The Enemy at Home

Power does not rest in the Congress. It does not rest in the courts. It does not even rest in the imperial presidency. It rests in the hands of Wall Street financiers, Silicon Valley, private equity firms, the fossil fuel industry, the predatory health care and pharmaceutical giants, agribusinesses and, most of all, the war industry.

No mainstream politician, including Bernie Sanders, dares utter a word against our entrenched militarism. If you do, you end up like Ralph Nader, who was turned into a pariah by a compliant media and our corporate-indentured political parties. Nader spoke the truth. He paid for his honesty.

We are about to witness the largest increase in war spending in American history with a proposed $1.5 trillion budget. The average taxpayer already shells out over $4,000 a year to the war industry as consumer and environmental agencies are dismantled, health care and education are defunded and programs such as Medicaid and food stamps (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) are slashed.

The new Pentagon budget will hand $58.5 billion to artificial intelligence and military command-and-control centers and see the effective merging of the United States and Israeli military industrial complexes. Seventy-four percent of the increase in the proposed $1.5 trillion budget will go to private contractors, including those who are building massive data centers on military bases.

None of this is good for us or good for the planet. The Pentagon, powered by the fossil fuel industry, is the world’s largest institutional polluter, emitting an estimated 66 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2024.

Americans, meanwhile, struggle with rising prices — nearly 30 percent of people go into debt to buy groceries. An estimated114,174. Americans die each year due to lack of health insurance or inadequate health care while a single-payer universal health care system could cover every American, save more than 100,000 lives a year, and reduce annual health expenditures by $1.04 trillion, or nearly 20 percent. Twenty-five percent of Americans are functionally unemployed. The minimum wage remains frozen, despite Democratic Party promises to raise it, at $ 7.25 an hour.

The elites use war not only for personal enrichment, but to stifle class conflict.

War, as W.E.B. Du Bois said, diverts the poor from their real interests. It funnels national frustrations into the “heroic” battle against a common enemy. The nationalist cant, with its endemic racism, seduces those who are alienated or on the margins of society into feeling they suddenly belong. It entices them to sacrifice themselves for a “noble” cause. They become the architects of their own enslavement. They march like sheep into war’s purgatory.

By the time they wake up, it is too late. They are cast aside, as so many of our veterans have painfully discovered, like human refuse. But as a tactic to consolidate power and enrich the billionaire class, it is unbeatable.

Wars will only be curtailed, if not halted, when we nationalize the weapons industry and dramatically reduce the military budget. Until then, nothing, absolutely nothing, will change. Indeed, things will only get worse. No one in Congress — or any other branch of government — will do this for us.

The masters of war sitting in the boardrooms of Boeing, General Dynamics or Northrop Grumman are not praying for peace in the Middle East or coexistence with China and Russia. The generals — who build their careers by orchestrating wars and post military careers enriching themselves working for defense contractors — are not seeking a cessation of global conflicts. They are seeking hundreds of billions in taxpayer dollars and government debt to fuel the self-defeating cycle of endless war.

The corporate vultures — especially the war makers — are, as I write, descending on Congress. They are meeting with Democratic Party leaders and holding out promises of millions in cash. They will corrupt, neutralize and compromise most. They will destroy the careers of the very few who refuse to do their bidding.

They hold the real power. They have no intention of surrendering it. The manufacturing of weapons systems and the waging of war are the chief activities of the U.S. government. It is no longer one among other means of advancing the national interest. War and violence are how we speak to the rest of the world.

The “shadow world,” — as the author Andrew Feinstein calls it in his book on the global arms trade — is defined by staggering levels of corruption, deception and senseless death. It is lawless and unregulated. Its criminal activities, cannibalization of national budgets and secrecy are sanctified in the name of “national security.”

Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon Technologies), Boeing, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, BAE Systems, Leonardo, Airbus, Rheinmetall and ThyssenKrupp, along with Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Palantir, Goldman Sachs, Citibank and Exxon, are the state.

We, including our political class, are the vassals. The voters can send whoever they want to Congress, but until these corporations and the billionaire class are regulated, taxed and controlled, until their vast monopolies are broken up, until we stop squandering half of all discretionary spending on war, nothing will change.

Nothing.

Civilizations, as the historian Arnold J. Toynbee argued, “die from suicide, not by murder.” They are disemboweled by an uncontrollable and unaccountable military that drains state budgets and plunges dying empires into one military debacle after the next. These decaying civilizations finally collapse from within.

This is where we are headed. The corporations, and the billionaires who run them, buy and trade politicians, academics and journalists like Pokémon cards. Their lobbyists write the legislation. They own the media. They have stifled the academy, shutting down free speech and purging critics. Judges offer them unlimited power. To defy them — and I speak from personal experience — is to be cast into the wilderness.

The military-industrial complex, as Karl Liebknecht said of German imperialists on the eve of World War I, is the enemy within. “Making a Killing: How the West Profits from Slaughter in Gaza and Yemen,” co-authored by Andrew Feinstein, Ruth Rohde and Jack Cinamon — with contributions from Paul Holden and Professor Anna Stavrianakis — examines the global arms trade in the Middle East.

The authors estimate that $130 billion was made from arms exports by Western nations to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates during the war on Yemen and over $50 billion from Israeli foreign military procurements.

“RTX Chairman and CEO Christopher T. Calio made $18 million in 2024, after being appointed halfway through the year, while his compensation package surged to almost $25 million in 2025,” the authors note. “His predecessor, Gregory Hayes, was remunerated to the tune of nearly $22 million in 2023. Lockheed Martin CEO and former U.S. Air Force pilot Jim Taiclet, who was deployed in Saudi Arabia while serving during the Gulf War, earns an annual package of more than $23 million. Since his appointment in 2020 he has raked in more than $136 million in total Lockheed Martin compensation.”

Phebe Novakovic, the CEO of General Dynamics, has a net worth estimated at $420 million, up $270 million since 2020. But it is not only the CEOs who profit. Members of Congress and their families traded between $24 million and $113 million worth of Pentagon contractor stocks in 2024.

Representative Josh Gottheimer from New Jersey — a Democrat — is a former Clinton speechwriter and a close ally of House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries. Gottheimer, who is heavily funded by the pro-Israel lobby and an ardent Zionist, traded $22 million worth of stock in the top 100 Pentagon contractors, including Microsoft — which received $414 million from the Department of Defense in 2023 for software and cloud computing services — Northrop Grumman and IBM.

Gottheimer serves on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Financial Services Committee. He is well placed to know which defense companies are enriched by government contracts and which are not.

Former Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is not any better. She made an estimated $38.6 million profit in one year from her stock trading, the most of any lawmaker, in 2024. These politicians run the Democratic Party. They carry out the same illegal insider trading and have the same conflicts of interest as the Republicans and the Trump White House. Hunter Biden is no less odious than Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump.

“Honeywell — which provides sensors and guiding devices to assist the Israeli military in airstrikes in Gaza — is the most commonly held arms company stock among members of Congress, followed by RTX, the company that makes missiles for Israel’s Iron Dome, among other weapons systems,” the authors write.

Members of Congress, they report, “made more than 13,300 trades totaling over $635 million in 2025.” The arms trade, the authors illustrate, has created an unelected, shadowy cabal of foreign policy, corporate and military officials, along with academics, who — no matter who is in the White House or the Congress — feed the military beast.

