Trump and the Election of 2024.

 

What a Second Trumpocracy Would Mean the Coming Crisis of 2025 Clarence Lusane  October 26, 2023 TomDispatch The 2024 election will not resolve the authoritarian attraction that the Trump vote represents. So it’s time to prepare now, not later, for the political crisis that will undoubtedly emerge from that event, whatever the vote count may prove to be.

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Calls for Cease Fire

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Poor People's Campaign- Dia de los Metros

 

With Día de los Muertos approaching, we’re sharing numbers on poverty-induced death in America—as well as some solutions. We also have recaps of a talk given in Oakland by Haiti’s former First Lady and a gathering to discuss racism in L.A. Speaking of L.A., Angelenos are urged to join the next regional meeting, where we’ll go over some big plans for 2024. Forward together!

Announcement

Remembering those lost to poverty As we approach Día de los Muertos (the Day of the Dead), we remember those we have lost—including loved ones and neighbors taken before their time by poverty.   Celebrated on Nov. 1 and 2 in Mexico and Central America as well throughout California, Día de los Muertos is when the spirits of the dead are believed to return home and spend time with their relatives. To welcome them, families build altars in their honor.   During a time dedicated to the recognition of mortality, our minds also turn to facts like these (from the PPC California fact sheet): Across the country, approximately 1,000 people are still dying from COVID every week and millions of people lack access to health care. During the most intense period of the pandemic, 2,704,300 people were uninsured. With the ending of continuous eligibility for Medicaid, 2,633,500 more people are estimated to lose access to health care. Also during the pandemic, moratoria on evictions and utility disconnections saved lives. If enacted earlier, they could have reduced COVID deaths by 40 and 15 percent, respectively, across the nation. Universal health care could have saved 330,000 lives. Between 2019 and 2020, California experienced a 1.9-year decline in average life expectancy. It doesn’t have to be this way. The Third Reconstruction Resolution points to solutions that could end this cycle of poverty and unnecessary death. Share these facts and solutions with your family, neighbors and elected officials. (Don’t know who represents you? The League of Women Voters has this handy tool.)

Sen. Sanders. On Gaza and Israel

 There have been five wars fought between Israel and its neighbors in the last fifteen years. Over that time, and before, there have been thousands of diplomats from around the world working on a variety of plans to bring peace and stability to the region, and hundreds of conferences. They have all failed.

Today, the situation in the area is more horrific, more brutal, more inhumane, and more dangerous than ever before. I wish I could tell you that I had some magic solution, or five-point plan to resolve this never-ending crisis. I don’t. But this I do know.

The barbarous terrorist act committed by Hamas against innocent men, women, and children in Israel was a horrific act that must be strongly condemned by the entire world. There is absolutely no justification for shooting down hundreds of young people at a music festival, killing babies in cold blood and taking hostages. In my view, the state of Israel has the absolute right to defend itself against Hamas' terrorism. 

It is also clear that this attack will only embolden the extremists on both sides who see violence as the only answer. It also creates the immediate possibility of a wider war in the area with unforeseen and dangerous consequences. 

But in the midst of the terrorism, the missiles and bombs being exploded daily, and a hospital in Gaza being destroyed, there is another humanitarian disaster that is unfolding. Today, as a result of an Israeli evacuation order, hundreds of thousands of innocent and desperate people in Gaza are facing inhumane and life-threatening conditions. These are people who have been driven from their homes, who have no food, water, or fuel, who don’t know where they are going or who will accept them or if they will ever again return to their homes. And I would remind you that half of those people are children.

Last night, on the floor of the Senate, I blocked an effort on the part of some Republicans to prevent desperately needed humanitarian aid from the United Nations and other relief agencies from getting to these Palestinians. 

In these very difficult times, we cannot turn our backs on these innocent men, women and children who are desperately trying to survive. That is not what this country must ever be about.

