Happy 80th!

 

“With the Rolling Stones, Keith Richards created the riffs, the lyrics and the songs that roused the world, and over [several] decades he lived the original rock and roll taking the chances he wanted, speaking his mind, and making it all work in a way that no one before him had ever done... Listening obsessively to Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters records as a child in post-war Kent. Learning guitar and forming a band with Mick Jagger and Brian Jones. The Rolling Stones' first fame and success as a bad-boy band. The notorious Redlands drug bust and subsequent series of confrontations with a nervous establishment that led to his enduring image as outlaw and folk hero. Creating immortal riffs such as the ones in 'Jumping Jack Flash' and 'Street Fighting Man' and 'Honky Tonk Women'. Falling in love with Anita Pallenberg and the death of Brian Jones. Tax exile in France, wildfire tours of the US, 'Exile on Main Street' and 'Some Girls'. Ever increasing fame, isolation and addiction. Falling in love with Patti Hansen. Estrangement from Mick Jagger and subsequent reconciliation. Solo albums and performances with his band the Xpensive Winos. Marriage, family and the road that goes on forever..." -from Goodreads

"The Democratic Party of today is no longer involved in movement building" -Thom Hartmann

 

Most people, particularly Democrats, would never speak of Donald Trump and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the same breath or context. But the very strategy that King used to help end legal discrimination in America is what Trump is today using to try to win back the White House in 2024: movement politics.

And if Democrats don’t figure out a way to match the passion and fervor (and organization) of Trump’s MAGA movement — yes, it’s as real a movement as was the Civil Rights movement — with their own passionate, broad-based, slogan- and action-driven movement, things could get very ugly for next year’s elections.

As of this moment, the biggest mistake the Democratic Party and most Democratic politicians are making is not realizing that political movements and political parties are very different things.

Barack Obama understood movement politics: he created a movement and it carried him into the White House. For the Democratic Party today, though, not so much…

Political parties deal with policy and practicality:

“How do we get healthcare for the most people in the most efficient way possible?
“What kind of legislation will best deal with poverty and make our streets safer?”
“How do we raise money to spread our message and get people out to the polls?”

Movements, on the other hand, deal with identity and passion. They spawn activists and evangelists:

“I’m in the street because I’m mad as hell that those idiots in the state capitol outlawed my right to healthcare.”
“Hey, buddy in the next booth over here in the diner, I just heard you mention Trump and I want you to know he’s a liar, con man, and rapist!”
“Officer, I believe that a new and better America is possible with the ideas of our movement, and I’m willing to let you arrest me for it.”

The Democratic Party of today is no longer involved in movement building.

It was building a movement during the Roosevelt administration in the 1930s, when millions showed up for FDR’s rallies or listened to his fireside chats on the radio, volunteered or joined the three-letter agencies to rebuild America, and helped the war effort to save the world from fascism.

It was engaged in movement-building during the Johnson administration, when the Party embraced MLK’s Civil Rights movement and passed a whole series of Great Society legislation, beginning with the Civil and Voting Rights Acts and then leading to Medicare, Medicaid, Food Stamps and others that lifted millions out of poverty and laid the foundation for our first serious step in generations toward a genuinely inclusive, pluralistic society.

As mentioned, Barack Obama created a movement and without it never could’ve gotten elected or passed Obamacare.

Part of the Democratic Party was definitely recruiting people into a movement during the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016 when tens of thousands of people showed up for rallies and Bernie himself repeatedly said:

“This campaign is not just about me. It is about building a movement of human solidarity...”

But since the Bernie movement was crushed by the Clinton machine and the remnants of Clinton’s and Obama’s neoliberal “New Democrats” in the 2016 primary, the Democratic Party has devolved into a safe and predictable fundraising and electoral-strategy institution. It’s left the movement building to us.

While many people, particularly women, supported Hillary, she didn’t run her campaign like a movement, probably because both she and her husband had been politicians their entire lives, rather than activists. The closest she came to it was the millions of women wearing “pussy” hats nationwide right after Trump’s inauguration, but by then it was far too late and that wasn’t even led by her.

My friend and SiriusXM radio colleague Joe Madison is fond of saying: “The difference between a moment and a movement is sacrifice.”

Politics, and political parties, deal with moments. They raise money, push legislation, get people elected, popularize issues, and react to the challenges of the day and to other parties’ rhetoric. People, not institutions, generally create and populate movements. And, as Joe Madison says, doing so requires effort, persistence, passion, evangelism, and, yes, sacrifice.

While Democrats decry “the cult of Trump” and the media often ridicules Trump’s “personality cult,” the reality is that there’s never been a successful movement in history that didn’t have a charismatic leader. The movement may have preceded the leader, but the leader and his or her charisma is what makes it so potent.

Trump is a rapist, grifter, criminal, and all-around-horrible human being. But, like many high functioning psychopaths, he has extraordinary charisma and can be very charming. He knows how to lead a movement, and that movement will be his main weapon next November.

I remember Bernie telling me in an off-line conversation years ago that most politicians — and some of the best and most effective politicians — are followers, not leaders. They look for a “parade” (the start of a movement, in this example) and, when the parade is big enough, they’ll run out to the front of it, lift its flag, and proclaim, “This is my movement!”

It sounds cynical, but it’s almost always true. And because the self-organization of the movement preceded the political leadership, it’s actually a rather organic process.

Certainly, that’s what FDR and LBJ did, as did Teddy Roosevelt back in the day. Each responded to movements that were already growing on the ground, ultimately leading those movements in ways that literally changed America for the better.

Obama, a uniquely brilliant politician who came up as an activist and community organizer, created his own movement from scratch and it carried him into the White House.

And movement building and leading are what Donald Trump has been doing — although not to better America — ever since he came down his escalator in 2015. His pitch was about emotion, not detail; about tribe, not facts; about identity and values, not politics. It was the language of movement, not momentary politics.

Even today, Trump is engaging in movement-building — this time a new and more forceful movement than in 2016, that is well-armed and enthusiastic about using violence — as he repeatedly proclaims his intention to use it to become a dictator if re-elected.

It cuts both ways. In their early days, most successful modern dictators were first leaders of movements.