This cabal, many parked in think tanks funded by the defense industry and given prominent platforms on cable news channels, preach endless war. They ensure the fabrication of bombs, missiles, warplanes, drones, ships, tanks and guns. They ship these weapons around the globe. They sustain the interconnected network of cutting-edge, high-tech systems of information warfare and surveillance, powered by data processing centers, cloud technologies and artificial intelligence.

Once these weapons and tools of surveillance are tested on Palestinians or Yemenis, they are brought back to manage and surveil us — an imperial boomerang abolishing what is left of our civil liberties and freedom.

The tyranny empire imposes on others, as Thucydides reminded us, it finally imposes on itself. The choice, as Rosa Luxemburg pointed out, is socialism or barbarism. If we do not dismantle global capitalism, if we do not free ourselves from the tentacles of the war industry, we will descend into the Hobbesian world of totalitarian capitalism, failed states, mass migrations, endless war, ecocide and permanent immiseration.

The genocide in Gaza is the harbinger of this coming dystopia. It is a stark message by the industrialized nations to the Global South, especially with the breakdown of the climate. The message is this:

There are no rules. International Humanitarian Law is dead. The strong will annihilate the weak. We control the world’s resources and most of its wealth. We will not relinquish it. Your suffering and lives are meaningless to us. Defy us and you too will be slaughtered.

Fear is the only language these vampires understand. This is a dark fact about human nature. It is why Richard Nixon was our last liberal president. Nixon was not a liberal. He was devoid of empathy. He lacked a conscience. But he was scared of movements. He knew the power of the strike.

It is not our job to take power. It is our job to create radical movements to hold power in check. Without these movements, we are doomed.

“You get freedom by letting your enemy know that you’ll do anything to get your freedom; then you’ll get it,” Malcolm X told young civil rights activists from Mississippi 51 days before his assassination on February 21, 1965. “When you get that kind of attitude, they’ll label you as a ‘crazy Negro,’ or they’ll call you a ‘crazy nigger’ — they don’t say Negro. Or they’ll call you an extremist or a subversive, or seditious, or a red, or a radical. But when you stay radical long enough, and get enough people to be like you, you’ll get your freedom…So don’t you run around here trying to make friends with somebody who’s depriving you of your rights. They’re not your friends, no, they’re your enemies. Treat them like that and fight them, and you’ll get your freedom; and after you get your freedom, your enemy will respect you. And I say that with no hate. I don’t have hate in me. I have no hate at all. I don’t have any hate. I’ve got some sense. I’m not going to let anybody who hates me tell me to love him.”

The disease of permanent war and militarism is devouring the guts of our nation. These forces snuff out democracy. They turn culture into nationalist cant and sentimental kitsch. They turn education and the media into echo chambers for the rich and the powerful. They wreck the economy. They immiserate the citizenry. They pump toxins into the air, soil and water. They strip us of our liberty. They foster moral nihilism.

War is the apotheosis of this corporate rule, designed to exploit people and the natural world until exhaustion or collapse. And time is running out. If we don’t transform this system we, and most other species, will go extinct. Literally. We must mobilize to defeat these forces. This means organized mass disruptions of government and commerce as we have seen in France, Spain and India, and with organizations such as Palestine Action and Just Stop Oil.

If we remain supplicants, if we hope desperately for a feckless political class to save us, the barbarians will triumph.

-Chris Hedges

 

Now What?

 

Now comes the hard part. The damage Trump and his cronies, including those in Congress, have done to the country, its people, its institutions, its policies, and its values is staggering. It will not be corrected overnight, or even in the next two years. 

No doubt, Trump’s allies — including billionaires like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Bill Ackman, and Larry Ellison — will pour unconscionable amounts of money into campaigns that will blame everything that goes wrong on the Democratic majority, who now share governing responsibility with Trump. There will be confrontations over investigations, subpoenas, and funding of programs that could lead to government shutdowns, along with vetoes of initiatives passed by both the House and Senate.

There will be a slew of substantive, strategic, and political ambitions Democrats in Congress will face when they assume power. But before any of those are addressed, the top priority has to be a serious reconsideration and reconfiguration of how Congress does its business, how it communicates with the American people about its efforts, and why. 

The challenge of determining where to begin will be immense. Voters are expecting real change, whether it is alleviating the affordability crisis, taking on rank corruption, confronting the shattered domestic and foreign policies and processes followed by Trump and his administration, or reforming our broken governing institutions.

Business as usual won’t cut it. So, what to do? Democrats, soon to be running the House and Senate, have to completely restructure the way they operate and communicate. There is a throughline to lay out: corruption, billionaire and corporate privilege, big money flooding politics, blowing up essential government services, safety nets and protections, senseless tariffs, and a reckless war have all created a toxic mix that has benefited bigwigs and caused average Americans to struggle to keep their heads above water. Congress will need to highlight who the miscreants are, in and out of government, and make clear what will be done to deal with them.

Democrats need to tell powerful stories, lay out relevant facts, put forth a road map to improve people’s lives and hold the villains accountable — not retribution against perceived enemies, but real justice. It starts with reforming the hearing process in every committee. 

For decades and more, committees have followed the practice of having five-minute segments for each committee member, alternating for the parties, often starting with rambling opening statements by chairs and ranking members. 

The process generates far more heat than light. If the witness is a hostile one — which will be the case with every hearing involving a Trump appointee — that means five minutes of him or her stonewalling, followed by five minutes of respite granted from a partisan ally likely to waste time either lambasting colleagues across the aisle or extolling the witness. And, as a general matter, majority members don’t coordinate their questions. The result is a lot of disjointed yelling, with an occasional insight or meaningful confrontation to make a sound bite.

Bottom of Form

There is a better model, one we saw demonstrated by the January 6 committee under Chairman Bennie Thompson. Start with a thirty-minute overview done by a professional staffer to lay out the premise of the hearing, followed by thirty-minute segments for each member. Make sure all the majority members are on the same coordinated page, prepared to deliver relentless follow-ups if witnesses evade, dissemble, or dance around their answers. Each hearing should have a goal — if it is a policy issue, include the panoply of those related to affordability. Inform people what the issue is, why it is important, and why Trump et al. are responsible for failures. Then articulate clearly what to do about it.

If it is about a lawless or corrupt act or set of acts, establish coherently why it was wrong, illegal, and unacceptable; who was responsible; what damage was done to the populace; and why it should result in those responsible being fired or impeached. It must become less about sound bites and dealing with Republican stonewalling, and more about what the witness did, how they did it, and what should follow.

The number of outrages and issues to cover is nearly endless, from corruption scandals — like pay-for-play pardons, crypto schemes, insider trading, and bribes from foreign governments — to tariffs, to slashing medical research while eviscerating Medicaid and health insurance protections, to cutting disaster relief, to undermining national defense and food safety. More broadly, there is the abuse of the Justice Department, the FCC, the CDC, the IRS, and the Postal Service — among other crucial institutions.

The Trump Administration has indeed flooded the zone with scandals and outrages. But the way for a Democratic Congress to combat this gross abundance is not to play Whack-a-Mole with a dozen or more misdeeds at a time; it is to have focus and discipline. One key focal point each week, starting with a press conference to lay out that week’s issue, with the relevant committees poised to take it on from their respective areas of expertise. Members should utilize every venue — the House and Senate floors, social and other media, podcasts, town halls, and prime-time debates — to communicate the key issues. 

That is the way to get through to a populace that is otherwise focused on their daily lives and a media that too often puts a thin veneer on most of these issues and scandals. That is also the way (if the result is not new policies forced by Trump’s vetoes or Senate filibusters) to highlight why the failure to act falls on Trump and Republicans, and what Democrats will do if they add the White House in 2028 to their majorities in Congress.

