Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped?

[Zelandakh]

Too far was about 4 years and 20over 23000 stops ago - but not a single Republican pulled the cord.

FYP

[Winstonm]

If this isn't reason enough to enact the 25th Amendment I don't know what would be:

 

 

At one point during the interview, Trump even speculated that his own administration's law enforcement entities could be complicit in the alleged conspiracies, which spanned across mail-in and in-person voting.

 

“This is total fraud. And how the FBI, and Department of Justice — I don't know, maybe they're involved — but how people are allowed to get away with this is stuff is unbelievable. This election was rigged. This election was a total fraud,” Trump said.

 

He later said, “All I can say, is: With all of the fraud that's taken place, nobody has come to me and said, ‘Oh, the FBI has nabbed the people that are doing this scheme.’”

 

The Department of Justice, he said, in response to a leading question by Bartiromo, is “missing in action.”

 

He also charged news media and social media companies with ignoring what he said was the worst political scandal in American history, and alleged, again with no evidence, that ballots were requested in the names of dead people, and that “many mailmen are in trouble for selling ballots.” He accused two leading Republicans in Georgia, Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, of failing to properly administer the election. “I’m sorry I endorsed him,” Trump said of Kemp.

 

 

 

 

It's no longer cute, curious. or an act - this guy is insane and has way too much power. He needs to be put aside. Now.

[shyams]

If this isn't reason enough to enact the 25th Amendment I don't know what would be:

 

It's no longer cute, curious. or an act - this guy is insane and has way too much power. He needs to be put aside. Now.

I think your President had shown, within about 4-6 months of taking over, that he as the President "is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office".

 

A few centuries from now people will probably have replaced "Nero" with "Trump", and "Rome" with "United States".

 

Edit: I just checked that particular betting market I referred to in previous posts. It is still open AND is now paying 5% on Biden!!! Any takers? No?? :) If one weighs risk v. reward and says "forget it", one is essentially saying that the US Govt. (viz. ALL the three branches of Govt. --- Executive, Legislative, Judiciary --- concurrently) is not trustworthy OR that the 2020 elections were not fair (or both).

 

Edit 2: I am not implying that people should risk their money. I too am in the "forget it" group; it's just that logic dictates the opposite view.

Edited November 30, 2020 by shyams

[Winstonm]

Since the election, surveys have consistently found that about 70% to 80% of Republicans don’t buy the results.

Are these the same surveys that said Biden had a 15 point lead in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania?

[johnu]

From the article.

"In calls to the White House, several GOP senators warned that Powell seemed unhinged, two officials said.

Powell, at least for the time being, had gone too far."

 

It would be hard to give any credibility if those GOP senators didn't also warn that the Manchurian President was seriously unhinged.

[Winstonm]

Two questions: 1) Where is the American Bar Association now?

 

 

Trump campaign lawyer Joe diGenova declared Monday that the Trump administration’s former cybersecurity chief deserves to be put to death for claiming that the presidential election was the “most secure” in the country’s history.

 

President Trump fired Chris Krebs, his head of cybersecurity, earlier this month after Krebs disputed Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was rigged against him. Krebs found himself at odds with the president after he called the election the “most secure in United States history.”

 

“Anybody who thinks the election went well, like that idiot Krebs who used to be the head of cybersecurity that guy is a class A moron. He should be drawn and quartered. Taken out at dawn and shot,” diGenova, who is also a former U.S. Attorney, said during an appearance on the Howie Carr show, broadcast on Newsmax, in comments first reported by The Bulwark.

 

 

 

2) Why is this guy still allowed to practice law?

[y66]

A bipartisan group of senators unveiled an approximately $908 billion stimulus proposal on Tuesday, aiming to break a months-long partisan impasse over providing emergency federal relief to the U.S. economy.

 

Congress has faced increasing pressure to approve additional economic relief since talks between the White House and House Democrats collapsed, first over the summer and then again in the fall ahead of the Nov. 3 presidential election.