Mussolini had his Fasci Italiani di Combattimento, the violent street mobs that became the enforcers of his Fascist movement when it made the transition to becoming a political party. Hitler brought people into the beer halls and the streets from the very beginning. Franco called his Spanish fascist Falange party “The Movement” to his dying day.

Most Democrats are passionate about defeating Trump and defending democracy, and some issues like abortion, pot, and voting rights will get people into polling places, but where is today’s progressive movement?

Outside of the protests against the murder of George Floyd in 2020 (which were then demonized by the right, as they have every leftist movement in history), most on the left have been content to consign all that “sacrifice” to the Democratic Party.

Instead of talking about values — the “right” of people to vote, healthcare, quality free education, a stable environment, or abortion, for example — the Democratic Party’s most powerful and visible leaders, President Biden, Vice President Harris, and Senator Schumer, talk about legislation and Republican obstructionism.

That’s all well and good, and people need to know those things, but details and information rarely motivate people the way a movement and its implicit invitation to membership, participation, and evangelism does.

When my old friend the late Tom Hayden helped organize Students for a Democratic Society, he and its founders envisioned it as a movement, not a party. I started showing up for the MSU chapter of SDS in 1967, hanging out repeatedly at the Student Union, for meetings off-campus, and in the streets, and ended up in jail for a week, shaved bald and beaten, for my efforts. Politicians don’t go to jail: movement participants (some of them politicians) do.

This comes out of something deep within our basic human nature. As any psychologist or competent novelist can tell you, we human beings are story machines: we carry deep within us stories about our nation, about our lives, about ourselves and our place in family and society.

Those stories drive our behavior more than any amount of data or information. They transcend party. And they drive movements. Deeply embedded into each of those stories are layers of emotion, identity, and a sense of self. It’s the stories that motivate us, which is why it’s always stories that drive movements.

Nobody ever got up off their couch and ran into the streets, particularly into a line of police or jeering militia thugs, because they were excited by a policy proposal offered in a boring floor speech read in a droning voice by the Senate Majority Leader.

Movement leaders know how to tell these stories to rouse people’s emotions and motivate them to action. It’s one of the keys to creating and sustaining movements. From JFK calling a “new generation” to action, to MLK proclaiming a “promised land,” to Donald Trump saying “I am your vengeance,” movement leaders reach deep into the stories that underpin our sense of who we are and our understanding of how we got into the messes we confront.

They are usually driven by a deep longing for change, and often animated by wounds, unfairness, and grievance as much as idealism, hope, and a desire to embrace others. Witness the Act Up movement demanding action about AIDS during the Reagan administration when that homophobic monster refused to say the word “AIDS” out loud for eight long years, much less do anything about it as so many people (including three very close friends of mine) died an agonizing death.

Read the history of the labor rights movement, from the slaughters of the late 19th century to the Flint Sit-Down Strike to Shawn Fain’s brilliant leadership of the UAW today. It has waxed and waned for almost two centuries; it’s reviving itself as a movement again right now (and Fain has the talent to become a major force).

Movements can come out of pain, but they can also come out of hope. The belief that a pluralistic, multiracial society free of poverty was possible in America was, for example, the initial motivation and mission of SDS: that was the essence of Hayden’s Port Huron Statement. Its anti-war activity came later.

This movement requirement for narrative, for deep story that transcends mere details and summarizes entire complex issues into a single crystalized legend, is why movements so often have not just leaders but also martyrs. They are the yin to the yang of leadership and heroes, and for a movement to be successful both are often useful or even necessary.

Sometimes the leader and the martyr are the same; the persecution of Malcolm X, for example, or the repeated jailing of Martin Luther King. Hitler played that role when he went to prison in the 1920s for trying to overthrow the government of Bavaria; Trump plays it today with his candidacy for president overlaid by his victim routine about his 91 indictments and the daily drama of his legal travails.

The Civil Rights movement had Emmett Till and Rosa Parks, with other famous names in its deeper history. The women’s movement had Susan B. Anthony, who was arrested for voting-while-female in 1872 and thus became both the movement’s martyr and leader.

Hitler’s movement held up Horst Wessel, who was killed in his violent street-gang Sturmabteilung volunteer militia that was often, initially, met with violence by police and anti-Nazi mobs.

FDR had a generation of martyrs destroyed by the Republican Great Depression and brought to popular consciousness by John Steinbeck and Woody Guthrie.

LBJ used the memory of the death of JFK to push through the Civil and Voting Rights Acts, and then he and RFK pointed to martyrs in the poverty-wracked South and a retiring WWII generation who couldn’t get health insurance in old age to build a movement for his Great Society programs of Medicare and Medicaid.

Tim McVeigh, who aspired to kick off a “new [white nationalist] America” movement blew up the Oklahoma City Federal Building on the anniversary of the death of white supremacist David Koresh and in the memory of white nationalist Randy Weaver, leading Trump, today having seized the mantle of leadership of Koresh’s and McVeigh’s movement, to give his first speech as a 2024 presidential candidate in Waco.

Trump regularly honors Ashli Babbit (and trots out her mother), killed by a Black Capitol Police officer during January 6th, along with the imprisoned January 6th insurrectionists (and their chorus) the way Hitler did with Wessel and his early Munich brawlers who’d been arrested or killed. He mentions Babbit and sings along with a recording of the imprisoned traitors at nearly every rally.

Trump’s movement also has multiple spin-off but aligned astroturf movements, many funded to the tune of millions by oil, tobacco, pharma, banking, tech, and other industry billionaires.

For example, the Tea Party — funded by those billionaires — was successful in driving a nationwide movement to stop a national healthcare program and guarantee that Obamacare ran exclusively through the highly profitable insurance industry.

Moms for Liberty has chapters all across America and delights in harassing teachers and school boards while promoting the banning of books (except about threesomes?).

Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA has over 300 chapters on campuses across America and sponsors conferences around the country; their stated purpose includes “to identify, educate, train, and organize students to promote the principles of freedom…” Not a word in there about policy or even politics, although they’re having a huge impact on both.

There’s an entire infrastructure — capitalized to the tune of billions of dollars a year — that supports the white nationalist, low-tax, small-government, anti-union, anti-woman, pro-fossil-fuel, anti-public-school movements and all their branches and offshoots that Trump successfully captured and now leads.