None of this is natural to members of Congress or their leaders. It is hard to change the way you have done things for decades, and hard to adapt if you are new to Congress. There will be powerful voices saying, “Hey, business as usual is what gave us these huge gains!” But no matter the inclination to revert to tried-and-true methods of deliberation, it is imperative to revise such practices. Otherwise, they will be perceived as just another group of politicians stuck in a system that most Americans now view with disdain and distrust. Unless our 120th Congress show an ability to bring palpable change to stalled, tired systems, their tenure in the majority will be short-lived.

Norman Ornstein is a renowned political scientist, co-host of the podcast “Words Matter,” and author of several books, including “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism.”

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It's about Time!

 

"...This was a personal repudiation of Donald Trump and his reign of corruption, but also of fascist, brutal, reactionary, and xenophobic MAGA rule and policies. An entire generation of dynamic, diverse Democrats rose to power in one dramatic night…"

Hate, fear and bigotry is all the GOP has to offer — but will it sell?

The Republican Party no longer has anything constructive to say about anything or anyone, so what is its closing argument in the 2026 midterm elections? Hate, fear, and bigotry. On Sunday, Trump claimed that if Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed won, he’d “invite hordes of jihadis to our shores.”

We’ve become so numbed to Trump’s bigotry that it’s necessary to remind ourselves that the president of the United States is now accusing an American citizen who’s running for the Senate of posing a danger to America because he’s Muslim.

Trump’s rants against Representative Ilhan Omar draw on the same Islamophobia. He’s launched a criminal investigation against her based on an allegation that she came to the United States fraudulently. He charged recently that her real name is Ilhan Nur Said Elmi and “her last name is, incredibly, also the exact name of her brother, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, the person they said she married and had children with.”

He’s called her “garbage” and “a scammer” who comes from “a non-country, basically. Somalia has no government, has no nothing. … All they do is run around shooting each other.” Again, the president of the United States is investigating a member of Congress because she was born in Somalia and is Muslim. Of course, hateful bigotry is nothing new for Trump. But until recently the Republican Party as a whole had avoided Trump’s bottom-feeding shite.

A few weeks ago, Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, claimed that Dr. El-Sayed slept in an Osama “bin Laden jersey.”

On Monday, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., while campaigning against Dr. El-Sayed, falsely accused him of being associated with the Muslim Brotherhood and then baselessly claimed that the rise of the Brotherhood (an Islamist political movement founded in 1928) had created “stagnant societies” in which Arabs do not win major global awards such as Nobel Prizes and “don’t produce literature.”

I once worked for RFK Jr.’s father. Junior’s bigotry would appall Robert F. Kennedy, whose life was dedicated to fighting such crap. But when it comes to mimicking Trump’s hatefulness, no one comes as close as JD Vance.

At a recent rally in Michigan, Vance branded El-Sayed a “little weasel” who harbored hatred for the U.S. and said he should “shut his mouth and show a little gratitude” to America. Vance’s bigotry extends beyond Islamophobia. Vance has tried to suggest that Texas Democratic Senatorial candidate James Talarico is gay. Campaigning in Texas on October 13 for Talarico’s Republican opponent, Ken Paxton, Vance answered a man who shouted that he loved him by saying he felt the same but in a “platonic” way, adding: “I’m not James Talarico.”

Then, insinuating that a positive statement Talarico once made about transgender children harbored something sinister in Talarico’s past, Vance alluded to Talarico’s internet search history before admitting he was “just guessing.”

Yet Vance thinks it’s fine to weaponize childhood sexual assault. He vigorously defends Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign ad featuring the estranged birth mother of Democratic candidate Amy Acton calling her daughter a “liar” and mocking her mental health — without mentioning that the mother had lost custody of Acton after Acton’s stepfather was indicted for raping Acton as a child. Vance even blasted fellow Republicans who spoke out against the ad, calling their criticism “disgusting” and telling them to “stop whining” because “politics is a tough business.”

The midterm elections are bringing out this filth because Republicans dare not talk about the economy, which they and Trump have wrecked for most people; or foreign policy, in which Canada has become an enemy and Putin a friend; or the violent dragnet of their domestic policy, in which American citizens have been shot and killed by masked ICE agents.

All they have left with which to appeal to Americans is fear of the “other,” hate of Muslims and LGBTQ+ people, and blatant bigotry toward anyone who’s different. If this is enough for a majority of voters to keep them in control of Congress and deliver them governorships, our nation is a lot worse off than I feared.

-Robert Reich, Truthdig

"Trump is openly embracing Putin and is working to destroy the strongest and most successful alliance in human history..."

 

It was exactly ten years ago that then–Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton told the American people that Russian president Vladimir Putin hoped to have a “puppet” in the White House, and that Donald Trump was that puppet.

A scowling Trump responded: “No puppet. No puppet.”

Clinton continued: “It’s pretty clear.

Trump interjected: “You’re the puppet.”

Clinton continued: “It’s pretty clear you won’t admit…”

Trump interjected: “No, you’re the puppet.”

Clinton: “...that the Russians have engaged in cyberattacks against the United States of America, that you encouraged espionage against our people, that you are willing to spout the Putin line, sign up for his wish list, break up NATO, do whatever he wants to do, and that you continue to get help from him because he has a very clear favorite in this race.”

Trump shook his head disparagingly.

Ten years later, Trump is openly embracing Putin and is working to destroy the strongest and most successful alliance in human history to cement that partnership, apparently with an eye to enriching himself.

And so, the events of the present change the way we see the past. Had Trump strongly supported Ukraine as Congress has demanded, and stood firm against Russia, a country that is, after all, a minor economic player whose military is flailing at its attempt to absorb its neighbor, we would rightly dismiss Clinton’s warning as campaign hyperbole. As it is, though, Trump’s tie to Putin—the story he has always tried to bury by calling it the “Russia, Russia, Russia hoax”—seems likely to emerge as the central story of the Trump years.

As Clinton wrote today: “In just the last few days: Trump made a deal for the U.S. to buy Russian diesel, an economic lifeline for Putin; he and Elon Musk blamed each other for an order that slowed down Starlink satellite connectivity over Ukraine, hampering the country’s defenses during a devastating Russian attack; and Trump waived sanctions on Russia that Congress, led by his late friend Lindsey Graham, had pushed for. Now, Putin has proposed a summit with Trump and Xi to decide Ukraine’s fate for them, bulldoze a century of international cooperation, and frame Russia as an equal to the U.S. and China. We’ll see if Putin’s puppet continues to dance on his strings.”

Second, as no one paying even a modicum of attention can have missed, Trump is so unpopular that support for Republicans has fallen into historically low numbers. The gutting of Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), tariffs that have destroyed markets for agricultural products and increased prices, the war on Iran that has sent prices of gasoline and especially diesel soaring and thus increased the cost of everything that travels by train or truck, the blatant corruption that is lining the pockets of Trump and his cronies while ordinary Americans can’t make ends meet, and now Trump’s open embrace of Russian president Vladimir Putin—all wildly unpopular positions—mean that the districts that were firmly Republican by double digits just two years ago are now up for grabs.

That shift has revealed something interesting. Republicans running for office are refusing to hold town halls or to engage in debates with Democratic challengers. When they do show up, they tend to show how unserious they are about filling elected office, as Republican Dan Sullivan of Alaska illustrated when he asked the moderators at a debate with Democrat Mary Peltola if she had been given the questions beforehand because she seemed to be reading from notes while he didn’t know how to answer the questions. As the moderators quashed his allegation, Peltola noted: “I’m prepared!”

