Oral arguments on the Supreme Court abortion case

Commentators on the two hours of arguments before the Supreme Court this morning lean toward an opinion that the Republicans on the court will uphold the Mississippi (MI) law that bans abortions after 15 weeks. The prior threshold was that states could not ban abortions before fetus viability, about 24 weeks. Under the MI law, the abortion ban sets in after 15 weeks. 

The state of MI and hard core Christian fundamentalists on the Supreme Court want to see the 1973 Roe v. Wade and another key pro-abortion precedent overturned. Abortion rights defenders argued to keep the old standard and Roe intact. Fortunately, the state anti-abortion side is arguing for the issue to be left to the states and the Republican judges seem to be OK with that. One possibility, now seemingly remote in view of the arguments this morning, was that 5 or 6 of the Republican Christians on the court would kill Roe and make all abortions in all states illegal. An all-out ban everywhere, at any time now seems to be quite unlikely based on the ~80 minutes of argument I listened to on the radio.

As the New York Times writes, Chief Justice Roberts wants to uphold the MI law, but not overturn Roe. The other 5 Republicans seem to want to see Roe gone:

Other conservative justices indicated that they were not interested in the chief justice’s intermediate approach. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said “the only real options we have” are to reaffirm Roe or to overrule it.

Assuming the three most conservative members of the court — Justices Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch — are prepared to overrule Roe entirely, Chief Justice Roberts would need to attract at least two votes for a narrower opinion, one upholding the Mississippi law but not overruling Roe in so many words, to be controlling. But the most likely candidates, Justices Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, said little to suggest that they were inclined toward that narrower approach.

The court’s three liberal members — Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor — were adamant that Roe should stand.  

Should Roe be overturned, at least 20 states will immediately or in short order make almost all abortions unlawful, forcing women who can afford it to travel long distances to obtain the procedure.

Chief Justice Roberts expressed frustration with Mississippi’s litigation strategy. In the state’s petition seeking Supreme Court review, officials told the justices that “the questions presented in this petition do not require the court to overturn Roe or Casey,” though lawyers for the state did raise the possibility in a footnote. Once the court agreed to hear the case, the state shifted its emphasis and began a sustained assault on those precedents.  

Justice Breyer quoted from Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 decision that reaffirmed what it called Roe’s core holding, the one prohibiting states from banning abortions before fetal viability: “To overrule under fire in the absence of the most compelling reason to re-examine a watershed decision would subvert the court’s legitimacy beyond any serious question.”

Justice Sotomayor asked whether the court would “survive the stench” of being considered a political institution, a point echoed by Justice Kagan.

Some arguments in brief

Anti-abortion people see Roe and 50 years of legalized abortions as (i) causing vast division and damage to society, and (ii) unconstitutional and not based on any workable standard to decide time limits for abortions. They argue that a standard of fetus viability is unworkable and socially divisive.  Pro-abortion arguments are that (i) the viability standard is quite workable and about as objective as one can get with a complex issue like this, and (ii) many women have relied heavily on the abortion option to control their lives, including when a pregnancy is unplanned despite use of birth control. 

In the time I listened, no pro-abortion argument was made that allowing abortions forces no woman to get an abortion, but banning abortions forces them to carry a birth to term and usually raise an unwanted child. Apparently, that is not an argument that carries legal weight and/or the court is just not willing to even hear it. Or maybe another concern I am unaware of is at play.

The pro-abortion side also argued that if the MI law is upheld, anti-abortion states would pass laws to seriously cut back on the time allowed for abortions, maybe to two or three weeks after conception or even less. A contested Texas law sets the limit at 6 weeks, which shows that time-cutting scenario has already started to play out. The anti-abortion side seems to implicitly agree and argues that there is no reasonably workable standard and thus Roe and key pro-abortion precedents need to be overturned and the issue left to the states.

The pro-abortion side also argued that since Roe and the key precedent Casey, not much has changed in science, law or society. That appears to be true. Anti-abortion arguments about fetal pain have been debunked because the fetal brain is not developed to the point that the early brain can feel pain at all. Despite the science, anti-abortion advocates argue the false fetal pain argument.