I hope you'll watch and share it today: 

In solidarity,

Bernie Sanders

Homelessness in Los Angeles. _ Poor People's Campaign

 

The L.A. Summit on Poverty and Homelessness Last Friday, the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor hosted an historic Summit on Poverty and Homelessness. Held at the IBEW Hall and attended by hundreds, the day brought together labor, political and community leaders to discuss solutions to poverty and homelessness in Los Angeles. The day began with a fact-filled presentation by L.A. County Federation of Labor President Yvonne Wheeler, who drove home how hard it is for people—even those who are working—to make ends meet. She noted that more than 2 million people are living in poverty in L.A. County, and many are one paycheck away from being homeless.   We also heard from elected officials including Mayor Karen Bass and County Supervisors Holly Mitchell and Janice Hahn. Workshop sessions centered on closing the wage gaps for all workers, creating unity with public-sector unions and community organizing efforts, and scaling up efforts to build affordable housing.   The surprise of the morning was Laphonza Butler, our new U.S. senator, who gave a heartfelt introduction to the keynote speaker: our very own Bishop Barber. And before he spoke, PPC theomusicologist Yara Allen energized the audience with a rousing call-and-response rendition of “Somebody’s Hurting My People.”

Bishop Barber began by reminding us that we must face up to the realities of poverty—that the numbers are higher than we’ve been told, that we continue to blame people for their own poverty and that we need to stop believing that the poor will always be with us (and how that phrase is an intentional misrepresentation of Scripture).    “What is the cost of poverty?” he asked, “it’s losing a trillion dollars due to child poverty…and losing 1.3 trillion due to corporate tax breaks.” He then fired us up as he repeated that “it’s time to have a meeting”—a community-wide, nationwide coming together across lines of division to eradicate poverty once and for all. “It’s time to solve this!” he said.   We left inspired and motivated to march toward that goal while strengthening connections between unions and the greater community. Read more about the summit in the Los Angeles Sentinel.

The Corrosive Nature of Hate

 

I’m trying not to despair, but the world seems awash in hate right now. In the Middle East. In Ukraine and Russia. In rabid anti-immigrant movements in Europe. Among some Trump followers, including Trump Republicans in Congress. 

Threats are mounting against Muslim Americans and Jewish Americans. On Saturday, outside of Chicago, a 6-year-old boy was stabbed to death in an anti-Muslim hate crime. Threats of domestic terrorism are mounting.

Yesterday I saw a demonstration by students at a university that prides itself on free speech and inclusion, but the rally reeked of hatefulness and intolerance. 

Robert Reich 

Tragically, hate is a huge motivator. “The whole secret of politics is knowing who hates who,” wrote Kevin Phillips, the political analyst who died last week.

I did not know Phillips well. We appeared together on various panels and forums over the years, so I heard a lot of his views about political strategy. I’m reluctant to speak ill of someone recently deceased, but it is important to understand Phillips’s legacy. 

His 1969 book, “The Emerging Republican Majority,” was for many decades the GOP’s blueprint for how to win over white voters unhappy with the Democratic Party’s embrace of civil rights in the 1960s.

Phillips urged Republicans to link white voters’ racial anxieties to issues such as crime, federal spending, and voting rights, and make racially coded appeals such as “law and order.” 

It worked — helping to produce Richard M. Nixon’s landslide victory in 1972, Reagan’s in 1980 (aided by Reagan’s condemnation of “welfare queens”), George W. Bush’s 1986 victory (remember “Willie Horton”?), and GOP majorities for decades.

Phillips’s politics of hate was the predicate for Trump’s politics of resentment and fear — Trump’s dehumanizing of immigrants and Muslims, use of antisemitic tropes, denigrating “globalists,” “coastal elites,” and the “deep state” bureaucrats, and attacking the mainstream media as “enemies of the people” and Democrats as “socialists.”

The politics of hate is central to today’s fierce divide between red and blue states — including Ron DeSantis’s and Greg Abbott’s wars on trans youth, “critical race theory,” women wanting to preserve autonomy over their own bodies, and undocumented immigrants.  

And it’s at the heart of the “great replacement theory” peddled by Tucker Carlson and other bottom-feeders in the right-wing media.

Trump and Chaos

 And that fervor has become the basis of a strategy — led by Trump — for seeking to persuade the rest of America that the nation is ungovernable as a democracy and therefore in need of an authoritarian strongman.