It has over 1500 radio stations blaring hate and fear 24/7; three national television networks daily promoting propaganda friendly to their billionaire owners; newspapers, websites, and appears to even be embraced by the billionaire owners of America’s largest social media companies who refuse to make public their algorithms that drive public opinion and, often, public outrage.

It pays for the political campaigns of politicians who support it, funds outsiders like Manchin and Sinema who will betray and disrupt its enemies, and ensures total loyalty to the movement and its leader Trump with the promise of funding primary challengers against anybody who deviates even the slightest from its orthodoxy.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party has none of this.

Its three most visible movement leaders of my lifetime, JFK, RFK, and MLK, were all murdered in the 1960s. SDS died in the 1970s when its violent offshoot, the Weather Underground, was finally brought down. The Civil Rights movement endures but never recaptured its vitality after the brutal murder of King.

When Bernie took up the progressive movement’s mantle in 2012 and 2016, he was opposed by the institutional Democratic Party in ways that leave his supporters bitter to this day and led former DNC Chair Donna Brazile to pen an apology to him in her autobiography and on multiple TV appearances.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the “Squad” had their moment in the sun, but haven’t caught on as national movement leaders; similarly, the short-lived Black Lives Matter movement caught fire after the murder of George Floyd but has now devolved into internecine warfare.

Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi did yeoman’s work overhauling the American economy and getting America back on track after the disastrous Trump years, but neither has the charisma (or youth or drivenness) to lead a new progressive movement.

Gavin Newsom is a fresh new face for much of America, and certainly mopped the floor with Ron DeSantis in a recent Fox “News” debate, but he’s yet to take the steps — and the chances/sacrifices — that could catapult him from politician to movement leader. And it’s that risk-taking that almost always characterizes the difference between mere politicians and leaders of movements.

Politicians play within the system; movement leaders aren’t afraid to offend or even injure the system if it will advance the movement. Politicians follow the rules; movement leaders often intentionally break them, if for no other reason than to demonstrate the need for their reform.

Movement leaders — like true movements themselves — are disruptive. They lay down in the street, stand before lines of police, let themselves get beaten and arrested for a greater cause. They sacrifice.

The successful ones are almost always talented in the arts of mass communication, in public speaking, in organizing political and guerrilla theater.

For better or worse, from Gandhi to Trump, John Lewis to David Duke and Alex Jones, Gloria Steinem to Nick Fuentes, movement leaders defy the status quo and gain an almost mythic stature and power from the audaciousness of their insurgencies.

Heading into the 2024 election, Democrats are facing a massive, multi-faceted movement driving Trump’s faction, held together by white supremacy, authoritarianism, hate, and fear of the “other.” In response, Democrats are holding up their considerable accomplishments, but have yet to activate or find their own grass-roots movement in response.

The craving for movement and movement leadership on the left is palpable: look at how the country rallied around the Tennessee Three, for example. But their local activism hasn’t succeeded in going national and has only occasionally — and then with minimal national press — been replicated in state houses across the nation.

Similarly, the Occupy Movement had a powerful moment, until it was co-opted by a New York Maoist cult leader and collapsed.

There’s still a dramatic imbalance between the massive, organized, and well-funded “anti-woke” movement driving the politics of the right, and the scattershot state-by-state efforts at reform and to salvage democracy on the left.

The closest to movement politics we have at the moment are the millions of American women (and their male allies) who want control of their bodies and are outraged at GOP attempts to return them to the status of men’s servants and playthings, from the boardroom to the bedroom.

That movement is beginning to find its voice and even has a current martyr in Texas’ Kate Cox, the woman who the men running Texas threatened to force a doomed pregnancy to term at the risk of her own life.

Will it become organized and national? Will a charismatic leader emerge or step forward to carry the women’s rights banner?

The other issue that President Biden keeps trying to evoke movement politics around — so far with only lip service from the press — is the attempt to rescue American freedom and democracy from both the corruption of six billionaire-owned Republicans on the Supreme Court and a fascist demagogue who promises to become a dictator from “day one.”

A movement for democracy.

(Anand Giridharadas, one of America’s most thoughtful commentators, recently had a discussion about this very topic with Joe Scarborough that’s well worth viewing.)

The power of the freedom meme is so great that fossil fuel billionaires have hijacked it for decades, smearing the words “freedom” and “liberty” all over everything they do. It resonates deeply in the American psyche.

Will a progressive democracy movement leader emerge to take on the growing forces of fascism represented by the Trump and Qanon cults — and the handful of third-party wannabee movement leaders — in America?

Are there people with talent and charisma willing to risk the fate of JFK and MLK to take head-on the armed militias and algorithm-fueled haters who’ve sworn their lives and allegiance to Trump and his ideal of a Christian-only white supremacist nation?

And, if one or more does, will the institutional Democratic Party treat them as a threat, the way they did Bernie and Howard Dean before him? Or will they recognize that the only way to defeat a movement like Trump now commands is with another movement of equal passion and fervor — and to get behind it, collaborate, and use its force and energy to change policy and politics, the way LBJ did when he saw that MLK would never give up?

As Jen Psaki said on Morning Joe this morning about the great recent economic news: “Data doesn’t move people, emotions do.”

She noted that its “never about the data” and the Democratic Party needs storytellers to convert Biden’s great economic data into narratives about “how this impacts you and your family.”

Similarly, should a movement and movement leadership emerge in the next few months that could inspire Bernie-like enthusiasm to drive millions to the polls, will the handful of billionaires associated with the Democratic Party, and the consultants who make their living on fees from conventional advertising, dismiss it the way they did Bernie, BLM, the Sunrise Movement, and the Occupy Movement?

Or have they finally learned their lesson and will thus embrace movement politics the way their rightwing peers did with the Tea Party, Trump in 2016, and continue to do today with all the spinoff “anti-woke” movements they fund?

The answer to that question may well determine the future of democracy in both our republic and around the world.

Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of "The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream" (2020)

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Source URL: https://portside.org/2023-12-16/progressive-democracy-movement-defeat-fascism

The Secret GOP Plot To Change Our Constitution Slithers Forward

 

One of the right’s favorite fever dreams over the years has been to gut the US Constitution of many of its checks and balances and officially turn America into a legal oligarchy with a strongman presidency, nearly bulletproof legal immunity for the morbidly rich, and full personhood for corporations.

