autonomy — prosperity, a return to a mythical past, order and security. The dark yearnings among the white working class for vengeance and moral renewal through violence, the unchecked greed and corruption of the corporate oligarchs and billionaires who manage our failed democracy, which has already instituted wholesale government surveillance and revoked most civil liberties, are part of the twisted pathologies that infect all civilizations sputtering towards oblivion. I witnessed the deaths of other nations during the collapse of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe and later in the former Yugoslavia. I have smelled this stench before.

The removal of Trump from office will only exacerbate the lust for racist violence he incites and the intoxicating elixir of white nationalism. The ruling elites, who first built a mafia economy and then built a mafia state, will continue under Biden, as they did under Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan, to wantonly pillage and loot. The militarized police will not stop their lethal rampages in poor neighborhoods. The endless wars will not end. The bloated military budget will not be reduced. The world’s largest prison population will remain a stain upon the country. The manufacturing jobs shipped overseas will not return and the social inequality will grow. The for-profit health care system will gouge the public and price millions more out of the health care system. The language of hate and bigotry will be normalized as the primary form of communication. Internal enemies, including Muslims, immigrants and dissidents, will be defamed and attacked. The hypermasculinity that compensates for feelings of impotence will intensify. It will direct its venom towards women and all who fail to conform to rigid male stereotypes, especially artists, LGBTQ people and intellectuals. Lies, conspiracy theories, trivia and fake news — what Hannah Arendt called “nihilistic relativism” — will still dominate the airwaves and social media, mocking verifiable fact and truth. The ecocide, which presages the extinction of the human species and most other life forms, will barrel unabated towards its apocalyptic conclusion.

“We run heedlessly into the abyss after putting something in front of us to stop us seeing it,” Pascal wrote.

The worse it gets — and it will get worse as the pandemic hits us in wave after deadly wave with an estimated 300,000 Americans dead by December and possibly 400,000 by January — the more desperate the nation will become. Tens of millions of people will be thrown into destitution, evicted from their homes and abandoned. Social collapse, as Peter Drucker observed in Weimar Germany in the 1930s, brings with it a loss of faith in ruling institutions and ruling ideologies. With no apparent answers or solutions to mounting chaos and catastrophe — and Biden and the Democratic Party have already precluded the kind of New Deal programs and assault on oligarchic power that saved us during the Great Depression — demagogues and charlatans need only denounce all institutions, all politicians, and all political and social conventions while conjuring up hosts of phantom enemies. Drucker saw that Nazism succeeded not because people believed in its fantastic promises, but in spite of them. Nazi absurdities, he pointed out, had been “witnessed by a hostile press, a hostile radio, a hostile cinema, a hostile church, and a hostile government which untiringly pointed out the Nazi lies, the Nazi inconsistency, the unattainability of their promises, and the dangers and folly of their course.” Nobody, he noted, “would have been a Nazi if rational belief in the Nazi promises had been a prerequisite.” The poet, playwright and socialist revolutionary Ernst Toller, who was forced into exile and stripped of his citizenship when the Nazis took power in 1933, wrote much the same in his autobiography: “The people are tired of reason, tired of thought and reflection. They ask, what has reason done in the last few years, what good have insights and knowledge done us.” After Toller committed suicide in 1939, W.H. Auden in his poem “In Memory of Ernst Toller” wrote:

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

The poor, the vulnerable, those who are not white or not Christian, those who are undocumented or who do not mindlessly repeat the cant of a perverted Christian nationalism, will be offered up in a crisis to the god of death, a familiar form of human sacrifice that plagues sick societies. Once these enemies are purged from the nation, we are promised, America will recover its lost glory, except that once one enemy is obliterated another takes its place. Crisis cults require a steady escalation of conflict. This is what made the war in the former Yugoslavia inevitable. Once one stage of conflict reaches a crescendo it loses its efficacy. It must be replaced by ever more brutal and deadly confrontations. The intoxication and addiction to greater and greater levels of violence to purge the society of evil led to genocide in Germany and the former Yugoslavia. We are not immune. It is what Ernst Jünger called a “feast of death.”

These crisis cults are, as Drucker understood, irrational and schizophrenic. They have no coherent ideology. They turn morality upside down. They appeal exclusively to emotions. Burlesque and celebrity culture become politics. Depravity becomes morality. Atrocities and murder become heroism. Crime and fraud become justice. Greed and nepotism become civic virtues. What these cults stand for today, they condemn tomorrow. At the height of the reign of terror on May 6, 1794, during the French Revolution, Maximilien Robespierre announced that the Committee for Public Safety now recognized the existence of God. The French revolutionaries, fanatical atheists who had desecrated churches and confiscated church property, murdered hundreds of priests and forced another 30,000 into exile, instantly reversed themselves to send to the guillotine those who disparaged religion. In the end, exhausted by the moral confusion and internal contradictions, these crisis cults yearn for self-annihilation.

The French sociologist Emile Durkheim, in his classic book “On Suicide,” found that when social bonds are shattered, when a population no longer feels it has a place or meaning in a society, personal and collective acts of self-destruction proliferate. Societies are held together by a web of social bonds that give individuals a sense of being part of a collective and engaged in a project larger than the self. This collective expresses itself through rituals, such as elections and democratic participation or an appeal to patriotism, and shared national beliefs. The bonds provide meaning, a sense of purpose, status and dignity. They offer psychological protection from impending mortality and the meaninglessness that comes with being isolated and alone. The breaking of these bonds plunges individuals into deep psychological distress. Durkheim called this state of hopelessness and despair anomie, which he defined as “ruleless-ness.”

Ruleless-ness means the norms that govern a society and create a sense of organic solidarity no longer function. The belief, for example, that if we work hard, obey the law and get a good education we can achieve stable employment, social status and mobility along with financial security becomes a lie. The old rules, imperfect and often untrue for poor people of color, nevertheless were not a complete fiction in the United States. They offered some Americans — especially those from the white working and middle class — modest social and economic advancement. The disintegration of these bonds has unleashed a widespread malaise Durkheim would have recognized. The self-destructive pathologies that plague the United States — opioid addiction, gambling, suicide, sexual sadism, hate groups and mass shootings — are products of this anomie. So is our political dysfunction. My book, “America: The Farewell Tour,” is an examination of these pathologies and the widespread anomie that defines American society.

The economic structures, even before the pandemic, were reconfigured to mock faith in a meritocracy and the belief that hard work leads to a productive and valued role in society. American productivity, as The New York Times pointed out, has increased 77 percent since 1973 but hourly pay has grown only 12 percent. If the federal minimum wage was attached to productivity, the newspaper wrote, it would be more than $20 an hour now, not $7.25. Some 41.7 million workers, a third of the workforce, earn less than $12 an hour, and most of them do not have access to employer-sponsored health insurance. A decade after the 2008 financial meltdown, the Times wrote, the average middle-class family’s net worth is more than $40,000 below what it was in 2007. The net worth of black families is down 40 percent, and for Latino families the figure has dropped 46 percent. Some four million evictions are filed each year. One in four tenant households spends about half its pretax income on rent. Each night some 200,000 people sleep in their cars, on streets or under bridges. And these stark figures represent the good times Biden and the Democratic Party leaders promise to restore. Now, with real unemployment probably close to 20 percent — the official figure of 10 percent excludes those furloughed or those who have stopped looking for work — some 40 million people are at risk of being evicted by the end of the year. An estimated 27 million people are expected to lose their health insurance. Banks are stockpiling reserves of cash to cope with the expected wave of bankruptcies and defaults on mortgages, student loans, car loans, personal loans and credit card debt. The ruleless-ness and anomie that defines the lives of tens of millions of Americans was orchestrated by the two ruling parties in the service of a corporate oligarchy. If we do not address this anomie, if we do not restore the social bonds shattered by predatory corporate capitalism, the decay will accelerate.

This dark human pathology is as old as civilization itself, repeated in varying forms in the twilight of ancient Greece and Rome, the finale of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, revolutionary France, the Weimar Republic and the former Yugoslavia.

The social inequality that characterizes all states and civilizations seized by a tiny and corrupt cabal — in our case corporate — leads to an inchoate desire by huge segments of the population to destroy. The ethnic nationalists Slobodan Milošević, Franjo Tudjman, Radovan Karadžić and Alija Izetbegović in the former Yugoslavia assumed power in a similar period of economic chaos and political stagnation. Yugoslavs by 1991 were suffering from widespread unemployment and had seen their real incomes reduced by half from what they had been a generation before. These nationalist demagogues sanctified their followers as righteous victims stalked by an array of elusive enemies. They spoke in the language of vengeance and violence, leading, as it always does, to actual violence. They trafficked in historical myth, deifying the past exploits of their race or ethnicity in a perverse kind of ancestor worship, a mechanism to give to those who suffered from anomie, who had lost their identity, dignity and self-worth, a new, glorious identity as part of a master race. When I walked through Montgomery, Alabama, a city where half of the population is African-American, with the civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson a few years ago, he pointed out the numerous Confederate memorials, noting that most had been put up in the last decade. “This,” I told him, “is exactly what happened in Yugoslavia.”

A hyper-nationalism always infects a dying civilization. It feeds the collective self-worship. This hyper-nationalism celebrates the supposedly unique virtues of the race or the national group. It strips all who are outside the closed circle of worth and humanity. The world instantly becomes understandable, a black and white tableau of them and us. These tragic moments in history see people fall into collective insanity. They suspend thought, especially self-critical thought. None of this is going away in November, in fact it will get worse.

Joe Biden, a shallow political hack devoid of fixed beliefs or intellectual depth, is an expression of the nostalgia of a ruling class that yearns to return to the pantomime of democracy. They want to restore the decorum and civic religion that makes the presidency a form of monarchy and sacralizes the organs of state power. Donald Trump’s vulgarity and ineptitude is an embarrassment to the architects of empire. He has ripped back the veil that covered our failed democracy. But no matter how hard the elites try, this veil cannot be restored. The mask is off. The façade is gone. Biden cannot bring it back.

Political, economic and social dysfunction define the American empire. Our staggering inability to contain the pandemic, which now infects more than 5 million Americans, and the failure to cope with the economic fallout the pandemic has caused, has exposed the American capitalist model as bankrupt. It has freed the world, dominated by the United States for seven decades, to look at other social and political systems that serve the common good rather than corporate greed. The diminished stature of the United States, even among our European allies, brings with it the hope for new forms of government and new forms of power.

It is up to us to abolish the American kleptocracy. It is up to us to mount sustained acts of mass civil disobedience to bring down the empire. It poisons the world as it poisons us. If we mobilize to build an open society, we hold out the possibility of beating back these crisis cults as well as slowing and disrupting the march towards ecocide. This requires us to acknowledge, like those protesting in the streets of Beirut, that our kleptocracy, like Lebanon’s, is incapable of being salvaged. The American system of inverted totalitarianism, as the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin called it, must be eradicated if we are to wrest back our democracy and save ourselves from mass extinction. We need to echo the chants by the crowds in Lebanon calling for the wholesale removal of its ruling class — kulyan-yani-kulyan — “everyone means everyone.”

Why this clinical psychologist is now sounding the alarm about Trump’s disturbing pathologies

Dr. Alan Blotcky is a practicing clinical psychologist in Birmingham, Alabama, where he works in private practice to diagnose and treat a variety of mental health conditions and disorders. But he’s recently been speaking out to join the group of mental health professionals raising alarms in public about President Donald Trump’s behavior, arguing that insights from their profession are vital to understanding his condition and his inability to function adequately as a national leader.

In a piece for DC Report last month,  Blotcky state his conclusion starkly: “Trump is incapable of being our pre-eminent public servant because he has malignant narcissism.”

“I have not met and interviewed Trump,” he acknowledged. “But I have had access to his statements, speeches, tweets, recordings, pictures, documents and much more. Books and articles have weighed in as well.”

To better understand his assessment of the president and the role he thinks mental health professionals can play in politics, I interviewed Blotcky over the phone. What follows is our conversation, lighlty edited for length and clarity.

Cody Fenwick: What do you think a clinical psychologist like yourself can bring to the public understanding of Trump that isn’t evident to the reporters and other observers who watch him every day?

Alan Blotcky: I think the lay public is not very sophisticated when it comes to psychological things. And I’m not dissing the public, I just think most people don’t know the difference between normal and abnormal, and degrees of abnormal. So I think what psychologists and other mental health professionals can bring is vital context in understanding the severity of what we’re seeing.

The term “narcissist” is used in the public now in a variety of ways, but Trump’s malignant narcissism is at a different level. I’ve heard some people out there say: ‘Well, all politicians are narcissistic.’ There may be some truth to that. But not all politicians have malignant narcissism.

So I think what mental health professionals, psychologists, and I can do is help people understand that this is severe. This is beyond everyday narcissism. This is a severe psychiatric disorder.

Some people have criticized the contribution of psychologists in the discussion of Trump because they fear it may stigmatize mental health, or mental illness, and people seeking out mental health care. Do you have any fears about that at all?

No, not at all. I think that’s a red herring, myself. Everybody that has a psychiatric disorder is different. And there are tens of dozens of different psychiatric disorders. So we’re not casting a everybody in the same light, and we’re not suggesting that.

I guess that gets a little bit into the Goldwater Rule, [which bars mental health experts from offering professional opinions on public figures]. The Goldwater Rule was established back in the 1960s by the American Psychiatric Association. I think many psychiatrists probably abide by that. 

But then there’s the counterbalance which is the duty to warn. The duty to warn says if you see a mental health problem or problems that impact people in society, then you have a duty to talk about that and bring that out into the open. Which is what I think a lot of us are trying to do.

I’m not worried about stigmatizing people, because everybody is different. The disorder, or disorders, that Donald Trump has is very different than if you have depression, or anxiety, or even schizophrenia or bipolar disorders. Those are very different kinds of illnesses. And one of the ways they’re different is they respond to medication. Donald Trump’s problems don’t respond to medication.

