Good morning and...there is a lot to get to so let’s jump right into it!
Dahleen Glanton of the Chicago Tribune writes that the death of Breonna Taylor and the refusal of the Kentucky Attorney General to indict her killers for actually killing her is all a part of a “law and order” politics that is racist to the core.
It should come as no surprise that this grand jury would render a decision that frees the officers from criminal prosecution in the botched drug raid. Consider who presented the case.
Cameron is a “law-and-order” politician. He made that clear in his speech last month at the Republican National Convention, where he called himself a “proud Republican and supporter of Donald J. Trump.”
Certainly, there’s nothing wrong with law and order. But under Trump’s racially divisive interpretation of law and order, there is no room for questions. Police officers can do no wrong. Their account of a killing is gospel. And anyone who says otherwise is an anarchist.
When prosecutors follow Trump’s lead, it not only raises questions about the investigation but also contributes to the growing mistrust of law enforcement by marginalized groups.
Cameron should have remained quiet and stayed away from the national political spotlight. He chose instead to reveal his allegiance to Trump’s politically inflammatory brand of law and order in the midst of the Taylor investigation.
Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence
Adam D. Schiff writes for the
Los Angeles Times that it is time to take up major democracy reforms.
When Donald Trump was inaugurated in 2017, I was confident that our Constitution and democratic institutions, which had survived the Civil War, terrorist attacks, economic crises and more, could withstand an unscrupulous president. What I did not foresee was the awful degree to which the party of the president would surrender its institutional responsibilities in order to protect its hold on power — and the extent to which this abdication would leave such a president unconstrained.
As we survey the wreckage of the past 3½ years, it’s apparent that the foundation of our democracy has been shaken. Trump has sought to turn the instruments of government to his personal and political advantage, and to an astonishing degree, he has been successful.
He has extorted a foreign partner for dirt on his political opponent, a scheme for which he was impeached. He has interfered in prosecutions of his closest friends and allies, and abused the pardon and commutation powers to help political friends. He has painted the press as the “enemy of the people,” violated the Hatch Act, usurped Congress’ power of the purse to build a wall Congress did not fund, and retaliated against whistleblowers and inspectors general who exposed his wrongdoing and that of others.
Renée Graham of the Boston Globe asks: Is it fascism yet?
Is it fascism yet?
Democracy in America isn’t dying. It’s being strangled before our eyes by an administration determined to maintain power at any cost. Trump isn’t just playing to his base. Every move he makes is designed to destabilize the nation, to bring its citizens to heel with threats, intimidation, and violence.
In the 2015 book “Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad,” M.T. Anderson writes that Russian dictator Joseph Stalin “was not merely trying to remove political enemies. He was not merely trying to terrorize the country into submission. He was trying to break down all social structure that did not emanate from him, and to create a new people, no longer Homo sapiens, but Homo sovieticus, the New Man of Communism.”
Except for the communism part, the rest sounds sickeningly familiar.
I think that “parsing” The Damn Fool’s language regarding conceding the 2020 election is a bit of a useless exercise because on this subject, I take him at is word. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump attempts to parse, anyway.
Over the past few weeks, there has been a growing rumble of the sort that was manifested in 2016: What if Trump declines to concede? The threat is more dangerous now, because Trump has the power of the presidency itself at his disposal. What if the scenarios outlined by journalist Barton Gellman for the Atlantic play out, and Trump pulls every available lever to subvert popular will should it become apparent that he might lose? How close is this country to seeing its experiment collapse?
During a news briefing, Trump was asked to assuage those concerns.
“Mr. President, real quickly, win, lose or draw in this election, will you commit here today for a peaceful transfer of power after the election?” a reporter asked. He noted various incidents of violence that have occurred in recent weeks, apparently to demonstrate the elevated national temperature. “Will you commit to making sure that there is a peaceful transferral of power after the election?”
Trump’s answer was not reassuring.
“Well,” he began, “we’re going to have to see what happens.”
It’s a sharply atypical response for a president, certainly. George W. Bush or Barack Obama, for example, would probably have said something like, while I’m confident I’ll win, of course I will cede my position should that be what voters want. But they weren’t asked similar questions, to my knowledge, because they didn’t need to articulate those obvious answers.
Jefferson Cowie writes for the Boston Review that the entire concept and practice of freedom, as constructed an American context, was (and perhaps still is) for whites only.
In American mythology, there exists a gauzy past when white citizens were left alone to do as they pleased with their land and their labor (even if it was land stolen and labor enslaved). In the legend, those days of freedom and equality were, and still are, perpetually under assault. Most often the entity threatening to steal or undermine freedom in the American melodrama is the federal government. In the federal government’s checkered—perhaps “occasional” might be the better term—history of protecting minority populations from white people’s dominion, it presents a constant threat to the liberty of white people. That is why, as southern historian J. Mills Thornton put it, southern history—I would say U.S. history—displays an obsessive “fear of an imminent loss of freedom.” Understanding the anxious and fearful grind produced by threats to the domination-as-freedom complex helps us understand what Richard Hofstadter called the “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” of the “paranoid style” in U.S. politics. The government is not just coming for your guns, its coming for your freedom—the freedom to dominate others.
