The ascent of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States in 2016 did not take place in a vacuum, nor did his grab for unprecedented executive power that far transcend democratic norms.

Starting back in the Soviet era, the KGB and its successors methodically studied various components of the American body politic and the economic forces behind it — campaign finance, the US legal system, social media, the tech sector, K Street lobbyists, corporate lawyers, and the real estate industry — and exploited every loophole they could find. In the end, they began subverting one institution after another that was designed to provide checks and balances to safeguard our democracy, including our elections, our executive branch, the Department of Justice, and the intelligence sector.

For the most part, the American media covered the Trump-Russia scandal as if it were a series of major criminal inquiries — following the investigations, prosecutions, and trials of Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Michael Cohen, and other Trump associates; the Mueller Report; Trump’s impeachment and no-witness acquittal in the Senate; and all the rest.

But the investigation began as a counterintelligence investigation, not a criminal probe, and therein lies the problem. Successful intelligence operations often have far higher stakes than ordinary crimes. After all, paying hush money to a porn star out of campaign finances is illegal and can result in jail time, as it did for former Trump layer Michael Cohen. But it pales in significance to installing a Russian asset in the Oval Office. And, believe it or not, that may be perfectly legal.

That’s because, as the KGB and its successor know all too well, intelligence operations are designed within the law, which, thanks to lax regulations, lax enforcement, and the very nature of counterintelligence, has given the plenty of latitude. After all, this is a country in which laundering massive amounts of money through anonymously purchased estate can be done with virtually no risk. It is a country in which it is possible to take money from Russian intelligence, to establish communications with Russian intelligence, and, in effect, Russian asset without breaking the law. It is a country in which the Russians can hire highly paid attorneys as lobbyists, who happen to have access to loads of important secrets, and use them to get what they want.

When one thinks about it like that — as an intelligence operation rather individual crimes — suddenly the interactions of Trump and Trump himself with dozens of Soviet émigrés, Russian mafiosi, businessmen, and the like over forty years can be seen in an entirely different light, not so much as crimes but as part of standardized intelligence operations that served to bring Trump into the KGB’s fold, that tested him to see if he was worth cultivating, that compromised him through lucrative money-laundering schemes, sycophantic flattery, pie-in-the-sky Trump Tower Moscow projects, extravagantly well-paid franchising projects, and more.

One might think questions Trump’s ties to Russia would have been fully addressed by now. After all, the Trump-Russia scandal began to unravel almost immediately after his inauguration. Indeed, less than a month after Trump became president, on February 13, 2017, he got rid of National Security Advisor Michael Flynn for lying about his ties to the Russians. The very next day, Trump urged FBI director James Comey not to investigate Flynn. “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go,” said Trump.

According to the Mueller Report, “The circumstances of the conversation show that the President was asking Comey to close the FBI’s investigation into Flynn.”

But Comey refused to do the president’s bidding — which would have breached the invisible firewall between the executive branch and the FBI — so on May 9, 2017, Trump fired him, too, and then told the world that the entire Trump-Russia thing was a hoax.

The difference between counterintelligence and criminal investigations is not some minor legal distinction. It’s fundamental. Criminal investigations are intended to lead toward prosecution; counterintelligence are not. Instead, they are undertaken to thwart an adversary’s spying, espionage, or sabotage — the adversary in this case, of course, being Russia.

Even though they are not about breaking the law per se, counterintelligence investigations may well involve issues that are far more serious than criminal probes. In this case, the point of a counterintelligence investigation was to protect the United States from Russian interference in America’s elections. From cyberwarfare. From disinformation. From Russian assets who had been groomed for years, perhaps decades, and were finally in place to do real damage to vital American institutions.

So is Trump a Russian asset?

Yes.

But it’s complicated. “When people start talking about Trump’s ties to the KGB or Russian intelligence, some are looking for this super-sophisticated master plan, which was designed decades ago and finally climaxed with Trump’s election as president of the United States,” said Yuri Shvets, a former major in the KGB who came to the United States and now lives outside Washington, DC.

What happened with Trump can best be seen as a series of sequential and sometimes unrelated operations that played into one another over more than four decades.

That’s a big difference between the KGB and some HUMINT [human intelligence] agencies,” Shvets told me during my first interview in what became an extended series of conversations that began in fall 2019. “The KGB is very patient. It can work a case for years. Americans want results yesterday or today; as a result, they have none.”

Excerpted from American Kompromat: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery, by Craig Unger. Published with permission of the author and Dutton, an imprint of the Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2021 by Craig Unger

Copyright © 2021 The Washington Spectator — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 25 February 2021

Word Count: 923

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Developed by John Maynard Keynes during the Great Depression, Keynesian economics provides a blueprint for combating economic stagnation and helping people survive difficult economic times. It advocates government spending programs and tax cuts for the poor and middle class, aiding those in greatest need. Spending by the masses would then generate economic growth and more jobs.

History has shown that Keynesian economics works. The New Deal and spending to fight World War II ended the Great Depression in the United States. After the war, the GI Bill provided a college education, medical benefits, and low-interest mortgages to veterans. Demand for college, medical care, and housing soared; the U.S. economy boomed. And LBJ’s War on Poverty and Great Society programs, including Medicare and Medicaid, led to a booming economy in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Keynesian economics dominated policymaking until around 1980. Then things changed. Republicans pushed tax cuts for corporations and the rich, although neither group needed the extra money and didn’t spend most of it. In 2018, corporations used the windfalls gained from Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 to buy outstanding shares of their stock. Share prices rose; spending barely changed. Wall Street gained. On Main Street things remained the same.

Even worse, Republicans have used Keynesian insights to sabotage the U.S. economy for political ends. When they controlled the government, Republicans ignored the large budget deficits stemming from their tax cuts. When Democrats were in the White House, deficits suddenly became a problem that could only be solved by cutting government spending, largely on needed social programs. Less spending would in turn reduce economic growth and job creation, making it harder for Democrats to win the next Presidential election.

This strategy underpinned Covid-19 relief bills in 2020. Congress passed the $2.2 trillion CARES Act in March, helping small businesses, state and local governments, and the unemployed. Also, a $1,200 check bearing Donald Trump’s signature was sent to Americans making under $100,000 a year. All this was aimed at keeping the U.S. economy from collapsing and improving Trump’s re-election chances (sic).

But these assistance programs were either one-offs (the check) or they expired after a few months. In May, House Democrats passed a $3 trillion Covid relief bill. The Republican-controlled Senate dithered from June to October. As it became more and more likely that Joe Biden would win the 2020 Presidential election, they increasingly balked at another relief bill, claiming Congress had done enough already and the U.S. didn’t need additional debt. Their real goal was to cripple “the Biden economy” in 2021 and into 2022, making Republican victories in the 2022 midterms and the 2024 presidential election more likely.

In late December, Congress finally passed a $900 billion Covid relief bill which President Trump signed into law on December 27. $900 billion, however, was shamefully inadequate given the headwinds facing the U.S. economy in 2021. Consumer confidence and retail sales both fell in October, November, and December. Employment fell by 140,000 in December 2020, the first such drop since April. New weekly claims for unemployment benefits during January have been nearly 1,000,000, compared with 200,000-250,000 at this time a year ago. Millions of small businesses are ready to throw in the towel in addition to those that have already done so. Debt-ridden state and local governments are ready to slash spending and lay off many hundreds of thousands of workers.

The December Covid relief bill was also seriously flawed. Most of the money went to help small businesses ($285 billion), extend unemployment benefits ($290 billion), and deliver $600 checks to most Americans ($170 billion). As with the CARES Act, checks went mainly to people who remain employed and didn’t need them. Sending the checks to everyone doesn’t focus help where it is needed most, and so a large portion of the $170 billion effectively went to waste.

Much of this money will be saved rather than spent, adding little demand to the economy. Another $82 billion went to state and local governments to fund education (K-12 and college). The remaining funds were directed to help produce and distribute Covid-19 vaccines, give tax breaks to business firms, provide food aid to the poor, and help build the President’s wall. Little here is Keynesian.

A first order of business in 2021 must be to enact policies to help those struggling most — state and local governments, small businesses, and the unemployed.

Unlike the Federal government, states can’t print money and must balance their budgets annually. State and local governments project deficits exceeding $250 billion in 2020, in 2021, and again in 2022, mainly because of reduced tax revenues. Local governments have already cut their spending sharply, laying off firefighters, teachers, trash collectors, etc. State and local government employment is down over 1.3 million since February 2020, and will sharply decline again without substantial Federal support. If state and local governments reduce spending by only $300 billion, one-third of the entire $900 billion Covid relief package passed in December will be countered by the actions of lower levels of government.

A Keynesian remedy is simple and easy here. The Federal government must give a large sum of money (at least another $400 billion) to state and local governments so that they don’t lay off their workers. President Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan proposes $440 billion in aid to state and local governments.

High unemployment also calls for Keynesian remedies. During recessions, the Federal government typically extends eligibility for unemployment and picks up the added cost. However, this doesn’t help one-third of the labor force — those not qualifying for unemployment benefits because they are self-employed or fail to meet stringent state requirements regarding past work history. Nor does it deal with the problem of insufficient assistance. U.S. unemployment insurance replaces just 57% of after-tax wages ($320 per week, on average). Some states (Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi) provide less than $220 per week. In Oklahoma weekly unemployment benefits average just $44.

The March 2020 CARES Act added $600 per week in Federal money to state unemployment benefits, and made the self-employed and gig workers eligible for unemployment assistance. Some people received more from unemployment than they could get from working, which became a Republican excuse to let this provision expire in September. The December Covid relief bill provided an extra $300 per week until mid-March. With only a small fraction of the U.S. population vaccinated against Covid-19 by then, and the economy likely to be in recession during the first half of 2021, this is insufficient. Again, President Biden’s $1.9 trillion Covid-19 assistance plan makes things better by increasing the $300 extra per week to $400 extra per week, and extending eligibility for this money through September.

Helping small business is also necessary. Small firms (with under 500 employees) comprise 99% of all U.S. businesses and employ 50% of all U.S. workers. They are failing in record number. More than half of small business owners surveyed in the middle of 2020 thought they would have to shut down their business by the end of Q1 in 2021. Firms dependent on tourism and firms needing people to congregate indoors (like restaurants) are especially vulnerable.

The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), part of the CARES Act, helped somewhat. It enabled small businesses to borrow 10 weeks of usual expenses with the loan forgiven if firms maintain their payroll. But PPP had many problems. Money went to firms (like the LA Lakers) that weren’t struggling, and to small businesses owned by private equity firms, wealthy individuals, or larger businesses.

Biden’s American Rescue Plan provides insufficient relief for small businesses, with proposed grants amounting to $15 billion. Implementations of the second PPP (in the December bill) and then a third PPP (contemplated in the Biden bill) are unlikely to avoid the earlier problems outlined above.

The UK developed a more Keynesian and more effective solution, helping both workers and firms, and circumventing problems associated with PPP. With the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme the Conservative UK government gave money to furloughed workers retained as employees. It paid them as much as 80% of their usual wages, with the government covering 60% of previous wages and the firm 20%. Low-income workers were also eligible for an additional monthly payment, up to the equivalent of $500. Firms survived because their largest expense (payroll) was largely covered by the government. Thriving liquor stores got no government aid; employees of struggling pubs received a good deal of assistance.