As of this month, it’s no longer just a dream.

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) completed their winter “National Policy Summit” get-together in Scottsdale, Arizona last week with Speaker Mike Johnson as its keynote speaker. This is the group that’s brought “Stand Your Ground” and voter suppression “model legislation” to Red states across America and, for fifty years now, has been bringing together corporate lobbyists and Republican state-level politicians to make state after state more corporate- and billionaire-friendly.

At this recent meeting they rolled out a new strategy to convene a Constitutional Convention, so they can finally remake America in their own image: they’re going to try to get the six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court — who all have direct or indirect ties back to ALEC, its related/affiliated organizations, and/or its funders — to go along with it.

Former Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold (now a professor of law and president of the American Constitution Society) is not prone to hyperbole; he’s always been a thoughtful and measured speaker and writer. So, it’s worth taking him seriously when he recently said of MAGA Mike Johnson:

“It is alarming to have a speaker of the House who supports the extremist Convention of States movement, which is striving to radically rewrite the U.S. Constitution.”

— Imagine if most public schools in the country closed and were replaced by for-profit charter and private academies — often racially segregated and only serving families who could afford their tuition — because the Constitution forbade state-level compulsory education laws and taxpayer funding for education (at all levels).

— Imagine if the U.S. Constitution required the EPA, FDA, USDA, DOT, Department of Education, and Department of Labor to shut down. All union protections are dead, there are no more federal workplace safety standards, and even child-labor laws are struck down, along with an end to the national minimum wage and the income tax, both individual and corporate.

— Imagine that the new billionaire-written Constitution makes it illegal for the federal government to protect you from big polluters, big banks, and even big food and pharma — all are free to rip you off or poison you all they want, and your only remedy is in state courts and legislatures — because the Constitution now prevents Congress from doing anything about any of it. The federal government can no longer even enforce voting or civil rights laws.

— Imagine if Citizens United and its position that political bribery is merely a First Amendment exercise of “free speech” were put into the US Constitution so it can never be overturned by Congress or a future court, meaning that whichever political candidates have the backing of the wealthiest donors pretty much win every election for the rest of American history.

— Imagine if the free and independent press protections of the First Amendment are gone and, like in today’s Hungary and Russia, politicians can sue anybody who writes anything about them for defamation or slander, effectively putting any kind of opposition media or even honest news operations out of business.

— Imagine, to add injury to insult, that the federal government has shut down Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, because all of these programs (along with food stamps, Pell grants, housing supports, and any programs that help the middle class, the less fortunate, or disabled) are “beyond the reach” of what the federal government can do because they’re now unconstitutional.

Morbidly rich billionaires and the groups they fund are working to rewrite our Constitution to do all this and more.

They want to provide corporations and the rich with more and more protections and benefits while chopping away at anything smelling of “socialism” like Social Security, child labor laws, or inheritance, income, and wealth taxes.

The Constitution provides for three ways to change or amend itself. The first is that Congress can propose a constitutional amendment, pass it with a supermajority in both houses, and have three-quarters of the states ratify it. This is the way it’s been done for every one of the existing 27 amendments.

The second strategy is done by using Article V of the Constitution and driving the process up from the states. The easiest way to do this is for three-quarters of the states to legislatively approve (with simple majority votes in the legislatures of each state) an amendment, in which case Congress is unnecessary and upon ratification by the 38th state, it becomes a permanent amendment to the Constitution.

While this strategy has never been used, it’s one process many of the good-government groups like Move To Amend and Public Citizen are pushing for a “Corporations are not people, and money is not speech” amendment to reverse Citizens United.

The third — and incredibly dangerous — strategy to amend the Constitution is to simply call a “Convention of the States,” again using Article V, and open the entire document itself up to rewriting and tinkering. 

This third strategy is the one ALEC was pushing this month. If they can pull it off in the states (where it’s cheaper to buy politicians), then Congress, state governors, the president, and even the courts would have no say over it. And ALEC has spent the past 50 years becoming a major — some would say controlling — factor in Republican-controlled state legislatures.

Their barrier has been that it takes 34 states to call for a convention, and there have never been that many states call for one at the same time since the founding of our republic. However, as was pointed out at ALEC last week, every state except Hawaii has — at one time or another, starting with Virginia in 1788 — passed a resolution proposing a constitutional convention (there have been 400 such resolutions since the founding of our nation).

While most of history’s resolutions for a convention have been specific to one issue or another (New York’s 1789 resolution called for a Bill of Rights to be added to the Constitution, for example, something that Congress and the states did in 1791), a half-dozen were simply calls for a convention without specifics. These are sometimes referred to as “generic” convention resolutions.

The theory pushed at ALEC, first rolled out three years ago at an ALEC workshop by conservative activist David Biddulph but now apparently fully endorsed, is to combine the existing 28 Red state resolutions along with the six “generic” ones (going all the way back to 1789) to hit the magic number of 34 states to open the convention.

The key to the strategy is to get it before the Supreme Court and let the billionaire-owned Republican justices do ALEC’s work for it by ruling that those old resolutions are still valid, even though the people who proposed and passed them are all long dead.

Utah Republican State Rep. Ken Ivory told ALEC lawmakers it was imperative to get the issue before the Supreme Court:

“Please join us in the state of Utah as we look into the legal mechanisms that we have under the Constitution… to [get the Court to] declare that Congress must count the [old] applications. … And if, as we believe, we’ve already achieved 34 applications to Congress for a fiscal responsibility convention, call [it]… and hold a Convention of States.”

If their plan works, these Republican toadies of the billionaires who fund and own them will rewrite our Constitution and state governors, the US Congress, and the President will have no say whatsoever in the process. Only state legislatures are necessary for rewriting the Constitution and then ratifying their own work, according to Article V of the Constitution, and governors can’t veto their actions.

Much like the many cases that have suddenly burst onto the scene and then been used by the six corrupt Republicans on the Court to alter American law and take away citizens’ rights, this one could move quickly. Now that the ALEC meeting is over, expect to see states begin putting together the lawsuits or other legal actions necessary to get this proposal before the Court.