This is the underlying agenda of Trump and his enablers as we head into the terrifying election year of 2024. 

It’s behind Trump’s increasingly wild ravings. It animates the House nihilists (such as Matt Gaetz, Jim Jordan, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Andy Biggs, and Nancy Mace). It fuels the zealotry of Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy. It’s behind Steve Bannon’s and Tucker Carlson’s incendiary agitprop. (It’s also basic to Putin’s maneuverings.)

The more chaos Trump and his allies create, the more pessimistic Americans feel about the capacities of our democratic institutions to govern the nation — which advances their authoritarian agenda. 

So they are increasingly unconstrained. Close the government! Vacate the speakership! Impeach Biden! Investigate the judges and prosecutors in Trump’s civil and criminal trials! Stop funding Ukraine! Don’t trust the intelligence community! 

“How do Americans feel about politics?” The New York Times asked a few days ago, answering in the same headline: “Disgust isn’t a strong enough word.” 

Trump wants us to be disgusted. He wants us to believe that America is ungovernable as long as power remains diffused. He wants us to think we need an authoritarian strongman — Trump — to concentrate power and take over everything. 

In a recent survey by the Pew Research Center, only 16 percent of people said they trusted the government — close to the lowest levels in seven decades of polling. Nearly 30 percent said they disliked both the Democratic and Republican parties, a record high. 

If we view the central political struggle of our era as not just between the two major parties, but more fundamentally between democracy and authoritarianism, Trump’s chaos agenda explains why much of the GOP no longer accepts the rule of law, the norms of liberal democracy, the legitimacy of the opposing party, or the premise that governing requires negotiation and compromise.

Trump’s chaos agenda continues to drown out news about how well we’re actually being governed: An economy that continues to generate a large number of new jobs, with real (adjusted for inflation) wages finally trending upward, inflation dropping, and no recession in sight.

Plus: Billions of dollars pumped out to fix and improve the nation’s roads, ports, pipelines, and internet. Hundreds of billions allocated to combat climate change. Medicare on the way to lowering the cost of prescription drugs. Billions in student debt canceled. Monopolies attacked. Workers’ rights to organize, defended. 

This asymmetry — a well-governed America barely registering on the public’s mind, while an ungovernable America becomes increasingly palpable — is not just a product of Trump’s GOP and right-wing media. It’s also due to the mainstream media, which attracts viewers and listeners with damning stories of dysfunction and crisis and an inclination to blame both sides. 

It is playing directly into Trump’s authoritarian hands. Trump thrives on the perception of disorder and dysfunction. 

The worse things seem, the stronger his case for an authoritarian like him to take over. “I’d get it done in one day.” “I am your voice.” “Leave it all to me.”

Reagan was wrong. Government is not the problem. A modern society needs government. The relevant questions are: What kind of government? And to whom is it responsible? 

Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress have been doing what they can to fortify American democracy and make it responsible to the people, under the most challenging politics of the post-war era. I have worked for two Democratic presidents (Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton) and advised a third (Barack Obama). In my view, Biden is the most progressive and effective of them all. 

That Biden is not getting credit — that the public sees and reads mostly about dysfunction and crises, created largely by Republicans and fomented by Trump — is not just politically disadvantageous for Biden and the Democrats. 

It is part of an increasingly effective strategy by Trump and his allies to foment public disgust with our democratic system of government. It is an essential component of Trump’s authoritarian agenda. 

If it succeeds, it will not just sink Biden and the Democrats. It will sink American democracy. 