There are lots of good provisions in the Biden relief bill. Besides the additional aid to state and local governments and the expanded unemployment benefits, there is an expansion of the child tax credit, expanded paid leave and sick leave, and mortgage foreclosure and eviction relief. But the bill fails to provide needed help to small businesses on the brink of bankruptcy. This will not keep millions of small firms from closing their doors and laying off workers, making a Republican victory more likely in the 2024 Presidential election — perhaps even with Donald Trump running again on the Republican ticket. The UK Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme would be a better model for the U.S. to follow.

Steven Pressman is professor of economics at Colorado State University, author of Fifty Major Economists, 3rd edition (Routledge, 2013), and president of the Association for Social Economics.

Copyright ©2021 The Washington Spectator — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 03 February 2021

Word Count: 1,525

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The U.S. Supreme Court loses something it can hardly get back now that Amy Coney Barrett has been foisted upon it by President Donald Trump and Senate Republicans. It loses even the patina of neutrality that Chief Justice John Roberts has tried to cover it with ever since the Federalist Society, Donald Trump, and those same Republicans stole the seat left vacant by the death of Antonin Scalia. It loses even the appearance of propriety, and the presumption of good faith, that it has almost always had, even in other times where its ideology swung wildly out of proportion to the politics and priorities of the nation it purports to serve. It loses more of its credibility, if not whatever moral authority it had left, and becomes just another collection of political functionaries all vying to extend or retract the law as they see fit.

That’s a loss we all should mourn no matter who we are voting for this election season. It’s a loss our parents could not have fathomed. The court now is populated by three types of Republican appointees. There are two radicals, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, who must be cackling at the prospects of the gun rights they’ll now be able to recognize and the voting rights they’ll now be able to ignore. There are the two political functionaries, Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Barrett, who will be relentlessly tilting the scales of justice toward Republicans and against Democrats for the next half century. And there are the two “adults,” the Chief Justice and Justice Neil Gorsuch, neither of whom for all their courtesies will be remembered as moderate interpreters of law.

The ascension of Barrett means the court’s “center” moves now from Roberts to Gorsuch and that means it moves even more to the right. It means a court as far to the right as it has been in a century. This is what Sen. Mitch McConnell was crowing about Sunday, the skin on his hands as blackened as his soul, when he boasted about Barrett’s confirmation as a move his political adversaries won’t soon be able to overcome. The quiet parts aloud, right? McConnell knows, like the rest of us should, that Amy Coney Barrett wasn’t selected by Donald Trump to be an honest broker of the law.

And she won’t be. There is no reason — none — for anyone to think that Barrett is going to be a fair and neutral arbiter of the relentless political causes and cases she’ll face. There is no reason — none — for criminal defendants or immigration advocates or civil rights attorneys or those who believe in gun regulations or reproductive rights or the Affordable Care Act or stout First Amendment walls between church and state to believe they have a fair shot for her vote. This is so not just because Barrett wouldn’t have passed muster with the Federalist Society if she were wobbly about the far-right ideology she’s espoused all her professional life. It’s also so because of what Barrett said, and didn’t say, during her confirmation hearing.

By accepting the nomination in these dubious circumstances, Justice Barrett, too, loses something she can never replace. Not just her self-respect, which she relinquished minute-by-minute during her desultory confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Not just her independence, which she waived Monday night by appearing with the president at the White House in what amounted to a campaign commercial for a beleaguered candidate. Sworn in by Justice Thomas, whose wife is a conservative activist, Barrett told the crowd of assembled Republicans that she would rule without fear or favor. She spoke these words after favoring her benefactor with her presence a week before Election Day.

She also spoke these words within an hour or so after the Court itself, in a dubious 5-3 ruling, sided with Wisconsin Republicans who had asked the justices to overturn a trial judge’s decision that extended the state’s deadline for receiving absentee ballots to six days after the ruling. This means, during a pandemic, that legitimate votes will not be counted, which is bad enough. What’s worse was the concurrence by Justice Kavanaugh, who indicated that he at least is amenable to having the court stop the counting of ballots on election night. Over and over again this election season, the court’s conservatives have sided with Republicans in election-related litigation. That imbalance will grow measurably worse with Barrett on board.

Barrett’s relentless willingness to serve as a prop for the Trump campaign — two COVID-19 super-spreader events in less than one month’s time — justifies the loss of respect the rest of us ought to have for her and the court itself. No matter how long she lasts on the court, and no matter how much the court’s makeup changes around her, she’ll always be recognized by half the country as an illegitimate justice, a judge whose confirmation was rushed through at the last minute by an unpopular president and a Senate majority on the verge of losing its power. She should have just said no. At a minimum she should have at least said no to the rallies she attended both before and after her confirmation.

Barrett has no one but herself to blame for this sad reality. She could have changed the narrative of her own story earlier this month if she had told the Judiciary Committee, and the rest of the world, that she would recuse herself from any litigation that arises from the 2020 election. Litigation, in other words, that the president said publicly that he needed her to weigh in on, on the side of Republicans, when he nominated her. Any judge below the level of the Supreme Court would be required, by ethics if not by law, to immediately recuse in such circumstances (it’s always about the quid pro quo when it comes to Trump, isn’t it?). Any judge worthy of our respect as a Supreme Court justice would have said so during her confirmation hearing.

But Barrett said nothing — or at least nothing meaningful given the fact that she could well be the swing vote next week that hands the election to the man who just handed her a lifetime appointment to the nation’s highest court. Barrett pledged only to consider the question were it to come before her as a Justice. Perhaps she remembered how angry her benefactor got when Neil Gorsuch, in a similar situation three years ago, took a bolder stand on behalf of judicial independence. The president reportedly even considered rescinding Gorsuch’s nomination. Amy Coney Barrett, groomed for this starring role, would have none of that. So we got empty platitudes. That’s not my idea of an independent judge.

But Barrett doesn’t care what I think, or what you think, or what anyone else thinks beyond those who have helped her rocket to the high court at age 48. Her confirmation secure, she didn’t even try to lift her hearing above the soiled political farce it became. If she had been honorably nominated, and then honorably vetted by a Judiciary Committee, she likely would have received bipartisan support for her nomination despite her reactionary legal views. But clearly no one cares about such hollow courtesies now. Barrett sullies the court just as Trump has sullied her and she’ll sully American law in thousands of decisions from now until our grandchildren and great-grandchildren are picking up the pieces of her shabby work.

When I was just starting out in the law, Justice Thurgood Marshall retired and was replaced by Clarence Thomas, a justice who has spent the past 29 years trying to undo Marshall’s work on the court. Now Amy Coney Barrett takes over for the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and gives every indication that she’s ready, willing, and able to spend the next 40 years undoing Ginsburg’s work. What a shame for all those who once saw the court as a bastion of light, not darkness. I keep hearing that Donald Trump ultimately ruins everything he touches. He and Mitch McConnell have now ruined the Supreme Court, too. That’s both an American tragedy and an open and obvious challenge to Senate Democrats if they win next week.

Andrew Cohen, a lawyer and journalist, is the Legal Affairs Correspondent for The Washington Spectator.

Copyright ©2020 The Washington Spectator — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 28 October 2020

Word Count: 1,364

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The homestretch of the interminable 2020 election is underway. For those who see the presidential contest as a horse race, which includes most of the American press, neither the Trump nor Biden camp appears to have benefited much from its convention, the poll numbers having stayed more or less consistent since July or earlier. How and why as many as 48 percent of eligible voters surveyed consider it acceptable that this individual should continue as president is a question that occupies a lot of my thinking, and one that I’ll try to address in this piece.

People on both sides of this deeply divided country view this election as a fight for the soul of the nation, but any similarity between the opposing camps ends there. President Trump has openly adopted the trappings and the reality of the authoritarian leaders whose respect he covets. He has embraced white supremacists and sided with law enforcement in the debate over recurrent police violence against Black people, while the Democrats have called for inclusivity and racial justice and have nominated the first woman of color to serve on the national ticket of a major party.

Where president Trump has withdrawn from the Paris accord, rolled back regulations on greenhouse gas emissions, and lifted restrictions on polluters across the corporate spectrum, the Democrats have signaled that climate change will be a priority in their agenda and have committed to develop alternative energy options and to reengage with the international community.

You can continue down the list of challenges we face in the United States, challenges that in most instances are also faced by other nations, and on issue after issue, Trump and the status quo business lobby in Congress stake out positions that favor the wealthy over the poor, white over Black, men over women, and profits over nature.

Democrats, in general, present a vision of a country undergoing profound change, driven by demographic shifts, technological innovation, the emergence of women in the workforce, the demands for economic justice and racial equity, and the need to be both better stewards of the environment and better global citizens.

Their positions on the issues resonate with as many as 65 to 70 percent of the electorate, yet for the third time in the 21st century, the Democrats are struggling to avoid losing a national election in which they win the popular vote but lose to the confounding math of the Electoral College.

Most recently in 2016, Hillary Clinton, with overwhelming support from the coastal states and their urban voters, earned nearly three million more votes than her Republican opponent, Donald Trump. Yet she lost in a lopsided tally of 304–227 in the Electoral College, a system held over from the slaveholding days of the 18th century that disproportionately rewards winner-take-all state vote tallies and gives swing states more of a say in the outcome.

It should be noted that many of the current alignments in American politics predate Donald Trump. With the exception of Virginia, the slavery states and the states that permitted slavery in the 1850s are the same states that voted Republican in 2012, more than a century and a half later. From voter suppression and the shredding of the safety net to the tolerance and even encouragement of bias throughout American life, the current Republican Party largely updates the Confederacy.

Democrats no longer count on New Deal coalition And while most Democrats will be reluctant to acknowledge it, the party that delivered the New Deal began to stray from its support of the working-class base as early as the 1970s, when several new cultural and generational trends emerged. It was a time when labor unions were still a major force in American political and economic life and largely reflected the anti-Communist politics of the Cold War years. Their members, many from patriotic immigrant families, were torn over the Vietnam conflict and were reluctant to accept that the United States could be so wrong.

Many rank-and-file Democrats came from traditional households and did not easily adapt to the call for women’s equality. And they bristled when activists in the emerging environmental movement argued that their employment in industry was harmful to the planet.

At the end of the decade, inflation surged into double digits and 52 Americans were held hostage by Iran in a highly public and humiliating affront to American power. In 1980, when a genial, B-list Hollywood actor ran for president on the Republican ticket with vague but seductive promises of a foreign policy based on “peace through strength,” many voters who had historically supported the Democrats — and indeed had reached the middle class largely on the strength of Democratic programs — switched over to vote for Reagan.

The Democratic coalition, with its roots in the Roosevelt era, was broken, and the Reagan Democrat was born.

The jovial new president signaled to the business community that making money was cool again, that taxes on the rich would be lowered and regulations on business would be lifted. Cronyism and corruption proliferated. The 1980s was the decade of indulgence, and for many, the guilt over the prosecution of an unjust war was set aside. Reagan built his 1984 reelection campaign around the slogan “It’s morning again in America,” a theme that the 2016 Trump campaign reprised with its derivative “Make America Great Again.”

Race and religion shape our politics Republicans may not govern as well as Democrats, but they play the political game better (or more ruthlessly), and they certainly do capitalism better. During the Reagan years, the unsustainable gap between rich and poor in America accelerated, and antagonism toward the aspirations of women and Blacks and gays was tacitly encouraged. Most of the labor movement had remained with the Democrats, and the business community and the Reagan administration worked together with notable success to diminish the power and size of the unions. And the Republican courtship of the Religious Right had begun to pay dividends, foreshadowing a time, decades later, when conservative evangelicals would find themselves trying to explain their alignment with a reality-TV host and conflict-saturated real estate mogul who was more at home in Sodom and Gomorrah than the olive gardens of Gethsemane.