 

With negotiations among congressional leaders at an impasse, rank-and-file senators in both parties have for several weeks worked together on a proposal that could break the logjam. Several centrist lawmakers in the Senate — including Sens. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), Mark Warner (D-Va.), Bill Cassidy (R-La.), Mitt Romney (R-Utah), and Susan Collins (R-Maine) — held a news conference Tuesday morning to push their new bipartisan agreement as a template for legislation that could pass Congress as the economy faces increasing strain from a winter surge in coronavirus cases.

 

“Our action to provide emergency relief is needed now more than ever before. The people need to know we are not going to leave until we get something accomplished,” Manchin said, flanked by about a half-dozen lawmakers in the U.S. Capitol. “I’m committed to seeing this through.”

 

The plan circulated by the bipartisan group is light on details but seeks to reach a middle ground on numerous contentious economic issues.

 

It would provide $300 a week in federal unemployment benefits for four months — a lower amount than the $600 per week sought by Democrats, while still offering substantial relief to tens of millions of jobless Americans. The agreement includes $160 billion in funding for state and local governments, a key Democratic priority opposed by most Republicans, as well as a temporary moratorium on some coronavirus-related lawsuits against firms and other entities — a key Republican priority opposed by most Democrats. The measure also includes funding for small businesses, schools, health care, transit authorities, and student loans, among other measures.

The measure faced early opposition from both flanks, with liberals opposed to the liability shield and conservatives opposed to spending more money to help the economy. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, criticized the proposal for leaving out another round of $1,200 stimulus checks. Jason Pye, vice president of legislative affairs for the conservative group FreedomWorks, said conservative GOP senators would likely reject the measure over its price-tag. Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) are among those who have resisted another spending package.

 

“Anything that adds to the deficit is a non-starter,” Pye said.

 

At the news conference, Romney stressed that he is a deficit hawk and that the proposal cost far less than the $1.8 trillion pushed earlier by White House officials. He also said the legislation was partially funded by more than $500 billion in unspent money from the Cares Act, reducing the amount of new spending it entailed.

 

Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants, spoke positively of the bipartisan effort and urged lawmakers to quickly approve emergency financial help.

 

“More will be needed later, but immediate relief is needed now,” Nelson said. “That’s what the senators are talking about. We cannot wait.”

[barmar]

If this isn't reason enough to enact the 25th Amendment I don't know what would be:

size="3"]It's no longer cute, curious. or an act - this guy is insane and has way too much power. He needs to be put aside. Now.[/size]

If he actually believes these things, it might be evidence of insanity.

 

But we know that Trump lies through his teeth all the time. It became clear from the Bob Woodward tapes, when he admitted to knowing that COVID-19 was a serious problem, but was deliberately downplaying it to the public. His public statements are not an accurate representation of his actual beliefs.

 

So his comments about fraud in the election could be part of a planned strategy to rile up his base, not delusions. He's learned that bluster like this works for him. And that's not grounds for invoking the 25th Amendment, unfortunately.

[Winstonm]

If he actually believes these things, it might be evidence of insanity.

 

But we know that Trump lies through his teeth all the time. It became clear from the Bob Woodward tapes, when he admitted to knowing that COVID-19 was a serious problem, but was deliberately downplaying it to the public. His public statements are not an accurate representation of his actual beliefs.

 

So his comments about fraud in the election could be part of a planned strategy to rile up his base, not delusions. He's learned that bluster like this works for him. And that's not grounds for invoking the 25th Amendment, unfortunately.

His niece, Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist, says he is so ill he believes (convinces himself) that whatever he says at the moment is true, which is what makes him such as effective liar. Mental illness is one of the toughest things to diagnose, though, as you are always questioning how much is real and how much is put on.

 

But the question to ask is: what planned strategy and why rile up the base? The election is over - unless you believe it is not. Which means you cannot distinguish reality. A strong symptom of mental illness.

[y66]

Required reading for 435 House and 100 Senate members ... @jasonfurman and @LHSummers paper: Reconsideration of Fiscal Policy in Era of Low Interest Rates.

WC executive summary: The risks of going too big on fiscal policy are much smaller than the risks of going too small.

 

The last generation has witnessed an epochal decline in real interest rates in the United States and around the world despite large buildups of government debt. This paper argues that while the future is unknowable and the precise reasons for the decline in real interest rates are not entirely clear, declining real rates reflect structural changes in the economy that require changes in thinking about fiscal policy and macroeconomic policy more generally that are as profound as those that occurred in the wake of the inflation of the 1970s.

