Touching base with liar fascist Republican elite tactics

The Washington Post writes in an article, Koch-backed group fuels opposition to school mask mandates, leaked letter shows:

It is motivated, the author explains, by a desire to “speak up for what is best for my kids.” And it fervently conveys the author’s feelings to school leaders: “I do not believe little kids should be forced to wear masks, and I urge you to adopt a policy that allows parental choice on this matter for the upcoming school year.”

But the heartfelt appeal is not the product of a grass roots groundswell. Rather, it is a template drafted and circulated this week within a conservative network built on the scaffolding of the Koch fortune and the largesse of other GOP megadonors.

That makes the document, which was obtained by The Washington Post, the latest salvo in an inflamed debate over mask requirements in schools, which have become the epicenter of partisan battles over everything from gender identity to critical race theory. The political melee engulfing educators has complicated efforts to reopen schools safely during a new wave of the virus brought on by the highly transmissible delta variant.

The document offers a rare glimpse into the inner workings of a well-financed conservative campaign to undermine regulations that health authorities say are necessary to contain the coronavirus. The frustration of many parents who want a greater say is deeply felt, school superintendents say. But their anger is also being fueled by organized activists whose influence is ordinarily veiled.  

The letter was made available on Tuesday to paying members of the Independent Women’s Network, a project of the Independent Women’s Forum and Independent Women’s Voice that markets itself as a “members-only platform that is free from censorship and cancellation.” Both are nonprofits once touted by their board chairman and CEO, Heather Higgins, as part of a unique tool in the “Republican conservative arsenal” because, “Being branded as neutral but actually having the people who know, know that you’re actually conservative puts us in a unique position.”

Tennessee parents make threats after school board mandates masks: ‘We will find you’

Implication: We will murder you

Last March, the New Yorker wrote about the billionaire radical right Koch propaganda Leviathan's money-drenched tactics that necessarily[1] dominate the fascist Republican Party's elites' approach to politics:

In public, Republicans have denounced Democrats’ ambitious electoral-reform bill, the For the People Act, as an unpopular partisan ploy. In a contentious Senate committee hearing last week, Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, slammed the proposal, which aims to expand voting rights and curb the influence of money in politics, as “a brazen and shameless power grab by Democrats.” But behind closed doors Republicans speak differently about the legislation, which is also known as House Resolution 1 and Senate Bill 1. They admit the lesser-known provisions in the bill that limit secret campaign spending are overwhelmingly popular across the political spectrum. In private, they concede their own polling shows that no message they can devise effectively counters the argument that billionaires should be prevented from buying elections.

A recording obtained by The New Yorker of a private conference call on January 8th, between a policy adviser to Senator Mitch McConnell and the leaders of several prominent conservative groups—including one run by the Koch brothers’ network—reveals the participants’ worry that the proposed election reforms garner wide support not just from liberals but from conservative voters, too. The speakers on the call expressed alarm at the broad popularity of the bill’s provision calling for more public disclosure about secret political donors. The participants conceded that the bill, which would stem the flow of dark money from such political donors as the billionaire oil magnate Charles Koch, was so popular that it wasn’t worth trying to mount a public-advocacy campaign to shift opinion. Instead, a senior Koch operative said that opponents would be better off ignoring the will of American voters and trying to kill the bill in Congress. 

Kyle McKenzie, the research director for the Koch-run advocacy group Stand Together, told fellow-conservatives and Republican congressional staffers on the call that he had a “spoiler.” “When presented with a very neutral description” of the bill, “people were generally supportive,” McKenzie said, adding that “the most worrisome part . . . is that conservatives were actually as supportive as the general public was when they read the neutral description.” In fact, he warned, “there’s a large, very large, chunk of conservatives who are supportive of these types of efforts.” 