So how would you characterize the key features of his “malignant narcissism”?

He’s what I would describe as somebody who has a personality disorder that has narcissistic and anti-social features. I think he has both of those. 

Look, I think it’s the same thing that you’ve read about and reported about; there’s really nothing new about that. It’s a stable, constant, entrenched problem. It doesn’t come and go. It’s not going to magically disappear. It’s a part of him. It’s who he is, and he needs treatment for it.

The primary features? Grandiose self-image, dishonesty, impulsivity, his tendency to scapegoat and to gaslight. All of those features that have been talked about in the press are exactly accurate. It’s just that I don’t know if the public as a whole appreciates the fact of how problematic it is and how severe it is.

I think Trump wants to be a dictator. He would like to be in an autocracy, not a democracy. And that’s a direct reflection of his narcissistic and anti-social personality disorder. And that’s part of what I’m concerned about. If he were to be re-elected, he would be empowered and emboldened to do what he wants to do. And he would literally push this [country] towards an autocracy and a dictatorial position for himself.

Has there been any of his recent behavior, in particular, that has concerned you?

You know what? You’ll have a field day. Every time he opens his mouth now — it’s lies, projections, gaslighting. I mean, everything he says. [His recent] comments that Biden is going to get rid of the Bible and hurt God. Every comment he makes like that is how dishonest he is. And his gaslighting is unbelievable.

Yeah, I found that comment particularly noteworthy and interesting. He says a lot of stuff, but it’s so ridiculous and over-the-top that no one could actually believe that. So who’s he actually trying to convince of that?

I think part of the problem with Trump is he’s been around now for four years. I’m afraid that his craziness is becoming normalized. In other words, people just sit back and say: ‘Oh that’s Trump, what’s the big deal? Let’s just keep going.’

Well, that’s not the way he should be. It’s not normal, it’s not healthy, it’s not OK for our country. And it shouldn’t become normalized. We shouldn’t become desensitized to it. That’s where a country can get into problems. ‘Let’s just re-elect him ’cause we sort of know who he is, and he may be crazy, but he’s OK.’ Well, no, he’s not OK. It can’t become normalized. It can’t become that that’s the new definition of what our president should be. Not at all.

Do you think some of his pathologies have had a role in how the coronavirus pandemic has played out?

Oh my God. In my opinion, his inaction, his denial, his willful inaction to deal with the pandemic, by itself, disqualifies him to be president, in my mind. He thinks he can just say: ‘Everything’s going to be OK, don’t worry about it, and everybody just sit back and do what they want to do.’ And it’s so contrary to the data and the science. He has pushed way the public health experts. They should be guiding this ship, not Donald Trump’s gaslighting. 

In my mind, honestly? I think his handling of this has been criminal. I really think he should be criminally charged for accessory to mass murder. Because he’s sitting back and absolutely doing nothing while tens of thousands of Americans are dying. And I think his handling of this pandemic is a prime example of how his pathology has gotten in the way. And it’s totally unacceptable because it’s causing deaths. We’re no better off than we were in March.

So how would you say pathology has affected the response? Because of his narcissism, he can’t accept that he’s done anything wrong?

Right. He can’t accept that anything’s wrong. He won’t listen to anybody. He thinks he’s the smartest person. He thinks he has all the answers. And he’s a showman. He thinks he can just convince the public that everything’s OK. ‘Let’s just open up the economies, and everybody will believe it. Just keep going. Who cares if we lose 200,000 Americans? Nobody will notice if I just keep telling them it’s not a problem.’ That’s the kind of attitude he has! Instead of being a president, where he should have taken decisive nation steps to defeat this pandemic.

I know this would drive him crazy, but Barack Obama would have handled this thing months ago. And we would have been in far better shape.

I certainly think that’s true, but one thing you could say is: It’s a hard problem. Solving a national response to a pandemic is a hard problem, so that could be a mistake that anybody who’s not good at being president could make. But you seem to be saying that …

Look, you check this out. Did he not do away with the pandemic office before? He was warned that pandemics were a serious problem to be on the watch for. He was notified of it in 12 different meetings I think, in January and February. And he did aboslutey nothing except deny it and deny it, and deny it. So that’s him, and his pathology.

You know why he denied it? Because he knew that the economy would suffer and he didn’t want the economy to suffer. Because he wants to be re-elected. So it was all about him and his re-election chances. And he didn’t want the public to be upset about that, so he tried to sweep it under the rug, hoping that it would go away. And here we are six months later, and he’s still not doing anything except denying it, denying it, denying it.

It seems like he thinks he can will his preferred reality into existence just by repeating it over and over.

And that’s what magical thinking is. That’s the definition of magical thinking. You think if you have the thought, it will magically happen. If you say the words, it will magically happen. That’s magical thinking.

That’s like what little babies do, that’s what little children do. That’s not what an adult president of the United States should do.

And that’s a component of his malignant narcissism?

Yes. That’s a component of his narcissism. He’s so grandiose, and he’s so self-absorbed, he thinks that if he wants something to happen, it will just happen. He’ll make it happen. If he says the words, people will do it. And that’s just not reasonable, reality-based, adult kind of thinking.

Yeah. Another way you could describe it is that it’s just immature. Is it a kind of arrested development?

Yeah. It’s a kind of — we use the term ‘primitive.’ But that means basically very young, like he didn’t develop properly. He was raised in a horrific kind of family environment. And I think you can trace a lot of this back to his family.

The problem is, Donald Trump never thinks he has any problems, issues, or anything, so he doesn’t get help. He’s like in a cocoon. And I think he’ s probably just surrounded by a few isolated sycophants who tell him what he wants to hear. And that’s who he has lived his life.

He really has developed this alternative universe in his head. And he lives in that alternative universe. And he thinks, because of magical thinking, that if he thinks that way, it’ll just happen that way. And it doesn’t. 

So I think his handling of this pandemic, really — I’m not a lawyer — but I think it’s criminal. And it certainly disqualifies him to be president again.

McSally says no to statehood for D.C. and Puerto Rico — it might hurt Republicans

Sen. Martha McSally, R-Ariz., suggested on Sunday that residents of Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico should continue to be denied full rights because giving them statehood would put Republicans at an electoral disadvantage.

McSally lamented in an interview with NBC News that Democrats may vote to grant statehood to Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia if they win control of both chambers of Congress and the White House this November. Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden and most House Democrats do support statehood for D.C., but there is no broad current support for Puerto Rico statehood, largely because residents of the island are divided on the question. Within recent memory, Puerto Rico statehood was backed by both major parties and even included in the Republican platform.

“There’s so much at stake here. They’re gonna make D.C. and Puerto Rico a state and get four new Democratic senators,” McSally said. “We’d never get the Senate back again. And look, this is just the implications of this seat, the implications of this vote.”

Washington, D.C., is home to more than 700,000 people, which is more than Vermont and Wyoming and roughly equal to Alaska. Puerto Rico, which has a Republican governor and a Republican nonvoting representative in Congress, has a population of about 3.2 million, which is larger than 20 states. 

The Democratic-led House of Representatives voted earlier this year to grant statehood to the District of Columbia, but the bill was roundly rejected by the Republican-led Senate. There have been no recent efforts in Congress to pass a Puerto Rico statehood bill. In 2017, about 97% of voters in Puerto Rico cast a ballot in favor of statehood, although that is deceptive: Many who opposed statehood boycotted the vote.

McSally, who is one of the most vulnerable Republican Senate incumbents heading into November, has consistently trailed retired astronaut Mark Kelly, the husband of former Rep. Gabby Giffords, D-Ariz., in both opinion polls and fundraising. McSally was appointed to the seat formerly held by the late Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., after losing a close race to Sen. Kyrsten Sinema in 2018.

Her opposition to granting nearly 4 million Americans full representation in Congress and a say in their government echoes President Trump’s comments dismissing the idea because residents of the disenfranchised communities may not support his political party.

“D.C. will never be a state,” Trump declared in June. “You mean District of Columbia, a state? Why? So we can have two more Democratic — Democrat senators and five more congressmen? No thank you. That’ll never happen.”

In fact, D.C. would get just one representative in the House, not five.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., similarly complained that granting statehood to D.C. and Puerto Rico would give each “two more new Democratic senators,” even though Puerto Rico is currently represented in Congress by a Republican.

“This is full-bore socialism on the march in the House,” he said ahead of the House vote. “And yeah, as long as I’m the majority leader of the Senate, none of that stuff is going anywhere.”

Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., who co-sponsored the D.C. statehood bill, said the issue was a matter of racial justice, noting that nearly half of the city’s residents are Black.

“Make no mistake: one of the many ways our country has silenced Black voices and suppressed Black votes has been by preventing D.C. statehood,” she said. “D.C. should be a state with two senators and full representation in the House. Congress must act now.”

Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., who sponsored a similar bill in the Senate, called it an “issue of fairness.”

“Think about paying taxes to the federal government and then not having a vote to help determine how that government functions,” he said. “Imagine the military being sent to your communities to patrol your neighborhoods without approval from the leaders you elect to represent you. That is the current reality for the more than 700,000 Americans living in the District of Columbia.”

Puerto Rico’s Republican Gov. Wanda Vázquez, who supports statehood, announced in May that the island will hold another referendum on the issue in November, the sixth such vote since 1967 and the third since 2012. The issue used to be bipartisan, with both George W. Bush and Barack Obama saying they would support statehood if the island’s residents so chose. Support for statehood was even included in the GOP platform.

Since then, Puerto Rico has been hit hard by hurricane devastation and the coronavirus pandemic, making the need for additional federal support it would get as a state more urgent. When the island was hit by Hurricane Maria roughly around the same time as Hurricane Harvey hit the Houston area, the Trump administration approved far more aid for those impacted in Texas.

“It’s true that enfranchising D.C. and Puerto Rico through statehood would likely benefit Democrats electorally (although it’s not at all clear that Puerto Rico would be a blue state),” historian Nicole Hemmer, a research scholar with the Obama Presidency Oral History project at Columbia University, wrote in a CNN op-ed. “But that’s not an argument against statehood. American citizens have the right to equal representation. The solution is not to stop Democratic voters from exercising their right to vote — that’s both immoral and undemocratic. The solution is to win them over. If the Republican Party can’t do that, then it doesn’t deserve to be in power.”

Newsweek criticized for publishing a new birther conspiracy about Kamala Harris

Newsweek is being attacked after they ran an opinion column by John Eastman, a law professor at Chapman University. “Some Questions for Kamala Harris About Eligibility,” was the headline.

The opening of the story already speculates that Harris is somehow ineligible for the position because she’s also somehow ineligible to be president.

“The fact that Senator Kamala Harris has just been named the vice presidential running mate for presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has some questioning her eligibility for the position,” said the Chapman University professor. “The 12th Amendment provides that ‘no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.’ And Article II of the Constitution specifies that ‘[n]o person except a natural born citizen…shall be eligible to the office of President.’ Her father was (and is) a Jamaican national, her mother was from India, and neither was a naturalized U.S. citizen at the time of Harris’ birth in 1964. That, according to these commentators, makes her not a ‘natural born citizen’—and therefore ineligible for the office of the president and, hence, ineligible for the office of the vice president.”

The absurd claim would have prevented six presidents from taking office: Barack Obama, Andrew Jackson, James Buchanan, Chester A. Arthur, Woodrow Wilson, and Herbert Hoover. Trump’s mother was also an immigrant that wasn’t a naturalized citizen.

It’s a campaign attempt that is remarkably similar to the conspiracy theories about former President Obama that President Donald Trump perpetuated over the years.

Harris was born in Oakland, California, so it’s unclear if Trump will be asking for her birth certificate.

You can see some of the attacks below:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Trump is driving millions of American seniors into poverty

Donald Trump’s inept handling of the coronavirus pandemic is condemning millions of older Americans to get by on much smaller incomes and forcing many into permanent poverty, a new study shows.

These people can anticipate shorter lives with less robust health, while taxpayers will bear the burden of care for many years of increased welfare benefits and subsidies.

The pandemic forced 2.9 million Americans ages 55 to 70 to leave the workforce in just March through June, a study by the Retirement Equity Lab at The New School found.

That’s 50% more than the 1.9 million older workers forced into retirement in the first three months of the Great Recession in 2007. Viewed in percentage terms, 7% of older workers left the labor force in recent months, compared with 4.7% in the Great Recession.

By the end of September, 4 million older workers could be displaced permanently from the job market, the study projects. And if America faces a prolonged recession because of the coronavirus, which is a distinct prospect, that number would continue growing into next year.

Those forced out of work are disproportionately minorities and women, highlighting the structural racism and misogyny in America’s labor and retirement systems.

Months of denial, crazy ideas and incompetence by the Trump administration have resulted in America having by far the highest infection rate among wealthy nations.

Hundreds of thousands dead

There can be no doubt that Trump’s inaction, neglect, incompetence and corruption are largely responsible for America’s more than 160,000 deaths, a figure that may nearly double by Election Day on Nov. 3.

In the past month, America recorded five times as many new infections as the combined populations of Australia, Canada, Europe (excluding Russia and Turkey), Japan and South Korea.

Those areas have twice as many people as America. That means our infection rate is 10 times that of all those areas combined. And deaths occur disproportionately among older Americans, which is prompting many teachers, nurses and others to leave the workforce rather than foolishly risk death.

In the December 2017 update of my biography The Making of Donald Trump, I predicted he would fail to act effectively in a pandemic.

“Sooner or later a crisis will arise,” I wrote, citing “a deadly virus hopscotching around the world on jetliners creating the kind of pandemic that killed Donald Trump’s grandfather a century ago. Whenever the big crisis comes the one thing we know is that Donald Trump lacks the deep knowledge, critical thinking skills, emotional maturity and ability to separate sound advice from nonsense that are needed in a crisis.”