In the past, Republicans in safe Republican districts did not have to appeal to constituents or campaign, apparently because the letter “R” was enough to get voters to make a mark next to their name. In this new environment in which constituents are furious with Republican policies, Republicans hoping to be elected continue to keep their heads down, apparently hoping that they can be elected, or reelected, if they simply keep their mouths shut.

Their invisibility raises the question of why these people, who evidently don’t care about representing their constituents, would want to hold national office. Perhaps they want to hobble the federal government to enable wealthy businessmen to gain even more control over the country. Perhaps they want to enable the rise of a theocracy. Perhaps they are hoping to make money off their offices. Perhaps they simply want the prestige of a federal office.

But the extreme gerrymandering of states at the hands of Republican lawmakers that made their candidates shoo-ins in the past also means those Republican candidates are weak. New scrutiny of those candidates as Democrats challenges them is revealing just how weak they are.

In Texas, for example, Republicans are running Trump’s hand-picked candidate for the U.S. Senate, state attorney general Ken Paxton, a stunningly corrupt man who has recently been revealed to have spent New Year’s Eve 2024 partying in Dubai with a mistress and two men who are fugitives from U.S. law. In Kansas the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate is incumbent senator Roger Marshall, a man who has been revealed as having sued more than 700 of his obstetrical patients for unpaid bills, resulting in 81 arrests.

In North Carolina, Republican U.S. Senate candidate Michael Whatley has little to recommend him other than Trump’s endorsement; the same could be said of the Republican candidate for Senate from South Carolina, Darline Graham, whose main qualification is that she is former South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham’s sister. The story is the same across the country as Republicans field subpar candidates. Even in Maine, where Senator Susan Collins should have been a strong candidate for the party, stories of apparent corruption are undermining her candidacy.

As Paul Waldman noted in Public Notice on October 15, these stories and others are “just the Senate candidates. Up and down the ballot, the [Republican Party] has nominated crackpots and nitwits, none more colorful than Victor Marx, their nominee for governor in Colorado. Marx refuses to say how many people he has killed (though he says his stepfather forced him to commit his first murder at age 7), hunts demons, claims he can call in US airstrikes, and boasts of being a seventh-degree black belt in a martial art he invented. Normal stuff!”

In contrast to the Republicans hoping to coast to election, the Democrats running for office are holding town halls, listening to the people of their districts, needling their opponents who refuse to debate, and using the word “mission.”

The contrast between the two is a snapshot of a dying party that is no longer bothering to compete, and a rising party whose candidates are eager for the job and willing to work for it. It reminds me of the 1850s, when the Democrats, who were so accustomed to holding office that they assumed they were entitled to their posts, met the rising Republicans, whom Democrats considered too uncouth to hold office, but who ended up dominating the political system for the next seventy years.

—Heather Cox Richardson

 

"The Framers of the Constitution thought they had designed a system that would prevent the rise of a tyrant"

 

Yesterday, Lingling Wei, Alex Leary, Thomas Grove, and Josh Dawsey of the Wall Street Journal reported that Russia’s president Vladimir Putin has proposed a meeting next month with Trump and China’s president Xi Jinping to decide the fate of Ukraine.

The reporters explained that a three-way summit with China and the U.S. would cement Russia’s status as one of the world’s three great powers, a status Putin has sought since 2000 when he entered the Kremlin. 

Such a summit would formally acknowledge that the U.S. had broken from Europe and allied with Russia, a goal for Putin as he tries to take control of Ukraine.

A former Russian intelligence officer told the reporters that the summit would replace the rules-based international order established by the United States and its allies and partners after World War II with a system that divides the globe into spheres of influence.

After ten years of Trump insisting that reports of his cooperation with Russia were a hoax, here we are, watching one profoundly unpopular man tear apart the global system under which we have lived for eighty years in order to climb into bed with Vladimir Putin.

In just over a week, Trump has lifted sanctions on the sale of Russian oil on the global market, a way both to send desperately needed money to Russia to fund its war on Ukraine and to begin the process of reintegrating Russia into the global economy. 

Either Trump or Musk or both appear to have slowed down Starlink and Starshield—the two systems that manage communications for defense and offensive drones, respectively—making them inoperable during one of the worst Russian bombardments of the war.

And on Friday, Trump waived additional sanctions Congress demanded in a recent law named for the late Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) two days before the sanctions were to go into effect. Putin confidant Kirill Dmitriev, who manages Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, reposted an AI-generated image of the U.S. eagle standing next to a Russian bear, snarling at a British lion standing next to the flag of the European Union—the U.S. and Russia standing shoulder to shoulder against the United Kingdom and Europe—with the caption “Things Have Changed…”

Over the post, Dmitriev wrote: “Together.” He cheered on Trump’s waiving of the sanctions imposed by the Graham Act and, in response to a post claiming that Trump’s move to bolster Russia had caused panic in Europe and Ukraine, posted: “Checkmate.”

In The Atlantic, national security scholar Tom Nichols noted with evident disgust: “The American commander in chief has abandoned the Western order, the most successful—and powerful—security arrangement in human history.” 

This decision, Nichols wrote, appears to have had nothing to do with the national interest of the United States. Instead, Trump appears to have thrown out the world order because of his own personal interests, his admiration for Putin, his resentment of Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, “and quite possibly other factors that so far have remained obscured from the American public.”

Outrage over Trump’s actions has come from across the political spectrum. Nichols notes that former federal prosecutor turned conservative commenter Andrew McCarthy wrote that Trump is giving Putin “aid and comfort.” Those words echo Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution, which defines treason against the United States, as “levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.”

McCarthy’s blistering article in the National Review on Saturday reminds readers that Putin is a murderous dictator who is actively supporting Iran’s military operations against the United States with both intelligence and drones and provoking U.S. allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). And yet Trump is siding with him against Ukraine, a U.S. ally. McCarthy demanded Congress hold “immediate hearings about this week’s shocking escalation of the Trump-Putin alliance.”

The backlash appears to have pushed Trump to try to justify his gutting of the Graham Act, at least. This afternoon, he posted on social media: “My decision on Russia is a very simple one.” He went on to claim that he didn’t want “to do anything that will drive, foolishly, Russia away from the bargaining table” in the quest for a peace deal with Ukraine.

He shrugged off Russia’s support for Iran in its war against the U.S. by suggesting it “is doing very little, if anything, to help the Islamic Republic of Iran, compared to what they could be doing, and I want to keep it that way.” 

And then he attacked Zelensky, blaming Ukrainian attacks on Russian refineries rather than his own war on Iran for the high cost of diesel in the U.S. and claiming that Zelensky “doesn’t want to end this war, and probably never did.”

Nichols tore through this screed, calling it a pathetic admission of Trump’s weakness “in his relationship with the Kremlin boss.” “The leader of the most powerful nation on the planet,” Nichols pointed out, “is trying to get everyone else, including the American Congress, to avoid antagonizing Putin, instead of warning Putin not to even think about aiding Iran.”

Until now, Nichols wrote, “[a] world in which the White House is allied to the Kremlin was…the stuff of paranoid fiction. Manchurian candidates and red presidents were fantasies.” Now that alliance exists. Nichols laments that Trump and Putin have fulfilled the dreams of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and the Cold War leaders who followed him, humbling and humiliating the mighty United States.