As a result, McKenzie conceded, the legislation’s opponents would likely have to rely on Republicans in the Senate, where the bill is now under debate, to use “under-the-dome-type strategies”—meaning legislative maneuvers beneath Congress’s roof, such as the filibuster—to stop the bill, because turning public opinion against it would be “incredibly difficult.” He warned that the worst thing conservatives could do would be to try to “engage with the other side” on the argument that the legislation “stops billionaires from buying elections.” McKenzie admitted, “Unfortunately, we’ve found that that is a winning message, for both the general public and also conservatives.” He said that when his group tested “tons of other” arguments in support of the bill, the one condemning billionaires buying elections was the most persuasive—people “found that to be most convincing, and it riled them up the most.” 

McKenzie explained that the Koch-founded group had invested substantial resources “to see if we could find any message that would activate and persuade conservatives on this issue.” He related that “an A.O.C. message we tested”—one claiming that the bill might help Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez achieve her goal of holding “people in the Trump Administration accountable” by identifying big donors—helped somewhat with conservatives. But McKenzie admitted that the link was tenuous, since “what she means by this is unclear.” “Sadly,” he added, not even attaching the phrase “cancel culture” to the bill, by portraying it as silencing conservative voices, had worked. “It really ranked at the bottom,” McKenzie said to the group. “That was definitely a little concerning for us.”  

With so little public support, the bill’s opponents have already begun pressuring individual senators. On March 20th, several major conservative groups, including Heritage Action, Tea Party Patriots Action, Freedom Works, and the local and national branches of the Family Research Council, organized a rally in West Virginia to get Senator Joe Manchin, the conservative Democrat, to come out against the legislation. They also pushed Manchin to oppose any efforts by Democrats to abolish the Senate’s filibuster rule, a tactical step that the Party would probably need to take in order to pass the bill. “The filibuster is really the only thing standing in the way of progressive far-left policies like H.R. 1, which is Pelosi’s campaign to take over America’s elections,” Noah Weinrich, the press secretary at Heritage Action, declared during a West Virginia radio interview. On Thursday, Manchin issued a statement warning Democrats that forcing the measure through the Senate would “only exacerbate the distrust that millions of Americans harbor against the U.S. government.”

Aw, jeez. It was "a little concerning" that ruthless Republican fascist propagandist polling research indicated that an intentionally divisive and deceptive label such as cancel culture wasn't persuasive enough to do the job of deceiving and ripping American society apart to the satisfaction of corrupt anti-democratic, autocratic Koch lies, deceit and misdirection. 

What a shame. /s

Presumably, most fascist Republican elites are thankful for Joe Manchin, their fascist champion in the Democratic Party.

Questions: 

1. Is the Koch propaganda Leviathan more democratic than anti-democratic? 

2. Is the Koch propaganda Leviathan not influential enough to bother mention by the MSM, so it is just the Koch propaganda pipsqueak minnow?

3. Is it possible that political and economic propaganda induce adult Americans to actually participate in public in this kind of deranged lunacy, or is it just harmless ranged lunacy?:

Valiant anti-mask patriots at a school board meeting:

Yeah!! Our kids deserve oxygen!!

Yeah!! Make breathing great again!!

Yeah!! Masks murder children!!

Yeah!! Slaughter all pedophile Democrats, meaning all Democrats!!

(or is at least some of this unfair and/or over the top?)

Footnote:

1. Necessarily because the FRP (fascist Republican Party) has known for decades that it cannot win majority public support, majority votes and/or autocrat/plutocrat-level power on the basis of honest debate, real acts or transparency. So, it has to rely on cheating such as unwarranted opacity, lies, slanders, unwarranted emotional manipulation, partisan motivated reasoning and other anti-democratic means to win votes and power. 

They hate masks, really

A faltering business model: Profit on cheap, abused labor and cheap goods

NYT: Paige Murdock, a manager, went weeks without getting a day off or seeing her family but, as a salaried employee, did not receive overtime pay. The company limited the hours she could give to her staff, she said, which often meant she was running the store short-handed. 

When a manager said Ms. Murdock, 44, couldn’t take her previously approved vacation week to help her daughter, who is in the military, move to Texas, she decided to quit. “If you look at my résumé, I am a very loyal employee,” Ms. Murdock said. 

“I will work my heart out. .... I don’t ask for much.”