Reduced Social Security benefits

Social Security benefits are based on the 35 years of highest earnings out of 38 years. Being forced out of the labor market can mean fewer than 35 years or fewer years at higher pay. It also can force people to seek Social Security benefits at 62, normally the earliest eligible age, rather than collecting a larger benefit by waiting.

The maximum benefit this year at age 62 is $2,265, while someone who waits to collect at age 70 gets $3,790. The worker who waits until age 70 to collect — most likely white and well paid—gets $1.67 for every $1 the younger retiree collects.

Those figures massively overstate typical benefits because few workers qualify for the maximum. The average Social Security benefit last year was only $1,470 a month.

The older workers forced into retirement sooner than they wanted tend to labor in lower-paid occupations and those that expose them most to the risk of contracting COVID-19. Older executives and other office workers can work from home, while that option doesn’t exist for those in physical jobs from stocking grocery store shelves to driving buses.

This means that those involuntarily pushed out of the labor market are likely to depend on Social Security for most or all of their income in old age. These workers are unlikely to have pensions or significant retirement savings and are likely to still be paying off a mortgage, assuming they even own a home.

The impact of Social Security benefits is enormous. This year about 65 million Americans — retirees, widows and widowers, disabled people and orphans will collect $1 trillion. That’s a nickel on each dollar of Gross Domestic Product.

Racism, too

There is also a strong institutionalized racist component in the reduced income disaster facing older Americans forced out of the labor market because Trump & Co. don’t know how to deal with the pandemic.

Because of the kinds of jobs they tend to hold, almost 30% of white people can telecommute while fewer than 20% of black people can.

Few low-wage workers can do their jobs from home. Only 9.2% of the bottom fourth of workers can work from home compared with 61.5% of those in the top quarter, an Economic Policy Institute analysis found.

Long after Trump is out of the White House taxpayers will be forced to shoulder much of the cost of these shortened working careers through more old-age welfare benefits, subsidizing housing and other costs.

There is a solution to this awful legacy — increasing Social Security benefits so the average benefit lifts older workers significantly above the poverty line.

Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works, says this solution will do the trick if combined with other actions. “Americans are desperate.  Those fortunate enough to have 401(k)s are depleting those savings. Those old enough to claim Social Security are doing so. But workers who claim early have their Social Security benefits reduced permanently, setting them up for destitution when they become octogenarians and have spent down their other assets,” Altman warned.

“Social Security’s modest benefits must be expanded, as the Democratic Party is proposing.  As part of that expansion, those who claim early should face a smaller reduction.

“That is not only affordable; it will dramatically reduce poverty and increase economic security,” said Altman, co-author with Eric Kingson of Social Security Works, a book debunking myths about the program. In December they will be out with a new book on the widespread benefits of increasing Social Security benefits.

Demands for welfare and charitable services would fall; average lifespans rise; and, most important of all, show something Trump lacks — regard for human life.

With Elizabeth Warren sidestepped, Wall Street execs cheer Joe Biden’s pick of Kamala Harris for VP

With the prospect of longtime bank critic and progressive Sen. Elizabeth Warren being chosen as Joe Biden’s running mate now officially dead, Wall Street executives are openly applauding the presumptive Democratic nominee’s selection of California Sen. Kamala Harris as a signal that the top of the party’s ticket in November will be sufficiently “moderate” for their liking.

Charles Myers, the founder of financial advisory firm Signum, told CNBC after Biden announced the California Democrat as his vice presidential pick that his “clients really wanted to know if Biden was going to stay in the center, and his pick of Harris reinforces that.”

“While certain to generate excitement and to invite additional scrutiny of Harris’ record, we see this choice as a net positive for the Biden ticket,” Myers wrote in a note to clients late Tuesday. “Harris, who generally could be called a centrist, will not push Biden to the left or the right on major policy issues. She will be supportive of Biden and the Democratic Party’s policy platform.”

Other Wall Street executives echoed Myers’ assessment in interviews with CNBC, pointing to Harris’ experience as a senator and California Attorney General as well as her fundraising abilities. “I think it’s great,” said Marc Lasry, the CEO of investment firm Avenue Capital Group. “She’s going to help Joe immensely. He picked the perfect partner.”

Ray McGuire of Citigroup and Blair Effron of investment firm Centerview Partners also hailed Biden’s choice of Harris as “great.”

“She has a strong and active fundraising organization,” said Mike Kempner, founder of corporate public relations firm MWWPR. “She will be an important and immediate addition to the Biden fundraising effort. She is a fundraising star. Her experience as a prosecutor makes her uniquely qualified to deliver the case against Trump.”

Biden’s selection of Harris as his running mate comes months after Wall Street executives and other corporate donors warned the former vice president against picking Warren, a frequent and fierce critic of big banks and advocate for the interests of consumers.

“She would be horrible,” one anonymous Wall Street executive and Democratic donor told CNBC in April. A longtime Biden fundraiser said “a lot of the donor base, on board and coming, would prefer almost anyone but Elizabeth.”

Veteran progressive organizer and radio host Jim Hightower suggested nothing about the choice of Harris should be surprising, but said the selection only makes more clear the road ahead for those wanting much bolder social change:

While vocally opposed by corporate big-wigs, Warren was widely reported to be among the finalists in Biden’s VP search and polled as the most popular option among Black and progressive voters in a Morning Consult survey released in May. A survey of MoveOn members that same month found that 73% would be more likely to vote for Biden if Warren was his running mate.

Warren applauded Biden’s final choice in a statement Tuesday evening, saying Harris “will be a great partner…in making our government a powerful force for good in the fight for social, racial, and economic justice.”

“I will do everything I can to ensure Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are elected in November so they can get big things done for the American people starting January 2021,” Warren added.

If Biden wins, get ready for Trump to punish America

What could happen to America if Trump were to further, severely crash the U.S. economy the day after Joe Biden is announced as the winner of the 2020 presidential race?

As Trump tweeted on June 15, 2019, “if anyone but me takes over… there will be a Market Crash the likes of which has not been seen before!”

On July 6, 2020, he tweeted, “If you want your 401k’s and Stocks, which are getting close to an all time high (NASDAQ is already there), to disintegrate and disappear, vote for the Radical Left Do Nothing Democrats and Corrupt Joe Biden.”

And on July 27, 2020, he further tweeted that “if Sleepy Joe Biden, the puppet of the Left, ever won. Markets would crash and cities would burn. Our Country would suffer like never before.”

Meanwhile, the meme is spreading. CCN Markets was quoting traders saying that a Biden win would cut 25 percent from the stock market, and Forbes is suggesting Biden “would be bad for businesses and could negatively impact the stock market.” Yahoo Finance quotes AdvisorShares CEO Noah Hamman as saying “a 25 percent decline is not an unreasonable expectation” if Biden wins.

Even the New York Times got into the act, with Matt Phillips writing that “the Trump tax cuts were a windfall for major American corporations, helping to drive up the profitability of companies in the S&P 500 more than 20 percent in 2018.” The suggestion is that reversing that tax cut will drive profitability down, and stock prices would follow.

All of these scenarios simply envision Biden removing the “sugar high” of unusually low corporate and billionaire tax rates through a Biden reversal of Trump’s $1.5 trillion tax cut.

But what if Trump decides he wants a slice of his favorite meal—revenge—and will get it during the nearly three months between the November 3 election and Biden’s inauguration on January 20?

What if Trump decides to punish America for not being sufficiently loyal to him, and that punishment is to drive America into a second Republican Great Depression while he’s handing the government over to Biden?

He now has the power to make this Depression, amplified by the pandemic, far, far worse than the Republican Great Depression of 1930, now that he’s cowed the Fed. It’s almost like it was set up in advance.

Jerome Powell is the first Fed chief in two generations who’s not an economist; instead, he’s a lawyer, a multimillionaire private equity banker and former partner with the Carlyle Group, whose BA was in politics.

And politics is where Powell shines. In a complete abrogation of the rules governing the Fed, he’s created roughly $7 trillion (one-third of the entire nation’s normal annual GDP) out of thin air and used much of that money to buy corporate stock and bonds to keep the stock market afloat.

In its 107-year history, the Fed has never, ever done this; some observers consider it illegal.

And the rest of the world is watching, as the dollar drops in value (and gold skyrockets) relative to other currencies, another sign that both inflation and economic disaster are on the horizon.

So, imagine that all the ballots are counted on, say, November 20, and Joe Biden is declared the winner. The next day, the Fed stops supporting the stock and corporate bond markets, and the Dow drops over the following few months to 7,800, roughly where it was in October 2008, the last time a Republican administration goosed the economy to keep things looking good until an election (although Bush mistimed it by a bit short of a year).

Making things even worse, Powell could announce that he’s actively working to drive up interest rates (a function related to inflation).

That would cause a tsunami of corporate bankruptcies (corporate debt is currently higher than any other time in American history) and a collapse of the housing market just as Biden is stepping into the White House.

Powell recently suggested he’s considering just such a move, as CNBC reported on August 4 with the headline: “The Fed is expected to make a major commitment to ramping up inflation soon.”

If Trump and Powell do this, Republican commentators will be all over TV and other media saying that the crash was entirely because Biden was elected. It’ll be a bald-faced lie, but the GOP has been peddling this kind of crap since the Reagan Revolution.

Getting our economic house in order, then, will be a more herculean effort than Franklin Delano Roosevelt pulled off after Republican President Herbert Hoover’s tax-cut and deregulation policies crashed the economy in 1930, and could take well over a decade.

And then there’s the matter of Trump showing the fascists in the GOP where the weaknesses are in our three branches of government. If a major market crash and even more widespread unemployment, homelessness and hunger than we’re experiencing today were to ripple across the country, a surge of protesters into the streets is probable.

And Trump’s been rehearsing how to respond to that, particularly in Portland, as Charles P. Pierce lays out in Esquire.

This would play right into the hands of right-wing groups that are openly working for a race-based second civil war, a replay of The Turner Diaries, the book that inspired Timothy McVeigh.

Trump and Attorney General William Barr have already revealed a number of areas where our rule of law is sadly deficient, including the inability to hold a president to account for crimes he has committed while in office and the damage a president can do by gutting almost every federal agency and then putting lobbyists in charge of them.

Many of the holes, cracks and weaknesses in our republic that Trump has exploited were put into place by the Supreme Court in the 1970s and by Congress after 9/11. It’s so bad that the headline of a Rolling Stone article by David S. Cohen notes, “Donald Trump is trying to start a race war. And with the Insurrection Act, he has the statutory authority to do so.”

America needs a major reboot.

The Buckley v. Valeo and First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti Supreme Court decisions of the 1970s gave corporations and billionaires the “free speech right” to own politicians and political parties, and the Patriot Act and other similar legislation since 9/11 have given the president vast police powers that, throughout history, we’ve only seen in authoritarian, strongman governments.

We must reevaluate, rescind and replace all of these, if our republic is to survive the fresh hell that Trump and his right-wing paramilitaries are apparently planning for this fall and winter.

If Democrats acquire federal power through holding the House and taking the Senate and White House, the entire country needs to be laser-focused on stripping the oligarchic and fascistic elements that have crept into our republic since the Powell memo, multiple Supreme Court interventions, and the Patriot Act with its associated war crimes and torture.

America today is at a turning point, and whether we continue our slide into fascism and oligarchy, or pull back to small-d democratic values will depend, in no small part, on the planning and work we do now, and the candidates and policies we support and put forward two and four years from now.

Trump campaign appears to be hiding massive Facebook spending — but why?

The Trump campaign has spent tens of millions of dollars on Facebook ads, but has not reported any of that spending to the Federal Election Commission, records show.

Along with a number of affiliated committees, the campaign appears to be funneling payments to Facebook through shell companies. Official committees affiliated with presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden have also apparently used shell companies to foot Facebook ads, but those committees have reported a much larger proportion of their spending.

The end result is that the public, and the government, can’t tell for sure who is paying for what. The scheme also hides the final destination of funds — including how much might be siphoned off in commissions, kickbacks and other hidden distributions. This is particularly relevant after reports that the in 2016 the Trump campaign paid $94 million to a company owned by Brad Parscale, at the time director of the campaign’s digital operations.

The discrepancies emerge in a comparison of public data from Facebook’s advertising library and government data made available through the FEC website. Facebook data includes the FEC-mandated “disclaimers” that reveal who officially sponsors and pays for ads, but FEC data often does not reflect the same purchases by the same groups.

For instance, public data from Facebook lists the Trump campaign as the ultimate sponsor of more than $20 million in ads on the official Donald Trump page since May 2018. However, the campaign did not report any Facebook payments to the FEC in that time.

The same data attributes an additional $35 million worth of Trump ads to the Trump Make America Great Again (TMAGA) committee, a joint fundraising vehicle shared between the campaign and the Republican National Committee. In that same timeframe, however, TMAGA told the government that it paid Facebook about $5,800 in total.

All told, official Trump committees have spent more than $61 million on Facebook page ads since May 2018. Almost none of that appears in government records.

Biden Victory Fund, a joint committee shared between the Biden campaign and the Democratic National Committee, has filed $765,000 in Facebook “digital advertising” payments with the FEC, but Facebook data attributes $6.3 million to Biden Victory. (FEC filings now available only cover the period ending June 30.)

The RNC itself shows a reverse pattern: The party told the government that it paid Facebook $5.5 million for “list acquisition” last fall, per FEC data. Those were purchases “related to” targeted ads, according to an RNC spokesperson. But Facebook data shows that the party only spent about $2.9 million on ads in the last two years.

It’s unclear how the RNC’s leftover $2.6 million for list acquisition was spent on the social media platform.

A Facebook spokesperson did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Alhough it’s difficult to discern why committees began hiding specific spending through shell companies, the shift appears fairly recent: Campaigns regularly reported Facebook purchases throughout the 2016 cycle.

The amount of money that the Trump campaign has recently shielded is staggering — at least $170 million, according to a criminal complaint filed last month by the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center.

“This scheme is illegal,” Brendan Fischer, Director of the CLC Federal Reform Program, told Salon at the time.