The Framers of the Constitution thought they had designed a system that would prevent the rise of a tyrant. They believed U.S. representatives would be so fearful of a leader's abuse of power that they would impeach any president who overstepped his authority, and that U.S. senators would be so jealous of their own power they would convict, and tyranny would not be able to take root. The Framers especially did not anticipate that senators, to whom they deliberately gave longer terms than they gave the president, would put party over country and stand aside as a president and his appointees captured the prerogatives of the Senate.

And yet, here we are.  But even given the evidence of the past ten years, it is truly astonishing to see Republicans, who for more than forty years have championed President Ronald Reagan for his stance against the Soviet Union, stand aside as Trump trashes the post–World War II system of global security in order to ally the United States with a Russian dictator.

-Heather Cox Richardson

 

The biggest question lurking behind the midterm campaigns is: Can we reverse the power shift that began four decades ago?

 

Behind this election’s dominant issue of affordability lies the record concentration of wealth at the top of America. The richest 0.001% of Americans — a handful of extraordinarily wealthy men — now controls more of the nation’s wealth than at any time in modern history. To be sure, wealth is not a zero-sum game in which the riches of those at the top necessarily come at the expense of everyone else. But power is a zero-sum game, because the more of it that is held by some people, the less of it is held by others.

Wealth cannot be separated from power. Great wealth becomes great power through campaign contributions, media ownership, the ability to buy off opposition, the capacity to wage public relations campaigns and the resources to deploy armies of lawyers who litigate on your behalf. Recent years provide abundant illustration of all this.

Wealth cannot be separated from power. In these ways, great power also becomes great wealth. It buys changes in laws, regulations and court decisions that bestow even more wealth on those with the power to alter the system to their benefit — and to siphon off resources from everyone else.

This power shift has also become clearly evident in recent years. In the Trump era it has taken the form of blatant corruption. But the political bribes, billionaire media ownership, PR campaigns and well-financed litigation predated Donald Trump.

For many years (with the notable exception of the Biden administration), antitrust enforcement has been defanged to make it easier for big firms to monopolize. Among the most widely discussed findings about the U.S. economy is the rise of corporate concentration since the 1980s. The biggest firms, their top executives and their major shareholders have all done wonderfully well. Consumers and employees, however, have faced higher prices, lower paychecks and fewer choices.

At the same time, labor laws have been altered to make it more difficult to organize unions. In the 1950s, more than a third of private-sector workers were unionized. Now, fewer than 6% are. Tax laws have been changed to reduce the rates and amounts paid by the super wealthy, to the point where many pay no taxes at all — even though they have more wealth than ever.

This massive power shift is even more starkly illustrated by the billionaires, financial mavens and tech bros who put Trump in power, who refuse to slow climate change and who are now deciding on the future of AI and therefore humanity.

The question I keep coming back to is whether this can be reversed. There is historic precedent. After the first Gilded Age — which ran from the 1890s to the start of World War I, and which featured wide inequalities of income, wealth and political power — America reacted in what came to be known as the Progressive Era.

This paradox should soon be the center of our national debate. Starting under Theodore Roosevelt, monopolies were busted up, corporations were regulated, a progressive income tax was enacted, and corporate political donations (bribes) were barred. Then, starting in 1933, under Teddy Roosevelt’s fifth cousin, power continued to be shifted to what became the largest middle class in world history. Then came the 1970s and 1980s, when the process began to go in reverse.

The challenge is arguably much greater today because wealth and power are more concentrated than in the first Gilded Age, creating a chicken-and-egg paradox: How can government enact and enforce the necessary reforms if it’s under the control of a power elite that won’t permit them?

Now, just four weeks from what could be a major political victory for the Democrats in taking back at least one chamber of Congress, this paradox should soon be the center of our national debate.

-Robert Reich, Truthdig

-Stephen Kolarin, Graphic

"It turns out that Americans believe in religious freedom, diversity, and democracy, not racist theocracy"

The blue wave is cresting five weeks ahead of Election Day. The extent of the wave depends on a range of factors, from a late money surge/negative ad dump from desperate MAGA Republicans to the propensity of Republican voters as the election approaches to “come home” to their party to the danger of Democrats’ overconfidence and reliance on “good news” polls, which may be subject to the same sort of error rate we saw in primaries.

Regardless of the final margins, we nevertheless see evidence that, at least in one critical respect, the fascist MAGA movement has not entirely remade the fabric of American democracy. Instead, we may be seeing, finally, a backlash to Republicans’ embrace of white Christian nationalism, the noxious ideology that America is a white Christian nation for the benefit of those “real” Americans descended from white Europeans who merely tolerate (or don’t) others’ presence.

It turns out that Americans believe in religious freedom, diversity, and democracy, not racist theocracy. “While 56 percent of Republicans support Christian nationalism, only 32 percent of Americans overall do,” a survey from Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and the Meanings of Democracy Lab of the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University recently showed. “Majorities in all but four states reject Christian nationalism.” Helping fuel the backlash is the rise of progressive Democrats who “are openly embracing their Christian faith and challenging Christian nationalism’s claim to be the true embodiment of Christianity.” It is about time.

The numbers are striking. “At least 12 pastors, seminarians and former clergy have run for federal office as Democrats this year … a number close observers say is unheard-of in recent memory,” the New York Times reported. “Even after the winnowing of the primaries, there will be seven running this fall. On the Republican side, there are only three.”

In contrast to the blasphemous deification of Donald Trump and MAGA self-proclaimed Christians’ frightful propensity to justify everything from concentration camps to war crimes to endemic lying as part of the mission to save white Christians from supposed obliteration, progressive Democrats are offering a different take on Christian values.

Melissa Deckman, PRRI’s CEO, and Ruth Braunstein, director of the SNF Agora Institute, wrote recently for Newsweek: Democrat Sarah Trone Garriott, an ordained Lutheran minister running in her state’s 3rd Congressional District, argues that Democrats have long avoided religious language because “all they’ve seen is the religious right and religious extremism.” Presbyterian minister Lindsay James says she was moved to run for Congress after the 2025 “Big Beautiful Bill” put 27,000 Iowans in her district at risk of losing health coverage, noting that her chaplaincy work showed her firsthand what that loss would mean for families struggling to get by.

In Alaska, congressional candidate and Presbyterian pastor Matt Schultz says he feels a moral obligation to speak out against Trump-era GOP policy, often invoking the parable of the Good Samaritan: “It’s important to remember that if someone is hoping to just be an innocent bystander, that’s not an option. You’re either helping or you’re part of the problem.”

Add to these the high-profile Senate nominees James Talarico in Texas and Adam Hamilton in Kansas, who have an opportunity not only to run up the score for Democrats in red states and districts but also to repudiate the notion that Christians have some religious obligation to vote for a party whose moral outrages and support for abhorrent behavior (e.g., covering up for a pedophile and his enablers) should disturb all but the most hardened MAGA cultists.

To be clear, the shift is among white Christians. Black churches have remained bastions of social activism, continuing the legacy running from abolition to the civil rights movement. What is new is the degree to which white Christians are responding to the call to return to the moral foundations of Christianity. (“Millions of Americans, including many Christians, look at Trump’s second term and see a litany of moral outrages: the sudden deportation of neighbors, the withdrawal of food aid and health care benefits and a war with no clear aim or endpoint.”)

For the first time in decades, white Christians are tying faith to political advocacy. “By hewing closely to Christian priorities like feeding the poor, the Democrats running as pastors have a chance to speak to Americans who are hungry for a different relationship between religion and politics, who want to see religion as a moral compass rather than a political agenda,” the New York Times noted. (And it provides a powerful counterweight to the Trumpian notion that empathy is “toxic.”)