Oh yeah, you asked for too much, so bugger off, you lazy ingrate. 

As the Donald would say, YOU'RE FIRED!!

By now, it is clear to anyone paying any attention that as a general rule capitalism does not care about anything except profit. Perks are necessary public relations (propaganda) measures needed to retain employees. Concerns such as human misery, environmental degradation, and low worker wages with non-existent benefits, or nearly non-existent, do not amount to things that lead to significant improvement. Sometimes those things lead to campaign contributions and fees to public relations companies (professional deceivers and liars) for corporate protection. They do not lead to protection for customers. 

That's just business as usual for most companies, most of the time, in most places. 

The New York Times writes:

Sandra Beadling was fed up with the 70-hour workweeks, the delivery trucks running days behind schedule, and the wear and tear on her knees from all the stooping to restock the bottom shelves.

The manager of the Dollar General store in Wells, Maine, Ms. Beadling, 54, had tried to hire more help. But that was a tough sell when Walmart was offering $16 an hour and her store was paying $12.

Ms. Beadling had spent long stretches this summer as one of only a few workers in the store, tending to the register and trying to help shoppers. She had pleaded with her managers to allow the store’s part-time workers to have more hours, but to no avail.

Dollar stores, which pay among the lowest wages in the retail industry and often operate in areas where there is little competition, are stumbling in the later stages of the pandemic.

Sales are slowing and some measures of profit are shrinking as the industry struggles with a confluence of challenges. They include burned-out workers, pressure to increase wages, supply chain problems and a growing number of cities and towns that are rejecting new dollar stores because, they say, the business model harms their communities.

The troubles follow a year of soaring profits and a period of staggering growth in the industry. Roughly one in every three stores that have been announced to open in the United States this year is a dollar store, according to Coresight Research, a retail advisory firm, a sign of how well the industry did in 2020.

The business model, which relies on relatively cheap labor and inexpensive goods, is designed to flourish even when its core customers are hurting financially. The strategy was honed during the high unemployment and wage stagnation of the Great Recession of 2008.  

In a statement, Dollar General said, “We pay competitive wages, which are determined based on several factors including the relevant labor market.” The company added that “our operating standards are designed to provide stores with sufficient labor hours, and it is not our expectation that store managers should work 70 to 80 hours per week.” 

Part-time workers sometimes encounter the opposite problem of not having enough work. As a store manager, Ms. Beadling said, she was constantly trying to find additional hours to give to her employees who needed the money, including one worker who was living in a tent because she couldn’t afford rent.

But the allotted hours for the store were limited by higher-up managers, she said.

This summer, social media buzzed with photos of dollar stores, from Lincoln, Neb., to Pittsburgh and beyond, where employees had taped up signs in the front door announcing that they had walked off the job.

“Capitalism will destroy this country,” read one sign in the window of a Dollar General in Eliot, Maine, this spring. “If you don’t pay people enough to live their lives, why should they slave away for you?”

DG's statement that it is not a “corporate expectation” that store managers should work 70 to 80 hours per week is public relations (a lie). Regular people's real world expectation that such a statement is corporate bullshit, a/k/a/ public relations, a/k/a lies and deceit.

a/k/a/ = “also known as” in legal jargon

A hungry lizard, poor thing, just looking for food

in its natural environment and being harassed by cruel 

cowboys with guns 

Eons ago in August of 2019, back when cowboys with six-shooters were wrangling grumpy but emaciated T. rex lizards on the prairies (and elsewhere) in defense of rich people and campaign donors (tied for first and second), God third, nation fourth and average people maybe 7th or 8th, I posted a discussion about an alleged nascent social consciousness among major corporations. At the time I dismissed that squeak of corporate moral concern like this: 

That is aspirational, but vague to the point of being meaningless.

Other people also questioned the motives of a strange corporate burp of social conscience, as discussed here last August: 

“But do people like [USB Bank chairman Axel] Weber really believe this stuff? .... The idea that banks were selling ESG [environmental, sustainability, green, etc.] products seemed a little like priests in the medieval Catholic church selling ‘indulgences’ .... the noise in the system was concealing a more important area of silence.