The complaint lays out a scheme where a campaign reports payments to those firms, which then pay other vendors. As a result, the final destinations for that money — and its final purposes — are hidden from the FEC. And because the campaigns use multiple shell companies, it’s impossible to trace payments backward from Facebook data.

Last week Salon’s reporting identified a third firm — Digital Consulting Group — which, unlike the firms named in the CLC complaint, has no visible internet footprint. Its owners and affiliates appear to be untraceable through public records.

Since February of this year, the RNC has paid that firm at least $5.3 million, according to FEC filings, most of it for list acquisition. No other political campaign or committee has reported any payments to the company.

Digital Consulting Group LLC was founded in Delaware on Jan. 15, 2020, just one month before the RNC made its first payment of nearly $2 million, according to FEC records.

Additionally, federal filings show that the RNC paid Digital Consulting Group nearly $1 million for “list acquisition” on June 17, 2020 — the day that the Trump campaign ran a series of controversial advertisements designed to solicit contact information, which were widely criticized for using “Nazi-style” imagery. The shell game makes it difficult to trace just who created and purchased those ads.

The RNC would not say whether Digital Consulting Group was affiliated with the Trump campaign or the Republican Party, but an official told Salon that “in August, the RNC announced that we would not be using Parscale Strategy for digital media buys.” That statement was unprompted, as Salon had not inquired about Parscale.

“It is not terribly uncommon for campaigns to not report direct payments to Facebook or Google,” Fischer told Salon in an email. “Usually, what’s happening is that the campaign is reporting payments to a digital consulting firm, and the firm creates the ads and also pays the platform as part of their contract. That’s the kind of situation where the FEC has said that sub-vendor reporting is not required.”

“With the Trump campaign, the Facebook payments are probably buried under a few layers: the campaign is reporting payments to American Made, and American Made is then paying the digital firm, and the digital firm is then paying Facebook and Google,” he added.

Fischer said, however, that he could not explain the situation with Digital Consulting Group.

“This is not a racist community”: New HBO doc reveals an all-too-familiar America deep in denial

Many aspects about the documentary “Yusuf Hawkins: Storm Over Brooklyn” echo strained conversations we’re having about race and equality in 2020 – the killing itself, the months of protests that shattered the illusion of comity politicians and popular culture long promoted about New York City, the stubborn refusal of a community to acknowledge its entrenched racism.

But director Muta’Ali opens the film with an especially curious scene fated to strike some in the audience one way and be interpreted another way by others. Gerald Dickens, an emergency medical technician who responded to the call to the scene of the 16-year-old Hawkins’ murder in 1989, describes the incident’s significance as “one of the bigger ones, besides the World Trade Center.”

Then he offers about Hawkins, “He looked like a good kid, you know. He didn’t look like a thug or anything.”

Unless a person has been keeping up with the more complex conversations on race that have been percolating lately, that quote seems innocuous enough. Those accustomed to reading subtexts others might not understand, including the speaker, may pick up the director’s signal in that comment.

Dickens is speaking from a place of empathy. You can see it on his face, hear the heaviness in his voice. There’s also racism in that qualifier that Yusuf didn’t look a certain way – implying that a few tweaks to his appearance might have made it inexcusable for a white kid to shoot him twice – even though the man probably doesn’t mean it or even realize his error.

Surely we know what he means, though. People offered similar thought about Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Ahmaud Arbery, and many young men killed before them and afterward.

In our national trend of people seeking out literature and documentaries in an effort to fill in the many intentional blanks inserted into our educational system’s version the Black American experience, “Storm Over Brooklyn” asserts itself as a study in how entrenched denialism is in this country.

We’ve been watching that play out in recent years as the media industry wrings its hands over whether it’s fair or correct to call the President a racist when he makes racist statements or enacts racist policies. People have long gotten used to tasting their own blood after biting their tongues in a commitment to remaining polite in the face of a relative, colleague or friend supporting or committing racist acts, or overlooking coded language.

But it’s also in plain sight, in the way we live. With fewer than 100 days before a presidential election that many see as a referendum on the truth in the American promise of liberty and justice for all, “Storm Over Brooklyn” provides a look at a few decades into the past at a reality that very much fuels our present schisms.

The country in 2020 wrestles the tensions over the cultural divides between urban voters and their suburban, exurban and rural counterparts, but those same schisms have been fracturing major cities for generations.

The documentary sets us down in 1989, when Hawkins and a group of friends took a subway train to Bensonhurst, a community dominated by working-class, Italian American families. Hawkins and his friends headed there to look at a car that was for sale; a mob of Bensonhurst men, primed to fight, surrounded and menaced them. One shot a gun into the crowd, striking Hawkins twice and killing him. The city was rocked by months of protests in the aftermath of his killing.

Hawkins’ family, particularly his mother Diane, siblings and cousins, steers the narrative by filling in the portrait of a young man whose promising life was cut short, something most of the newspaper and television coverage failed to convey at the time.

Residents of Bensonhurst who remember the night with clarity offer their perspectives, including one of the neighborhood’s few Black kids associated with the white mob that attacked Hawkins and his friends, provide their view of what happened. The Rev. Al Sharpton features as prominently here as he did in the many protests demanding justice in the wake of the crime and the court proceedings that followed, as does a representative from the Nation of Islam, who has his own take on how events unfurled.

Voices past and present give “Storm Over Brooklyn” a piercing relevance in the here and now, whether by what they’re saying or what they represent. Muta’Ali juxtaposes archival footage from news coverage and police interviews with some of the still-living subjects in the present day, and together it shows a part of America as it is and has been. I’m not referring to the archival footage from the 1989 marches showing white people taunting Black protesters by holding up watermelons; that this no longer qualifies as stunning is telling.

Instead it’s the recognition that this tragedy occurred in the same year “Do the Right Thing” became a cinematic phenomenon and in the midst of a new Black conscience movement guided by hip-hop, but also a year after a grand jury discredited Tawana Brawley‘s claim that she’d been raped by four white men. Hawkins’ death and the uprisings that resulted also led to the election of New York City’s first and only Black mayor to date, David Dinkins.

But even he campaigned on the selling the illusion of New York City as a beautiful “mosaic,” echoing a phrase used by previous New York mayor Mario Cuomo in the late ’70s.  Do a little research and that viewpoint actually looks more sinister than sanguine. ”I never liked ‘melting pot,”’ Cuomo is quoted as saying. ”Our strength is not in melting together, but in keeping our cultures.”

That’s not in “Storm Over Brooklyn,” but interesting to remember when Bensonhurst residents and local law enforcement insist that it’s unfair to paint the neighborhood at that time as bigoted. “This is not a racist community,” one man says in an interview taking from archival news footage. “We just don’t like Black people, that’s all.”

Looking at New York and America by extension as a mosaic back in 1977, when Cuomo said it, or in 1989, when Dinkins hooked into that dream, is a predecessor to where we are now.

But those moments show the price of maintaining a façade of peace and progress by refusing to admit the existence of bigotry, America’s racial denialism has solidified into a massive roadblock slowing our way towards reconciliation and healing, let alone equity.

With even clarity, “Storm Over Brooklyn” shows what that obstacle looks like through the lives of those pressing against it and those who seek to benefit from keeping it in place.

Diane Hawkins’ openness in the film also gives her a voice that for the most part went unheard two decades ago; she explains that she was too overwhelmed to express herself in the wake of her son’s murder. She says her grief also was swept away in the waves of uprisings that followed, an admission that gives us something to ponder in the present. Her inability to mourn rendered her nearly mute back then; we have an obligation to hear her now and add it to a conversation that might actually move us forward, painful as each step may be.

“Yusuf Hawkins: Storm Over Brooklyn” debuts at 9 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 12 on HBO.

“Stop hiding”: Betsy DeVos accused of holing up in her mansion as she pushes for schools to reopen

As school systems across the country reckon with the innumerable challenges of re-opening amid the pressures of a resurgent coronavirus pandemic, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has reportedly isolated herself within her expansive Michigan estate.

At the same time, public attitudes about reopening have soured as schools experimenting with in-person learning report nearly immediate outbreaks of COVID-19. In a recent Politico/Morning Consult poll, almost 60% of Americans rejected fully in-person learning. That figure rose from 53% in July, when DeVos compared the risk of returning to schools with riding a rocket ship into space in a phone call with governors.

As DeVos has apparently distanced herself from population centers while the pandemic’s effects impact new parts of the country, she has simultaneously pushed for the nation’s public schools to put teachers and students back in the classroom full-time. DeVos’ hardline advocacy, which flouts both the warnings from public health officials and increasingly robust medical data, drew fierce criticism from Democrats before she supposedly disappeared into her summer home.

Recently, a mobile billboard featuring three LED screens with slogans blasting DeVos — “stop hiding in your mansion” and “start protecting our kids” — has been making its way across cities throughout Michigan.

A spokesperson for the Department of Education rejected the reports of DeVos’ isolation. 

“That’s simply not true,” the spokesperson told Salon via email. “Secretary DeVos has held 9 roundtables, 4 briefings, 30 calls with governors, 62 calls with state superintendents, 28 interviews and 13 conference calls about this pandemic. She provided 7 major flexibilities, took 5 steps to protect students’ rights, and made $30B for schools available in 30 days.”

But NBC News reported Tuesday that it could not find any records of a significant number of public events held by DeVos with public school officials. Noelle Ellerson Ng, the associate executive director for advocacy at the School Superintendents Association, told the outlet that the group had not heard from DeVos at all this year.

Dubbed the “McMansion from hell” by BuzzFeed, the education secretary’s 22,000-square-foot estate on the shore of Lake Macatawa commands a 24-hour, taxpayer-funded security detail courtesy of the U.S. Marshals Service when she is present.

DeVos, who is the only Cabinet member protected by the agency, was afforded the unusual arrangement in February 2017 by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions after her encounter with protesters at a Washington-area middle school. The total taxpayer bill could run to $26 million, or about 0.1% of DeVos $2 billion net worth, should she serve through Trump’s full term.

DeVos told the Washington Examiner in June that she would work mostly from her Michigan estate as the school year approached, and the Detroit Free Press reported that she had made good on the promise in July.

During that time, DeVos’ public schedule has been almost entirely empty, according to NBC News. A Washington event was added this Wednesday after the outlet reported another blank slate for the week: the “Kids FIRST: Getting America’s Children Safely Back to School” forum, featuring education officials, teachers and parents, at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

DeVos was, in fact, present at the event, seated onstage without a mask along with President Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway. The education secretary spoke for one minute and fifteen seconds at the top of the 40-minute session before sitting silently for the duration.

DeVos faced backlash earlier this summer for participating in publicly unlisted Federalist Society events, where she and top staff held virtual meetings with society chapters in Alabama, Arizona and Ohio to discuss her recently released Title IX rule which overhauls how schools and colleges handle accusations of sexual misconduct. The rule goes into effect Aug. 14.

DeVos, who reportedly participated in recent events related to school voucher advocacy and private schools, has admitted to using the pandemic as a way to further her private school agenda. The education secretary has diverted millions of dollars in coronavirus relief to private schools, resulting in a lawsuit. A Salon investigation found that charter schools which received federal funds might have double-dipped as much as $1 billion in small business loans. 

Amid a vacuum of public consensus on science, school reopening plans have become almost wholly political. A recent data analysis by Senior Brookings Institution fellow Jon Valant found that “there is no relationship — visually or statistically — between school districts’ reopening decisions and their county’s new COVID-19 cases per capita.”

“In contrast, there is a strong relationship — visually and statistically — between districts’ reopening decisions and the county-level support for Trump in the 2016 election,” Valant added. 

In late July, DeVos and fellow school-choice advocate Pence visited Thales Academy — a network of private nonsectarian schools in North Carolina — to applaud the school’s reopening model. Following the visit, several fourth-grade students had to quarantine after a classmate tested positive for COVID-19.

“Thales is a great example more schools could emulate,” DeVos had said during the visit. “You didn’t wait for guidance from the Department of Education. You didn’t ask for permission.”

Trump’s so-called eviction protection order does nothing to help those at risk of eviction

President Donald Trump issued an executive order on Saturday that he claimed would help American renters stave off the ongoing threat of eviction — a crucial need, given that economists predict 20 million Americans will face eviction by the end of September 2020.

Yet experts agree that Trump’s order won’t actually do anything. 

While the CARES Act imposed a temporary eviction moratorium under certain conditions, that order has now expired. To remedy this, Trump’s executive order, titled “Executive Order on Fighting the Spread of COVID-19 by Providing Assistance to Renters and Homeowners,” instructs the Secretary of Health and Human Services and the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to examine whether possible measures temporarily halting evictions would be reasonably necessary to halt the spread of COVID-19.

The order also asks the Secretary of the Treasury and the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to find available federal funds that can temporarily help renters and homeowners, and instructs government officials to “review all existing authorities and resources that may be used to prevent evictions and foreclosures for renters and homeowners resulting from hardships caused by COVID-19.”

The problem, experts agree, is that these actions largely consist of “recommendations” to different agency leaders — which fail to do anything substantive to help renters at risk of being evicted.

“My understanding is that it does not actually provide any protection at all from evictions,” Dr. Jesse Rothstein, an economist at the University of California Berkeley, told Salon earlier this week. “It directs a couple of federal agencies are studying what they could do to protect you. That’s the sort of thing you might have thought they would figure out before he issued the order, not afterward. But it was just to study. It isn’t going to do anything.”

The National Low Income Housing Coalition was similarly scathing, calling the order “an empty shell of a promise that does nothing to prevent evictions and homelessness and acts only to mislead renters into believing that they are protected when they are not.”

They added, “This executive order is reckless and harmful, offering false hope and risking increased confusion and chaos at a time when renters need assurance that they will not be kicked out of their homes during a pandemic.”