At issue is whether Christianity, or frankly God, is the province of one party. For years, progressive groups such as the Interfaith Alliance have advocated for religious diversity, an essential component of pluralistic democracy embodied in the First Amendment. Now, their leaders see a spiritual revival to accompany a pro-diversity political movement.

“I have become convinced that we are indeed experiencing what we so desperately need, a great awakening in our own time,” Paul Raushenbush, the president of Interfaith Alliance, said in his September 19 keynote address for the William M. Johnson Lecture Series at Crescent Hill Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky. “Unlike previous examples of religious revival, our awakening is not attached to a single faith tradition or leader, but rather is a broad stirring inspired by a combination of a radical spirituality of nonviolent resistance, a named moral ethic of loving our neighbor, and driven by a promise of a democracy that can be made a reality by and for the people.” (Certainly, one factor in this “great awakening” is a widespread yearning for personal connection, something more emotionally sustaining than impersonal, often angry and cruel online discourse.)

Democrats remain a diverse party with a much higher percentage of “none of the above” voters (who reject any religious affiliation), so this is not about creating a left-wing theocratic party. Instead, as Doug Pagitt, an evangelical pastor and founder of the progressive Christian nonprofit Vote Common Good told the Times, Democrats finally seem determined to push back against Republicans who paint “Democrats as hostile to the Christian faith.” Rather than Christianize the Democratic Party, progressive Christians are making the case that the party must “include religious people in the pro-democracy movement.”

If Democratic candidates identifying as progressive Christians win in November, they will help sustain a Democratic blue wave but also, and more important, reaffirm the ideals of a country founded by religious dissenters and renegades who suffered from repressive established religion. Their wins would repudiate the noxious idea that America was founded for the benefit of white Christians rather than as a pluralistic democracy. And finally, for Christians longing to get mean-spirited, racist, xenophobic ideology masquerading as faith out of the pews, public acceptance of spiritual role models may reaffirm their own faith tradition that looks to churches for spiritual and social connection, not political indoctrination.

In short, defeat of white Christian nationalism at the hands of a diverse political electorate that includes millions of faithful Christians would be transformative for Democrats, democracy, and American Christianity. What a fitting rebuke to white Christian nationalism that would be.

---

-Jennifer Rubin, The Contrarian is community-supported. Help fund bold journalism and critical lawsuits to stop Trump’s corruption by becoming a paid subscriber. Join the fight now!

Photo by Brad Dodson on Unsplash

Commentary:

What should we make of today's theocratic Trump Republican fascists, these white Christian Nationalistic misogynists and homophobes who are defunding the United Nations refugee agency? And what should we make of today's theocratic Trump Republican fascists who are scapegoating and deporting immigrants, repressing and dehumanizing women's rights and LTGBQ, and weakening rules on toxic air pollution by keeping coal power plants opened? And what about their continuing undermining of government functions already approved by Congress, their slashes to Medicaid, their closure of USAID and allowing the Affordable Care Act tax subsidies to expire, their attacks on elections and independent Media, their plan to restrict mail-in voting, their restrictions on protests, their politicization of the military, and their disregard of the U.S. Constitution, to name just a few of their autocratic, undemocratic injustices.

-Glen Brown

"Is the United States of America a Democracy... or Is It Not?"

 

On Thursday, in The New Republic, conservative judge J. Michael Luttig published a dire warning to the Republican Party…and to all Americans. In the piece, Luttig outlined how Republicans could refuse to seat elected Democrats in January after a Democratic victory in the 2026 midterm elections of November. “The coming crisis,” the piece says, would be “The Final Battle for America’s Democracy.”

Luttig spelled out that Trump is fighting a war against America’s democracy. While the refusal of Vice President Mike Pence to assist his power grab made it fail in January 2021, Luttig notes, today Trump and his Republican congressional allies are more determined than ever to take over the country.

Luttig focuses on the ability of House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to prevent the recognition of duly elected Democratic representatives on January 3. Johnson has the power, Luttig says, to remove the current House clerk, Kevin McCumber, and replace him temporarily with a MAGA loyalist who will refuse to list Democrats on the roll of those elected to the 120th Congress.

In this scenario, once Democrats are eliminated, they will have to get a federal court to order the temporary clerk to list their names. If a court does so, another crisis point will arrive if the clerk simply refuses to obey the order. Then it’s possible the courts will stay out of the fight until the 120th Congress formally convenes and the Republicans vote not to seat the Democrats. That vote would be reviewable by the courts, including the Supreme Court.

But that review would take weeks, if not months, paralyzing the United States and leaving the country “helplessly vulnerable to all the world’s evil, as it would have been in January 2021 had Mike Pence not thwarted Donald Trump’s plan to overturn the 2020 presidential election.” And at that point, how would the current Supreme Court answer the question: 

“Is the United States of America a democracy, in which ‘We the People’ elect our representatives to the Congress and to the presidency, or is it not?”

As if to illustrate Luttig’s warning, House speaker Johnson told attendees at Trump’s convention in Dallas on Thursday: “We cannot and will not allow them to take the majority in the Congress. We’re not gonna do it.”

Trump’s attempt to use the United States Postal Service to screen mail-in voting has recently had a test run. Yesterday, Jim Saksa of Democracy Docket picked up a story from Jeff Berlew of the Tallahassee Democrat to report that the USPS rejected mailed ballots from Leon County, in Florida, because the words “return service requested” were only 0.236 inches from the election office’s return address. They were supposed to be a full quarter inch apart. So, the delivery of that mail-in ballots came down to a federal complaint about a spacing issue of 0.014 of an inch. 

“It’s ridiculous,” Supervisor of Elections Mark Earley told Berlew. But, as Saksa notes, the rejection of ballots for such a petty flaw shows what will likely happen if the Supreme Court lifts the injunction blocking the postal service from implementing the new rules it has put in place since Trump ordered such interference in a March executive order.

On Thursday, September 10, Nick Corasaniti of the New York Times reported that the Department of Justice (DOJ) under Trump has sent threatening letters to at least thirty top election officials in the states, warning that those officials “are currently under investigation” and are subject to “ongoing litigation,” and so must not destroy any records relating to the 2024 election. As Corasaniti notes, the administration has sued 30 states for their voter lists and has lost 23 of the cases and won none. Trump has claimed to be the victim of voter fraud since the 2016 primaries but has never produced any proof of his claims.

In July, Harmeet Dhillon, who heads the civil rights division in the DOJ, threatened state election officials with criminal prosecution if any noncitizens cast a ballot in their state (although it is already illegal for noncitizens to vote), and Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin threatened election officials with criminal prosecution if they did not put Trump’s election changes into effect.

Election officials already follow the laws about retaining documents, so the letters seem to be about threatening them. Nevada secretary of state Francisco Aguilar, a Democrat, told Corasaniti: “It’s the constant ‘flood the zone’ of harassment and intimidation and threats of legal action hoping we’d fold at some point.” But, he added, “We’re going to continue to follow the law and do what’s in the best interest of our voters.”

And what of the MAGA Republicans Trump would like to see in Congress?

Liz Goodwin of the Washington Post reported yesterday that 25-year-old Stephen Woytek, a top campaign staffer for Senator Jon Husted (R-OH), has recently cultivated a public playlist of songs celebrating the former country of Rhodesia, in which a white minority rule over a Black majority, captioning it “homesick for a place that no longer exists.” Rhodesia is a rallying cry for white supremacists who deplore the change that created Zimbabwe. Woytek also appears to be a historical reenactor who appears to have both worn Nazi uniforms and used a photo of Nazi soldiers as his Facebook profile picture.