Robert Reich 

Trump and Endless Lies - Not Truth

Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more Truth as a Common Good The 10th and final installment of The Common Good ROBERT REICH OCT 6   READ IN APP   Today’s is the last of my 10 essays on the common good, and I want to focus on what each of us can do to discover, spread, and insist upon public truth.  By public truth, I mean facts about what is happening around us that affect how we together understand the world.  In recent years, public truth has been undermined by people who have been willing to do whatever it takes to gain wealth or power.  The most egregious example is Donald Trump, of course.  But even before Trump, the mainstream media occasionally slanted the news out of fear of offending major advertisers or powerful interests. (The New York Times reporter Judith Miller notoriously colluded with the George W. Bush administration in propagating its blatant lie about Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction.) Meanwhile, journalists have been under mounting pressure to deliver stories that attract the largest number of viewers or readers rather than inform readers and viewers of important truths.  Corporate public relations professionals, who now vastly outnumber professional journalists, do whatever it takes to get favorable stories for their companies and avoid unfavorable ones.  Finally, because of ever-intensifying competition for funding, universities and nonprofit research institutions sometimes shape their research agendas to satisfy funders — some even suppressing analyses that funders dislike. All of this paved the way for Trump — his ubiquitous lies, his ongoing attacks on journalists, his assault on scientists and researchers, his onslaught against truth.  Truth is the most basic of common goods. As the late senator and professor Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, everyone is entitled to their own opinions but not their own facts.  When we accept lies as facts, or illogic as logic, we lose the shared reality necessary to tackle our common problems. We become powerless.  OUR DEMOCRACY is obviously imperiled when the rich buy off politicians. But we are no less endangered when the rich buy off the institutions our democracy depends on to research, investigate, expose, and mobilize action against what is occurring.  David Koch’s $23 million of donations to public television earned him positions on the boards of two prominent public broadcasting stations. They also helped ensure that a documentary critical of Koch and his brother Charles, called “Citizen Koch,” did not air on public television.  Google’s donations to New America (formerly the New America Foundation), an influential center-left think tank, enabled it to squelch research the organization was undertaking about Google’s market power.  Google has quietly financed hundreds of professors at universities such as Harvard and Berkeley to write research papers that help Google defend itself against legal challenges to its market dominance. Some professors have allowed Google to see the papers before they’re published, enabling Google to offer “suggestions.” The professors’ research papers do not disclose that Google sought them out and don’t reveal Google’s backing. DISTRUST OF THE MEDIA was on the rise even before Trump. On the eve of the 2016 presidential election, only 18 percent of Americans said they trusted national news media, according to the Pew Research Center.  Contrast this with American opinion almost five decades before. In 1972, in the wake of reporting that revealed truths about Vietnam and Nixon’s Watergate scandal, 72 percent of Americans expressed trust and confidence in the press. Today, most large media corporations are motivated by shareholder returns, not by the common good. In order to generate high profits and share prices, they have to attract consumers rather than serve citizens.  This has transformed journalists from investigators offering serious news to “content providers” competing for attention.  A Harvard study found that in the 2008 presidential election, the major TV networks devoted a total of 220 minutes to reporting candidates’ positions on issues of public policy. In 2012, the networks allocated 114 minutes to policy. In 2016, they devoted 32 minutes.  Hillary Clinton’s policy ideas and proposals received almost no attention, while her “emails” commanded 100 minutes of airtime.  MEANWHILE, IN 2016, Trump’s antics ruled the airwaves. His eagerness to vilify, disparage, denounce, and defame others — not just Clinton, but also President Obama, Mexican Americans, Muslims, new immigrants, China, other nations, Democrats, and the press — turned him into a magnet for readers and viewers.  Regardless of whether they were appalled or thrilled by his diatribes, they were entertained. As the 2016 presidential race heated up, Leslie Moonves, CEO of CBS, said the Trump phenomenon “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS,” adding, “Who would have expected the ride we’re all having right now? The money’s rolling in and this is fun. . . . I’ve never seen anything like this, and this is going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going.” Moonves knew his admission was a terrible thing to say because he was aware that the common good required a different response, and less coverage of Trump. As a candidate for president once again, Trump’s media dominance continues — and, again, for much the same reasons: because he uses lies that not only shock but are the diametric opposite of the truth, deploys them shamelessly, and entertains.  BEFORE THE 1980s — before the corporate transformation I have outlined — the news divisions of America’s major broadcast networks made decisions based not on how much profit they generated, but on what an informed public needed to know. Former CBS correspondent Marvin Kalb remembers CBS’s owner and chairman William Paley telling news reporters in the 1960s, “I have Jack Benny to make money.”  