Noting that the executive orders were merely recommendations given to various federal agencies, and did not have the force of law, Dr. Richard D. Wolff — professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst — told Salon that “you have a situation here in which the federal government has chosen, not required by law but has chosen, not to put into effect — neither the president, nor the Congress — any kind of national universal eviction rule such as exists in many other countries and many other states below the level of national authority.”

Wolff compared the eviction situation in America with that in France. As he notes, it is illegal to evict anyone in France between November 1st every year until March 31st, because of the threat of cold weather to the homeless. Wolff pointed out that Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo has said no evictions are allowed between April 1 and October 31st — in effect, banning evictions semi-permanently, as that span covers an entire year. 

“There ought to be that in the United States,” Wolff concluded. “There is no such thing. What we have is a hodgepodge of state and local moratoria — and those are very interesting because what they do is they do not deal with the problem of unaffordable rent at a time when people’s income is pinched. All they do is say that you cannot evict a person because they have not yet paid their rent. . . . but their rents are accumulating. And if New York City is any example — where I know a little bit about it in detail — landlords have already instructed their legal representatives to prepare the paperwork, so the minute it becomes okay in New York city to file the papers to get evictions, they will do so.”

How Trump’s war on USPS threatens democracy itself

Most of us think of the postal service as a mail system, and little more. Yet it turns out that highways and roads, mass media, the idea of privacy, and much more all owe a direct debt to the history of the United States Postal Service (USPS).

The recent political machinations of Trump, and the postmaster general he appointed to that post, suggest that his administration is trying to slow, or perhaps even destroy, the United States Postal Service for partisan reasons.

In the process, Trump and his allies illustrate an obliviousness for one of America’s most revolutionary institutions. Indeed, in terms of its role in shaping American civilization, the postal service is on par with the internet and democracy itself. 

Last week, the Trump administration perpetrated what has become known as the “Friday Night Massacre.” Postmaster General Louis DeJoy — the former CEO of a company called New Breed Logistics and a major Republican contributor to Trump — fired a number of top executives and reshuffled more than two dozen other employees. Before that, he had slashed the agency’s budget so drastically that it slowed down mail service, including delivery of mail-in ballots in recent primary elections. Under his watch, the USPS has issued a new guideline that deliberately slows down the mail service, and USPS officials are now pushing to nearly triple the cost of postage for mail-in ballots. DeJoy was reportedly appointed because his predecessor was upset at how Trump was trying to discredit the Postal Service.

Because there are 30 states where ballots must be received on or before Election Day in order to be counted, DeJoy’s policy could disenfranchise millions of Americans who vote through mail-in balloting this year. Trump has been personally working toward that end by spreading misinformation about mail-in ballots being susceptible to fraud, even though there is no evidence of that and he supports absentee balloting (which is basically the same thing).

There are many reasons to be concerned about these developments. Yet one aspect of this story that has been underreported is how, by debasing the Postal Service, Trump is throwing one of America’s greatest achievements into a figurative trashbin. USPS’s institutional history goes all the way back to the Founding Fathers, and is interwoven with our understanding of what privacy means.

“I would start kind of immediately with 1792 when James Madison and George Washington established the civic mandate for the institution,” Richard John, a professor of journalism at Columbia Journalism School and author of “Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse,” told Salon. He said that some of its most important traits were the “low cost circulation of newspapers,” the fact that there was “congressional control — which means popular control over the designation of routes” and that “the network that would expand with the country, and [with] privacy so the government will not as a matter of principle open your mail.”

In a roundabout way, the modern idea of privacy was shaped by the postal system. That e-mails are assumed to be private from the moment they are sent to the moment we open them is an expectation that derives in part from the promise of privacy in physical mail.

John argued that the act that created the postal system, known as the Post Office Act of 1792, was “more important in establishing the foundations of the information infrastructure than any other piece of legislation until the First World War.”

Because the United States government was willing to invest in developing a sophisticated postal service, it became the biggest information network in the world by 1828, John explained. “The post office was so admired, lawmakers were calling [for] the government to take over Western Union and run it like the post office,” he continued. 

Author Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel “Looking Backward” advocated for an economy that was run like the post office; Soviet Premier Vladimir Lenin made a similar argument, and the post office was praised by historical figures from robber-baron Andrew Carnegie to marketing pioneer John Wanamaker.

David Morris, the co-founder of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and a longstanding advocate of the USPS, explained to Salon that the post office was instrumental in making American democracy work.

“Its primary goal was to knit together the country, and it did that,” Morris told Salon. “The second primary goal, if you can have two primary goals, was to inform the country — that is, to build citizenship.” Morris explained that, by building postal roads, the postal service laid the foundations for the national highway system decades later.

In terms of building citizenship and informing the country, the postal system achieved that, too, by delivering newspapers for free or almost free for decades. Both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson advocated for the distribution of periodicals on the basis of stimulating a free and robust press.

Morris said in that sense that the post office was “the creator of a democracy —the infrastructure of a democracy in terms of physical communication and in terms of intellectual communication.” And because the federal government took pride in its postal service and was diligent about maintaining its quality, “it continued to be the most sophisticated [postal service in the world] until very recently. . . . at the very beginning, it was probably the most complex post office in the world.”

There are clear parallels between the USPS and the internet. Both institutions exist because the American government was willing to invest considerable sums of money and human energy into making them happen, exposing the conservative lie that private enterprise alone can achieve such monumental results. Both made it possible for citizens to transmit information — whether about current events or through private messages — with an efficiency and speed that was unprecedented at the time. And both were fundamentally decentralized, making it difficult for foreign adversaries to attack them.

They are also both testaments to the American innovative spirit, one that conservatives claim to support even as Trump attempts to gut the post office today.

“I can’t think of another institution that you could tell the whole history of the United States through their lens,” Rebecca Brenner Graham, a PhD student at American University writing her dissertation about the USPS, told Salon. “You can tell the whole American history through the lens of the post office.”

When asked about Trump’s claim that mail-in balloting would lend itself to fraud, Graham told Salon that “this spirit of mail-in balloting is precisely the kind of civic participation that the Post Office has tried to advance since the Post Office Act of 1792.”

John, when asked if Trump is correct in his complaints about fraud for mail-in ballots, emphatically replied, “No.”

He added, “I mean, everyone has looked at. It says now it’s very hard” to commit vote-by-mail fraud.

Political Scientist Edie Goldenberg writes that since 2000, there have been only 204 allegations and 143 convictions for voter fraud that involved mail-in ballots. In that span, 250 million mail-in ballots were cast. There were far more allegations of voter fraud for in-person voting in the same span. 

McConnell’s refusal to provide states the help they need could cost more than 4 million jobs: report

During the coronavirus crisis, Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell has stressed that he has no interest in “bailing out” blue states that have been suffering budgetary problems because of the coronavirus pandemic. But Democrat-dominated states are hardly the only ones suffering: according to analysis from Moody’s Analytics, the U.S. economy could contract by 3% if Congress does not give states the help that they need — and Moody’s told the Wall Street Journal that more than 4 million jobs could be lost.

In July, Senate Republicans introduced a coronavirus relief package, but it did not include any aid for states or cities. However, negotiators in the Trump Administration have since said they are willing to offer states $150 billion in coronavirus relief — which is how much was included for state and local governments in the CARES Act when Congress passed it in March. Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives, however, have said that states need a lot more help and called for $915 billion in relief when they passed a bill on May 15. But Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin described the Democratic recommendation as “an absurd number,” and McConnell made it clear that the Democratic bill passed on May 15 was dead on arrival.

McConnell has dismissed aid to states as a “blue state bailout,” and on August 10, President Donald Trump tweeted that House Democrats “only wanted BAILOUT MONEY for Democrat run states and cities that are failing badly.” But in fact, red states are also suffering budgetary woes because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Wall Street Journal noted that deep red Louisiana, for example, is up against a 46% decline in revenue. And Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana has asked for $500 billion in relief for state and local governments — which is $415 billion less than House Democrats asked for on May 15, but $350 billion more than the Trump Administration’s $150 billion offer.

Rudy Giuliani’s daughter announces her support for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris

The daughter of current Trump lawyer former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani has endorsed Joe Biden’s presidential bid.

Caroline Rose Giuliani, 31, tweeted a photo of herself with Harris on Tuesday with the caption “an excellent day for a repost from this bleeding [heart] of mine #bidenharris2020 #removetrump.” She also shared a donation link in a subsequent tweet, calling on people to “help start turning this sh*t around!! It’s a matter of life or (many) death(s) at this point.”

As The Daily Caller points out, Giuliani’s daughter supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 and former President Barack Obama for both presidential runs.

You can read Giuliani’s post below via Twitter:

Trump says QAnon supporter condemned by GOP leaders for racist videos is “future Republican star”

President Donald Trump praised QAnon supporter Marjorie Taylor Greene as a “future Republican star” after she won her primary for the House of Representatives in Georgia this week.

“Marjorie is strong on everything,” the Republican president wrote Wednesday morning, even though her record of “appalling” and “disgusting” comments about race have been publicly condemned by the party’s top two leaders in the lower chamber.

After defeating neurosurgeon John Cowan by about 15 points in a primary runoff, Greene — a fervent QAnon conspiracy theorist — is expected to handily win her general election race in Georgia’s deep-red 14th Congressional District.

“She is not conservative — she’s crazy,” Cowan said of Greene in an interview with Politico ahead of the runoff. “She deserves a YouTube channel — not a seat in Congress. She’s a circus act.”

Greene frequently espouses QAnon conspiracy theories in videos she posts online. The FBI has warned that the fringe conspiracy theory poses a domestic terror threat. The Republican Party has nonetheless seen more than a dozen candidates who support QAnon in some way run in its primary races this year. Another QAnon supporter recently won the Republican Senate nomination in Oregon. Unlike Greene, she and most of the other conspiracy theorists are widely expected to lose their bids in November. 

Though Republicans have largely been mum on the rise of the dangerous conspiracy theory, Greene’s videos attacking Black people, Jews and Muslims have been rebuked by top party leaders.

In hours of Facebook video uncovered by Politico in June, Greene claimed that Black people were “held slaves to the Democratic Party,” alleged that Jewish Democratic mega-donor George Soros was a Nazi and suggested that Muslims should not be allowed in government. Greene also compared Black Lives Matter activists to neo-Nazis, saying: “Guess what? Slavery is over. Black people have equal rights.”

A spokesman for House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., called the comments “appalling,” while Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., the No. 2 Republican in the House, publicly backed her opponent in the primary race.

“The comments made by Ms. Greene are disgusting and don’t reflect the values of equality and decency that make our country great,” Scalise said.

A spokesman for Rep. Tom Emmer, R-Minn., the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, said he was “personally disgusted by this rhetoric and condemns it in the strongest possible terms.”

Greene hit back at her Republican critics after her Tuesday primary victory.

“The Republican establishment was against me, the D.C. swamp is against me and the lying fake news media hates my guts,” she told The New York Times. “It’s a badge of honor. It’s not about me winning. This is a referendum on every single one of us — on our beliefs.”

Despite congressional leaders publicly criticizing her remarks, Politico reported earlier this month that the party had done “little to stop her.” 

Trump, who chose not to endorse Cowan like Scalise and several other lawmakers, praised Greene after the win.

“Congratulations to future Republican Star Marjorie Taylor Greene on a big Congressional primary win in Georgia against a very tough and smart opponent,” the president wrote. “Marjorie is strong on everything and never gives up – a real WINNER!”

Trump’s reaction was markedly different than some of the more moderate Republican members of Congress.

Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., rejected the QAnon conspiracy theory, a fringe movement which grew out of far-right message boards. The conspiracy theory is based on “clues” from an anonymous person called “Q,” who claims to be a government insider. Supporters of the conspiracy theory baselessly believe that Trump is working against the “deep state” to shut down a global sex trafficking ring involving prominent Democrats and Hollywood celebrities, among other nonsensical ideas, even though the so-called clues have been repeatedly proven wrong.

“Qanon is a fabrication. This ‘insider’ has predicted so much incorrectly (but people don’t remember PAST predictions) so now has switched to vague generalities,” Kinzinger wrote after Greene’s win. “Could be Russian propaganda or a basement dweller. Regardless, no place in Congress for these conspiracies.”

But Tuesday’s primary followed by Trump’s support show that some members of the Republican Party have increasingly aligned with the fringe views of Greene. Indeed, documents recently obtained by NBC News shows that the QAnon movement has grown far larger in size than anyone expected.

Greene’s bid was encouraged by the House Freedom Caucus, Politico reported. Rep. Jim Jordan and his House Freedom Fund poured thousands of dollars to help Greene in the race and political action committees linked to Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows and Koch Industries also backed her bid, according to The New York Times. (The Koch PAC reportedly requested a refund on its donation.)

Democrat Kevin Van Ausdal, who will face Greene in November, admitted he faces a steep uphill climb in the heavily Republican district where retiring Rep. Tom Graves, R-Ga., won with 76% of the vote in 2018.

“Honestly the local Democratic money is not a lot,” he told the Associated Press. “We need donors to help get out the message and show people that there is an alternative — and a great alternative — to QAnon conspiracies and divisive rhetoric.”

The dark and biting “Luster,” plus 5 more provocative must-reads for August

Summer is winding down, and even though we’re done with the beach reads (sans actual beach in quarantine), must-read books are still coming. The pandemic hasn’t slowed down publishing, and August has much to show for that.

Continuing the nation’s education is Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson’s essential “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents” (Random House, Aug. 4) that examines America’s racism and finds connections to the outcastes of India and the Third Reich. Meanwhile Morgan Jenkins’ “Wandering in Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots” (Harper, Aug. 4) explores how six million Black Americans left the South from 1916-1970 and the result of this displacement.

Also Salon’s Amanda Marcotte spoke with philosopher Kate Manne about her new book “Entitled” (Crown Publishing Group, Aug. 11) to learn how society’s tolerance of male privilege harms women. In the new book “Tomboy” (Hachette Go, Aug. 11), Lisa Selin Davis’ argues for rejecting gender norms altogether, including with our children as they go back to school. 