Alexander Hamilton was prescient: in the last sentence of Federalist 85, he warns us of efforts to re-write or replace our Constitution:

“I dread the more the consequences of new attempts, because I know that powerful individuals, in this and in other States, are enemies to a general national government in every possible shape.”

Common Cause and the Center for Media and Democracy have been at the forefront of sounding the alarm and I’ve hot-linked their names to their most recent articles about the work they’re doing to try to stop the billionaire machine devoted to rewriting our Constitution.

Please check them out, get on their mailing lists, and spread the word. This is one of those things that Republicans on the Court could use to seemingly spring out of nowhere and bring down our democracy once and for all.

Thom Hartmann is a NY Times bestselling author of 34 books in 17 languages & nation's #1 progressive radio host. Psychotherapist, international relief worker. Politics, history, spirituality, psychology, science, anthropology, pre-history, culture, and the natural world.

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Source URL: https://portside.org/2023-12-13/secret-gop-plot-change-our-constitution-slithers-forward

The Theocratic Ambitions of Project 2025

 

A coalition of far-right groups, led by the Heritage Foundation, is planning for the next Republican administration. Project 2025 has received considerable media attention for its $22 million budget, for its plans to expand presidential power over federal agencies, and for specific policies, like rolling back environmental protections.

However, the plan’s theocratic elements have gone unscrutinized.

Project 2025 published a book of policy proposals, titled “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” for the next Republican administration. Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts opens the book by prioritizing the securing of “our God-given individual rights to live freely” against a “woke” threat. 

“Today the Left is threatening the tax-exempt status of churches and charities that reject woke progressivism,” he claims without evidence. “They will soon turn to Christian schools and clubs with the same totalitarian intent.”

Roberts’ view that progressives are out to get Christians sets the tone for individual chapters on various federal agencies. While anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ policies run throughout the book, several policy areas stand out.

This is about the next Republican president, whoever it may be, who pushes Christian nationalism.

Roger Severino’s chapter on the Department of Health and Human Services urges the next conservative president to “maintain a biblically based, social science–reinforced definition of marriage and family.” 

Severino is concerned that federal programs will be subjected to “nonreligious definitions of marriage and family as put forward by the recently enacted Respect for Marriage Act.”

The Respect for Marriage Act, passed last year by Congress with strong bipartisan support, requires the federal government and states to recognize same-sex and interracial marriages. The law is not religious or nonreligious; it is a constitutionally enacted law of the United States.

Project 2025 appears to call on the next Republican president to draw distinctions between parts of the law as “religious” and “nonreligious.” 

The Bible is not a higher authority than laws passed by Congress, and far-right groups do not have to like American laws to respect that those laws are not overruled by their personal interpretation of the Bible.

Another startling section by Severino concerns Covid-19 policies, opposition to which has galvanized conservative Christians. He criticizes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s actions and wonders “how much risk mitigation is worth the price of shutting down churches on the holiest day of the Christian calendar and far beyond as happened in 2020? What is the proper balance of lives saved versus souls saved?” 

That’s not a tough question to answer: The federal government does not need to worry about saving souls.

Trump is campaigning to establish ‘a presidential dictatorship,’ historian Beschloss says

Meanwhile in his chapter on the U.S. Department of Labor, Jonathan Berry frames his proposals as part of divine history. “The Judeo-Christian tradition, stretching back to Genesis, has always recognized fruitful work as integral to human dignity, as service to God, neighbor, and family,” he writes, while claiming the Biden administration “has been hostile to people of faith.”

Berry worries that “God ordained the Sabbath as a day of rest, and until very recently the Judeo-Christian tradition sought to honor that mandate by moral and legal regulation of work on that day” and blames consumerism and secularism for the decline in Sabbath observance.

But he’s not content to reminisce about the good ol’ days when Americans went to church. He wants the federal government to push people back to church, and calls on Congress to “encourage communal rest by amending the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) to require that workers be paid time and a half for hours worked on the Sabbath.” Berry argues this would lead to higher costs that would reduce work on the Sabbath. 

Conservatives often frame their policy crusades as part of an effort to expand “religious freedom,” a narrative deployed across the Trump administration to gut civil rights protections. 

But now “Project 2025” is saying the quiet part out loud: Right-wing groups do not want to ensure all Americans have religious freedom, but want to impose conservative Christian views on our religiously-diverse country.

The federal government does not need to worry about saving souls.

Instituting “biblically based” policies, saving souls and inducing Sabbath observance constitute a direct attack on religious freedom, a freedom guaranteed by the First Amendment, which keeps the government out of religion.

In the chapter on the U.S. Department of State, Kiron K. Skinner writes: “Special attention must be paid to challenges of religious freedom, especially the status of Middle Eastern Christians and other religious minorities, as well as the human trafficking endemic to the region.”

There are certainly international religious freedom issues that the president should pay attention to, but our ability to advocate for religious freedom abroad is enabled by our respect for people of all faiths — and nonreligious people — at home. 

A U.S. president who enacts “biblically based” domestic policies has little to say to heads of government abroad who pursue their own religion-based policies.

Concerns about policies of this kind aren’t only about the possible return of former President Donald Trump to office — this is about the next Republican president, whoever it may be, who pushes Christian nationalism. Project 2025 is providing a blueprint for any Republican administration.

It shouldn’t need to be said that the Bible shouldn’t trump American law, but this campaign season it needs to be repeated, over and over again.

Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons is a religion contributor and the author of "Just Faith: Reclaiming Progressive Christianity."

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Source URL: https://portside.org/2023-12-11/theocratic-ambitions-project-2025

"Our national check-writing habit is turning into an enormous problem" by Ron Lieber

Check fraud is growing rapidly, and there’s one big reason: Anyone with a smartphone can download an app and within minutes get access to bundles of stolen checks that thieves are selling in open forums.

Last week, I downloaded Telegram, a messaging app where fraudulent activity is particularly robust, and quickly found forums selling stolen checks. I called the people who had written the first 20 stolen checks that I found for sale to ask them if they were aware that they had become victims. They were not pleased.

So what’s the deal with this online market?