Which leads us to Clint Smith’s piece in The Atlantic which asserts that it is not “indoctrination” to teach the history and truth of American slavery.
Listening to Trump, one would think that a rigorous examination of slavery and its implications was a central fixture of American classrooms. Recent surveys, however, show that young people in America have enormous gaps in what they understand about the history of slavery in this country. According to a 2018 report from the Southern Poverty Law Center, only 8 percent of high-school seniors surveyed were able to identify slavery as the central cause of the Civil War. Two-thirds of students did not know that a constitutional amendment was necessary to formally end slavery.
What fascinated me most about Trump’s speech was his choice to frame it around “indoctrination.” It was strange to realize that providing a holistic account of what slavery was, and the horror it wrought, might be understood as indoctrination—especially if the only stories one has been told about America have been cloaked in the one-dimensional mythology of exceptionalism.
“We have too often a deliberate attempt so to change the facts of history that the story will make pleasant reading for Americans,” Du Bois wrote in Black Reconstruction.
New York Times/Siena battleground state polling of Iowa, Georgia, and Texas is out this morning.
Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin/New York Times
Mr. Trump’s vulnerability even in conservative-leaning states underscores just how precarious his political position is, less than six weeks before Election Day. While he and Mr. Biden are competing aggressively for traditional swing states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Florida, the poll suggests that Mr. Biden has assembled a coalition formidable enough to jeopardize Mr. Trump even in historically Republican parts of the South and Midwest.
A yawning gender gap in all three states is working in Mr. Biden’s favor, with the former vice president making inroads into conservative territory with strong support from women. In Iowa, where Mr. Biden is ahead of Mr. Trump, 45 percent to 42 percent, he is up among women by 14 percentage points. Men favor Mr. Trump by eight points.
In Georgia, where the two candidates are tied at 45 percent, Mr. Biden leads among women by 10 points. Mr. Trump is ahead with men by a similar margin of 11 percentage points.
Mr. Trump’s large advantage among men in Texas is enough to give him a small advantage there, 46 percent to 43 percent. Men prefer the president to his Democratic challenger by 16 points, while women favor Mr. Biden by an eight-point margin.
Meaghan Winter and Gaby Goldstein write for the Guardian that Democrats must continue to prioritize state-level electoral races.
For decades, Democrats prioritized federal elections over state-level races, and left-leaning interest groups often fought through the courts, not local elections. Ginsburg, after all, won her icon status after becoming an attorney and crusading to establish human rights in court. That tactic worked well for many progressive causes. In the 1970s, litigation against corporations worked so well, in fact, that libertarian billionaires responded by building an entire political apparatus designed to stack the courts with ideological judges opposed to environmental and labor protections. Meanwhile, conservative interest groups began cultivating anti-abortion and anti-gay rights judges and political connections. The Republican party’s transformation of the judiciary under Trump is the culmination of those decades-long efforts.
At the same time, Republicans and their donors have kept a laser focus on winning state legislative races – especially in redistricting years like this one. By gerrymandering districts, Republican strategists have almost guaranteed that their candidates can pass unpopular legislation without risking their seats or control of their states. This trend is especially alarming given that a central goal of conservative jurisprudence is to eliminate federal protections and give states more leeway to write their own laws.
D.T.Max of the New Yorker writes that a pandemic and culture of public shaming has arisen alongside the COVID-19 pandemic.
When two brothers from Tennessee amassed nearly eighteen thousand bottles of hand sanitizer to resell on the Internet, social-media users devoured them. “I hope that man from Tennessee overdoses on sanitizer for being such a useless, repulsive piece of shit,” a woman from New Jersey tweeted. Abashed, the brothers agreed to donate the goods instead. One of them issued a public apology, saying, “If by my actions anyone was directly impacted and unable to get sanitizer from one of their local stores because I purchased it all I am truly sorry.” He then told the Times, “That’s not who I am as a person. And all I’ve been told for the last 48 hours is how much of that person I am.” The Augusta Chronicle, declaring justice well served, said, “The vast court of public opinion is superbly suited to shame morally ambiguous opportunists.”
Even though the public has treated superspreaders as if they had intended to transmit the disease to others, incidents in which someone has deliberately spread covid-19 to unsuspecting people have been virtually nonexistent. In March, ABC News reported that the F.B.I. had advised local law enforcement that far-right groups were planning to give the virus to their enemies, by sending infected supporters to Jewish services and spraying police officers with infected fluid. No such acts have occurred.