Although triumphalist Republicans would try to tell a different story, it was also the beginning of the decline of the Republic, a downward slide that has led us, in the words of the journalist Lou Dubose, to “the squalid, systemic partisan corruption that metastasized into what today is the party of Donald Trump.”

Toward the latter part of the 20th century, facing divided legislatures, increasing deficits, and slowing growth, Democrats found it increasingly difficult to replicate the sweeping social reforms of the New Deal and the Great Society (programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid) and relied largely on incrementalism — income supplements, help for single mothers, college debt relief — to address social problems.

The Clinton administration, in the 1990s, did try for universal health care with its ambitious “Health Security” plan, an attempt at forging a middle path between market forces and regulatory reforms. But despite strong public sentiment for affordable health care, the plan — and its principal spokesperson, Hillary Clinton — were attacked by Republicans and the business community for ushering “too much bureaucracy” and being a “big government” solution. Divided over concerns that the plan did not go far enough, the left provided only lackluster support, and the proposal went down to defeat.

In the postwar years, when the economy was booming, it was possible to ask the middle class to absorb new taxes to pay for benefits for those who needed them most. But later in the century, the global economy cut into the American share, and other factors — above all, the damaging tax cuts Republicans delivered to corporations and the wealthy — helped to derail the American dream.

Republicans have overtly appealed to the racial grievances of white voters since the passage of the Civil Rights Act. In the conventional narrative, their focus has been on the Southern states, provoking a historic realignment premised on white supremacy and producing conservative majorities that voted seamlessly Republican until the Obama campaign in 2008. But in reality, Republicans have long been stoking fears about integration and incipient “urban problems” in comfortable white suburbs throughout the country.

Democrats, for the most part, have advanced the goals of the civil rights agenda — of the 53 African Americans currently in the U.S. Congress (including two delegates), 52 are Democrats and one is a Republican. Though the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act would not have passed without the support of Republicans in the Senate, today the party in both practice and policy is more polarizing on issues of race than at any time in the modern era.

Trump is by far the most unfettered, unapologetic racist since Andrew Johnson to have occupied the White House. Yet his approval ratings have remained consistent, reflecting the profound racial divisions that persist, and Republicans in office refrain from holding him accountable. Conservatives in the Trump era know they are staring into the face of history. The Republican Party understands that changing demographics will overwhelm its efforts to fend off progress, and it has resorted to extraordinary antidemocratic measures to delay this reckoning.

Republicans in the Trump era have launched an attack on immigrants (many of whom were American citizens or were here legally), accusing them of taking American jobs and obscuring the private sector’s role in transferring jobs to low-wage markets overseas. Few recall that it was the policies of the Reagan and Bush Senior years that led to the financial meltdown of the Savings and Loan era, and the utter lack of enforcement during Bush W. that chiefly paved the way for the massive economic dislocations of 2007–08.

Republicans attack the right to vote The right has also built a massive voter-suppression apparatus, based on false claims of voter fraud. These initiatives are aimed at poor people, minorities, students, and ethnic populations who might be expected to vote Democratic.

Officials in Republican-controlled states have re-drawn the boundaries of political districts in ways that violate fundamental constitutional prohibitions against discrimination. They have instituted burdensome voter ID requirements; they’ve reduced the number of polling places in minority and other high-turnout Democratic districts; they’ve reduced the number of days during which voters may cast their ballots, making it harder for working people to vote. And they were abetted by a disastrous Supreme Court decision, Shelby County v. Holder, in which the conservative majority cut the heart out of the Voting Rights Act and signaled to local Republican jurisdictions that they could suppress the vote with impunity.

Even against this backdrop, Trump has shamelessly used the bully pulpit to sow doubt about the integrity of our election system, laying the foundation for a challenge to the legitimacy of the outcome should he lose.

One of the most notable through lines during the Trump years has been the continued success of the right in making its victims its most ardent supporters. Not for the first time, Republicans advanced a tax bill that hugely favors their rich and connected patrons and disingenuously promoted it as a middle-class tax-relief act.

The economist Steven Pressman, writing in The Washington Spectator, has observed that as the 2017 tax bill made its way through Congress, President Trump claimed “his tax giveaway to corporations and the wealthy would trickle down. Everyone would gain. Firms would invest in efficient equipment and in their workers. Household income would rise $4,000, to $9,000. None of this happened. The standard trickle-down Republican hokum, peddled since the 1980s, had the same effect as in the past — the rich gained enormously.”

Trump attacked existing trade deals and wildly exaggerated his negotiating talents. With great fanfare, he replaced Nafta (our trade regime with Mexico and Canada) with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, a warmed-over, rebranded version of its predecessor that was long on rhetoric and short on substance. His only apparent tactic on trade and foreign policy negotiations is to alternate between lavish expressions of admiration and eviscerating ridicule on Twitter, a strategy that may work on reality TV and even in New York real estate but has failed to produce progress in crucial talks with China and has led, unsurprisingly, to further deterioration in relations with North Korea.

“People voted for Donald Trump feeling they had nothing to lose after decades of income stagnation,” Pressman points out. “But lose we did. America lost respect around the world. Many lives have been lost to Covid-19, due to a deadly combination of incompetence and self-serving behavior. And even before the coronavirus hit, income gains during the Trump administration headed toward Wall Street: U.S. workers saw few benefits. Significantly, the president’s two signature economic policies, protectionism and tax reform, abetted this demoralizing outcome.”

Yet still, the base clamors for more. Trump partisans are a mix of white working- and middle-class voters who are estranged from costal elites and resentful at the perception of preferential treatment afforded minorities (try explaining that nuance of American political life to the Black parents of a child hurt or killed by police violence or a random shooting incident). They include the hugely influential religious fundamentalists and values-based coalitions, who have settled on an “imperfect vessel” as the explanation for their hypocritical embrace of the most morally compromised president in U.S. history. And they include the political agnostic who simply wants to pay fewer taxes and make more money.

Widespread concern over response to Covid-19 But very few people anticipated the virus, and it’s the virus — more than any convincing argument, more than any solid evidence, more than direct experience with the impact of the damaging lies this president and his unapologetic allies in Congress and right-wing media have repeatedly told — that will decide the outcome of this election.

Millions of Americans are sick, and tens of thousands are dying, significantly because of Trump’s incompetence and single-minded focus on his own political and financial self-interest. Somehow, the same people who dismiss the rape charges against Trump, who know he underpaid his taxes and broke the law in his business dealings but have been willing to overlook it, who understand he is the furthest distance from being a good Christian a person can be but still make excuses for him; these same people sense that he mishandled the virus and lied about it — is still lying about it — and it bothers them.

The charge of collusion with Russia during the 2016 election and Trump’s repeated denials further underscore the chasm between the president’s lies and political truth. Even after an independent investigation authorized by his own Justice Department reaffirmed the Trump campaign’s dealings with Russia, resulting in jail terms for key campaign operatives, Trump and his visibly compromised attorney general continued to distort and contest the evidence.

Now a Republican-led Senate committee has released a bombshell report concluding, in the words of The New York Times, “the Russian government disrupted an American election (in 2016) to help Mr. Trump become president, Russian intelligence services viewed members of the Trump campaign as easily manipulated, and some of Mr. Trump’s advisers were eager for the help from an American adversary.” While the fallout from these bipartisan findings has yet to filter into the campaign debate, the case against Trump’s reelection was bolstered.

Trump campaign operatives, however, seem undeterred. The fine investigative journalist Anne Nelson revealed in The Washington Spectator that in May, when Covid-related deaths were nearing 74,000, members of the president’s reelection campaign team recruited a few compliant doctors with questionable credentials to argue publicly against the use of masks and lockdowns and to offer spirited claims that, contrary to numerous studies, the extremely dangerous hydroxychloroquine was an effective remedy.

They staged a press conference on the steps of the Supreme Court, attended largely by a few straggling tourists, but the video was aired on Breitbart News, where it reached 185,000 viewers. Over its six hours on Facebook, the video was the second-most-engaged post on the platform, with 14 million views. A few hours after the presentation, President Trump tweeted to his 84.5 million followers, and Donald Trump Jr. told his 5.3 million followers to watch the video.

Social media, however, is growing wise to the prevaricator in chief. Nelson reports that Facebook took the group’s video down a few hours after it was posted, and Twitter and YouTube followed suit, “all three on the grounds that the video violated their Covid-19 misinformation policies.”

There is still a long road to travel before the election in November. Given the administration’s fatal mismanagement of its response to the virus, and an economy in shambles, with no particular policy achievements to point to and without a discernible agenda for Trump’s second term, Republicans are fanning racial fears and counting on conservative media to distract voters from the overwhelming documentation of the president’s moral deficiencies and political failures.

The 2020 elections will turn, in part, on whether local precincts can offset Republican efforts to disrupt the vote and whether Democrats can inspire Black voters and women and wavering independents to go to the polls based on more than just their disgust with Trump. Will Democrats succeed in offering voters a promising path out of the mess Trump has created? And will very narrow slices of the electorate, who live and vote in bellwether districts that disproportionately affect the national race, look beyond Trump’s self-serving lies and conclude, after nearly four years of this unscrupulous peacock, that our country cannot survive four more?

Hamilton Fish is the editor and publisher of The Washington Spectator.

Copyright ©2020 The Washington Spectator — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 28 October 2020

Word Count: 2,916

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Until recently deemed irrevocably in Donald Trump’s column, Ohio has been thrown into play as November’s election hurtles near.

A series of opinion polls since the spring have put Trump neck and neck with Joe Biden. Analysts say that makes Ohio a mineshaft canary for the president’s reelection, regardless of whether he ultimately carries the state.

“A close outcome in Ohio means that Trump has lost enough support in the Midwest that he will lose the states he really needs,” says Kyle Kondik, an expert on Ohio politics and elections.

That both parties wrote off the state as a battleground this year seemed logical. After all, Republicans hold the governor’s mansion, the legislature, every senior elected state office, one U.S. Senate seat, and all but two of 16 U.S. congressional districts.

Trump won the state last time by eight points, more than double Barack Obama’s margin of victory four years earlier. Hillary Clinton won all the state’s major cities except Dayton, which she lost by a hair. But Trump carried all but eight of Ohio’s 88 counties, and overwhelmingly in the more rural ones.

The results in 2016 painted Ohio’s political map as a strawberry tart sprinkled with a handful of blueberries. But things may have changed. If the state really is up for grabs, it is owed to a congealing and unstable brew of defecting conservatives, disgusted suburbanites, and pacified progressives.

Last November, the Spectator alerted readers to the real possibility of a Democratic comeback in Ohio and nearby states, the prospects for which would improve if the party’s primaries produced a moderate like Biden.

Despite some defections, polling suggests most rural voters and working-class white voters remain with the president. But urban liberals, many of whom stayed home four years ago to spite Clinton, appear ready to turn out for Biden. Suburban voters, especially women put off by Trump as a person, may tip the balance.

“Joe Biden might not have been their first choice, but maybe he was their third choice, and that’s good enough for them,” says Bill Wood, a magazine editor and founding member of a progressive political group in the booming Columbus suburb of Westerville. “There couldn’t be bigger difference between the two parties.”