Sarah Hendren also wants to shift thought with “What Can a Body Do?: How We Meet the Built World” (Riverhead Books, Aug. 18). In this fascinating set of stories, she looks at familiar objects and environments with new eyes and question what “normalcy” looks like.

On the fiction side, Alice Randall pays tribute to Detroit’s legendary neighborhood with “Black Bottom Saints” (Amistad Press, Aug. 18), in which the author visits legendary Black artists through the lens of a local gossip columnist and jazz club emcee. Over on another continent, Nazanine Hozar’s “Aria” (Pantheon Books, Aug. 25) visits Iran in the 1950s as a young orphan girl is raised by three mother figures and eventually participates in a popular uprising against the shah.

Back again to the U.S. in the 1950s, the title character in Tiffany McDaniel’s “Betty” (Knopf, Aug. 18) is the daughter of a white mother and Cherokee father and finds her voice as a writer to recount horror from her family’s past. Finally, David Heska Wanbli Weiden blends crime fiction with Native American identity in “Winter Counts” (Ecco Press, Aug. 25), the story of the local enforcer on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota.

Below, Salon has highlighted six more works of fiction for the month.

“The Death of Vivek Oji: A Novel” by Akwaeke Emezi (Riverhead Books, Aug. 4)

Akwaeke Emezi’s electrifying novel begins with a one-sentence chapter: “They burned down the market on the day Vivek Oji died.” It establishes a kind of score for the coming-of-age story, a heady percussive beat that underlays the vivid chapters to come. 

As readers, we don’t immediately meet Vivek; we first come to know the people closest to him. His father, Chika, his mother, Kavia and Vivek’s cousin, Osita. We learn how Vivek was born — to a Nigerian father who had “looks that should have lived forever, features he passed down to Vivek” and to an Indian mother, who immigrated to the country for a new start — and how he possessed the same birthmark on his foot that his paternal grandmother had. 

She died the day he was born, the birthmark a potential sign of reincarnation. It’s there that we establish one of the main themes of the book, which is presented as a question: “If nobody sees you, are you still there?” 

Each chapter is told from a different perspective, allowing Emezi to immediately weave a really textured portrayal of southeastern Nigeria during the 1980s and ’90s. Eventually, there are some chapters narrated by Vivek and his childhood acquaintance-turned-confidant Juju. From them, we hear how Vivek was different from many of his peers and how from early on he longed to break free of the constraints of his middle-class community. 

“Picture: the boy, shirtless, placing necklaces against his chest, draping them over his silver chain, clipping his ears with gold earrings, his hair tumbling over his shoulders,” Osita reveals to readers. “He looks like a bride, half naked, partially undressed…he was so beautiful he made the air around him dull.”

That’s when the percussive beat established in the first chapter begins to intensify, rapidly propelling the narrative forward. We as readers know the ultimate destination, but Emezi expertly guides us there. 

Vivek starts to slip into fugue states, due largely to the stress of concealing his true gender identity. He loses weight and has a breakdown while at university. Once he begins to wear his hair long, some of his anxiety is alleviated, but it introduces new problems in the forms of an aunt who thinks he’s possessed by a demon and young men who toss broken bottles at him as he walks through town. 

Just as he’s beginning to live openly, the drum beat stops — and the market is burned down. 

Emezi’s “The Death of Vivek Oji” is a masterful contemplation on gender identity and fluidity, the heavy weight of shame, and the importance of having friends and family who accept you rather than attempt to “fix” you. 

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“All the Right Mistakes” by Laura Jamison (She Writes Press, Aug. 4)

If you enjoyed our July recommendation of “Want: A Novel” by Lynne Streger Strong, Laura Jamison’s “All The Right Mistakes” is a spiritual sequel (though with perhaps a little more “beach read” levity). 

Both novels center on women who appear to have everything, and are thankfully largely aware of that privilege, but are forced to interrogate whether at their respective stages in life it’s everything they actually wanted. 

“All the Right Mistakes” centers on five 40-year-old women who became fast friends as Dartmouth undergraduates. They’ve stayed close for decades through career changes, births, deaths, marriages and divorces. Their friendship seems like a kind of bland given — that is until self-centered dynamo of the group, Heather Hall, releases her first book. 

It’s an advice book titled, “Four BIG Mistakes of Women Who Will Never Lead or Win.” As her friends read it, they realize that they are the thinly veiled basis for each of the chapters.

There is “Mistake No. 1: Opting Out,” which is based on the life of Carmen Jones, whose career was interrupted by an unplanned pregnancy and subsequent marriage. After her professional plans were so thrown off track, she dreamed of having other children — a wish that never came true. 

“Mistake No. 2: Ramping Off” is Martha Adams’. She’s a physician with two children and she and her husband, a doctor named Robert, are planning on another. But she isn’t sure she actually wants to return to work after the new baby is born. 

Sara Beck is the basis of “Mistake No. 3: Half-Assing It.” She is frazzled and frustrated trying to manage her household of four young children and her full-time job as an attorney. Sara constantly feels pulled between the responsibilities of both work life and home life, and never feels that either are being attended to correctly. 

Finally “Mistake No. 4: Ignoring the Fertility Cliff,” based on Elizabeth Smith, another “big-firm attorney” with a 3-year-old son and distant stay-at-home husband. She thinks she wants a second child, but keeps pumping the brakes on ultimately making that decision. 

The four friends who were written about are deeply wounded by Heather’s callousness, but the release of the book (which becomes a bestseller) also makes them deeply consider their “mistakes” and whether they are actually as bad as they’re made out to be — and if so, what can be done to remedy them. 

“All The Right Mistakes” isn’t an incendiary commentary on women’s labor, both seen and unseen; but it also doesn’t set out to be. It succeeds as a story of well-paced and engrossing story friendship with a pleasing dash of ’90s rom-com cattiness.

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“Luster” by Raven Leilani (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Aug. 4)

Since Zadie Smith teased Raven Leilani’s “Luster” in an essay back in February, hailing it as a novel that, “with the lightest of touches, skewers our contemporary moment, and announces a writer of exhilarating freedom and daring” anticipation has been high for this debut. Every minute of the wait for this intimate coming-of-age story about a young Black artist caught up in a middle-aged white couple’s open marriage has been worth it, and then some.

The novel opens with Edie — a painter frustrated in her position as an underemployed editorial coordinator, one of only two Black employees in her division — furtively sexting at her desk, her fear of “yet another disciplinary meeting with HR” overridden by her desire for Eric, a white forty-something Volvo-driving archivist (“a total daddy”) in an open marriage who corrects the typos in her dating profile. Blocked in art and stifled at work, Edie’s life — pest-ridden Bushwick apartment, aching loneliness, and all — is stripped of the adorkable basic-cable gloss typically applied to fictional millennial women working in New York’s creative industries: “My salary is very low. I have trouble making friends, and men lose interest in me when I talk. It always goes well initially, but then I talk too explicitly about my ovarian torsion or my rent.”

On her second date with Eric, at a wine bar — the first is Six Flags, his mortifying choice — he presents a list of rules he must follow when stepping out, written by his wife Rebecca. He later ghosts Edie but she refuses to fade quietly, showing up in his suburban New Jersey house and inadvertently crashing their wedding anniversary party, where she meets their daughter, who is Black and adopted. When Edie loses her job, her precarity juxtaposed mercilessly against their suburban comfort, she becomes even further enmeshed in the family unit; more than a friend, not quite a sister-wife, her relationships with Eric’s wife and daughter, both intriguing characters themselves, become much deeper and more interesting than her affair with him.

The lines blur further as Eric and Rebecca lean on Edie to inject at turns excitement, companionship, and discomfort into their home, demand she bear witness to their lives in a way that is impossible to separate from their whiteness: The feeling never quite shakes that they welcome her only as long as it serves them to, as long as she can fit herself into the corners of their well-appointed rooms.

Sinking into the pleasures of Leilani’s darkly funny and bitingly insightful prose over an aimless shut-down weekend is a treat you deserve. With a highlighter in one hand and “Luster” in the other, chapter one alone becomes a riot of yellow stripes: “I think to myself, you are a desirable woman. You are not a dozen gerbils in a skin casing,” and “Of course, there is still the business of trying to look sexy while hurtling through the sky,” and “The last time I painted, I was twenty-one. The president was black. I had more serotonin and I was less afraid of men,” and this gut-kick of a closer, “It’s that there are gray, anonymous hours like this. Hours when I am desperate, when I am ravenous, when I know how a star becomes a void.” Edie is at times hungry, reckless, unsparing, and aching to be remembered, but always unforgettable. — Erin Keane

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“True Story: A Novel” by Kate Reed Petty (Viking, Aug. 4)

“Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” Christine Blasey Ford testified at a Senate hearing during Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation proceedings, in which she alleged that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted and humiliated her when they were both teens at a house party in a tony suburb of Washington, D.C. “The uproarious laughter between the two, and their having fun at my expense.”

How much power does a story like that have? Who should get to harness that power? What does it mean to be a reliable narrator? What are the consequences of burying the truth? In “True Story,” Kate Reed Petty’s genre-bending page-turner of a novel about sexual assault, trauma, the disputed events of one evening and its long aftermath, there are no tidy answers.

The callous and cosseted, beer-pounding jocks of “True Story,” with their blunt-force coach worship and dips**t posturing, will certainly sound familiar to those who followed the Kavanaugh hearings, or who grew up in any given sports-thralled American suburb, tony or otherwise. That the novel devotes more than half of its narration to such a flat and boring dude — sidekick Nick, a bystander who seems haunted, or even cursed, by what his teammates did or didn’t do after one fateful high school lacrosse party, “the whole thing with the private school girl” as he so horrifyingly dismisses it — at first seems like a narrative injustice. Seriously, we have to spend how much time with this dim bulb, rather than with Alice, the girl wronged, or Haley, the girl adjacent to the story who pushed for the truth to be known? But what first seems like misplaced attention ripens into something like a revenge tale, before transforming into something else entirely in Petty’s skillful hands.

“True Story” told in a mash-up of genres, Nick’s increasingly paranoid and horrifying tale interspersed with a pastiche of essay drafts, screenplays, and emails written by Alice, “the private school girl” who grew up to be a ghost writer who can’t bring herself to tell the story that changed her life, and almost ended it. It’s an engrossing and provocative meditation on the power of a story to shape, destroy, and even redeem. — E.K.

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“Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear: A Novel” by Matthew Salesses (Little a, Aug. 11)

Matt Kim is disappearing. How else to explain why people are ignoring him or bumping into him? Besides, every night he passes out, and things vanish from his apartment. His family left him, leaving an empty purple bedroom. And his cat also just died, but he can still hear its ghost from between the walls. 

The sense of disappearing is all in his head, his girlfriend Yumi insists. Except she then meets her doppelgänger . . . who once dated someone who was a cooler, more successful version of Matt. But this double actually did disappear. Is this what lies in store for our fading protagonist?

“Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear” is an absurdist work of fiction in which the events feel inspired by the mind of David Lynch . . . if he were Asian American. Both wildly funny and horrific in its observations, the novel is an unsettling examination about identity and one’s place in the world.

As an Asian American, Matt Kim lives in the liminal world of citizen and foreigner. But that’s not his only ambivalent status: he’s also a father and husband but rejected as both by his ex-family; in trying to uncover the mystery of the other Matt, he becomes predator and prey; and in the office “as a hetero Asian male, employment always made me feel sexless and shenanigan-less.” 

Even his daughter Charlotte – who’s hapa and therefore is both white and Asian – is a teenager, neither child nor adult and somehow both simultaneously. And in science fiction, to be Asian is to both possess ancient wisdom but also alien technology. 

Salesses, who also wrote the bestselling novel “The Hundred-Year Flood,” piles on the many ways that Asian Americans are marginalized and Othered, but infuses dark humor into every line as he embraces the absurdity of that imposed dichotomous existence. He even plays with puns, a form of wordplay that embraces duality, and therefore is touted as the “language of rebellion.” (And yes, our humble author is also a “Matt,” which is no mere coincidence.) 

With sly references to presidential candidates endorsed by the KKK, men wearing red hats, and finding purpose through protest, “Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear” is a novel for our present moment in America, a moment that has been centuries in the making. It’s a story that asks what lengths one must go to in order to be seen. – Hanh Nguyen

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“A House Is a Body: Stories” by Shruti Swamy (Algonquin Books, Aug. 11)

In the title story of Shruti Swamy’s debut, a mother watches as a California wildfire encroaches on her home and muses, “A house is a body, a body houses the soul.”  This is one of the rare times that the author makes the connection of the physical to the spiritual so explicit, but it’s a pervasive presence throughout her work.

Whether it’s a closeted lesbian couple attending a cousin’s wedding or a student who is studying the art of laughter, in the dozen brief but impactful short stories, every moment and every observation has weight, giving a vibrant sense of atmosphere and emotion using an economy of words. 

The settings range from the humid rooftops of India and a cool university town in Germany to the cookie-cutter suburbs of the U.S., but always it’s the unflappable characters who anchor the action. Swamy writes each protagonist (all female except for one) as tackling life with a brisk matter-of-factness that rarely allows for the luxury of slipping into the sentimental, despite an intense yearning for more. Instead, the stories celebrate the sensual – the sluicing of ocean water over one swimmer’s body – and the frankly sexual interactions detailed without flowery romanticism or moral judgment. 

With the exception of one detour into the fantastical when an artist begins a relationship with the god Krishna, the characters are unabashedly mammalian in their needs and experiences. Death makes an appearance almost as much as sex or pregnancy does. What appears to be missing are the motivations, but all the clues are given in the actions.

Swamy is deliberate in her use of words and scenes to capture the essence of anger, mourning, frustration, and anticipation. The tales sometimes end abruptly, on the precipice of revealing all. It’s a testament to Swamy’s writing that the reader knows what comes next, whether it’s hope or bleakness. No matter what, one is left with the sense of having partaken of a precious morsel of life. – H.N.
 