It starts with a pretty low-tech operation, after people pay bills, put checks in envelopes and drop them into a blue mailbox. At that point, criminals find ways to take them out. Or it’s an inside job at the post office, or elsewhere.

Next, the thieves choose from a number of paths that could involve selling the checks on Telegram, or keeping them. Either way, their next move is often to assume a fake identity in order to open a bank account where the check will end up. They typically will wash the ink off a stolen check, rewrite it to their new identity, deposit it, withdraw the money and then abandon the new account. Rinse and repeat.

 

It’s a fast-growing business. During the first year of the pandemic, the Postal Service received 299,020 mail theft complaints, an increase of 161 percent from the previous year, according to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. Financial institutions also reported triple-digit increases. Socure, a company that sells digital identity confirmation services to banks, says it believes there may be nearly 2.5 million so-called synthetic identity accounts out there in the world, sitting in wait for nefarious dealings.

The Telegram forums selling stolen checks are easy to find if you know the code words to search for. I didn’t, but bank security consultants do, and they provided me with a few to try. I spent just a few minutes looking and immediately lost count of the number of checks I found for sale.

 

“Telegram’s moderators actively monitor public parts of the platform and accept user reports in order to remove content that breaches our terms of service,” said Remi Vaughn, a Telegram spokesman. I didn’t buy any checks, but I did grab images of the account owner’s name when it was visible. (Sometimes, thieves blur that part when putting the checks up for sale.)

Right away, a few things were clear. Thieves often post batches of checks, and those checks often have something in common. One curious collection included four checks made out to the St. Simons Land Trust, a nonprofit that preserves open space and historical properties in St. Simons Island, Ga. They had round-number amounts that looked like donations, so I called or texted the people whose names were on the top left of the checks, the presumed donors.

Confusion ensued. Donors reported my inquiries to the trust. The next morning, I received an urgent message warning me that someone was using my name and contacting the trust’s donors. Its executive director eventually sent me a safe word (“coastalGA”) using the email address on my profile page on the New York Times website, and I confirmed that I was working on an article about stolen checks on the internet. 

In many instances, thieves steal checks before they reach their recipient. But in this instance, staff at the land trust received them, took them to the bank in person right away and deposited them. 

So how did the thieves get them? The trust does keep images of the checks it receives, which is a theoretical vulnerability, but it brought in consultants to scour its systems immediately after speaking with me and they saw no signs of a breach. 

Nevertheless, the trust has stopped scanning checks for now. I waited on hold for a while to speak to the manager at the land trust’s bank, Truist. Was someone stealing images of checks there? 

“Let’s work together to keep your account safe and protect you from fraud,” a recorded voice said, over a tinkly melody that sounded like a xylophone. The manager wouldn’t speak to me, and Kyle Tarrance, a senior vice president at Truist and director of media relations, declined to comment as well. 

Another group of checks I found were from the bank accounts of people who live in Bartlett, Tenn., or nearby. They wrote checks to TV Guide, Sears and the local water department, among other places. None of these checks seemed to have arrived at their intended destinations. One check writer told me that he had taken his envelope directly to the post office, but somehow his check showed up on Telegram anyway. Was it an inside job at that post office? 

A Postal Service spokesperson said inspectors were looking into reports of theft in the area, and would not provide more detail because of the active investigation. Other checks I found on Telegram seemed like one-offs — but turned out not to be. 

There was a single check that a couple in Bay Harbor Islands, Fla., had sent to the Center for the Advancement of Jewish Education. (One half of the couple, Violet Lagari-Libhaber, confirmed the facts with me after providing her own safe word, “bialy,” to make sure I wasn’t a criminal.) 

This check made it to the organization, which deposited it, but it still turned up for sale. Staff at the center do not know why, and this was the first it had heard of such a thing happening with checks made out to the organization. The couple called their bank, and the bank did its own search of online check fraud channels. 

There, it found an older check that the couple had made out to the same organization but that hadn’t been deposited. The banker told them that finding stolen checks online was common. They ended up with a new account number to protect their money. 

While my random sampling of stolen checks numbered just 20, the resulting confusion was enough to leave experts scratching their heads. “This is more convoluted than I even could have thought,” said Frank McKenna, chief fraud strategist at Point Predictive, which uses data to help clients prevent theft. 

He asked whether anyone had considered another possibility: that post office insiders steam open envelopes, remove checks, take pictures of them, reseal the envelopes, send the checks on their way and then go and sell the images of the checks. Nope, and so noted! Does Mr. McKenna write checks? “Absolutely not,” he said. “It has to be for something where they won’t take anything but a check.” 

 

NY Times: Ron Lieber has been the Your Moneycolumnist since 2008 and has written five books, most recently “The Price You Pay for College.” Tara Siegel Bernard contributed reporting. Susan Beachy contributed research.

 

"We are in a dangerous moment, and too many people are numb to the implications of a second Trump presidency" -Joyce Vance

 