Ohio governor Mike DeWine appointed Husted to the Senate to replace J.D. Vance after Vance was elected to the vice presidency, and Husted is now locked in a battle for that seat with former senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat known for his defense of labor. A statement for Husted said that while Woytek “denies negative intent,” the campaign was parting ways with him.

As Goodwin notes, growing numbers of younger Republicans have been expressing support for white nationalism and the Nazis.

Indeed, in his warning, Luttig did not single out Democrats to protect democracy; as he noted in a piece on his Substack in August, plenty of people are already fighting. He called out Republicans.

“There was a time not long ago when virtually every member of Congress could be expected to commit to the peaceful transfer of congressional power in advance of an election,” Luttig wrote. But now, “[i]n a damning indictment of the president and today’s congressional Republicans, it would be hard to find even one congressional Republican with the integrity, sense of duty to country, honor, and courage to put America above the Republican Party, let alone above Donald Trump.”

He urged Republicans “to decide that they are not going to betray their oaths and their country one last time for Donald Trump,” and to make it clear to Trump and Johnson that they will not participate in any unconstitutional plan to deny Democrats seats in the new Congress.

He warned them that should Republicans go along with such machinations and the Supreme Court overrule them, the Republican Party “would finally meet the fate to which it has been destined since January 6, 2021, and cement its place in history as the most corrupt political party ever to emerge in the United States of America for its second attempt in six years to defy the will of the American people on Election Day.”

“The writing is already on the wall, Republicans,” the conservative jurist wrote. “The Republican Party in particular must finally lose the chains of its political and moral enslavement to Donald Trump and separate itself from the MAGA political party cult.”

Today, in Ireland, where he traveled for the Irish Open at his golf club in Doonbeg, Trump told reporters: “We had a rigged election. As you know, it was totally rigged. Because I won three times. I didn’t win twice. I won three times.”

—Heather Cox Richardson

 

Ectopic Pregnancy Deaths Have Nearly Doubled. It’s Worse in States with Abortion Bans.

 

Reporting Highlights:

Increase in Deaths: ProPublica’s analysis of CDC data found that almost 200 women died after an ectopic pregnancy from 2020 to 2025, compared with about 100 in the previous six years. 

Delays in Care: Abortion bans make exceptions for ectopic pregnancies, but getting a definitive diagnosis can mean waiting days or even weeks, while the risk of rupture and death rises.

Federal Inaction: There’s been no public response to the increase in deaths. The Department of Health and Human Services has drastically cut maternal health staffers and grant funding.

These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.

The number of women who died after an ectopic pregnancy has spiked in recent years, a ProPublica analysis found. The mounting deaths in Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data have drawn little scrutiny or response.

Such deaths typically occur in the first trimester, after a pregnancy fails to properly implant in the uterus and begins to develop elsewhere, most commonly inside a fallopian tube. The embryo grows until it causes the organ to rupture, triggering catastrophic bleeding. 

With prompt and appropriate medical care, maternal health experts say, women should not die. Yet ProPublica’s analysis found a stark and baffling increase: Almost 200 women with the condition died from 2020 to 2025, compared with about 100 in the previous six years.

“A death related to ectopic pregnancy should really be a never event,” said Dr. Alice Abernathy, an OB-GYN in Philadelphia.

For the entire article, click here: Ectopic Pregnancy Deaths Have Nearly Doubled. It’s Worse in Abortion-Ban States. — ProPublica

Oligarchy and Redistribution: A Reply to Paul Krugman/ Global Free Market: A Perspective and Admonition by Glen Brown

 

The Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman continues his “series on the rise of American oligarchy” this week by discussing “the decades-long dismantling of the system of progressive taxation.” Krugman defines oligarchy “as the extreme concentration of wealth and political power in the hands of a small number of people—not the 1 percent, but the .01 percent or even the .0001 percent, the 300 billionaires who made 19 percent of all reported federal political donations in the 2024 election.” He argues that widespread tax avoidance, and accordingly the plummeting of effective tax rates, is largely responsible for giving us a system of oligarchy.

Krugman admits that where he once saw the absurd inequalities of the present day as primarily the consequences of technological change and the market economy, “looking into the math” changed his mind, and it became clear to him that “much of the rise of the modern American oligarchy has been driven by deliberate policy.” 

The math Krugman is focused on is the tax gap and thus the effective tax rate. The problem for Krugman’s hypothesis is that the United States was already firmly an oligarchy when the tax gap was much smaller and the effective tax rate much higher. Oligarchy is not first and foremost a product of the system of taxation, and it never has been. It is rather a product of the pre-distribution of wealth through state-created special economic privileges.

Though the American “free market” is riddled with these political privileges, they are not well understood or formally quantified. Indeed, they are all but ignored by the economics profession and popular commentary. If we’re trying to address inequalities of both wealth and power—inseparable in practice—through more progressive taxation, then we have already conceded the game, leaving the pervasive legal privileges that create the problem untouched. 

The mainstream conversation on politics and economics (which some of us prefer to discuss as political economy, precisely because the two are historically and materially inseparable) should work to reestablish careful distinctions between redistribution and pre-distribution.

What economists must begin is the project of formalizing the study of state-granted privilege and quantifying these special giveaways to corporations and the ultra-rich—not only tax credits and other favorable tax treatment, but intellectual property rights, land transfers and eminent domain, professional licensure and barriers to market, arbitrary limitations on civil and criminal liability, and the countless other features of corporate capitalism that have nothing to do with “market forces” or economic freedom in itself. 

If we began to quantify these in a serious and rigorous way, we would quickly see that capitalism is a system rife with welfare for the infinitesimal billionaire ruling class. It is a system that shifts enormous quantities of wealth upward by systematically restricting opportunities for the popular masses as it creates special prerogatives for our corporate overlords.

Today’s U.S. government is a system of arbitrary administrative rule under the permanent control of interlocking elites in the major corporations and government agencies; this system of discretion under “expert” rulemaking is much easier for oligarchs to manipulate than the one contemplated by the Constitution’s three-part structure, under which the people’s representatives are charged with making law. 

If elected officials don’t actually make the rules or shape public policy toward a level playing field, the common good, and equality of rights under the law, then it matters little or at all who wins any given election. Oligarchy is much easier to create and maintain when it is thus insulated from popular political pressure.

Capitalism is not a free market economy with some minor noise and deviations; regarding the math—the massive gaps of wealth and income and the actual, observable relations of domination and exploitation—capitalism is a continuation of feudalism and mercantilism in a different form, one under which there is intense competition between workers, but strong anti-competitive protections for capital. 

There is a reason that no liberal of the nineteenth century saw their philosophy as a defense of the capitalist or the capitalist system. Free trade and equal rights were once understood explicitly as a blow against elite, organized, government-aligned economic interests.

Properly understanding and quantifying the pre-distribution of wealth would require that we shift our analytical paradigm: rather than looking only at after-the-fact inequalities of income and wealth, we should also examine the structural rents built into our political and economic system before any taxes are taken. 

Pre-distribution in this context could be measured by the difference between inequality (and the various inputs, for example, wages, prices, profit margins, revenues, and capital accumulation processes more generally) under current conditions as opposed to a counter-factual situation of actually competitive markets without special privilege and with widely distributed property.