 

We discuss three implications for fiscal policy that follow from low interest rates:

 

First, fiscal policy must play a crucial role in stabilization policy in a world where monetary policy can counteract financial instability but otherwise is largely “pushing on a string” when it comes to accelerating economic growth.

 

Second, we reconsider traditional views about the dangers of debt and deficits. We note that in a world of unused capacity and very low interest rates and costs of capital, concerns about crowding out of desirable private investment that were warranted a generation ago have much less force today.

 

Third, we consider the issue of borrowing in the context of how the borrowed funds are used. Drawing on recent work considering dynamic scoring effects of various Federal expenditure programs we argue that borrowing to finance appropriate categories of Federal expenditure pays for itself in Federal budgetary terms on reasonable assumptions.

 

We conclude with thoughts on appropriate guidelines for U.S. fiscal policy. We reject traditional ideas of a cyclically balanced budget on the grounds that it would likely lead to inadequate growth and excessive financial instability. We set the goal that fiscal policy should advance economic growth and financial stability. Achieving this goal depends on both improving responses to downturns and expanding and improving public investment. As a new guidepost, we propose that fiscal policy focus on supporting economic growth while preventing real debt service from being projected to rise quickly or to rise above 2 percent of GDP over the forthcoming decade. We also propose three guidelines that would be consistent with achieving this broader objective within the guidelines we recommend: (i) undertaking substantial emergency spending that is not paid for in response to economic downturns; (ii) paying for all long-term commitments with broad exceptions for ones that plausibly pay for themselves in present value; and (iii) improving the composition of government to make it more supportive of demand and also more efficient.

[johnu]

WC executive summary: The risks of going too big on fiscal policy are much smaller than the risks of going too small.

Moscow Mitch and his Moscow associates have already signaled that because a Democrat is going to be president, they are again in favor of no deficit spending.

[y66]

On Tuesday, Attorney General William P. Barr shot down President Trump’s assertion of widespread voter fraud, acknowledging that the Justice Department had uncovered no wrongdoing “on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”

 

“Fraud on a scale — also known as the president’s annual physical,” Stephen Colbert joked on “The Late Show.”

“When Trump heard about William Barr, he was so mad, he ordered William Barr to prosecute William Barr.” — JIMMY FALLON

[Winstonm]

Past is prologue: Harper's, Nov. 1964

 

American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.

I believe now this "paranoid style" is being termed "authoritarian voter".

Edited December 2, 2020 by Winstonm

[y66]

Mr. President, it looks like you likely lost the state of Georgia. We’re investigating. There’s always a possibility, I get it, you have the right to go to the courts. What you don’t have is the ability to — and you need to step up and say this — is stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence. Someone’s going to get hurt. Someone’s going to get shot. Someone’s going to get killed.

I think Mr. Sterling meant "inciting", not "inspiring".

[Winstonm]

I think Mr. Sterling meant "inciting", not "inspiring".

 

A little more about this: https://digbysblog.net/2020/12/where-the-slippery-slope-leads/

 

 

Reacting to Sterling’s emotional press event, McKay Coppins of The Atlantic told “All In with Chris Hayes” how Trump, insecure and paranoid, regularly demands Republicans prove their loyalty:

 

He’s created this increasingly absurd set of litmus tests that he requires the rest of his party to pass. First it was Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States … absurd conspiracy theory, completely untrue. People felt like they had to go along with it or at least wink at it in order to be taken seriously by the Republican base.

 

Then it was Muslim immigration should be banned. Then it was openly soliciting foreign interference in a presidential election. It’s fine, and we don’t have to care about it. Then it was the idea that the presidential election should be reversed. The outcome should be reversed by tossing millions of ballots. That’s currently the argument that Donald Trump’s legal team is making, and the vast majority of Republican elected officials are going along with it…. I’m pretty sure we’re going to hear pretty soon the idea that bribery for a presidential pardon is no big deal. That’ll be the next litmus test.