Jack Smith has filed his 404(b) notice, advising the Court and Trump of other crimes and bad acts committed by Trump that he intends to offer as evidence when the D.C. election interference case goes to trial. The notice is nine pages long, you can read the whole thing here. It contains a tremendous amount of new information about the case Smith intends to make against Trump. This is the best window we’ve had in on his strategy since the four count indictment was unsealed in August. Smith starts about by advising the court that he intends to provide it with “extensive advance notice” of the evidence he’s going to introduce at trial in pleadings, including exhibit and witness lists, pre-trial motions, and his trial brief (a detailed layout prosecutors file in advance of trial discussing their evidence and issues they believe might come up during the trial). This is good news for all of us—it means we’ll have access to much if not all of this information as well. You’ll recall that in “The Week Ahead” we took a look at Federal Rule of Evidence 404(b), which required Smith to file this notice. This rule tells prosecutors they can’t offer evidence that a defendant committed bad acts or crimes beyond what’s charged in the indictment to try and show that the defendant has a propensity to commit crimes, that he’s a bad guy. But the rule permits prosecutors to use the evidence for other purposes.  Jack Smith tells the court that all of the evidence he’s going to introduce at trial is “intrinsic to the charged crimes”—in other words, admissible without the need to resort to Rule 404(b) because it’s part of the conduct Trump is charged with in the indictment. But, hedging his bets, Smith advises the court that in the alternative, any evidence the court might deem “extrinsic” is still admissible under 404(b) to prove “motive, intent, preparation, knowledge, absence of mistake, and common plan.” This is important. As much as getting the case to trial and getting a conviction matters in the first instance, making sure that conviction gets affirmed on appeal is paramount in the larger scheme of things. So prosecutors like to have multiple independent arguments to justify a ruling by the appellate court that what happened at trial was proper. Smith sets that up here, and the judge, who has broad discretion to determine what evidence is admissible at trial, will put on the record whether she is admitting evidence as intrinsic, extrinsic under 404(b), or as Smith suggests, admissible as both. Good judges make a clear record for the court of appeals to consider, and Chutkan has shown she is very good at doing this, most recently as she ruled against Trump on his presidential immunity motion. But it’s the substance of Smith’s notice that’s so intriguing. He reveals six areas where he’s going to introduce evidence. Let’s dip into the specifics of his plan: ·       Historical Evidence of Trump’s Consistent Plan of Baselessly Claiming Election Fraud: The criminal conspiracy charges against Trump require the government to prove Trump knew his claims of election fraud were false. Smith wants to offer public statements Trump made before the election took place claiming that there would be fraud in the 2020 presidential election, and his claims as early as the 2012 and 2016 elections about fraud, to prove it. Smith says he’s entitled to offer this evidence under Rule 404(b) because it shows Trump’s “plan of falsely blaming fraud for election results he does not like, as well as his motive, intent, and plan to obstruct the certification of the 2020 election results and illegitimately retain power.” ·       Historical Evidence of Trump’s Plan to Refuse to Commit to a Peaceful Transition of Power: Smith says “The Government will offer proof of this refusal as intrinsic evidence of the defendant’s criminal conspiracies because it shows his plan to remain in power at any cost—even in the face of potential violence.” Smith points to this exchange with a reporter as evidence of Trump’s intent to hold power: This category of evidence is very valuable for Smith’s case. It forces jurors to confront the inherent contradiction in Trump’s public statements about election results, which amount to, “If I win, it’s a fair election, but if I lose it’s fraud.” This is the type of argument that makes it difficult to maintain that Trump was acting in good faith, and it’s a strong point in the government’s case. Smith points to a question during the 2016 debate where the moderator reminded Trump of the American tradition of a peaceful transfer of power and asked Trump whether he was willing to commit to that principle. Trump responded, “What I’m saying is that I will tell you at the time. I’ll keep you in suspense. OK?” ·       Evidence of Trump and his unindicted Co-Conspirators’ Knowledge of the Unfavorable Election Results and Motive and Intent to Subvert Them: Things get interesting here. Smith references an “agent” of Trump’s (the agent language is important because it means Trump is responsible for this person’s conduct) who was a campaign employee and sent texts to a campaign lawyer in Detroit encouraging rioting and other obstruction at the TCF Center where the vote count was taking place as it trended against Trump.  It’s so frustratingly reminiscent of the Mueller Report! Something about this witness, perhaps their identity or status as a cooperating witness, or something in the substance of their testimony, is being protected from public disclosure for the moment. The redaction follows this sentence, “the Campaign Employee encouraged rioting and other methods of obstruction when he learned that the vote count was trending in favor of the defendant’s opponent.” Prosecutors pick back up to say they will offer evidence that as the vote began to go Biden’s direction, “a large number of untrained individuals flooded the TCF Center and began making illegitimate and aggressive challenges to the vote count.” Even without knowing what comes in between those two bookend sentences, we know enough now to see that Smith has a compelling example that connects Trump’s knowledge he was losing to a willingness to unleash violence to interfere with finalizing the count. The government concludes this section by noting that as his agent was seeking to disrupt the count with riots, Trump began to make knowingly false statements about the count at the TCF Center. They write, “this evidence is admissible to demonstrate that the defendant, his co-conspirators, and agents had knowledge that the defendant had lost the election, as well as their intent and motive to obstruct and overturn the legitimate results.” This is an example of how Smith will use evidence of specific incidents to substantiate the overall charges against Trump. 404(b) evidence is important in part because it gives jurors confidence that what happened when a crime was committed wasn’t a mistake because the defendant manifested a similar intent on another occasion when something similar took place. ·     Pre- and Post-Conspiracy Evidence Trump and his Co-Conspirators Suppressed Proof Their Fraud Claims Were False and Retaliated Against Officials Who Undermined Their Criminal Plans: Smith makes it explicit in this pleading. He has evidence Trump “repeatedly sidelined advisors and officials who told him or the public the truth about the election results” as part of a deliberate plan and that Trump and his co-conspirators “continued their efforts to stifle any dissent to their false claims of election fraud” even after the conspiracies charged by the government ended. That has always been a fair assumption based on what we observed, but Smith confirms he’s got the goods that lets him prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.   