While losing the national popular vote by three million ballots, Trump gained the White House with the electoral votes of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. He carried each state, whose demographics and voter concerns resemble Ohio’s, by less than a percentage point.

An August poll of polls by FiveThirtyEight, a statistical analytics firm, showed Biden ahead in Ohio by the thinnest of margins. In comparison, the website had Biden leading in Michigan by more than seven points; in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania by more than six.

Many expect those three Midwestern states, and perhaps a few others, to decide November’s contest.

“Ohio is going to vote to the right of the nation again,” says Kondik, the elections expert. “If it is close either way, that suggests that Trump is losing.”

Although many see this November’s vote as a referendum on Trump, the state Republican Party has troubles of its own, after years of complete political control.

Governor Mike DeWine remains popular for his handling of the pandemic. But the party was rocked in July when Larry Householder, the powerful speaker of the state legislature, was indicted on charges of taking $60 million in bribes to pass legislation favoring a utility.

“People are questioning the current direction of the Republican Party and are open to voting for the alternative,” Wood says. “We see it in people we talk to, neighbors who have been reliably Republican in the past. It will have a very significant effect in towns that are traditionally Republican.”

A late-July survey by the Bliss Institute, a think tank at the University of Akron, put Biden four points ahead, 46 to 42, just outside the margin of error.

“Without a doubt, Ohio is a battleground,” says political scientist David Cohen, the institute’s acting director.

One newspaper’s illustration of the survey results shows Biden’s support cutting across Ohio like a multihued sash — from the deep-blue Cleveland area in the northeast to the robin-egg tint in the erstwhile Republican redoubt of metropolitan Cincinnati in the south.

“The suburbs are now pretty rapidly changing from being a strength of Republicanism to being a bastion of the Democrats,” Cohen says. “Educated women, especially in the suburbs, are disgusted by Trump’s language. It’s not only in Ohio: people across the country are tired of the craziness.”

Barb Lewis, a conservative Republican county commissioner in the suburbs north of Columbus, agrees.

“We’re seeing a huge gender gap,” Lewis says of the more prosperous and growing communities in her Delaware County. “There certainly is a reticence among people because of the president’s personal style.”

But Lewis, a political scientist who taught election campaigns at Ohio State University, says those suburbanites’ disdain of Trump as a person could be overcome by support for the conservative judges he’s appointed and economic policies he’s favored. Fear of crime and protest violence — in Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis, and Kenosha, Wisconsin — could erode white suburban support for racial equality efforts, a major Democratic theme.

“When their personal safety is at stake, they will vote for whoever will protect them,” Lewis says. Not surprisingly, an ad blitz by the Trump campaign played to those worries, warning viewers that “you won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America.”

Both Biden and Kamala Harris have been criticized by more left-leaning Democrats and independents for their records of being tough on crime. That may help them fend off Trump’s demagogic attacks.

But Lewis says that many voters in her suburban world may still vote for Trump but be unwilling to talk about it with anyone but their closest family and friends. “If they say they are for Trump, then they will have to defend it immediately,” she says.

Clinton garnered some 300,000 fewer votes in Ohio in 2016 than Obama did in 2012. Trump, in turn, bested Mitt Romney’s turnout by nearly a quarter-million votes.

Trump excited white rural and working-class urban voters. Many others who lean Democratic either voted for him or stayed home to spite Clinton, figuring she would easily win.

With November’s vote a clear referendum on Trump — and Sanders publicly supporting Biden — the rifts in the Democratic ranks have been healed for now, analysts and Democratic operatives say.

“I see some semblance of getting in line and behind the ticket,” says Chris Redfern, who resigned his nine-year chairmanship of the state’s squabbling Democratic Party after Republicans swept state elections in 2014. “This thing is baked. I don’t know many undecided voters. Biden wins.”

Most white working-class voters, who exit polls suggest make up more than half of the electorate, will likely stick with Trump, says Dave Betras, a longtime Democratic operative in Mahoning County, which anchors Ohio’s battered steel industry.

Clinton barely won the county, which includes the once reliably blue and union city of Youngstown, while Trump surged. Signs supporting Trump, many of them handmade, flourish in yards across the region this summer, Betras said, eclipsing the few backing Biden.

“I’ve never seen anyone defy political gravity like he does,” Betras says. “He’s the smartest stupid person I know. He has a talent and a knack to feel the mood. He seems to know what feeds the bad angels on people’s backs.”

“They say they know he’s crazy,” Betras says of Trump backers he knows. “They don’t care.”

Maybe they don’t. But Chris Gibbs, a longtime Republican stalwart in southwestern Ohio, does.

Gibbs, a 62-year-old former Republican county chairman and election board president, says he reluctantly jumped aboard the train after Trump won the 2016 nomination. Though disgruntled by trade tensions that sapped grain exports, Gibbs consoled himself with Trump’s judicial appointments and regulatory rollbacks.

He finally stepped off the train, Gibbs says, when Trump kowtowed to Vladimir Putin at their 2018 Helsinki summit.

“The Republican Party was a welcoming place, where disparate views were brought together,” Gibbs said of his old political home. “Everyone had the opportunity to be heard. Today’s Republican Party has no resemblance to that. It’s a populist cult that’s all about tearing down.”

Now Gibbs and a handful of other conservatives have founded Operation Grant, a local affiliate of the Lincoln Project, the movement of never-Trump conservatives that has been churning out damning ads against Trump.

He and his fellow Ohio deserters — all locally prominent Republicans — have no illusions about swaying a majority of their party against Trump. John Kasich, the conservative and once-popular former Ohio governor who has endorsed Biden, is widely vilified by Ohio Republicans.

Gibbs and his colleagues just hope to convince enough Republicans to make a difference.

“To me, this is a matter of conscience,” says Phil Heimlich, a Cincinnati lawyer who has served as a Republican city and county commissioner.

“There are a significant number of Republicans in this state who are fed up with Trump,” says Heimlich. “These are the people we are trying to reach. We’re saying to them, let’s put country first and party second. The man is a danger to the country and a threat to democracy.”

For his part, Gibbs points to polling that suggests Trump’s support in rural voters has been cut from about 30 points to nine.

“There is still strong support of the president. These are conservative people,” Gibbs say of his neighbors in Shelby County, a rural county north of Dayton that gave Trump 78 percent of the vote. “But everybody has their internal red lines. We are trying to get the word out in rural communities that it is OK to change your mind. . . . You can stand up.”

As a staff correspondent for the Houston Chronicle, The Wall Street Journal, and other newspapers, Dudley Althaus has spent his career reporting on politics and other issues in Texas, the U.S.-Mexico border, and across Latin America.

Copyright ©2020 The Washington Spectator — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 28 September 2020

Word Count: 1,617

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Two numbers reveal everything you need to know about the U.S. economy over the past two decades. Between 1999 and 2018, the S&P 500 grew 6 percent annually, after accounting for dividends (2 percent annual gain) and inflation (2 percent annual loss). Stock prices more than doubled in value over this time period. Wall Street boomed.

Over the same time period, Main Street saw 0 percent gains. Workers got shut out. According to official government statistics, median household income rose a tiny fraction of one percentage point annually, after adjusting for inflation, and less than 3 percent in total. But this overstates how poorly average Americans have fared. A 2013 change in how the government collected its data led to a 3 percent increase in reported income. That means middle-class incomes actually changed little over two decades — even as more household members were working and people were working more jobs and more hours.

These two numbers (6 percent annual growth in the S&P and 0 percent net growth in median household income) are connected. Average incomes stagnated because corporations absconded with all economic gains; their profits then increased stock prices. The two numbers also delivered a dire political outcome. A third-rate real estate developer with a history of racism and misogyny became president because Americans sought change and thought Trump understood this, that he would help Main Street.

People voted for Donald Trump feeling they had nothing to lose after decades of income stagnation.

But lose we did. America lost respect around the world. Many lives have been lost to Covid-19 due to a deadly combination of incompetence and self-serving behavior. And even before the coronavirus hit, income gains during the Trump administration headed toward Wall Street; U.S. workers saw few benefits. Significantly, the president’s two signature economic policies, protectionism and tax reform, abetted this demoralizing outcome.

Donald Trump frequently complains about the U.S. trade deficit — the United States buys more from other nations than they buy from us. For him, this means U.S. jobs get sent abroad, hurting the U.S. economy. We are losers.

But the president gets things backward. U.S. trade deficits stem from an economy that is doing relatively better than its main trading partners. Low U.S. unemployment leads to more consumer spending and increased imports. High unemployment abroad leads foreign consumers to spend less. As they buy fewer U.S.-made goods, we export less.

China is an exception here and accounts for a majority of the U.S. trade deficit. This is because China doesn’t play by the rules. It steals intellectual property and protects Chinese firms from foreign competition. Cheap labor, and less spending on worker protection, lets China provide inexpensive parts to multinational firms. This puts downward pressure on U.S. wages as workers are threatened with having their jobs move to China.

President Obama developed the Trans-Pacific Partnership (which, in fairness, received uneven support here at home and a general thumbs-down from labor) to pressure China to end its trade restrictions and recognize intellectual property, using the combined force of China’s main trading partners as a cudgel. President Trump withdrew the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership upon taking office. China persevered with its trade policies. President Trump failed to change anything. The U.S. trade deficit with China in goods barely changed: from $347 billion in 2016 (pre-Trump) it fell to $346 billion in 2019.

Then there was Nafta — according to Trump, the worst trade deal ever and the cause of the U.S. trade deficit with Canada and Mexico. On July 1, Trump’s deal, the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, replaced Nafta. Yet this new North American trade deal differs little from Nafta. To the extent it does, it provides greater incentives for U.S. manufacturers to shed American jobs and move them to Mexico. So much for helping Main Street.

Trump has done even worse when it comes to taxation. He ran for president promising “the largest tax reductions… for the middle class” and a 35 percent tax cut for a middle-class family with two children. Actually, his 2017 tax bill did little for average Americans. Small tax breaks for some middle-income households will disappear over the next few years. Yet large corporations and the rich received huge tax cuts. After-tax corporate profits reached record levels.

As the tax bill made its way through Congress in 2017, the president claimed that his tax giveaway to corporations and the wealthy would trickle down. Everyone would gain. Firms would invest in efficient equipment and in their workers. Household income would rise $4,000 to $9,000. None of this happened. The standard trickle-down Republican hokum, peddled since the 1980s, had the same effect as in the past — the rich gained bigly.

Businesses’ investment grew more slowly in 2018 and 2019 than in 2016 and 2017. This is not surprising, as the new tax law provides huge incentives for companies to invest overseas rather than in the United States. Foreign subsidiaries of U.S. companies are now taxed at half the 21 percent corporate rate that applies to domestic profits.

Firms didn’t spend more money training their workers. Instead, record corporate profits were used to buy back outstanding shares of stock, with the goal of raising stock prices. Median household income rose $553 the year that Trump’s tax cut took effect — far from what was promised, and below the $847 increase in 2017 and the $978 gain in pre-Trump 2016.

President Trump was also wrong when he claimed his tax bill would be revenue neutral because the enormous economic growth it unleashed (5 percent or more) would generate enough tax revenue to pay for it. The economy grew at a rate of 2.5 percent in 2018 and 2019, a bit more than the 2 percent growth the two years prior to the tax cut, but half the promised 5 percent minimum. The result was a government budget $200 billion deeper in red ink each year.