 

Trump has been doing this for years. And I think that what was so powerful about that clip that you showed wasn’t really the anger and indignation, at least to me. It was the desperation. It was like almost a sense of hopelessness, because he knows even as he’s giving this impassioned speech … he knows that President Trump is not going to forcefully condemn these threats. He knows that the vast majority of Republican senators, especially the ambitious ones, are not going to come out and condemn this. So it’s almost like a cry into the wind. He’s saying his peace, but he knows that it’s probably not going to make a difference.

 

Hayes recalled a column by National Review Online writer Michael Brendan Dougherty that Trump’s demands for loyalty echo the initiation rites of street gangs:

 

Allegiance to a plain insanity is a good test of loyalty, like being beat-in during a gang initiation… It demonstrates “commitment” or heart. Shared insanity can make people loyal to each other, sure. But it does so by rendering them useless or repulsive to the normal and decent people who need champions.

 

The paranoid style of the American right has a storied history dating from the McCarthy and Bircher eras and before. That paranoia, Dougherty wrote, once “expressed itself in the demand to believe Dwight Eisenhower was a communist.” Thirty years ago in another century, after the Berlin Wall fell, American conservatives declared Sir Ronald of Reagan had slain the Evil Empire and won the Cold War. Yet they are still fighting it.

 

International New York Times opinion writer Jochen Bittner cautions that Trump-world’s refusal to accept the loss echoes what he calls “arguably the most potent and disastrous political lie of the 20th century — the Dolchstosslegende, or stab-in-the-back myth.”

 

 

 

[y66]

Justice Amy Coney Barrett had a choice.

 

She could provide the fifth vote on the Supreme Court that Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh needed — and would not have received from the Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg — to place a temporary block, in the name of religious freedom, on New York’s pandemic-driven limitations on church and synagogue attendance.

 

Or she could give that precious fifth vote to Chief Justice John Roberts in the name not only of public health but also of judicial modesty, since the most severe restrictions the Catholic and Jewish organizations were complaining about were no longer in effect and the whole case might well disappear into thin air if the Supreme Court simply stayed its hand.

 

History will record the choice Justice Barrett made in the court’s Nov. 25 decision as the first moment of fruition for the hopes and fears engendered by her abrupt election-eve ascension to the Supreme Court following Justice Ginsburg’s death in September. Until then, Chief Justice Roberts had held the line in favor of public health in similar cases from California and Nevada, each by 5 to 4 votes. Now he was left in dissent, joined by the remaining members of his former majority, Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. Justice Barrett, who did not express her opinion in writing, was a silent member of the new majority.

 

I’d like to think this was a tough choice for her, but in the end, this case may simply disappear. The Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, along with an Orthodox Jewish organization, was appealing the decision of a Federal District Court judge not to enjoin the state from enforcing attendance limits at worship services. That’s when the Supreme Court stepped in, at the request of the diocese, and issued the injunction itself, pending the appeal to a federal appeals court in New York, which will hear the case in two weeks. Maybe then the case will end up back at the Supreme Court on the merits, but most likely, it won’t, because the governor eased the restrictions while the case was pending in the court.

 

The real significance of the decision lay in the which-side-are-you-on test it posed for the newest justice. I don’t mean the conservative side versus the liberal side. Obviously, she’s a conservative. What matters is that a month into her tenure, she chose to align herself with what I call grievance conservatism: conservatism with a chip on its shoulder, fueled by a belief that even when it’s winning, it’s losing, and losing unfairly.

 

The embodiment of grievance conservatism is Justice Alito, who in a speech last month to his fellow members of the Federalist Society said that “it pains me to say this, but in certain quarters, religious liberty is fast becoming a disfavored right.”

 

Justice Alito is a member of a Supreme Court majority that during his nearly 15-year tenure has been more deferential to the demands of religious believers than any Supreme Court in modern history. Just this past summer, the court ruled that a state that offers a subsidy for private-school tuition must include parochial schools in the program; that religious organizations may exclude a substantial category of employees from the protections of federal civil rights laws under a “ministerial exception” that goes well beyond members of the ministry; and that employers with religious or even vague “moral” objections to contraception can opt out of the federal requirement to include birth control in their employee health plans.