The issue at stake revolved around risk management. If you listened to the noise around ESG, it seemed that the movement was all about activism: vocal campaigners were calling for social and environmental change, and companies and financial groups were shouting about what they were doing to support this. But if you looked more closely at ESG, with an anthropologist’s lens, it was clear that there was a second factor at work that was less openly discussed: self-interest.

So, once again, money talks and real people, the environment and everything else, e.g., democracy, and civil liberties walks. Unless ignoring those disgusting non-profit things ding profits too much, they get ignored, denied, or spun into faux realities by public relations professionals, a/k/a dividers, liars, and/or deceivers. 

Questions: Are low paid American workers just spoiled whining wuss? Does pay reflect what the market will bear and if you don't like, quit and get a better job? Is this yet another bucket of worms where American government is neutered and unable to respond so that uncaring market forces, i.e., insatiable profit lust, are in control? How meaningful are civil liberties if you are so poor and tied to your job that you are generally unable to exercise them, e.g., insufficient time to vote or become informed, insufficient time to get vaccinated, etc?

Corruption and anti-democratic rot in the two-party system

ProPublica reported on how one provision of the December 2017 tax cut for rich people and big corporations law came into being:

In November 2017, with the administration of President Donald Trump rushing to get a massive tax overhaul through Congress, Sen. Ron Johnson stunned his colleagues by announcing he would vote “no.”

Johnson’s demand was simple: In exchange for his vote, the bill must sweeten the tax break for a class of companies that are known as pass-throughs, since profits pass through to their owners. Johnson praised such companies as “engines of innovation.” Behind the scenes, the senator pressed top Treasury Department officials on the issue, emails and the officials’ calendars show.

Within two weeks, Johnson’s ultimatum produced results. Trump personally called the senator to beg for his support, and the bill’s authors fattened the tax cut for these businesses. Johnson flipped to a “yes” and claimed credit for the change. The bill passed.

The Trump administration championed the pass-through provision as tax relief for “small businesses.”

Confidential tax records, however, reveal that Johnson’s last-minute maneuver benefited two families more than almost any others in the country — both worth billions and both among the senator’s biggest donors.

Dick and Liz Uihlein of packaging giant Uline, along with roofing magnate Diane Hendricks, together had contributed around $20 million to groups backing Johnson’s 2016 reelection campaign.  

The expanded tax break Johnson muscled through netted them $215 million in deductions in 2018 alone, drastically reducing the income they owed taxes on. At that rate, the cut could deliver more than half a billion in tax savings for Hendricks and the Uihleins over its eight-year life.

That speaks for itself: Quid pro quo. Pay-to-play. Corruption parading as free speech. 

In another ProPublica article, Republican anti-democratic rage over the 2020 election is still white hot. It appears to be intensifying in at least the some places, not softening. ProPublica writes:

HOOD COUNTY, Texas — Michele Carew would seem an unlikely target of Donald Trump loyalists who have fixated their fury on the notion that the 2020 election was stolen from the former president.

The nonpartisan elections administrator in the staunchly Republican Hood County, just an hour southwest of Fort Worth, oversaw an election in which Trump got some 81% of the vote. It was among the former president’s larger margins of victory in Texas, which also went for him.

Yet over the past 10 months, Carew’s work has come under persistent attack from hard-line Republicans. They allege disloyalty and liberal bias at the root of her actions, from the time she denied a reporter with the fervently pro-Trump network One America News entrance to a training that was not open to the public to accusations, disputed by the Texas secretary of state’s office, that she is violating state law by using electronic machines that randomly number ballots.

Viewing her decisions as a litmus test of her loyalty to the Republican Party, they have demanded that Carew be fired or her position abolished and her duties transferred to an elected county clerk who has used social media to promote baseless allegations of widespread election fraud.

That speaks for itself: Anti-democratic American-style fascism that demands loyalty to the fascist Republican Party, not loyalty to democracy, voting rights, or election integrity. And this is from rank and file Republicans, not national elites.