Budget deficits are desirable sometimes. If consumers and companies can’t or won’t spend, the government must step in; otherwise, goods won’t be sold and workers will get laid off. At other times budget deficits are harmful. The 2017 tax cut was a huge mistake because it didn’t boost the economy and because workers on Main Street got nothing. It was an even bigger mistake because budget surpluses (or small deficits) during good economic times make it is easier to run large deficits in difficult times. The lost revenues could have supported the millions of Americans forced to stay at home in order to reduce coronavirus infections and save lives.

Covid-19 has led to massive job and income losses and rising household indebtedness. Wall Street panicked. From mid-February to mid-March, stock prices tumbled, reversing their entire gain during the Trump administration.

President Trump panicked in turn. Rather than addressing the pandemic, he pushed to reopen the economy, caring more about falling stock prices and how they might impact his election prospects than about American lives. Instead of listening to public health experts, he politicized the coronavirus. Initially he denied the problem, claiming it would disappear by April. He promoted phony cures that “someone” told him would work. He proudly pranced about without a face mask and held rallies without social distancing, scorning the two best ways to stop the coronavirus from spreading.

The latter action put Trump’s own supporters at risk. If they caught Covid-19 at a Trump rally, they would lose weeks of work while in quarantine, even if they had no symptoms, and months of work if they did. Covid-19 would spread to friends and family, putting lives at risk.

We can estimate the lives lost from not taking simple precautions and from reopening the U.S. economy too soon. Had the U.S. and Canadian Covid-19 death rate been the same, 96,000 fewer Americans would have died from Covid-19 (as of August 22). This is more than half of all U.S. Covid-19 deaths. If trends continue, by November more than 130,000 Americans will have died because the United States has not done as well as Canada. The rich can escape to their country estates, working safely from home and/or living off their wealth. Those getting ill and dying reside on Main Street.

Steven Pressman is professor of economics at Colorado State University, author of Fifty Major Economists, 3rd edition (Routledge, 2013), and president of the Association for Social Economics.

Copyright ©2020 The Washington Spectator — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 23 September 2020

Word Count: 1,362

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On July 27, a dozen physicians posed in front of the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., dressed in white lab coats with “America’s Frontline Doctors” stitched over the pocket. The group’s chief spokesperson was Dr. Simone Gold, an emergency physician from Los Angeles. They were introduced by Jenny Beth Martin, the founding CEO of Tea Party Patriots, as participants in the “White Coat Summit.” The doctors made spirited arguments for the use of hydroxychloroquine as a “cure” for Covid-19 and against wearing masks and imposing lockdowns — all running counter to the recommendations of Dr. Anthony Fauci and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Although the event was billed as a “press conference,” few journalists attended. A video posted by a bystander showed only a handful of attendees, most of them dressed in tourists’ shorts and T-shirts. But the event was livestreamed by Breitbart News and quickly went (so to speak) viral.

There was a rapid backlash. Much of the media attention focused on Dr. Stella Immanuel, one of Gold’s cohort. Following the press conference, the Daily Beast posted a video of Immanuel, who is also a Pentecostal preacher, delivering a sermon claiming that various female ailments were caused by sexual visitations from “demons.”

Immanuel has since disappeared from the America’s Frontline Doctors online roster, but the group has continued to get traction. On August 10, Pat Robertson’s show on the Christian Broadcasting Network carried an interview with Simone Gold and an endorsement of her hydroxychloroquine cure. On August 21, Alex Jones’s NewsWars carried an interview with another member of America’s Frontline Doctors, Mark McDonald. McDonald — a child psychiatrist — maintained, “If all Americans had access to hydroxychloroquine, the pandemic would essentially end in about 30 days.”

Science has shown otherwise. Despite early hopes last spring, there is mounting evidence that hydroxychloroquine is a problematic — and even dangerous — treatment for Covid-19. One expert with firsthand knowledge is Nick Sawyer, an academic emergency physician in Sacramento, Calif. In July he wrote an article for Lifeline, the publication of the California chapter of the American College of Emergency Physicians, describing his harrowing two weeks of service in the Covid wards of Elmhurst Hospital in Queens. Sawyer was part of a team of California doctors dispatched by Governor Gavin Newsome to offer emergency assistance at the epicenter of the epidemic, at the height of the New York City outbreak.

Sawyer is now dealing with the spike in cases in California, this time with the benefit of four months of additional Covid research. “The science on the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine in treating Covid-19 is settled — multiple high-quality studies have shown that it shows no benefit,” he notes. Far more concerning, Sawyer says, is its potential harm: “Hydroxychloroquine can cause unstable cardiac arrhythmias, cardiac arrest and sudden cardiac death.” Over recent months, the Food and Drug Administration, the American Medical Association, and other organizations have issued warnings that the drug should be withdrawn as a Covid-19 treatment. “It’s irresponsible for America’s Frontline Doctors to continue to push this medication on the unwitting American population,” Sawyer states.

Why, then, would Gold’s band of physicians continue its campaign to pitch the treatment to the public? Simone Gold has repeatedly described her group as a “grassroots organization” acting in the service of its patients. In fact, it has been a highly orchestrated effort, months in the making, assembled by conservative Washington insiders in direct consultation with the White House, with the goal of reopening the economy in time to benefit Trump’s reelection prospects — regardless of the toll in human lives.

The first public mention of the initiative may have been a Washington Post story on April 13, as the virus raged across New York City and Covid-19 deaths passed the 20,000 mark. The Post reported the creation of a new conservative coalition “pushing for the White House and GOP lawmakers to push back against health professionals who have urged more caution.” The leadership was listed as Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation, Adam Brandon of FreedomWorks, and Lisa Nelson of the American Legislative Exchange Council. A fourth individual, Jenny Beth Martin, is the founding director of the Tea Party Patriots. She would play a key role in organizing the events to come, including the doctors’ Washington “summit” in July.

Brandon, Nelson, and Martin are all prominent members of a secretive organization called the Council for National Policy, a shadowy coalition that coordinates initiatives among conservative megadonors, political operatives, and media owners, many of them Christian fundamentalists.

The Post story quoted an interview with Richard Viguerie, a co-founder of the CNP, on the mission of the initiative: “The sooner we get the economy going and back up, the better it’s going to be for conservatives and Republicans in this election year…. Conservatives feel the government has overreacted, and it’s got to end.”

The new coalition, called Save Our Country, officially debuted on April 27, as U.S. Covid deaths approached 55,000. Headed by economist Art Laffer, its maiden press release featured quotes from Brandon, Nelson, and Martin. “The long-term consequences of a prolonged societal shutdown outweigh the damage done by the virus itself,” Martin stated. “We must immediately reopen the economy.” Earlier that week, The New York Times reported that the Save Our Country coalition’s members were mobilizing their networks for state-level rallies, filing lawsuits, and commissioning polls, all to counter the lockdowns: “Nonprofit groups including FreedomWorks and Tea Party Patriots have used their social media accounts and text and email lists to spread the word about protests across the country.”

But the state-level protests turned out to be of limited utility, and the group began to look for new avenues. In April, CNP Action, the lobbying arm of the CNP, began a series of weekly conference calls to discuss Covid strategy. On May 11 — as U.S. Covid deaths reached 74,270 — one of the calls was intercepted and published by the Center for Media and Democracy and the Associated Press.

Among the participants were CNP President William Walton, CNP member Nancy Schulze, and Mercedes Schlapp, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign. Schulze, the wife of former nine-term Pennsylvania Republican Congressman Dick Schulze, opened the call with a warning that two-thirds of the American people were wary of reopening the economy. But, she added, “Doctors are seen by the American people — they have a 92 percent trust rate with the American people according to polling…. There is a coalition of doctors, doctors’ coalition, who are extremely pro-Trump, that have been preparing and coming together for the war ahead in the campaign on health care, and these doctors could be activated for this conversation now for reopening.

“The one thing the left does give credence to, in that they tend to be motivated by a secular worldview, the one thing that they do appreciate and listen to is science, and we have doctors that have the facts, that lived this themselves, that are in the trenches, that are saying it’s time to reopen,” Schulze continued. “I’ve been working with them for three years. There’s a coalition of doctors…. including the most respected doctors in this country, that are ready to speak if somebody will just call on them.”

Walton told her, “We need to not just make the economic argument, we need to make the health argument, and we need doctors to make that argument, not us. And so that would be great if you, if we could tee that up.”

Schulze said she’d be happy to put him in touch “with any and all of these doctors, and I have submitted 27 of these doctors’ names to the campaign for the doctors’ coalition that they’re in the process of building.”

Mercedes Schlapp asked Schulze if she had spoken with Hannah Castillo, director of coalitions for the Trump campaign. “I know they’ve been working on building that coalition. I know they’re going through the vetting process right now. As long as you have the names, that would be helpful. . . . Those are the type of guys we want to get out on TV and radio to help push out the message.”

Schulze replied, “I’ve been working with Hannah for over six weeks now, so they already have been vetted. But they need to be put on the screen.”

Dr. Simone Gold, a 54-year-old emergency physician from Los Angeles, was ready for her close-up. On April 22, Gold had tweeted a stand-up of herself wearing a white “Emergency Dept.” coat, in front of Los Angeles’ Cedars-Sinai hospital emergency room, suggesting that concerns over the virus were inflated. She pointed out that the hospital “parking lots are empty, the emergency department volume is down, the patient census is down, and that’s really in most of the areas I’ve been to.”

On May 7, she brought a more explicit anti-lockdown message to a program on the Whiskey Politics show on Salem Radio, part of the massive Salem Media conglomerate owned by two leading members of the Council for National Policy. It was headlined “DR. SIMONE GOLD GOES PUBLIC! What the Government WON’T Tell Us About COVID-19.”

“It’s not at all clear that overall, that social distancing is going to make a huge impact,” Gold said. “We’re all acting like as though there’s a huge medical crisis. There’s a medical issue, we should handle it responsibly, but what’s going on in our country now is a terrible legal crisis. Our constitutional rights are being trampled on right and left.” Gold later added, “There’s always viruses . . . but I’m not sure that it’s front-page news.”

The Guardian reported that over the same period, the Save Our Country coalition spent $50,000 on videos on social media platforms “targeting independents and Republicans with the message that Covid-19 mostly hits the elderly to minimize risks for others.”

On May 19 — as U.S. Covid deaths reached 84,640 — the CNP’s doctors coalition (billed as “A Doctor A Day”) made its debut with an open letter to Donald Trump signed by “500+ doctors” (a number that was later revised to over 800). “In medical terms, the shutdown was a mass casualty incident,” it stated. “It is impossible to overstate the short, medium, and long-term harm to people’s health with a continued shutdown.” The lead signatory was Dr. Simone Gold.

On June 16 — with U.S. Covid deaths approaching 110,000 and the U.S. economy in freefall — the Save Our Country coalition published an open letter to President Trump and Leader McConnell, urging “that the multi-trillions of dollars of federal government debt spending in the wake of the Coronavirus come to a stop.” Twelve of the 20 signatories (among them Brandon, Nelson, and Martin) were members of the CNP, including CNP President William Walton and Executive Director Bob McEwen.

The push to reopen the schools became a full-court press. On July 7, Trump assembled a White House meeting on the subject. Jenny Beth Martin spoke as both the CEO of Tea Party Patriots and “as a mom.”