Trump projected his flaws on Hillary Clinton, and it worked — but 2020 is different

Mere hours after former Vice President Joe Biden made history by picking Sen. Kamala Harris of California as his running mate — making her the first Black and Asian woman on a presidential ticket — Donald Trump coughed up his response. A little after 10 p.m. on Wednesday night, Trump posted a tweet claiming that “Joe Biden has a racism problem.”

The response on Twitter was, as one can imagine, contemptuous, given that Trump is an overt racist who leans heavily on white nationalist rhetoric. His niece, psychologist Mary Trump, says she’s heard him use the N-word, an accusation that no one sincerely doubts. 

“Let’s be real: Trump attacking Biden as racist after Biden nominates the first woman of color for vice president in American history is beyond idiotic,” tweeted Mark Follman, the national affairs editor at Mother Jones, in a typical response. 

“Not to mention Trump’s ‘white power’ tweet, his boost for ‘very fine’ torch carrying neo-Nazis etc etc etc,” Follman added. 

But this wasn’t yet another case of the president of the United States, intoxicated from Fox News, idiotically lashing out on Twitter. On the contrary, the “racism problem” tweet was a well-edited video that had clearly been put together by the Trump campaign, compiling audio clips of Biden misspeaking or saying tone-deaf things about race, including comments about his 1970s relationships with segregationist senators, for which Harris famously criticized him in a 2019 debate. 

In other words, this was a strategic choice by the Trump campaign, which has quietly become more competent in recent weeks (despite having to manage an overgrown toddler as a candidate), after dumping relative newbie Brad Parscale as campaign manager in favor of the more experienced Bill Stepien. This was an example of the false-equivalence strategy, and Democrats should be on alert, since earlier versions of this same strategy were used to great effect to defeat Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Al Gore in elections Democrats expected to win. 

Folks who dunk on Trump on Twitter don’t understand that this strategy isn’t meant to convince anyone that Trump isn’t a racist, which Stepien and other campaign officials know full well is an impossible task. The point is to convince potential Democratic voters that both candidates are irredeemably flawed, and they might as well sit this election out rather than sullying themselves by voting for “the lesser of two evils.”

This isn’t even really a Trump innovation, but pretty standard operating procedure in Republican politics. A GOP candidate’s team figures out the various strengths that the Democrat has over their candidate and then systematically starts trying to sow doubt about that with voters, often by projecting their own candidate’s flaws onto the Democrat.

What Republicans understand, and too many political commentators don’t, is that no election is strictly a choice between two candidates. There are always other choices: Not voting at all or throwing your vote away on a third-party candidate. Republicans know they can’t win over more voters than the ones they’ve got, so they win by poisoning the well against the Democrat. 

In 2016, the Republicans were saddled with a candidate who is a pathological liar with a long history of corruption, and who doesn’t seem to be in the greatest mental or physical condition. So they turned around and falsely accused Clinton of all these things, giving her the nickname “Crooked Hillary” and claiming she had secret health problems she was hiding from the public. 

It was the same story with the 2004 election, when Democrats ran Kerry, a decorated Vietnam veteran, against George W. Bush, whose draft-dodging only made his eagerness to send other people’s kids into a quagmire of a foreign war more suspect. But the Bush campaign directly attacked Kerry’s record, falsely accusing him of embellishing his service record and implying he hadn’t earned his Purple Hearts. 

Same story, again, with the 2000 election, in which the Bush campaign was successful in portraying Gore as a liar and a fabulist, and distracting from Bush’s own habit of telling lies — including the ones he unfortunately employed shortly after that, trying to justify his invasion of Iraq. 

This “I know you are, but what am I” strategy only works because the mainstream media — living in perpetual fear of conservatives accusing them of “bias” (which they’ll do no matter what) — is all too eager to play along with Republican efforts to wildly exaggerate Democratic flaws, all so journalists can crow about how they give it equally to “both sides,” and without quite noticing that they are abandoning their duty to the truth with these false equivalences. 

The 2016 election offers a perfect example of how the media falls for this trick. Clinton is actually one of the most honest politicians in America, pretty much free of any proven “corruption” despite endless harassment and investigation. Nonetheless, journalists ran with every fake Clinton scandal right-wingers threw at them, from the false accusations against the Clinton Foundation to the email server debacle, because they were more motivated by the desire to look “balanced” than they were by telling the truth. (Sexist stereotypes about female mendacity also drove much of the coverage.) Kerry and Gore got similarly unfair treatment by the press in the name of “balance.”

As I warned repeatedly in 2019 — to no avail — Biden’s foot-in-mouth disease makes this an easy play for the Trump campaign. As my colleague Chauncey DeVega explained this week, Biden possesses a “sense of affinity” with Black voters that makes him too comfortable and leads him to share “impolitic observations at inappropriate times.”

In the past, that kind of nuanced explanation has too often fallen on deaf ears in a media environment more driven by the need to portray “both sides” as equivalent than to explore the truth. 

That said, there’s reason this time around to be mildly optimistic that Trump’s efforts at sowing a “both sides are bad, so don’t vote” narrative might not work as well as it did for him in 2016, or as well as it did for Bush in 2000 and 2004. The media just doesn’t seem as interesting in elevating nonsense this time around. 

That’s probably because the Trump presidency has been such a massive disaster that even the journalists most devoted to both-sides-ism have, however temporarily, been shocked out of their addiction to false equivalency. As the economy collapses and the U.S. succumbs to the coronavirus pandemic in a way unmatched by the rest of the world — all because of Trump’s maliciousness and recklessness, as well as Republican opposition to competent governance — it’s become impossible to keep a straight face while asserting any moral or political equivalence between Democrats and Republicans. 

A similar situation happened in 2008, when the disaster of the George W. Bush presidency finally overcame the mainstream media’s desire to pretend there was no meaningful difference between Democrats and Republicans. Oh, there were efforts to scandalize Obama with nonsense, such as when right-wingers got journalists to take the bait of painting Obama’s Chicago pastor as anti-white and anti-American. But it basically never worked, because that kind of circus sideshow seemed weak in the face of the economic disaster of 2008, the failed response to Hurricane Katrina and the ill-fated invasion of Iraq. 

Compared to Donald Trump, Bush is small potatoes in the failed-presidency department. The seriousness of our current crisis makes it difficult for the press to play their silly both-sides false games. So it’s not working for Trump so far.

But it’s still two and a half months until the election, and we know it will feel longer than that. The media’s desire to appear “unbiased” is strong, even in the face of an economic catastrophe and a soaring COVID-19 death rate. Trump will keep trying to make this election about bullshit, and it’s important to stay vigilant against a press that struggles to resist the siren call of false equivalency. 

Sen. Susan Collins falls further behind Democrat rival Sara Gideon in latest poll out of Maine

Embattled Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine trails Democratic rival Sara Gideon by eight points among registered voters in a new Bangor Daily News poll.

Though Collins registers slightly higher among likely voters, she still trails Gideon by five points in the demo. That figure represents a slight slip from a four-point deficit in last month’s Public Policy Poll.

Perhaps more troubling for Collins? She is the only statewide elected official with a negative approval rating. Voters approve of Gov. Janet Mills, a Democrat, by a margin of 55% to 23%, and Sen. Angus King, an independent, by a margin of 55% to 33%. In Collins’ case, however, Mainers disapprove of her job performance by a margin of 49% to 37%. Collins, the only of the three officials on a 2020 ballot, has a 12-point approval gap.

Because Maine is a nuanced state which historically prides itself on its political independence, Collins’ fate may be tied closer to voters’ view of the state. While only 27% of Maine voters think the country is on the right track, 58% think Maine is doing well. 

On the national front, the poll shows presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden with a comfortable lead over President Donald Trump — 44% to 36%. Trump’s approval is also deeply underwater — 36% to 56%. Those numbers are disconcerting if voters identify Collins more closely with the president than Maine. 

To that end, a source familiar with internal Republican Party discussions told Salon that Senate Republicans and election strategists have decided to focus resources almost entirely on holding two seats in November: Collins in Maine and Cory Gardner in Colorado. The Cook Political Report currently marks both races as toss-ups.

Spending in the state supports this revelation. Conservative organizations such as the Federalist Society have invested heavily in Collins, while on the other side, the influential Republican-led never-Trump Lincoln Project has done the same.

One dark money group affiliated with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and election strategist Karl Rove has spent millions defending Collins’ seat since January. Collins toppled McConnell in public-opinion polling as the most unpopular member of the U.S. Senate the same month.

The same source also told Salon that a series of unproductive discussions with Trump at the White House last month raised serious concerns about the president’s commitment and electability, leading the Republican Party to shift to a Collins-centric strategy in Maine. A sizable chunk of Republican efforts are now aiming to divorce Collins from Trump in the minds of voters without alienating enthusiasm from the Trump crowd.

Over the last few months, the Collins campaign has mirrored that strategy. For instance, Collins skipped a tour of the state with Trump amid the twin crises of the coronavirus pandemic and nationwide upheaval in the wake of the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.

Collins’ advertising efforts have leaned heavily on video testimonials from Maine voters, but a recent Salon report revealed that more than 20 of those testimonials, packaged as “regular” Mainers, came from current or former elected Republican officials and Collins staffers.

Birther conspiracy theories circulate on Facebook after Joe Biden taps Kamala Harris as running mate

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), who was chosen by presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden as his running mate on Tuesday, is already being flooded with “birther” conspiracy theories similar to the ones used by President Donald Trump against former President Barack Obama.

FactCheck.org has taken stock of several Facebook posts being widely shared that falsely claim that Harris is not eligible to serve as president under the Constitution.

“If crazy Joe cannot serve his full term, Kamala cannot by constitutional law become President,” reads one post that started making the rounds even before Biden announced Harris as his selection. “She is an anchor baby, mother is from India, father is Jamaican, and neither were american citizens at time of her birth.”

Of course, thanks to the Constitution’s birthright citizenship clause, it doesn’t matter if Harris’s parents were citizens at the time of her birth. Once she was born in Oakland, we became an American citizen.

“To serve as president, one must be at least 35 years old, have been a resident of the United States for at least 14 years, and be a ‘natural born Citizen’ (Article II, sec. 1 of the Constitution),” explains Josh Chafetz, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, in an email to FactCheck.

Chafetz also described the Facebook posts questioning Harris’s eligibility as “racist nonsense.”

Kanye West meets with Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner amid independent bid for White House: report

Rapper Kanye West, who is running a so-far unsuccessful spoiler presidential campaign against former Vice President Joe Biden, reportedly met with Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner over the weekend.

The New York Times reports that West met with Kushner over the weekend, although the paper does not have details about what the two men discussed.

West told The Times that “they had discussed a book about Black empowerment called ‘PowerNomics,'” but declined to elaborate further on the conversation. According to The Times, West also “expressed anger about abortion rates among Black women and said he didn’t reflexively support Democrats.”

West’s campaign is widely seen as an attempt to draw Black voters away from the Democratic presidential ticket, although a recent Morning Consult poll found that West is drawing just two percent of Black voters and is not making a dent in Biden’s lead overall.

 

Trump’s executive orders affect unemployment, evictions, and Medicare. Here’s what to expect

On Saturday President Donald Trump issued four executive orders that provided an additional $400 in weekly unemployment benefits, backdating the payments so that they can begin retroactively on August 1. Shortly after doing so, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) released a statement blasting Trump’s new policies as “unworkable, weak and narrow” and adding that, in addition to reducing unemployment benefits, it “endanger seniors’ Social Security and Medicare.”

In headlines, Trump’s executive orders have been lumped into a few media talking points: First, the $400 additional weekly unemployment benefits, $200 lower than the previous CARES Act provided. Second, the word that Trump’s orders will threaten Medicare and Social Security.

As always, the devil is in the details. Salon spoke to economists who broke down how these orders will affect the average American – working or unemployed, rich or poor. 

1. Trump’s executive orders were multifarious, and achieved several policy goals at once. 

It is important to remember that Trump did not sign just one executive order, but four. In addition to extending unemployment benefits, the orders also extended federal protection from evictions, granted a payroll tax holiday and deferred student loan payments through 2020.

The ostensible goal of these measures was to provide relief for Americans who are financially suffering after the economy closed down in March as a response to the pandemic. Many conservatives, such as Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, have argued that too much federal generosity could disincentivize people from working, even though studies have debunked this. Still, that unfounded belief is why some Republicans called for a reduction of the original $600 federal supplement to unemployment benefits.

Trump’s federal protection from evictions, incidentally, was meaningless.

“My understanding is that it does not actually provide any protection at all from evictions,” Dr. Jesse Rothstein, an economist at the University of California Berkeley, told Salon. “It directs a couple of federal agencies are studying what they could do to protect you. That’s the sort of thing you might have thought they would figure out before he issued the order, not afterward. But it was just to study. It isn’t gonna do anything.”

Other economists have echoed Rothstein’s observations.

2. Social Security and Medicare are at risk, although the situation is not entirely dire.

“The payroll tax cut removes some funding to Medicare and Social Security, but those funds can always be replaced with other revenue from the general fund so it’s unlikely to cause any cut to outlays,” Dr. Gabriel Mathy, a macroeconomist at American University, told Salon by email.

Right now, the payroll tax has been deferred, which means it eventually has to be paid. That does not in its own right put those programs in long-term jeopardy.

It is also important to note that, because Trump said he would make his temporary payroll tax deferral permanent if he is reelected, he is effectively arguing that Medicare and Social Security funds should be slashed. Payroll taxes are solely used to pay for those two social programs, and since Republicans traditionally oppose raising taxes, it is difficult to see how permanently eliminating payroll taxes would not jeopardize Medicare and Social Security.

“One of the limitations of executive orders is that they don’t actually spell out what actually would happen, but that tax revenue goes to pay for Social Security and Medicare,” Rothstein explained. “And so if you got rid of those taxes, or cut them, then that takes away the funding that finances Social Security benefits. And without new legislation, we would have to either come up with other money for it or we’d be cutting the funding for Social Security.”