In the final analysis, Krugman is correct about at least one thing, that what we are witnessing today is the consequence of public policy choices, not any supposedly neutral market forces or technological changes. Even the notion of a natural or pre-political economic system is a profound misunderstanding of historical and social realities. 

Instead of focusing on the system of taxes and redistribution, what happens after the benefits to capital have already done their job, we desperately need to start seriously examining the structure of the political and legal system that aggrandizes and protects capital at the expense of society at large.

-CounterPunch: David S. D’Amato is an attorney, businessman, and independent researcher. He is a Policy Advisor to the Future of Freedom Foundation and a regular opinion contributor to The Hill. His writing has appeared in Forbes, Newsweek, Investor’s Business Daily, RealClearPolitics, The Washington Examiner, and many other publications, both popular and scholarly. His work has been cited by the ACLU and Human Rights Watch, among others.

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Global Free Market: A Perspective and Admonition by Glen Brown

Free market principles, supported by neo-conservatism or neo-liberalism and perpetuated by a “corporatists’ crusade,” are aligned with the policies of the “Chicago School” ideologues, the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund. These doctrines perpetrate a blitzkrieg deconstruction of the middle class, privatization of public ownership and industry (downsizing and parceling out public companies and services to private interests), government deregulation and cuts to spending (thus, stimulating deep economic recessions) and cutbacks or the elimination of the public sphere and all social funding – hence, turning the working class into the “disposable poor” – to loosen control of the flow of money and to produce “freer trade” in the global market marked by an intransigent belief that “it should be left to correct itself.” Global free market theory has surfed “the waves of fear and disorientation” while advancing an ideology of “unfettered capitalism,” leaving inequality and degradation in its wake (Naomi Klein, award-winning journalist, fellow at the London School of Economics, author and filmmaker).

The free-market theory caters to self-interested desires and profit to the detriment of other peoples’ lives, all the while promising “freedom and prosperity.” Free market plutocratic advocates believe the rich and poor should be taxed at the same flat rate, despite creating a vast inequity; that, for example, public education, health care, retirement pensions, national parks (and most any function intrinsic to essential governing) become privatized; they believe in the elimination of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid; they believe environmental protections should be deregulated and climate change denied; they believe any publicly-owned companies, services and their assets should be auctioned off to private investors and systematically dismantled; they believe labor unions should be eliminated and that universities and colleges can easily be held hostage with exorbitant donations in exchange for indoctrination of right-wing ideologies and the firing of any dissenting professors; they believe the U.S. tax code should be reformed advantageously for the wealthy, privileged elite; and besides allocating vast amounts of wealth and resources from public to private ownership, they believe in the transfer of private debts to the public sector.

The free market economic theory was developed by Milton Friedman in the 1950's at the University of Chicago. It has come to underlie the basis for the exploitation of ecological, economic, political, and/or social catastrophes, documented in such places as Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Southern Cone, Poland, Falkland Islands, Bolivia, China, South Africa, Russia, Thailand, Malaysia, South Korea, Philippines, Indonesia, former Yugoslavia, “New Orleans,” Canada, Iraq, Sri Lanka… (Klein) – all attempted transformations through invasion, occupation, and deconstruction, in other words, the ransacking of a country’s natural resources, its culture and industries, and thus forcing austerity on masses of people, while further dispossessing the poor. (Resultant violence, theft, and torture are often “thriving industries” in the world of global free market philosophy).

Whether inadvertently or not, Friedman’s theory results in a concentration of wealth and the creation of a plutocracy through unregulated corporate profits at the expense of eradicating the middle and lower classes’ rights to earn a decent income, public pension and the opportunity to acquire any semblance of dignity or satisfaction of basic human needs. This is also referred to as the “busting of unions, the slashing of payrolls and the shredding of employee benefits, without any attempt by government to constrain or reverse these practices…” (Robert Reich, Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and former secretary of labor in the Clinton administration).

The method employed by “corporatist crusaders” includes unilaterally imposing the free-market ideology and its creed that freedom without government regulation (or unlimited, avaricious profit for a few people) will create the greatest benefits for everyone. Historically, it has been exercised with such corruptive force that it generates “economic genocide” (Klein). Often times, this is accomplished by manufacturing a “pseudo crisis” to be later used as leverage for such opportunism. This “crisis” is then transmitted vigorously through the media and funded by big banks and corporations. Moreover, the method has also been known to employ the “divide and conquer” strategy (to break unions) and hyperinflation to forward the free market crusade.

It is said that the free-market economy is built upon “planned misery” for the masses, where the majority of the population is excluded from reaping any benefits despite promises for “freedom” and “shared wealth.” The notorious effects of global free market principles at work are the elimination of subsidies, layoffs or the loss of millions of jobs, especially in the public sector, and decreased or frozen wages while the corporate elite continue to procure exorbitant financial gains through the demolition of the public sector, the consistent outsourcing of jobs and inundation of cheap imports, tax loopholes, untaxed off-shore bank accounts (a “theft ex post facto”) and from laws, that David Cay Johnston, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and Syracuse University law and business schools’ lecturer, says “continue to enrich the wealthy few at the expense of the many through auctions that are called markets but act instead like bid-rigging systems approved by government.”

We have witnessed legislators who pass corporate-sponsored reform bills that support privatization and deregulation (the slow destruction of labor unions, public jobs and pensions) in order to garner money for their re-election bids. We should ask: might there be a conflict of interest when it comes to some policy changes for politicians who have moved from the corporate world into public office and whose motive for service is market-based profit and/or self-interest?

The results of wealth being transferred to “disaster capitalists” while hundreds of thousands of people are subject to human rights’ abuses, mass poverty, repression, and other forms of political, economic, psychological and physical terrorism – “policies of dispossession” – are fully substantiated and documented. As many of us are aware, free market strategies have capitalized on national emergencies to meet objectives by initiating a “manufactured” debt crisis or through price and currency “shocks” crafted by a volatile and deregulated economy.

The global free market economy has proliferated unchecked corruption manifested in lucrative private contracts, tax cuts, and redistribution of public wealth to existing (or now defunct) profit-driven billionaires, corporations and banks such as the Koch Brothers, Halliburton, Blackwater, Lockheed Martin, FEMA, Fluor, Shaw, Bechtel, CH2M Hill, New Bridge Strategies, Ash Britt, Service Corporation International, Entergy, CACI, Booz Allen Hamilton, Koch Industries, Searle Pharmaceuticals, Monsanto, Wal-Mart, Intel, Caterpillar, Microsoft, IBM, Exxon Mobil, Shell, BP, Chevron, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Merrill Lynch, Washington Mutual, Arthur Andersen, AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Enron, WorldCom, Adelphia, Global Crossing, Tyco, Sunbeam, ImClone, to name just a few.

Behind the entire plutocratic “corporatist crusade” are also wealthy, influential “think tanks” such as the Charles Koch Foundation, Cato Institute (Koch founded), the Heritage Foundation, Americans for Prosperity, American Enterprise Institute, Freedom Works, Hoover Institution, the Carlyle Group, Milken Institute, Mercatus Center (at George Mason University), Club for Growth, the Heartland Institute, the Tax Foundation, the Reason Foundation, Citizens for a Sound Economy, the State Policy Network, the Leadership Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Illinois Policy Institute, the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, the Civic Federation, et al.

-Glen Brown

Sources:

Johnston, David Cay. Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill). New York: Penguin Books, 2007.

Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Picador, 2007.

Reich, Robert B. Aftershock: the Next Economy & America’s Future. New York: Vintage Books, 2010.