Now, the owners and major investors in broadcast television demand that their news divisions make money. This evolution paved the way not only for Trump’s dominance of the news after becoming president, but also his ongoing assaults on journalists — “the most dishonest human beings on earth,” as he has called them, “the lowest forms of life,” “scum,” “sick,” purveyors of “fake news,” and the “enemy of the people” — even suggesting that their goal was to remove him from office (they “have their own agenda, and it’s not your agenda, and it’s not the country’s agenda”).  The harangues have scored points with Trump’s base and served to discredit anything the press discovers that damages him, but at the expense of a weaker democracy.  When a large enough portion of the public comes to trust Trump’s words more than they do the media’s, Trump can get away with saying — and doing — whatever he wants. When that happens, democracy ends. TRUMP’S “shoot-the-messenger” war on truth-telling institutions has been an extension of all this.  When Trump couldn’t find evidence to support his claim that “three to five million” fraudulent votes were cast for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, he created a commission to find such evidence. They never did.  When the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that large numbers of Americans would lose their health insurance coverage as a result of the Republican plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Trump’s press secretary warned that the Congressional Budget Office could not be trusted to come up with accurate numbers.  Several weeks after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, as Trump tweeted that his administration was doing “a GREAT job” restoring the island, the Federal Emergency Management Agency removed data from its website showing that half of Puerto Ricans still did not have access to drinking water and only 5 percent had electricity. Then came the pandemic, and Trump’s attempts to suppress facts about COVID, and public confusion and anger about wearing masks and getting vaccinated. And then, Trump’s big lie that the 2020 election was stolen, and his subsequent lie that government prosecutors have targeted him to thwart his 2024 reelection campaign.  PRINT AND BROADCAST NEWS OUTLETS must demonstrate to the public that their news stories are produced accurately and intelligently. They need codes of ethics with clearly stated processes for checking facts and correcting errors, and ways to ensure that the public is made aware of such corrections.  They must clearly separate facts and analysis from opinions and advocacy, and inform readers and viewers of any news or news-gathering that is funded by organizations with a stake in what’s reported.  They need ombudsmen to investigate public complaints about their coverage, along with public editors who serve as paid in-house critics.  They must not be wedded to “both sides” reporting that misleads the public into believing false equivalencies.  Network news divisions should be independent of top executives who represent the interests of shareholders.  Finally, readers and users of the media must demand truth.  It should be understood as a responsibility of citizenship to be skeptical (but not cynical) about what we hear and read, find reliable sources of information, apply basic logic and analysis, and know enough about history and the physical world to differentiate fact from fiction. These steps are necessary to restore the media to its rightful place in our democracy and protect the truth as a common good. AT ONE TIME, I BELIEVED THAT SOCIAL MEDIA would democratize the news — enabling more people to become truth-tellers, giving more of us access to a greater range of stories and perspectives, and providing a useful alternative to corporate media.  I was wrong. Even as evidence mounts that Russia and China have intensified covert influence campaigns, and even as advances in generative artificial intelligence have opened the door to potential widespread voter manipulation, social media platforms have pulled back on moderating content. This is dangerous and wrong.  But here, too, we are not powerless to receive the truth.  We must demand that the leaders of giant platforms like Facebook, Google, and “X” act as trustees of the common good, and take appropriate steps to guard the truth.  They must choose to be treated as other publications and subject to libel laws, or as regulated public utilities, or to be broken up (with their software and algorithms freely shared with small competitors).  They cannot continue as giant monopolies exempt from liability for false claims and also free from oversight. This puts too much power over determining the truth into too few hands.  I have chosen to make this last essay about truth as a common good because it is so central to our capacity to democratic deliberation over the nature of the common good — and because it is now so directly under attack.  *** Obviously, there are no easy answers, no quick fixes. But I hope these essays have been helpful to you in thinking through what we owe one another as members of the same society and inhabitants of the same planet — and how we resurrect and build upon that understanding.  Thanks again for joining me on this journey. Next Friday, a short summary.  *** These weekly essays are based on chapters from my book THE COMMON GOOD, in which I apply the framework of the book to recent events and to the upcoming election. (Should you wish to read the book, here’s a link.)  Robert Reich  Leave a comment So glad you can be here today. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber of this community so we can do even more.