Max’s article has a lot of case studies of “public shaming” to choose from. The example I excerpted above is a case that I consider acceptable. Many of the cases of the accidental spreading of COVID-19 that Max documents in the article are not acceptable. In one case that Max does not mention, for example, I had a visceral negative reaction to a case of public shaming in South Korea with outright and heavy undertones of homophobia.
Americans don’t always get the public shaming thing right, either, even when it is warranted and especially in cases that does not involve the spread of COVID-19.
Although I will say that, in an American context, it seems that a lot of the complaints about a culture of “public shaming” come from straight white men. This is actually a pretty broad issue beyond the politics of public shaming and COVID-19 and I appreciate Max writing about this topic.
Since so much of social media seems to traffic in “doom porn” lately, I guess that I can throw Washington Monthly’s Eric Cortelessa’s nightmare scenario for the United States Postal Service on the pile.
...without Donald Trump lifting a finger, he could get precisely what he wants: Dysfunction and disorder in the USPS, enabling him to claim vindication that vote-by-mail doesn’t work; to push for disenfranchising countless voters who cast ballots by mail; and possibly to assert, if it looks like he is losing, that the election is being rigged and that he should stay in power.
A virus temporarily crippling the postal service isn’t idle speculation. In March, for instance, when New York City was the epicenter of the pandemic, a Bronx mailman died of the virus. More postal deaths followed around the country. USPS leadership soon received frantic emails from mail carriers and their spouses nationwide begging the agency to protect its staff—who were on the front line of delivering medicines, supplies, and benefits checks—with more and better personal protective equipment and keeping vulnerable workers out of harm’s way, according to a raft of documents recently obtained by The Washington Post. One local union leader urged the Postal Service to temporarily simply suspend operations in New York City.
It was no surprise, then, that mail delivery slowed down dramatically, at a time when more people were relying on the mail even more than usual because of physical distancing, and the USPS was experiencing severe staff shortages. To address the emergency, the Postal Service reached a memorandum of understanding with the major postal unions to allow for extended paid sick leave for letter carriers and postal workers—and to allow for the USPS to hire temporary workers to fill the void.
Nicu Calcea of the New Statesman writes that the data shows that poorer states are losing out on accessing COVID-19 relief funds.
David Miliband, the CEO of the International Rescue Committee, said that the New Statesman’s data “provides yet another worrying indication that the international community urgently needs to get its act together if we are to mount a robust and truly global response to this crisis”. He added that the poorest countries require “unprecedented global assistance” to handle both the health crisis and its economic and political fallout.
***
...of the ten nations that received the most aid per capita, nine are small island countries, many of which are classed as high-income economies by the World Bank. The Bahamas received $182.4m in coronavirus funding for a population of around 393,000, putting its per capita funding at $464. Other island nations also received more money per person than most, including the Seychelles ($389/capita), Saint Lucia ($274), Barbados ($230) and Grenada ($199). Some countries in eastern Europe are also among those that received the most money per capita, such as Macedonia ($139), Georgia ($139) and Bosnia and Herzegovina ($121). On the other end of the scale, Zambia, Kazakhstan, Cameroon, Tanzania and Brazil have all received less than 20 cents per person.
Finally this morning, Dave Zirin of The Nation writes about the burgeoning political capital of the Los Angeles Lakers’ LeBron James.
Because of social media, LeBron has a measure of power that previous athlete-activists could not touch. Muhammad Ali always had to go through the filter of the sports media, and at times the right-wing Beltway media, in order to be heard. Michael Jordan was only heard through the prism of corporate salesmanship. We could hear what Michael was saying, but it usually involved Nike or Hanes underwear. LeBron James has 47.4 million Twitter followers. On Instagram, he has 72.3 million. Those totals exceed the combined “following” of Donald Trump, and he doesn’t resort to appealing to people’s basest instincts in order to get there.
Trump has mocked LeBron’s intelligence, but no one, not even Trump’s powerful lizard brain, uses their messaging more effectively. Trump insults legions of people to the point where it’s all become “white noise.” When LeBron called Trump “u bum” after the president disinvited the Golden State Warriors to the White House, it was a news event unto itself.
With this voice that is capable of reaching more than 100 million people, LeBron has shown a remarkable discipline in trying to uplift his community and openly criticize a US police force that is off the rails. The latest slander he has had to endure from the white nationalist right, which seethes over the fact that he has such a platform, is that his activism has encouraged violence against police officers. The LA Sheriffs’ Department, the same LASD that’s being sued by Kobe Bryant’s widow, Vanessa, for taking pictures of Kobe and their daughter Gianna at the site of their helicopter crash for personal use, challenged LeBron to put up a reward to capture the shooter of two police officers.
Everyone have a good morning!