The silver lining here, though, is that the Constitution grants Congress power over spending federal funds, not the president. It is debatable whether the president can even issue the executive orders that he already did; he does not have the power to unilaterally make permanent changes to payroll taxes.

3. If you’re surviving off of unemployment benefits, Trump’s executive order just made your life a whole lot harder.

“The $400 unemployment extension is less than the $600 before [from the CARES Act], and it requires a 25% ($100) match from states so it may not even happen given how tight state budgets are,” Mathy told Salon. 

Dr. Betsey Stevenson, an economist at the University of Michigan, told Salon by email that “states are highly unlikely to come up with an extra $100, so the Department of Labor has already said that regular UI [unemployment insurance] payments can count toward it. If all 31 million people currently receiving UI get these payments, the pot of money that the administration has allocated for it will last only until the beginning of September.” 

Dr. Richard D. Wolff, professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, told Salon by email that there was no evidence that the $600 unemployment supplement was disincentivizing work to begin with. 

Wolff added, “In [National Economic Council Director] Larry Kudlow’s words, this is because $600 extra is a disincentive to work (for which no evidence exists that I know of or respect). In honest terms, the reduction is a measure aimed to force people back to work and thereby operates as an incentive for employers to cut likely wages or benefits knowing how many desperate recipients of $400 instead of $600 want/need almost any job.”

Rothstein stressed to Salon that, as with much of Trump’s Saturday executive orders, the exact ramifications are unclear because the new policies themselves are not well defined.

“it’s completely unclear. This creates a new program out of scratch out of whole cloth, but the details have not been worked out,” Rothstein explained.

4. This is not good news for the economy.

Both Mathy and Wolff agree that this is not long-term good news for the economy, which will need to put a lot of money in Americans’ hands to prevent widespread poverty and maintain a sustainable level of consumer spending.

“It’s better to keep these program going as the pandemic is continuing, but as these programs will almost certainly be cut back, this will make being unemployed harder — and with the government pumping less money into the economy, the recovery is likely to slow or reverse,” Mathy explained.

Rothstein expressed a similar view, telling Salon that “people need this money. Our economy needs this money. Our economy needs people not to be going bankrupt due to the pandemic. We need people to be able to pay their rent and buy groceries It looks as if have we cut off the benefits they were depending on when there was no realistic prospect of them going back to work. That’s bad for all of us.”

Referring to the reduced unemployment package, Stevenson told Salon that “while this spending is better than no spending, it’s a far cry from what is needed to stave off hardship and poverty. We currently have widespread unemployment, it is the reason why additional stimulus is so necessary.”

Wolff said the executive orders were partially a distraction. “Trump needs to keep attention away from the [pandemic] and economic crunch,” he said. “Breezy orders about relief are this week’s deflection effort — not much likely real effect, mostly political theater.” 

Wolff said the way that Trump and his party were pandering to employers rather than workers was criminal. They are “savaging [the] working class back into unsafe working conditions,” he said. “The risk they take (beside the utter immorality of it all) shows how desperate they are and how everything is aimed at the [November] election. A modern version of Louis XIV’s ‘apres moi le deluge.'” The translation for that: “After me, the flood.”

Trump’s acting solicitor general tells court Barr had secret reasons for dropping Michael Flynn case

Acting solicitor general Jeff Wall told a panel of federal judges that Attorney General William Barr had secret reasons for asking a judge to dismiss criminal charges against President Donald Trump’s first national security adviser Michael Flynn.

Wall, the government’s top Supreme Court lawyer, made the stunning claim during a Tuesday hearing on the Flynn case in front of the full D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.

“Under the circumstances, we went further than we thought we were obligated to,” Wall told Judge Merrick Garland. “To drive that point home, the attorney general sees this in the context of public information from other cases.”

“It may be possible the attorney general had before him information that he was not able to share with the court, and so what we put in front of the court were the reasons that we could,” Wall continued. “But it may not be the whole picture available to the executive branch.”

“We gave three reasons: One of them was that the interests of justice were no longer served by the prosecution,” he said. “The attorney general made that judgment on the basis of lots of information. Some of it is public — and some is not.”

The legal issue at hand is whether the Department of Justice can force presiding U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan to dismiss the Flynn case without a full review of Barr’s abrupt decision to drop charges.

Flynn pleaded guilty on two occasions to lying to the FBI about his contacts with former Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak ahead of Trump’s inauguration. He was about to be sentenced when he withdrew his plea. While Flynn’s withdrawal was unusual, Barr’s intervention was more so, sending shockwaves through the legal world and prompting nearly 1,200 former Justice Department prosecutors and officials to sign a petition encouraging Sullivan to hear the case out.

Wall told the appeals court that the administration had concerns about Sullivan looking into Barr’s role in the decision, saying the attorney general based his call in part on non-public information — which he desired to keep private. Wall did not further specify the nature of that information.

“I don’t know that the additional reason for dismissal is necessarily nefarious,” former U.S. attorney Barbara McQuade told Salon.

But while the motion to dismiss might be derived in part on classified information, such information could still be provided to the court under seal or in chambers.

“It did surprise me only because DOJ filed a lengthy brief explaining the reason and did not make this disclosure. But it is hard to know the reason,” McQuade added. “It could be that [U.S. District Attorney] John Durham is investigating misconduct relating to the Flynn investigation, and he cannot publicly disclose it at this point. Or it could be that there was some classified reason, such as the method by which the Flynn calls with Kislyak were intercepted.”

Though judges defer to prosecutors to make charging decisions for a number of reasons, McQuade said Wall’s statement “sounds more like a specific fact that can’t be shared.”

“Just because it is not public does not mean that it is necessarily part of a cover-up of some sort,” she said, suggesting one possibility could be a pending investigation that may or may not result in charges, specifically the sweeping probe of the Russia investigation which Barr commissioned to Durham after former special counsel Robert Mueller’s office concluded its work.

As for the current Flynn hearing, experts have laid out essentially three possibilities. The judges might side with the Justice Department and dismiss the case outright, or they could kick the case back to Sullivan’s courtroom given that Flynn could still appeal his decision through other channels. Finally, the court might reassign the matter to a different judge should it decide that Sullivan can no longer rule on the contentious case with impartiality.

Though those questions are narrow, the outcome has become about much more than Flynn. Trump and his allies, Barr included, have commandeered the case as a vehicle to counterattack alleged “deep state” officials over accusations that federal agents acted improperly when they investigated counterintelligence threats in 2016. Durham’s ongoing probe is one arm of this effort.

Further, Flynn’s guilty pleas play a central role in the “QAnon” conspiracy theory, which casts the former three-star general — who served under former President Barack Obama — as a martyr, persecuted for his inside knowledge of the previous administration’s alleged efforts to undermine Trump.

Barr, for his part, told CBS News in May that “people sometimes plead to things that turn out not to be crimes.”

Mail sorting equipment being “removed” from post offices, leaving mail to “pile up”: union leader

Mail sorting equipment is being removed from U.S. Postal Service (USPS) offices amid a slew of operational changes implemented by new Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, according to the head of the Iowa Postal Workers Union.

Numerous reports have detailed how changes made by DeJoy, a top donor to President Donald Trump and the Republican Party, have cut overtime and changed policies, which have slowed down mail delivery across the country. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said last week that DeJoy had “confirmed that contrary to prior denials and statements minimizing these changes, the Postal Service recently instituted operational changes” shortly after he assumed office.

“We believe these changes, made during the middle of a once-in-a-century pandemic, now threaten the timely delivery of mail — including medicines for seniors, paychecks for workers, and absentee ballots for voters — that is essential to millions of Americans,” they wrote in a letter to DeJoy, calling the cost-cutting measures “counterproductive and unacceptable.”

The USPS, which underwent a controversial staff shake-up after DeJoy took over, recently advanced a proposal that would nearly triple states’ postage costs for mail-in ballots and is also reportedly planning service cuts. But Kimberly Karol, the head of the Iowa Postal Workers Union, told NPR that there have been even more changes than previously reported.

“We are beginning to see those changes and how it is impacting the mail. Mail is beginning to pile up in our offices, and we’re seeing equipment being removed,” she said on Tuesday. “So we are beginning to see the impact of those changes.”

“Curious,” exclaimed host Noel King, “I hadn’t heard about this one. Equipment being removed. What equipment?”

“The sorting equipment that we use to process mail for delivery,” said Karol, who is also a postal clerk. “In Iowa, we are losing machines . . . so that also hinders our ability to process mail in the way that we had in the past.”

USPS spokesman David Partenheimer told Salon that the equipment removal was among actions the agency was taking “focused on increasing operational efficiency.”

DeJoy, who took over the cash-strapped agency in June, said the USPS was “vigorously focusing on the ingrained inefficiencies in our operations” in a Friday statement.

“By running our operations on time and on schedule, and by not incurring unnecessary overtime or other costs, we will enhance our ability to be sustainable and to be able to continue to provide high-quality, affordable service,” he said, adding that the agency would “aggressively monitor and quickly address service issues.”

DeJoy said the operational changes were “necessary” given the cash crunch.

“This realignment will strengthen the Postal Service by enabling us to identify new opportunities to generate revenue, so that we will have additional financial resources to be able to continue to fulfill our universal service obligation to all of America,” he said.

Karol said DeJoy’s changes have alarmed postal workers “all across the country.”

“His policies — although they’ve only been in place for a few weeks — are now affecting the way that we do business and not allowing us to deliver every piece every day as we’ve done in the past,” she said.

She also disputed that the changes were cost-cutting measures.

“I don’t see this as cost-saving measures. I see this to undermine the public confidence in the mail service,” she said. “It’s not saving us. We are spending more time trying to implement changes, and in our office, it’s costing more overtime.”

Democrats included $25 billion to help the USPS in their coronavirus relief proposal in May, but Trump and Senate Republicans have balked at providing additional funding. Democrats have accused Trump and DeJoy of trying to “sabotage” the mail service ahead of an expected surge in mail voting in November’s election, which the USPS has adamantly denied.

Democrats called on the USPS inspector general’s office to review changes made during DeJoy’s tenure, and Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., the top Democrat on the committee which oversees the agency, launched his own probe, too.

Despite her concerns about the mail slowdown, Karol expressed optimism that the USPS was prepared to handle the expected increase in mail-in ballots.

“The Postal Service has been in place for over 200 years. We have a history of being able to process mail, and we’ve been developing and perfecting our methods for all that time,” she told NPR. “So although the postmaster general is taking actions that are starting to impact that, by having that preparation in advance of this election, we still have the system that will do that.”

But she warned that the agency’s leaders were trying to “circumvent the rules that have been set in place to safeguard the public by making changes that don’t require public comment but have the same impact as closing offices and changing delivery standards.”

“So this is a way to avoid that kind of public comment. So we are trying to make sure that the public understands that they need to make comment,” she said. “We are trying to activate people all across the country and notify the public.”

Trump filed “fraudulent” financial information about overseas golf clubs to US government: watchdog

President Donald Trump filed “fraudulent” documents to the U.S. government inflating the value of his golf clubs in Ireland and Scotland, according to a left-leaning government watchdog group.

The American Democracy Legal Fund called on Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance and the FBI to investigate whether Trump broke the law by filing false financial disclosure documents, according to a letter obtained by Politico.

Trump reported to the U.S. government that his Trump International Golf Links Aberdeen and Trump Turnberry resorts in Scotland and the Trump Doonbeg in Ireland earned about $179 million in revenue between 2014 and 2018, according to research compiled by the group. Documents from the U.K. and Ireland show significantly less revenue — around $152 million — and the resorts actually lost $77 million over that time frame when expenses are included. 

Trump reported to the U.S. government in 2018 that the two Scottish resorts were worth at least $100 million, but records from the U.K. show the resorts actually had about $80 million more debt than assets.

“The Trump Organization repeatedly reported fraudulent financial details to the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, while reporting a different set of numbers to U.K. and Irish regulators,” Brad Woodhouse, a longtime Democratic Party operative and president of the American Democracy Legal Fund, said in the letter to Vance. “If the Trump Organization has seen fit to fake this information to federal agencies, it is likely they have used falsified information in business dealings regarding these courses.”

Woodhouse separately asked FBI Director Christopher Wray, a Trump appointee, to investigate “apparent inconsistencies, misstatements and lies in President Trump’s annual financial disclosure filings.”

After a win in the Supreme Court case over whether he can subpoena Trump’s tax returns, Vance’s office told a judge this month that it was investigating “public reports of possibly extensive and protracted criminal conduct at the Trump Organization,” including bank and insurance fraud.

Vance, who already subpoenaed and obtained documents from Deutsche Bank, which has been Trump’s primary lender for 20 years after other mainstream banks refused to do business with him following a series of bankruptcies and defaults, is seeking to obtain years of Trump’s tax returns as part of the investigation.

Last year, former longtime Trump fixer Michael Cohen testified to Congress that Trump repeatedly inflated the value of his assets when seeking loans from the bank but deflated the value of the same assets in tax filings.

“It was my experience that Mr. Trump inflated his total assets when it served his purposes, such as trying to be listed amongst the wealthiest people in Forbes, and deflated his assets to reduce his real estate taxes,” Cohen said.

Former Forbes reporter Jonathan Greenberg revealed in 2018 that Trump had even disguised himself as “John Barron” to convince the magazine to include him on its list of wealthiest Americans.

The Trump Organization and the White House did not comment on the Politico report, but an administration official told the outlet that officials at the Office of Government Ethics do not fact-check financial disclosures. The report noted that Trump was required to report his assets and income on the disclosures but “always appears to list his company’s revenue instead, not taking into account expenses or debt, allowing him to hide his company’s losses and his actual income.”

Kathleen Clark, an ethics expert at the Washington University School of Law, told the outlet, the allegation “raises flags” and “begs for an investigation.”