 

Justice Alito was in the majority in these decisions and so, notably, was Chief Justice Roberts. And both were in dissent five years ago when the court declared a constitutional right to same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges. But while the chief justice seems to have made his peace with that decision (he was in the majority in the decision in June that interpreted federal civil rights protections as applying to gay and transgender individuals, while Justice Alito called the ruling a “brazen abuse” in a 54-page dissent accompanied by a 52-page appendix). The implications of Obergefell for people with religious objections to same-sex marriage still gnaw at Justice Alito.

 

Along with Justice Thomas, he wrote sympathetically in early October about Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who refused for religious reasons to issue marriage licenses to same- sex couples. While agreeing with the other members of the court that the clerk’s appeal wasn’t suitable for Supreme Court review, the two justices wrote that “nevertheless, this petition provides a stark reminder of the consequences of Obergefell.” They continued, “By choosing to privilege a novel constitutional right over the religious liberty interests explicitly protected in the First Amendment, and by doing to undemocratically, the court has created a problem that only it can fix.”

 

Since the two justices were neither voting to grant the appeal nor dissenting from its denial, their opinion was entirely gratuitous. They simply used the case as a platform to reiterate warnings about the threat to religion from official recognition of same-sex marriage.

 

Justice Barrett was not yet confirmed when Justices Thomas and Alito issued this statement. I wonder whether she would have signed it. It was pure grievance conservatism, with no effect other than to invite new cases seeking to overturn Obergefell, and to strike fear in some parts of the L.G.B.T.Q. community that it could happen. It won’t. But I’m certain that the pressure on the court will only grow.

 

There’s no neutral ground: The Supreme Court has become a prize in a war over how far the country will go to privilege religious rights over other rights, including the right not to be discriminated against. A case the court heard last month, Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, raises the question whether a Catholic social services agency under contract with the city to place children in foster homes can refuse to consider same-sex couples as foster parents despite the city’s nondiscrimination law.

 

For religious adherents pressing such claims, equal treatment is no longer sufficient. Special treatment is the demand. That’s clear in another Covid-related case that reached the Supreme Court this week. In mid-November, Gov. Andrew Beshear of Kentucky issued a temporary order barring in-person instruction in all public and private schools. A religious school, Danville Christian Academy, promptly won an injunction from a federal district judge.

 

A three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit stayed the injunction this past weekend. The court observed that because the order applied to religious and secular schools alike, it was “neutral and of general applicability,” key words that under a 1990 Supreme Court decision, Employment Division v. Smith, to foreclose a claim under the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause for a special religious exemption.

 

Claiming that “it is called by God to provide in-person instruction to its students,” the school has gone to Justice Kavanaugh, who has supervisory jurisdiction over the Sixth Circuit, asking him to vacate the stay of the injunction. The 35-page brief skips almost entirely over the fact that public schools are under the same strictures, asking instead, “Why can a 12-year-old go to the movies along with two dozen other people, but she can’t watch ‘The Greatest Story Ever Told’ with a smaller group in Bible class?” Justice Kavanaugh has told Governor Beshear to respond by Friday afternoon.

 

The Sixth Circuit panel’s unanimous ruling against the school was somewhat unusual because it was issued by one Democratic-appointed judge, Karen Nelson Moore, and two judges appointed by President George W. Bush, John Rogers and Helene White. Statistics compiled recently by Zalman Rothschild, a fellow at the Stanford Constitutional Law Center, show a startling partisan divide in how federal judges have approached cases involving religious objections to government-imposed limitations related to Covid-19.

 

In a group of 89 such cases, Democratic-appointed judges voted to uphold all the government orders, while Republican-appointed judges did so only 36 percent of the time. The difference is even more stark with judges appointed by President Trump. They voted to uphold the orders in only 6 percent of cases, voting 94 percent of the time in support of the religious plaintiffs.

 

Numbers like this pose an obvious question: Are Trump-appointed judges supporting religious claims as a matter of personal faith, or has voting to uphold religious claims become a kind of judicial MAGA cap, a mark of political identity?

 

At this moment’s legal and political inflection point, the answer may not matter. If Justice Barrett wants company, she clearly has plenty. And the rest of us have plenty to worry about.