“Mr. President, you were right, and I hope you will trust your instincts,” she told Trump. “America is not meant to be shut down. And we have to reopen schools this fall. I’ve been in touch with almost a thousand doctors from around the country. I helped Dr. Simone Gold spearhead a letter to you signed by 800 physicians and surgeons who talked about the side effects of the lockdowns. I’ve done a second letter with over 150 doctors, 240 nurses, 330 educators, 70 national groups, and thousands of parents and concerned Americans who want to see schools reopened.”

A video of Martin’s statement appeared, billed as “Mom Gives Unexpected Speech Directly to Trump” without naming her or her affiliation. It was posted on various social media platforms, including Glenn Beck’s YouTube channel, The Blaze (where it clocked over 400,000 views as of August 4).

Dr. Simone Gold was now preparing to join Jenny Beth Martin on center stage. On July 22, Gold warmed up for her appearance on The Charlie Kirk Show, with over 157,000 YouTube subscribers. Kirk, a member of the Council for National Policy, heads a group called Turning Point USA, which recruits right-wing campus activists. (Donald Trump addressed its Youth Action Summit last December, and Donald Trump Jr. is quoted on its website stating, “I’m convinced that the work by Turning Point USA and Charlie Kirk will win back the future of America.”)

The introduction for Kirk’s show summed up the case Gold and her colleagues would make over the coming weeks: “Charlie is joined in studio by board-certified emergency physician Dr. Simon [sic] Gold, who says nearly everything we’ve been told about the Chinese Coronavirus is a lie. She and Charlie take a deep dive into the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine and why the U.S. government is barring physicians from prescribing the drug — endangering potentially 100,000 lives, at least. Charlie also takes on Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx, asking if Dr. Gold challenges the effectiveness of wearing masks. Dr. Gold makes a stunning and factual assertion about the death rates and who exactly is to blame for what she believes is one of the biggest lies ever perpetrated against the American people.”

Gold’s “stunning assertion” was the often-repeated claim that doctors were falsifying death certificates, speculating without foundation that they were inflating Covid-19 cases by “20 to 30 percent.” Gold also asserted, “Masks are really foolish, they don’t do anything. . . . There’s zero scientific justification for the mask.”

Jenny Beth Martin emphasized a social media campaign from the start. Her Tea Party Patriots website posted the program of the White Coat Summit, offering the participating doctors a two-hour session devoted to expanding their social media reach: “YouTube and other social media vastly exceed television news as the information source for most Americans. Interviews and Q/A with social media personalities with large followers is the best way to talk to Americans. Doctors who want to answer questions from these modern journalists will have the opportunity.”

By the time Jenny Beth Martin hosted Gold’s White Coat Summit on July 27, U.S. Covid-19 deaths had skyrocketed to over 136,000. The physicians’ presentation carried a lethal stew of misinformation. Dr. Bob Hamilton, a pediatrician from Santa Monica, assured viewers, “Children are not passing [the virus] on to their parents or their teachers.” (A few days later, the CDC released a report on a massive transmission event in June at a Georgia summer camp, with a median age of 12.)

Dr. Richard Urso — an ophthalmologist — praised hydroxychloroquine as a “cure” for the virus, but it was not clear that Urso had ever had any significant experience treating Covid-19 patients. Another speaker was Dr. Daniel Erickson, a Bakersfield physician who co-owns an urgent care facility. In April he had been censured by the American College of Emergency Physicians and the American Academy of Emergency Medicine for his “reckless and untested musings” opposing stay-at-home orders and promoting the conspiracy theory about doctors misattributing deaths to Covid-19.

The social media strategy paid off. Gold and her colleagues’ video, livestreamed on Breitbart News, reportedly reached 185,000 concurrent users. The New York Times’ Kevin Roose reported that over its six hours on Facebook, it was the second-most-engaged post on the platform, with 14 million views. (The audiences for network news broadcasts, by comparison, range from 9 to 12 million.) A few hours after the presentation, President Trump tweeted the video to his 84.5 million followers. Donald Trump Jr. told his 5.3 million Twitter followers, “This video is a much [sic] watch!!! So different from the narrative everyone is running with.” Trump redoubled his support at his press conference the following day, stating “I think they’re very respected doctors.”

But major social media platforms reacted with relative speed. Facebook took the group’s video down a few hours after it was posted, and Twitter and YouTube followed suit, all three on the grounds that the video violated their Covid-19 misinformation policies. Twitter took the unusual step of suspending Trump Jr.’s account for 12 hours.

Gold had built the original America’s Frontline Doctors website on a SquareSpace platform, but SquareSpace took it down. Gold rebuilt the website (omitting Stella Immanuel of “demon sperm” renown) and started raising money through PayPal and fundly.com. The doctors’ program also remained on the Tea Party Patriots site.

There was an additional reaction to the doctors’ “frontline” Covid credentials. MedPageToday, a peer-reviewed medical news site, was unable to find evidence that any of America’s Frontline Doctors in Washington had served in “frontline” emergency rooms during the Covid epidemic. Simone Gold came under additional scrutiny. Her initial Whiskey Politics introduction described her as a “frontline doctor” in an “inner-city emergency room” that treated “150 patients a day,” but neither her LinkedIn profile nor other available sources listed the emergency room in question. Her personal website (taken down amid the controversy but archived) described her as a “Concierge Immediate Needs Physician” working in “C-Suite Medicine.”

On July 29, Cedars-Sinai, the backdrop for Gold’s Twitter video, issued a disavowal stating, “Simone Gold, MD, has not worked with Cedars-Sinai Medical Center or any of its offices or affiliates since 2015. For three weeks in late 2015, Dr. Gold was employed on a per diem basis by Cedars-Sinai Medical Network, a component of Cedars-Sinai. She worked during this brief time in a network urgent care clinic. Dr. Gold is not authorized to represent or speak about any information on behalf of Cedars-Sinai.”

The sharecare.com “Find a Doctor” site stated that “Dr. Simone Gold, MD, is a[n] emergency medicine specialist in Los Angeles, CA. and is affiliated with Centinela Hospital Medical Center.” But on July 31, Centinela Hospital posted a statement reading: “Simone Gold, MD, is not credentialed as part of the Centinela Medical Staff, as she resigned her position here a number of years ago. Dr. Gold was never employed here as we don’t employ our physicians.”

Also troubling was American Frontline Doctors’ repeated suggestion that patients should demand hydroxychloroquine from their doctors for Covid-19. The medication has been an important treatment for lupus and other autoimmune diseases, but the publicity around its application to Covid has created an ongoing shortage with devastating consequences.

Much of the mainstream coverage of America’s Frontline Doctors was devoted to Stella Immanuel’s “demon sperm” sermon, but alternative platforms were another story.

Simone Gold was reaching a vast new public and was now celebrated as a victim. On July 30, Fox News’s Tucker Carlson interviewed her on his nightly program. The crawl stated, “Doctor Censored by Big Tech Has Now Lost Her Job” (though that job was never specified) — echoing Trump’s executive order on Big Tech censorship released the previous day. (Carlson’s show is currently the highest-rated program on cable television, with an audience of over 4.3 million.)

Glenn Beck’s multi-platform media operation, The Blaze, covered the story on his radio program and posted the Tucker Carlson video on its website on July 31, with a companion piece repeating her case for hydroxychloroquine. A similar report was posted the same day on CNS News, founded by Council for National Policy Executive Committee member L. Brent Bozell III. (MediaPost recently named CNS News as the country’s fastest-growing conservative website, with more than 8.3 million unique visitors in June and over 1,000 percent gain in year-over-year unique visitors.) Pat Robertson’s CBN.com averages over four million unique visitors each month. Add these to Alex Jones’s August 21 coverage — as well as legions of subsidiary platforms — and you have a deadly misinformation campaign that’s reaching tens of millions of voters, most of them off the radar of the national news media.

Emergency physician Nick Sawyer is disturbed by the implications for medical practitioners. The America’s Frontline Doctors campaign, he says, “violates two of the primary principles of medical ethics. Medical ethics has four major principles: beneficence, non-maleficence, autonomy, and justice. As hydroxychloroquine offers no clinical benefit and may be harmful, it violates the first two tenets. Further, their statements place actual frontline physicians treating patients with Covid-19 in conflict with patients’ right to autonomy.

“Patients have the right to make decisions regarding their medical care, but as more and more patients are asking — if not outright demanding — that physicians prescribe hydroxychloroquine to them, it places these physicians in a position where they are faced with an ethical dilemma. We respect patients’ right to autonomy, but we are not willing to allow them to demand a treatment that is not helpful and may be harmful. In sum, America’s Frontline Doctors are introducing additional havoc into the already complex Covid-19 pandemic.”

As of the publication deadline for this article, neither Jenny Beth Martin or Simone Gold had responded to requests for comment.

The day after Gold’s Washington presentation, U.S. Covid-19 deaths stood at 140,309; they swelled to 147,653 only a week later. Less than a month later, on August 21, Donald Trump addressed the Council for National Policy at the Ritz-Carlton in Pentagon City, his last major address before the Republican convention. In his opening remarks, he thanked several figures from the CNP, including Jenny Beth Martin, “for your tremendous leadership of the CNP. You’ve done a fantastic job.”

As of that Friday, over 174,000 Americans had died of Covid-19. That number continues to climb.

Anne Nelson is the author of Shadow Network: Money, Media, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right. She is the recipient of the Livingston Award for journalism and a Guggenheim Fellowship for historical research.

Copyright ©2020 The Washington Spectator — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 09 September 2020

Word Count: 3,532

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With Covid-19 and Black Lives Matter foremost on everyone’s mind, it is unlikely that Social Security will play a prominent role in the 2020 election. Joe Biden and the Democrats should try to ensure it does. Focusing on Social Security works to their advantage.

One reason Donald Trump won the 2016 election was that he received a sizable majority of votes cast by those 65 and older. Currently, Biden is running ahead among this demographic. A surefire way to maintain this support would be to present a plan to improve Social Security. Another approach would be to emphasize that Democrats built the program and Republicans have repeatedly sought to dismantle it, despite its status as the most successful and popular government program in U.S. history.

Social Security turns 85 this month. Developed during the Great Depression, born during a period of dire economic circumstances, including double-digit unemployment, it was a feature of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Initially it was just a retirement program, providing income to those 65 and over without jobs. Roosevelt wanted each generation to save for its own retirement rather than taxing each generation to pay for the retirement of its parents and grandparents. He thought this would generate greater political support.

Social Security payroll taxes (so called because they apply only to wages or firm payrolls) were collected starting in 1937, and benefits were scheduled to begin in 1942. However, a problem surfaced — the tax contributed to a reduction in consumer spending. Unemployment spiked from 14 percent in May 1937 to 19 percent in June 1938. In response, retirement benefits began in 1940 and the system became pay-as-you-go — taxes collected now pay for current benefits.

Over the years, Social Security has grown. Benefits for spouses and children of deceased workers were added in 1939. Disability insurance was added in 1956, so that those unable to work would receive some income. Health insurance for the elderly (Medicare) was added in 1965.

In addition, benefits were increased regularly during the 1960s and early 1970s. Payroll taxes rose to fund these improvements. In 1973, Social Security recipients began receiving automatic cost-of-living adjustments, or COLAs. Each January, benefits rise with inflation recorded over the previous year, assuring retirees a minimum standard of living. As Social Security benefits increased, the poverty rate of Americans 65 and older dropped sharply — from 35.5 percent in 1959 (far higher than the national average) to 9.7 percent in 2018 (well below the national average).