The example he offers involves the Republican National Committee’s (RNC) Chief Counsel at the time, whom Smith alleges Trump and one of his co-conspirators retaliated against for publicly refuting their lies about election fraud. He’s not named in the pleading, but the description matches Justin Riemer, who it was reported as far back as July 2021 had laughed off Trump’s fraud claims following the election. There are a couple of large redacted blocks in this part of Smith’s pleading. But enough is made public for us to understand prosecutors have evidence that the retaliation continued after Trump left office and the conspiracy Smith has charged Trump with ended. Riemer appears to have his own law firm these days and bills himself as an election law lawyer who has “been advising clients and high-ranking Republican officials on election and political law matters for nearly 15 years.” It’s all very interesting. Even though we don’t know what all of Smith’s evidence here looks like because of the redactions, we get his full assessment of what it’s available to prove: “The defendant and his co-conspirators’ and agents’ aggression in stifling dissent against election fraud claims before, during, and after the charged conspiracies is admissible to demonstrate the defendant and his co-conspirators’ knowledge that their fraud claims were false, to establish their plan for depicting their election lies as true, and to show their intent to silence anyone who refuted their false claims.” If knowledge is the key to the case against Trump, Smith seems to have been amassing a good bit of it. ·       Pre- and Post-Conspiracy Evidence of Trump’s Public Attacks on Individuals, Encouragement of Violence, and Knowledge of the Foreseeable Consequences: Smith is going to ram Trump’s attacks on people involved in the cases against him, and especially witnesses, right back down his throat at trial. He writes, “the defendant has an established pattern of using public statements and social media posts to subject his perceived adversaries to threats and harassment.” What conclusion does Smith draw from this undeniable fact? The government says it will introduce pre-conspiracy evidence that shows Trump encouraged violence including his “stand back and stand by” shout out to the Proud Boys during a 2016 presidential debate. And they’ll show this thread of promoting violence continued beyond the end of the conspiracy Trump is charged with, when Trump “continued to falsely attack two Georgia election workers despite being on notice that his claims about them in 2020 were false and had subjected them to vile, racist, and violent threats and harassment.” ·       Post-Conspiracy Evidence of Trump’s Steadfast Support and Endorsement of Rioters: Finally, we get to the matter of Trump’s continued support of rioters who overran the Capitol, violently attacked Capitol police, and defiled the Capitol. It still seems odd to write that. Faced with their conduct, Trump didn’t condemn it. He condoned it and, even more than that, he celebrated it. Jack Smith isn’t going to give him a pass for it.   Smith says he will introduce evidence that “in the years since the January 6 attack on the Capitol, the defendant has openly and proudly supported individuals who criminally participated in obstructing the congressional certification that day, including by suggesting that he will pardon them if re-elected, even as he has conceded that he had the ability to influence their actions during the attack.” As we’ve hoped all along, someone on Smith’s team has been keeping tabs on Trump’s public appearances. The Special Counsel writes that Trump’s support for some of the most violent participants in January 6 will be part of his evidence, including a September 17, 2023, appearance on Meet the Press, where Trump, referring to Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, now convicted of seditious conspiracy, said, “I want to tell you, he and other people have been treated horribly.” Smith says he’ll also delve into Trump’s criticism of lengthy sentences set for other seditious conspiracy defendants. Then there’s Trump’s support for the “January 6 Choir,” inmates in the District of Columbia jail, “many of whose criminal history and/or crimes on January 6 were so violent that their pretrial release would pose a danger to the public” and who Trump has staunchly supported. He played their rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner at the first rally of his 2024 campaign. Watch here. He has supported the financially according to Smith who also says he refers to them as “hostages.” Smith feels strongly about this last category of evidence, and he offers a lot of reasons it’s admissible. He says it proves Trump’s motive and intent, that on January 6 he sent his angry group of supporters “to the Capitol to achieve the criminal objective of obstructing the congressional certification.” Smith says it proves the Trump intended to obstruct the certification because he “held, and still holds, enormous influence over his supporters’ actions” and chose not to end the violence on January 6.  But Smith says the most important proof the evidence provides is that Trump’s “embrace of January 6 rioters is evidence of his intent during the charged conspiracies, because it shows that these individuals acted as he directed them to act; indeed, this evidence shows that the rioters’ disruption of the certification proceeding is exactly what the defendant intended on January 6. And finally, evidence of the defendant’s statements regarding possible pardons for January 6 offenders is admissible to help the jury assess the credibility and motives of trial witnesses, because through such comments, the defendant is publicly signaling that the law does not apply to those who act at his urging regardless of the legality of their actions.” Smith gives us a lot of insight into what some of his evidence is and how he intends to use it. There is a lot here that we didn’t know and that suggests Smith’s evidence is deeper, richer, and more compelling, even than what we’ve seen already. Combine that with news today that people like Mike Pence and Bill Barr will testify against Trump in Georgia, which almost certainly signals they are on board in the D.C. prosecution as well, and it’s easy to understand why Trump’s best strategy is delaying the trial—and the increasingly inevitable moment where he’s finally held accountable by a jury. Also today, six Nevada Republicans were indicted for submitting fake documents in connection with the fake electors scheme in that state. The speculation is that this is, at least in part, the result of Kenneth Chesebro’s cooperation with prosecutors there. He is charged in Georgia with conduct documented in his own emails: he personally drafted the fake electoral documents and sent them, along with directions on filing them, to would-be fake electors. And Chesebro did this not only in Georgia, but also in seven states where the scheme was put into play, including Nevada. That’s why the news he was meeting with prosecutors there garnered so much interest last week. Something else that’s interesting in this mix. In his proffer to Fulton County prosecutors ahead of his plea there, Chesebro told them he met with Donald Trump, in person, in the White House on December 16, 2020. We know that because parts, but not all, of that proffer statement were leaked. But there were reports he said he met with Trump as well as with Mark Meadows and Dan Scavino. Chesebro, if—and I think it’s still a big if—he’s committed to testifying truthfully, may be able to offer direct evidence of Trump’s involvement. Yesterday, Trump acolyte Kash Patel, who served on the National Security Council during the Trump administration, said that if Trump is elected again, his administration will retaliate against people in the media “criminally or civilly.” This happened on Steve Bannon’s podcast. And Patel’s words were really chilling. He said, “We will go out and find the conspirators not just in government, but in the media.” So, not to be a drama queen, but that’s the end of democracy right there. Trump’s campaign said Patel’s comments had “nothing to do with them.” But Trump has also promised “retribution” would be a feature of his second term in office. And in a recent Iowa town hall interview with Sean Hannity, Trump missed the easy and obvious answer when Hannity asked if “Under no circumstances, you are promising America tonight, you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody?” “Except for day one,” Trump replied. What? This exchange carries echoes of Trump’s response in the presidential debate, the one Jack Smith referenced, where Chris Wallace asked Trump if he would condemn white supremacist and militia groups, only for Trump to respond, “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by.” We all know how that ended. Trump’s intentions are out in the open for anyone who is paying attention. His statement to Hannity, that about “day one” and that “after that, I’m not a dictator,” is a bizarre response for a would-be American president... We are all on notice of what Trump intends to do. Now more than ever, and I know I say this almost any time I write to you, it’s critical that we stay engaged and that we try to give those who aren’t information that will wake them up as well. We are in a dangerous moment, and too many people are numb to the implications of a second Trump presidency. Here at Civil Discourse, we aren’t. Please help to spread the word, encourage your friends to subscribe or forward your edition of the newsletter to them. There is lots of work ahead of us. We’re in this together, -Joyce Vance