[Zelandakh]

At some point someone is going to have to stand up and say that the SCOTUS has become so explicitly political that it can no longer be trusted to uphold the constitution and law on certain (mostly religious-influenced) cases. Some would probably say, quietly, that that point was reached many years back but the appointment of ACB makes it more important than ever that this comes out into the open. Roberts himself seems only too well aware of the issue and has apparently done what he could to avoid the worst. But now his ability to control just how political the SCOTUS rulings become is diminished, maybe it will take an impulse from outside of the judicial branch for the courts to get back to doing what they are supposed to do.

[Zelandakh]

I guess everyone has seen the Melissa Carone testimony by now. If you haven't, I highly recommend it - it's better than the average SNL sketch.

[Winstonm]

At some point someone is going to have to stand up and say that the SCOTUS has become so explicitly political that it can no longer be trusted to uphold the constitution and law on certain (mostly religious-influenced) cases. Some would probably say, quietly, that that point was reached many years back but the appointment of ACB makes it more important than ever that this comes out into the open. Roberts himself seems only too well aware of the issue and has apparently done what he could to avoid the worst. But now his ability to control just how political the SCOTUS rulings become is diminished, maybe it will take an impulse from outside of the judicial branch for the courts to get back to doing what they are supposed to do.

 

My concern is that those in positions to sound the alarm do not realize or take seriously the persistence, impact, and enormity of the movement to establish a de facto Christian theocracy.

[y66]

With just one cabinet appointment, President-elect Joe Biden could tackle economic inequality, the rural/urban divide, climate change, the growing mistrust of science, systemic racism and even the coronavirus.

 

That appointment is Secretary of Agriculture.

 

Some view the U.S. Department of Agriculture (U.S.D.A.) as a backwater that matters only to the nation’s two million farmers. But this perception is at odds with both the department’s actual budgetary allocation and its history: Two thirds of the U.S.D.A.’s $146 billion annual outlay goes to programs addressing nutrition and food insecurity, not to agriculture (or forestry, also in the department’s domain).

 

And the U.S.D.A. invests hundreds of millions each year in financial and technical assistance for rural communities to improve infrastructure that most urban residents take for granted — electrification, broadband access, water and waste disposal, housing, health care and public safety. Yet broad sections of the rural population feel — indeed have been — left behind.

 

Even with this aid, the U.S.D.A. supports a system that, overall, prioritizes trade and profit at the expense of most farmers, the environment and everyday Americans — instead of encouraging a food system that provides a thriving livelihood for farmers and farmworkers, environmental protection and healthy food for all. At best, 7 percent of farmers are able to make a living from farming; food chain workers earn poverty wages; large-scale agriculture poisons land, water and air and contributes mightily to climate change; and good food is available only to the relatively wealthy.

 

In normal times, 10.5 percent of U.S. households are food insecure, a number that has nearly doubled during the pandemic. And our junk-food diet has made nearly three quarters of us overweight or obese, which in turn causes our notoriously high rates of diabetes, hypertension and cardiac disease, shortening life spans and predisposing many to complications from COVID-19.

 

Enlightened leadership at the U.S.D.A. could begin to change all of this. Rather than seeing its paramount mission as supporting agribusiness, the new secretary could steer the department toward becoming what President Lincoln envisioned when he established it — “the people’s department,” with responsibility to everyone in the nation.

 

When the U.S.D.A. was founded more than 158 years ago, about half of all Americans lived on farms; today just 0.6 percent of the population are farmers, and we devote only 20 percent of agricultural land to produce food we eat.

 

But while the demographics of agriculture have changed, everyone is affected by a farm system that degrades the environment, drives climate change and churns out a junk food diet. That same system has displaced people and extracted wealth from rural communities, driving monopolistic concentration and record profits for Big Food, while almost all farmers must supplement their income with off-farm jobs.