Finally, multiple sources have reported that Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) has received significant campaign contributions from the pharmaceutical industry. She is one of two conservative Democratic Senators who are blocking passage of two infrastructure bills. She refuses to give reasons for her opposition other than to say the bill she opposes is too big at $3.5 trillion. The reconciliation bill imposes a requirement for the government to negotiate drug prices instead of letting companies charge whatever they can get away with. Based on those facts, (campaign contributions, her silence, and corporate profits at stake) one can reasonably conclude that Sinema is giving pay back to the pharma industry for their generosity.

Salon writes:

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, the controversial Arizona Democrat who threatens to derail President Biden's legislative agenda, received more than $750,000 in donations from the pharmaceutical and medical device industries. After that, she announced her opposition to a Democratic plan to lower prescription drug costs.

Sinema told White House officials that she opposes House and Senate bills that would allow Medicare to negotiate drug costs, sources told Politico this week. Democrats estimate these bills would save $450 billion over the next decade and thereby pay for a large portion of President Joe Biden's $3.5 trillion spending plan.  

Sinema is a longtime favorite of the pharmaceutical industry and now appears ready to undermine Biden's entire agenda as Big Pharma wages a lobbying blitz in hopes of torpedoing the bill, which nearly 90% of voters support. Sinema and several House Democrats who oppose the drug pricing plan have received major financial support from the industry. Given a 50-50 Senate and a narrow House majority of 220 to 212 (with three seats currently vacant), their opposition could sink the proposal or even the entire budget bill.

Sinema has received $519,988 from PACs and individuals in the pharmaceutical industry throughout her political career, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics. She brought in more than $120,000 in pharma contributions between 2019 and 2020 even though she is not up for re-election until 2024. Sinema has also received $190,161 from donors in the pharmaceutical manufacturing space and $62,797 from the medical supplies industry.

That speaks for itself: Quid pro quo. Pay-to-play. Corruption parading as free speech. Contrary public opinion be damned.

Questions: Is our two-party system seriously corrupted by campaign contributions? Is democracy under serious attack by an American style fascism or authoritarianism?

The Eastman memo: A fascist plan to subvert an election

The Washington Post writes about a way to overthrow the US government that a legal adviser to the ex-president wrote to steal the 2020 election for him:

it’s a good bet that most people have never even heard of the Eastman memo.

That says something troubling about how blasé the mainstream press has become about the attempted coup in the aftermath of the 2020 election — and how easily a coup could succeed next time.

The memo, unearthed in Bob Woodward and Robert Costa’s new book, is a stunner. Written by Trump legal adviser John Eastman — a serious Establishment Type with Federalist Society cred and a law school deanship under his belt — it offered Mike Pence, then in his final days as vice president, a detailed plan to declare the 2020 election invalid and give the presidency to Trump.

In other words, how to run a coup in six easy steps.

Pretty huge stuff, right? You’d think so, but the mainstream press has largely looked the other way. Immediately after the memo was revealed, according to a study by left-leaning Media Matters for America, there was no on-air news coverage — literally zero on the three major broadcast networks: ABC, NBC and CBS. Not on the evening newscasts watched by more than 20 million Americans, far greater than the audience for cable news. Not on the morning shows the next day. And when Sunday rolled around, NBC’s “Meet the Press” was the only broadcast network show that bothered to mention it. (Some late-night hosts did manage to play it for laughs.)

“The Horrifying Legal Blueprint for Trump’s War on Democracy” read the headline on Jonathan Chait’s piece in New York magazine’s Intelligencer section. And in the New York Times, columnist Jamelle Bouie took it on with “Trump Had a Mob. He Also Had a Plan.” The Post’s Greg Sargent hammered away at it.

Some national newspapers paid attention, but not much. USA Today with a story; the New York Times with a few paragraphs dropped deep into a sweeping news analysis.

For the most part, the memo slipped past the public — just another piece of flotsam from the wreckage of American society, drifting by unnoticed.

Questions: 

1. Has the MSM failed to report responsibly on the Eastman memo, or is it merely an aberrant curiosity of little importance and the MSM did a fine job by mostly ignoring it?