Still, Republicans have always perpetuated the myth that Social Security was on the precipice of bankruptcy, an eventuality that would lead to dramatic cuts in benefits for retirees. And their solution has always been the same — cut Social Security benefits. Surprisingly, no Democrat has pointed out that the Republican cure is exactly the same as their phony problem.

Since Ronald Reagan, virtually every Republican president has sought to gut Social Security. In most cases, benefit cuts have been covert in order to avoid any political backlash.

Soon after taking office, President Reagan formed a commission to make Social Security solvent when the baby boomers retired. This led to the 1983 Social Security Amendments that permanently increased Social Security taxes and gradually increased the retirement age to 67. The latter change, when fully implemented in 2027, represents a 16 percent cut in benefits for an individual collecting Social Security at 65.

During his second term as president, George W. Bush proposed that two percentage points of the Social Security payroll tax go into private accounts controlled by individuals (creating a version of 401k accounts). But with less money coming into Social Security, benefits would have had to be cut significantly. Facing enormous opposition, this plan went nowhere.

Running for president in 2016, Donald Trump promised that, if elected, he would never touch Social Security. Yet he has suggested benefit cuts to the program every year that he has been president. His 2021 budget proposes cutting disability insurance benefits, which is part of Social Security. And during the Covid-19 pandemic, he floated the idea of allowing people to receive lump sum payments now instead of future Social Security benefits. Deemed the “Eagle Plan,” it is effectively a payday loan from the government — a small sum of money now that you pay for dearly in the future. Fortunately, the Eagle Plan did not fly.

Finally, President Trump has held seniors hostage, refusing to support any coronavirus relief for them unless Congress cut the Social Security payroll tax. The tax cut would aid those currently employed but not retirees or the unemployed, who need money now for food and rent and to pay medical bills. It will also have an odious consequence — Social Security will appear to be a failed program, inching closer to insolvency.

This brings us to the 2020 election.

Republicans frequently suggest raising the age for collecting full benefits from 67 to 70. In practice, this means a 25 percent cut in benefits, or $375 less each month for an average Social Security recipient. Another Republican plan seeks to reduce or eliminate COLAs, thereby reducing the value of Social Security benefits each year. With 2 percent annual inflation, someone retiring at age 67 would see the buying power of their benefits fall around 25 percent by the time they reached 80, and 40 percent at age 90.

In contrast, Joe Biden has promised that, if elected, he would improve the finances of Social Security by taxing wages above $400,000. He should do more. The past four decades have been difficult times for average Americans. Household incomes have stagnated. People have gone deeper into debt to pay their bills; many have little savings and see no possibility of a secure retirement. Under such circumstances, Social Security needs augmentation.

Increasing the retirement age from 65 to 67 cut benefits by more than $200 each month. Several economists have proposed increasing monthly Social Security benefits by $200, returning them to their 1980 level. This would not be hard to finance, despite the longer-term financial difficulties now facing the Social Security program.

Pre-Covid-19, actuaries estimated that Social Security would run out of money by 2035. Forecasts suggested that the program would then be able to pay only 75 to 80 percent of promised benefits. The coronavirus surely will make things worse, as lost jobs and income reduce payroll tax revenues.

One reason for the problems facing Social Security is the retirement of the baby boomers. A larger reason is the sharp rise in inequality over the past several decades. With a greater fraction of total wages going to the rich, the income cap on Social Security taxes ($137,700 in 2020) reduces Social Security tax revenues. In addition, because wages fell from 64 percent to 58 percent of total income in the United States, while profits rose, the Social Security payroll tax yielded less revenue.

No economic principle requires that all retirement benefits be paid with payroll taxes. This is an institutional decision. Different nations fund their retirement programs differently. The United States can do so as well. Money can come from other taxes or from borrowing. A small tax on estates worth over a few million dollars, with the funds earmarked for Social Security, would help recover losses from rising inequality during the past several decades. Another possibility is to tax forms of income other than wages. And if it is acceptable for the federal government to borrow when Republicans cut taxes for the wealthy, it should be acceptable when providing retirement benefits to every American.

People understand that a Democratic Congress and President Biden would strengthen rather than dismantle Social Security. This is why Biden polls well with older Americans. As the election season approaches, Biden should channel his inner FDR, talk about expanding Social Security, and emphasize his sharp differences with Donald Trump on this issue.

Steven Pressman is professor of economics at Colorado State University, author of Fifty Major Economists, 3rd edition (Routledge, 2013), and president of the Association for Social Economics.

Copyright ©2020 The Washington Spectator — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 31 August 2020

Word Count: 1,304

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It was a defining moment, and it was also long overdue. In the summer of 2020, with the country gripped by a global pandemic that also sharpened the wealth divide of the digital economy, a congressional committee brought the CEOs of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google to account. They asked why the firms, claiming to be neutral platforms, preferenced their own products. They asked why small businesses were afraid to openly discuss predatory business practices. And they asked about election interference, disinformation, civil rights, and privacy.

This was not the two days of photo ops that Mark Zuckerberg enjoyed when he appeared before Congress in the spring of 2018. In those days, members of Congress asked questions as if they were enrolled in Internet Companies 101. Little action followed. No new legislation. The dominance of the tech firms grew as shopping malls and small businesses across the country collapsed, long before a national health crisis.

Representative David Cicilline, the former mayor of Providence, had a different plan. Over the last few years, the chairman of a House subcommittee charged with antitrust pursued an in-depth investigation into the business practices of the largest tech firms, organized briefings and hearings, worked with Republican members, and let loose his talented staff. This week there was a hearing in Congress that, for the first time, actually treated tech company CEOs as if they were subject to the laws of the United States and not simply as donors to political parties or advisers to presidential candidates.

That was the milestone, and it is difficult to overstate its significance. Over the past decade, Washington has endured a form of agency capture unmatched in modern U.S. history. The revolving door spun fast in the halls of power, as tech company employees and policy advisers traded places with such frequency that there was barely time to update email addresses. Several of the D.C. advocacy groups, long funded by Silicon Valley to avoid government regulation — including the backers of net neutrality (which preferences Google’s dominant position for internet services) and section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (the immunity shield that preferences the speech of internet companies over actual publishers and journalists)—did a quick pivot. They embraced tech industry oversight.

Others held fast to their economic worldviews. Several members of the House committee, looking over the dais at tech firms checking in at more than $1 trillion in capital value, said “Big is not necessarily bad,” and perhaps there is some truth in that statement. Consider the cosmos. But “big and unaccountable” is necessarily bad. As the New Brandeisians have argued, monopoly power has far-reaching implications for American democracy. Tim Wu, Lina Khan, Barry Lynn, and others are drawing on lessons of history and the current experience of local communities to argue for an overhaul of antitrust law, largely out of concern that U.S. political institutions are at risk as economic power becomes more concentrated. As Brandeis had warned, “We can have a democratic society or we can have the concentration of great wealth in the hands of a few. We cannot have both.”

Much of the current antitrust debate turns on the “consumer welfare standard,” a popular laissez-faire doctrine that has, at least in the last few decades, left U.S. firms subject to far less scrutiny than they deserved. There are still economists (many working for the tech industry) who believe that the consumer welfare standard remains a viable antitrust theory. They are living in an era that predates the internet economy, when price effects may have been a useful measure of market power. No one today is worried that the cost of Gmail may rise 10 percent next year. But a user looking for an alternative email service will have few places to turn. And even if they sign up for another service, there is no guarantee it will not simply be acquired by a tech giant. Just ask a user of WhatsApp who has their data now.

The consolidation of the tech industry is fueled by the desire for user data. That is why Facebook acquired WhatsApp. That is why Google is going after Fitbit. That is why, in the earliest days of the internet economy, Doubleclick—the internet advertising firm later acquired by Google—went after Abacus. This was not hard to see coming. The Electronic Privacy Information Center and other consumer groups argued almost 20 years ago that the Federal Trade Commission should have intervened in the Abacus deal. And we made similar arguments about the acquisitions of Doubleclick, WhatsApp, Nest, Fitbit, and many others. The FTC had two decades to develop an antitrust theory for the internet economy. But the FTC chairman, Joe Simons, recently told reporters, with a heavy heart, that it was unlikely that the FTC would complete the antitrust investigation of Facebook before the November election.

We also explained to the Senate Judiciary Committee, back in 2007, that Google’s increasing appetite for other internet services would disadvantage advocacy organizations as well as business competitors. We documented how Google promoted its own videos on “privacy,” while demoting ours, after the search company acquired YouTube. In Europe, where the debate over competition and remedies is much further along, the search company is now required to promote non-Google services. That is good for consumers, for new entrants, and for competition.

The failure of the United States to update U.S. privacy law has also fueled consolidation. In a world of privacy policies — but not actual privacy laws — consumers are left with take it or leave it propositions, an avalanche of legalese of interest only to privacy lawyers. And market-based models that would encourage the sale of personal data, now in vogue in Silicon Valley, reflect a profound misunderstanding of the modern-day right of privacy. Privacy today is about fairness, accountability, and transparency in automated decision-making. Those are the decisions that impact housing, employment, credit, education, and criminal justice. No one should have to pay to avoid unfair, opaque, or biased outcomes.

In discussions about regulating Silicon Valley, U.S. firms often point to the growing power of Chinese tech companies and genuine concerns about a political model that aligns large firms with centralized state authority and promotes mass surveillance. But the answer to that argument is more innovation, more competition, and more respect for democratic values, including privacy protection. Monopolists are not innovators, and if the U.S. is to maintain an edge in the increasingly high-stakes battle for technological leadership, it will require a movement away from de facto national firms. Innovation that is less dependent on the collection and use of personal data could also make U.S. businesses and government agencies more resilient as cyber conflict intensifies. The widely known secret is that vast troves of personal data of Americans is held now by foreign adversaries. Just ask Equifax or the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.

Outside of Congress, state attorneys general are also pursuing substantial investigations. Although there is some partisan angling and also overstated concerns about censorship of conservative views (let me know when the president is unable to tweet his nonsense to 83 million followers), the concern among attorneys general is long-standing. More than a decade ago, Connecticut Attorney General Blumenthal launched the successful investigation of Google “Streetview,” Google’s plan not only to conduct surveillance of towns and cities but also to track the location of Wi-Fi hotspots to displace a business competitor. Back in Washington, the FTC, the Federal Communications Commission, and the Department of Justice all took a pass, even after they learned that Google was also intercepting Wi-Fi communications.

So Representative Cicilline’s hearing this week also stands in contrast to “business as usual” and other congressional committees that have largely overlooked the FTC’s failure to use its antitrust authority and have also sat on legislation to update U.S. privacy laws. This should have been the year that Congress enacted a comprehensive privacy law and established a data-protection agency. Instead, personal data collection is accelerating as the country becomes ever more dependent on online services.

Whoever is chairing congressional committees next year should take their cues from Chairman Cicilline and embrace real oversight, regardless of who is in the White House. Federal agencies fail to safeguard the public when congressional committees fail to do their job. And it will require action by the Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Justice, and others to restore competition to the internet industry. That was one of the many lessons in democratic government provided by the House Antitrust Subcommittee this past week in Washington.