 

These dysfunctions began long before the decline of the family farm. The U.S.D.A. has long been accused of discrimination in dispensing its services and resources, and of intentionally driving the commercial success and wealth building of white farmers while causing the failure, bankruptcy and land loss of Black, Hispanic, Native American and women farmers and ranchers. A series of legal actions from the late 1990s, including the Pigford v. Glickman and Keepseagle v. Vilsack lawsuits, resulted in settlement agreements that paid millions to eligible class members to compensate them for their discrimination claims against the department.

 

The U.S.D.A. still reflects the culture of 1862, the year of its creation and of the passage of the Homestead Act, which gave more than 270 million acres of Native American land to white settlers. At the same time, the Morrill Act “distributed” an additional 11 million acres of appropriated Native land to establish a network of state colleges of agriculture and mechanic arts, a network that to this day serves whites preferentially. (A series of underfunded land-grant universities was established in 1890 and 1994 in a feeble attempt to paper over this federally sanctioned racism.) The result of this social engineering is aggregate assets of around $2.7 trillion, held disproportionately among today’s farmers, 96 percent of whom are white.

 

There’s another sense in which the U.S.D.A. is bound to the past. Large-scale plantation agriculture, a major reason the South seceded from the Union, was a mercantilist economic system. The production of cotton, sugar, tobacco, rice and other commodities drove a web of global trade that enriched profiteers, corporations and nations at a distance from the enslaved people who labored under brutal conditions to generate that wealth. That same model of agriculture — cash crops grown primarily for processing or trade rather than for eating, a brutally exploited work force — has become the norm, and has been consistently promoted by recent secretaries of agriculture, most stridently by the incumbent, an agribusiness veteran.

 

That template still benefits mainly the global conglomerates that sell to and buy from farmers, to the great economic detriment of the majority of farmers and their rural communities, and especially to that of the largely immigrant work force that replicates the work of the formerly enslaved, with largely imperceptible improvement in their treatment.

 

Yet the American model of agribusiness profiting from low value commodities combined with through-the-roof production volume works so badly for farmers that the system is propped up by federal subsidies — until recently $15 billion per year — that are funneled into the bottom lines of mega-corporations. Since 2018, however, an additional $60 billion of taxpayer money has been splurged on this sector, making it one of the most socialized sectors of the economy.

 

Expanding the department’s vision of the food system beyond the interests of agribusiness would allow the U.S.D.A. to promote health and well-being for all. For President-elect Biden to “build back better,” he will need a secretary of agriculture who cares not only about how food and industrial products are produced, but also for whom, and to what general public good.

 

The secretary of agriculture should lead the fight against corporations that have created a toxic food environment and support groups building healthful alternatives. The secretary should champion unity among farmers, rural people and urban advocates for racial and economic justice against the common enemy of consolidation and concentration of wealth. And the secretary should use the department’s vaunted research and extension capacity to support a food system that can rebuild rural economies, regenerate ecological capital, mitigate climate change and provide nourishing food for all.

 

While we’re at it, we might as well change the department’s name from its archaic, misleading misnomer to something that reflects the country’s needs: a Department of Food and Well Being.

Ricardo Salvador is the director of the food and environment program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. Mark Bittman is on the faculty of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia and a former Times columnist whose book “Animal, Vegetable, Junk” is to be published in February.

[johnu]

Ricardo Salvador is the director of the food and environment program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. Mark Bittman is on the faculty of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia and a former Times columnist whose book “Animal, Vegetable, Junk” is to be published in February.

Why do we need a new Secretary of Agriculture when we have Sonny Perdue, a recognized expert on insider trading and violating the Hatch Act???

[johnu]

'An attempt to sabotage': Trump's potential purge of career employees casts pall across federal government

[Winstonm]

Behind the myths of politics and social networks: The WaPo:

 

 

 

AFTON, Va. — There was a time in Denver Riggleman's life when he sat on the banks of a creek that reeked of dead fish and peered through night-vision goggles into the thick of the Olympic National Forest.

 

 

 

He was looking for Bigfoot.

 

Or at least, others in his group were. Riggleman, a nonbeliever who was then a National Security Agency defense contractor, had come along for the ride, paying thousands of dollars in 2004 to indulge a lifelong fascination: Why do people — what kind of people — believe in Bigfoot?

 

 

Now in one of his last acts as a Republican congressman from Virginia, Riggleman is asking the same questions of supporters of QAnon and deniers of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.