2. Is corporate ownership and/or capitalism of news media mostly compatible with competent, professional journalism, or mostly incompatible? Does it matter that corporations are people and unlimited dark money can flow to politicians to buy them? 

Status check: The Democrats and judicial nominees

Under current broken government circumstances, political partisan appointments to the federal bench are the most direct way to move politics to the left, right or anywhere else. Congress is hopelessly broken by hyper-partisan fascist Republicans. Republicans in power don't compromise unless there is absolutely no alternative. Democracy demands compromise. Republican refusal to compromise is anti-democratic authoritarianism.

Under our fascist and crackpot ex-president backed by a fascist and crackpot Republican Party Senate, putting radical right judges on the federal bench was a top priority. Arguably the top priority. What is it under Biden and the Dems?

Wikipedia writes about the status of judicial nominees as of Sept. 30, 2021:

This is a comprehensive list of all Article III and Article IV United States federal judges appointed by President Joe Biden as well as a partial list of Article I federal judicial appointments, excluding appointments to the District of Columbia judiciary.[1]

As of September 30, 2021, the United States Senate has confirmed 14 Article III judges nominated by Biden: five judges for the United States courts of appeals and nine judges for the United States district courts. There are 27 nominations currently awaiting Senate action: eight for the courts of appeals and 19 for the district courts. There are currently five vacancies on the U.S. courts of appeals, 71 vacancies on the U.S. district courts, two vacancies on the U.S. Court of International Trade,[2][3] and 32 announced federal judicial vacancies that will occur before the end of Biden's first term (11 for the courts of appeals and 21 for district courts).[4][5] Biden has not made any recess appointments to the federal courts.

In terms of Article I courts, as of September 30, 2021, the Senate has not confirmed any judges nominated by Biden. There are currently two nominations to Article I courts awaiting Senate action; both for the United States Court of Federal Claims. There are currently four vacancies on the United States Court of Federal Claims, two on the United States Tax Court, and one on the United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces. On March 2, 2021, Biden designated Elaine D. Kaplan as Chief Judge of the Court of Federal Claims.[6]

Regarding Article IV territorial courts, as of September 30, 2021, the Senate has not confirmed any judges nominated by Biden. Biden has not elevated any judges to the position of Chief Judge.

Questions: 

1. What grade should Biden, Schumer and Senate Democrats reasonably get so far about putting Democratic judges on the federal bench, A, B, C, D or F? 

2. Should Biden's choices not be called Democrats, and if not, why not? Since Republican judges are clearly partisan Republican politicians, should Democrats take the "high ground" and not worry too much about political partisanship, or are we now past that and it's time to drop the pretense?

Words of inspiration… or not.

 

"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."  –Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

What do you think?  First, let me plant some mixed seeds in your brain, just for the hell of it:

• I believe it beyond question
• I believe it, but with caveats
  
• I don’t believe it, period
  
• What a crock, but it makes people feel better
  
• Only after we’ve exhausted every other possibility
• Correlates based on certain variables (e.g., skin pigmentation, bank account balance, how well-connected one is, based on one's GPS situation, other)
• Morality and justice are ECCs (essentially contested concepts) that are in the eye of the beholder
• The moral universe keeps changing the goal posts and can’t be kept up with in a timely manner
• There is no "universal arbitrator" of morality and justice
  
• God decides justice and morality, not man
• Justice is just a four seven letter word
• Idealistic, bleeding-heart bullshit
• Theoretical, not real.  Wake up and smell the corruption
  
• “The [arc] wall is high, and too hard to climb,” a la Juliette
• “I believe for every drop of rain that falls, a flower grows”
• “What’s morality got to do, got to do with it?”
• “A tree grows in Brooklyn,” but that’s about the extent of it
• “There is a rose in Spanish Harlem.”  And she’s mostly effed.

Okay, okay, getting a little weird here just for the dramatization (and I know it 😉).  Anyway, here’s the question:

Do you believe that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice?

Bloviate.  And recommend.