Marc Rotenberg is director of the Center for AI and Digital Policy and former president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

Copyright ©2020 The Washington Spectator — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 13 August 2020

Word Count: 1,422

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 On April 21, in the midst of El Salvador’s hard-core coronavirus lockdown, President Nayib Bukele tweeted a photo of himself seated behind a desk in an elegant office, wearing a facemask. Accompanying the photo was the following reassurance: “The rumors of my kidnapping by aliens are completely unfounded.”

As if that weren’t odd enough, the next day he updated his profile picture to the same image of him face-masked, this time with the desk photoshopped out — and replaced by a spaceship.

Granted, Bukele had already gone orbital long before the coronavirus struck — like that time he announced: “President Trump is very nice and cool, and I’m nice and cool, too … we both use Twitter a lot, so, you know, we’ll get along.” This, mind you, was after the same Trump had referred to Bukele’s country as a “shithole.”

A former advertising executive and mayor of San Salvador, Bukele assumed power in June 2019 at the age of 37, having successfully marketed his Nuevas Ideas party as a desperately needed break from ARENA and the FMLN, the two parties that have dominated contemporary Salvadoran politics since the end of the bloody civil war in 1992. It seems, though, that Bukele’s ideas aren’t so nuevas — in that phenomena like unchecked authoritarianism and power-tripping have been around for quite a while.

In addition to tweeting ad nauseam and taking selfies from the podium at the United Nations, Bukele’s presidential activities have included deploying heavily armed soldiers and police inside El Salvador’s Legislative Assembly in February and threatening to dissolve it if lawmakers didn’t cooperate on a loan he was demanding for his Territorial Control Plan. According to Bukelian fantasy, this plan will resolve the country’s gang problem — and to hell with democracy. The militarization of the Assembly was a stunt unseen even during the 12-year civil war, during which the vast majority of atrocities were committed by a U.S.-backed right-wing military and allied death squads. But, you know, new ideas.

I happened to be in San Salvador at the time of the Assembly spectacle this winter and attended a brief pro-Bukele demonstration in front of the building. Demonstrators, many of whom had been bused in from outside the capital, were given black crosses adorned with a hashtag denouncing the recalcitrant lawmakers as mierda, signified by the poop emoji. The crosses were meant to symbolize how Salvadorans were dropping dead because Bukele wasn’t getting his loan; it was not clear, however, how anyone in such a fanatically religious country had deemed it prudent to put a poop emoji on a cross. The lawmakers, for their part, were given at least a temporary reprieve when Bukele called off the siege of the Assembly, informing his followers that he had spoken with God, who had told him to be patient.

Now the coronavirus has provided another opportunity for Bukele to be the big boss, again under the pretense of saving Salvadoran lives. On March 14, a state of emergency was declared in El Salvador, despite there being no confirmed cases of Covid-19. And the situation quickly deteriorated into one of the craziest lockdowns on the planet.

As Salvadorans found themselves under de facto house arrest, Bukele set about flaunting his disdain for inconvenient notions like human rights and the separation of powers. Repeatedly, he ignored Supreme Court rulings that cautioned him to respect fundamental rights and proceeded defiantly to arrest people arbitrarily for perceived quarantine violations and then stuff them all into crowded detention centers. This practice, it bears underscoring, did far more to undermine the quarantine than, say, an individual who left home to buy food for their family.

As of the beginning of May, thousands had already been arrested and jailed for alleged violations of the quarantine. Around mid-month, news articles began appearing with headlines like this one from The Washington Post: “El Salvador quarantine centers become points of contagion.” Salvadorans returning from abroad have also been placed in unsanitary containment centers. In one case reported by the Salvadoran investigative news outlet El Faro, 67-year-old engineer Carlos Henríquez Cortez returned from a two-day business trip to Guatemala in March and was forcibly interned in a quarantine facility despite a supposed provision for persons over 60 to quarantine at home. Five weeks later, he became El Salvador’s eighth coronavirus fatality.

Meanwhile, in a country as brutally impoverished as El Salvador — where, for many people, access to food depends on whether they’ve earned any money that day — the mere act of staying at home can also be a death sentence. And while the government promised the neediest families a onetime payment of $300 in assistance, the incompetent distribution of these funds constituted a disaster in itself. Crowds of desperate people flooded banks and government offices, further eroding the protections of social distancing.

Nor, to be sure, do all the victims of femicide and domestic violence under lockdown have much reason to view Bukele as the savior of El Salvador. As reported in El Faro, the lockdown instigated a spike in domestic violence reports. “For some women, obeying the stay-at-home order has proved lethal, yet addressing this problem has not been a priority in El Salvador — the country that, in 2018, registered the highest levels of violence against women in the world.”

But the president has more important things to think about, like ordering the total shutdown and blockade of the municipality of La Libertad — which he did in April, via Twitter, after seeing a video-tweet of what he deemed to be too many people in circulation in the area. The Salvadoran defense minister tweeted back, and the job was done. Such is life in Bukelelandia.

In a recent email to me, Salvadoran anthropologist Juan José Martínez d’Aubuisson remarked that, while Bukele had long harbored “ambitions to concentrate the most power and resources possible in the executive branch,” the pandemic has rendered ever more visible his administration’s “authoritarian strategy.” A May 15 Bloomberg opinion article enumerated some additional Covid-19 highlights from El Salvador:

 The government abruptly closed down all public transport, leaving many doctors and other first responders on foot. Police were given broad powers to enter homes without warrants and arrest those thought to be violating quarantine; security forces mistook a young woman who’d gone shopping for a Mother’s Day present for a criminal gang member and shot her dead.

Bukele himself has railed against critics of police abuse on the grounds that these critics are simply “wanting more Salvadorans to die,” an inversion of reality of Trumpian proportions, given the Salvadoran security forces’ established tradition of extrajudicial assassinations and myriad other human rights violations, including torture. And of course, these same security forces have received funding and other forms of encouragement from the United States, whose complicity in the deaths of Salvadoran civilians is hardly new.

During the Salvadoran civil war, the United States poured billions of dollars into a conflict that killed more than 75,000 people and caused countless Salvadorans to flee, many of them to Los Angeles — where a different kind of brutality awaited. There, the MS-13 and Barrio 18 gangs formed as a means of communal protection. At the end of the war, the United States undertook mass deportations of gang members — which, coupled with the U.S.-backed neoliberalization of the tiny country, spelled more death for El Salvador and created the conditions for yet more northward migration. To this dubious record add the present era of harsh deportation policies in the United States, in which Salvadorans are knowingly sent back to face abuse and even death. Now, even if a returnee survives the gauntlet of unaccountable security forces and gangs who prey on deportees, the coronavirus has made the whole inhuman process even more lethal.

California State University’s Dr. Steven Osuna observes that the “punitive populism deployed in El Salvador with the support of the U.S. state has targeted a marginalized relative surplus population that has been deprived of any access to the wealth and resources of the country.” Gangs have long served as a politically useful scapegoat for El Salvador’s woes and its regular appearance on the global list of homicide capitals, justifying mano dura policies and other measures that criminalize youth and render young men and tattooed persons, in particular, fair game for abuse and/or extermination by security forces. But as Osuna emphasizes, the violence perpetrated by marginalized groups will “never equal the viciousness of what neoliberalism and transnational capital have produced for the majority of the country — alienation, domestic uncertainty and desperation.”

Enter Bukele and his mano dura response to the coronavirus, which one might be forgiven for interpreting as an attempt to just wipe out the surplus population altogether. As if the Salvadoran guardians of law and order required any more leeway, following a spike in homicides in April, Bukele authorized the army and police to use lethal force against gang members (read: people buying Mother’s Day presents). The corresponding presidential tweet specified that such force was permissible in “self-defense or in defense of the lives of Salvadorans.”

Alleging that the orders for the spike in violence had come from imprisoned gang leaders, Bukele orchestrated a show of force within the prisons, as well, and his press office tweeted images of hundreds of tattooed, underwear-clad prisoners seated crotch-to-ass on the floor with legs extended.

Indeed, things have gotten so bad that even The Wall Street Journal’s Mary Anastasia O’Grady — who, as far as I know, has never met a hard-line authoritarian she didn’t love — felt compelled to call Bukele out at the end of April (although she couldn’t help getting in a jab at Fidel Castro for good measure). Describing how Bukele had just brought about the shutdown of the Legislative Assembly by tweeting a suspicion of Covid-19 contamination in the chamber, O’Grady complained that the Salvadoran president was “undermin[ing] democracy” and therefore “no friend of the U.S.”

For someone who viewed the 2009 right-wing coup d’état against the democratically elected president of Honduras as a defense of democracy — and Hillary Clinton as a Communist sympathizer — it’s not clear why exactly O’Grady has a beef with Bukele. In fact, he is a very good friend of the United States, at least in its current incarnation, and not just because of the shared presidential affinity for Twitter — or, now, a shared commitment to ingesting hydroxychloroquine as a discredited prevention measure against the virus.

Beyond presiding over a landscape of acute neoliberal misery, Bukele has also cooperated with Trump’s anti-migrant policies and last year even signed a so-called “safe third country” agreement as a preliminary step toward serving as a dumping ground for migrants seeking asylum in the United States. Never mind that a ton of U.S.-bound migrants hail from El Salvador in the first place because it’s, well, super unsafe.

Bukele is furthermore on board with Trump’s policy of perpetual harassment of Venezuela, spearheaded by U.S. special envoy Elliott Abrams, who unsurprisingly played a significant role in the Salvadoran civil war. Commencing his stint in 1981 as Ronald Reagan’s assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs immediately after the U.S.-trained and funded Atlacatl Battalion massacred up to 1,200 people in the Salvadoran village of El Mozote, Abrams spent his early days on the job denying any such massacre had happened. In later years, he would defend notorious Salvadoran death-squad leader Roberto d’Aubuisson and praise the Reagan administration’s blood-drenched record in the country as one “of fabulous achievement.”

When the Salvadoran Supreme Court ruled Bukele’s quarantine detentions unconstitutional, he responded with the tweet: “Five people are not going to decide the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans.” The national state of emergency was extended twice, and on May 18 the Bukele administration issued an executive decree to extend it once more — just a day after the Legislative Assembly had refused any further extensions due to a lack of transparency surrounding the expenditure of emergency funds.

As always, there’s nothing like a bit of religion to distract from — or complement — the neoliberal project. Hence, perhaps, Bukele’s declaration of May 24 as a “National Day of Prayer” against the pandemic. Interestingly, as recently as January 2019, Bukele insisted in a Facebook post that he was “not a religious person.” Of course, this hadn’t prevented him from conducting a dramatic bout of prayer at the Western Wall in Jerusalem in 2018, where — despite being of Palestinian origins — he had traveled on an Israeli government-sponsored trip. God can be a useful ally — and it’s presumably thanks at least in part to him that Bukele’s approval rating is still so inconceivably high.

Still, as he persists in ignoring basic human rights, undermines the independence of the judiciary, displays contempt for the constitutional authority of the legislature, presides over a downward-spiraling economy, and propels his country into ever greater emergency, maybe it’s time the young president got on that spaceship, after all.

Belén Fernández is the author of Exile: Rejecting America and Finding the World, published by OR Books; Martyrs Never Die: Travels Through South Lebanon, published by Warscapes; and The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work, published by Verso. She has written for The Washington Spectator on a range of countries, from Honduras and Colombia to Turkey and ex-Yugoslavia.

Copyright ©2020 The Washington Spectator — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 22 July 2020

Word Count: 2,141

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