 

 

 

Months after his ouster by Rep.-elect Bob Good ® in a contentious GOP convention, Riggleman has become one of the loudest voices in Congress warning of the infiltration of conspiracy theories into political discourse.

 

And he is surely the only voice to have made the point after self-publishing a book about Bigfoot beliefs.

 

 

To Riggleman, the book, “Bigfoot . . . It’s Complicated,” mirrors the way pockets of the country are falling into conspiracy wormholes — everything from extremist fringe groups such as QAnon and the “boogaloo” movement to President Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud.

 

 

Like the Bigfoot hunters in the Olympic National Forest, they see what they want to see.

 

 

 

“I always say the [bigfoot] expedition leader and Rudy Giuliani are very similar people,” Riggleman said of Trump’s conspiracy-theory-spinning lawyer, during a recent interview at his distillery in Afton, Va.

 

Bigfoot believers have plenty in common with political extremists on both the far right and the far left, Riggleman said, lambasting a political ecosystem where, oftentimes, “facts don’t matter.”

 

“They’re all bat---- crazy. Right?” he said, not really joking. “All of them ascribe to a team mythology that might or might not be true. And they stay on that team regardless. And that is what’s so dangerous about politics today. That’s what I’ve been trying to say.”

 

I think a strong reason so many of the religious turn to the right politically - the hierarchy of Christianity compares nicely to the concepts of authoritarian voter theory and, if my memory serves, there is also an evolutionary component to humans gathering in groups. There is nothing particularly wrong about a rightward political bent, nor a leftward bent; however, when those ideations are expressed in fabricated myths that are assimilated by the group, that is a problem. Unfortunately, there is no quick or simple solution to overturn crowdthink - only by individuals, one-by-one, deciding that they have been duped does the madness stop. Common, agreed upon facts are the lifeblood not only of democracies but of civilizations. Social media is challenging those facts, and in so doing is challenging civilizations across the globe.

 

[Winstonm]

'An attempt to sabotage': Trump's potential purge of career employees casts pall across federal government

 

Although it took him a long time to figure it out, it appears now that Trump is trying to position himself to be re-elected in 2024 and structuring the executive branch to make it much easier to staff with clones. Now that he is down, it is imperative to stomp on any remaining shard of probability that he could run again.

[y66]

The prospects for a new coronavirus relief plan are finally improving. To be sure, the months of delay up to this point, and the fact that talks in Washington might even now fail to break the stalemate, are little short of scandalous. But compromise is in the air. Better late than never, leaders of both parties need to seize the opportunity.

 

A bipartisan group of senators opened a crack in the wall earlier this week, proposing a new relief plan of a little over $900 billion — less than the $2.4 trillion that Democratic Party leaders had previously insisted on, and more than the roughly $500 billion favored by the GOP leadership. Senator Mitt Romney said, “We’re getting more and more support from Republicans and Democrats.” The Problem Solvers Caucus, a bipartisan group of moderates in the House, has backed the measure. President Donald Trump has also suggested he’d support it.

 

The respective leaderships in Congress have expressed interest and willingness to talk further. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called the plan a basis for negotiation. But as yet neither side has committed to getting it done. That isn’t good enough.

 

Democrats should follow President-elect Joe Biden’s lead. He got it exactly right, saying the compromise proposal wasn’t enough but but he saw it as a down payment that would deliver prompt relief. When Biden takes office in January, the issue can be revisited and further support arranged. With the existing relief measures expiring, those in need of financial help can’t wait.

 

Make no mistake, the Democrats have been right all along to argue that a bigger proposal would be better. With Covid restrictions tightening again, a measure of between $1 trillion and $2 trillion is needed — enough to provide renewed unemployment assistance, help for struggling businesses, and adequate support for financially stretched states and cities.

 

Even so, the country would see settling for the compromise as the best that could be done under the circumstances, not as a Democratic defeat. And if Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and others still refused to budge from their woefully inadequate proposal, the blame for the impasse and its consequences would lie squarely where it belongs, with Republicans in Congress.

 

This saga has dragged on far too long already. Come to terms immediately and get this measure passed.