Finally, Chief Justice Roberts was desperately looking for a middle ground to uphold the MI law without overturning Roe. There really isn't any middle ground here I could see. Either fetal viability as the legal limit for protecting abortions stands, or Roe falls. The anti-abortion advocates seem to have a valid point here. Since 5 of of the 6 Republicans see fetal viability as (i) an unworkable standard, or (ii) otherwise rationalizable into no barrier, Roe seems set to fall. 

When the court decides (probably next May or June) to kill Roe, it is likely that at least each state can decide for itself on how to regulate abortions. That's the good news. The damage to women who are forced to bear a child, and their lives, in states that outlaw abortions is the price those people will pay for fundamentalist Christian nationalism deciding from the bench what is legal or constitutional and what isn't.

It is pretty clear that the radical Republicans on the federal bench are willing to survive the stench of the Supreme Court being considered a political institution, which it already is. That is a key reason why fundamentalist radical Christian Republicans have been put there by Republican Senates and Presidents. They hate abortion rights even more than they hate voting rights or same sex marriage rights.

Some anti-abortion judges and advocates also argue the fetus has rights equal to the mother and thus few or no abortions can be constitutional.

The neutral constitution argument: Anti-abortion advocates correctly argue the Constitution is silent about abortion. They argue that the matter must therefore be left to the states. If that was to hold, think of how many federal laws would be open to attack and thrown back to the states. That is why radical right conservatives have been attacking the general welfare and necessary and proper clauses for decades. They also dislike the implied powers doctrine for the same reasons.

In my opinion, shifting power to states, shifts power to elites and wealthy people and interests. States are easier and cheaper for special interests and wealth to corrupt and subvert than a single national government. This neutrality argument is potentially lethal to democracy and the rule of law.

Question: If Roe is overturned and states left to decide if they want to allow abortions under conditions the legislatures specify, would that be a win for abortion rights in view of the probably remote possibility the court could make all abortions illegal in all states under any circumstances? (is the glass half full or half empty?)

Welcome to the Land of Oz

 

TV host Dr. Oz to enter Senate race in Pennsylvania

The celebrity doctor says he will seek the Republican nomination to fill an empty U.S. Senate seat in Pennsylvania.

(CN) — Celebrity heart surgeon and TV personality Mehmet Oz announced plans Tuesday to run for Senate in Pennsylvania.

“I’m running for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania because America needs a Conservative Republican to cure what’s wrong with Washington,” Oz said in a tweet. “I’m a world-class surgeon, fighter, and health care advocate stepping forward to cure our country’s ills.”

The physician, best known as the host of the daytime talk show “The Dr. Oz Show,” is expected to enter a crowded and highly competitive Republican primary.

Several GOP candidates are aiming to fill a seat left open by retiring Republican U.S. Senator Pat Toomey, now that a leading candidate is out of the running.

Sean Parnell was once seen as a top GOP contender for Toomey's seat in the key battleground state. But Parnell, who had been endorsed by former President Donald Trump, announced his intention to suspend his campaign last week after losing custody of his children via a court order that said he was abusive towards his wife in the past.

Trump narrowly won the swing state in 2016, but Pennsylvania voters gave President Joe Biden a narrow 1 percentage point victory last year. 

“Pennsylvania needs a conservative who will put America first, one who could reignite our divine spark,” Oz said in a video released Tuesday.

The phrase “America first” and Oz’s promise to “tell it like it is” evokes messaging similar to that used by Trump during his presidential campaigns.

In an op-ed published in the conservative Washington Examiner on Tuesday, Oz commended Trump for overseeing the development of Covid-19 vaccines through Operation Warp Speed.

He added that “many great ideas were squashed” during that time, blaming “elites” for mishandling the pandemic response.

Born in Cleveland to his parents who are Turkish immigrants, Oz has resided in New Jersey for the past 20 years.

He started to vote in Pennsylvania’s elections this year through an absentee ballot registered to his wife’s parents’ address near Philadelphia. Oz’s campaign website lists his home as Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania, where his in-laws live.

Democratic Congressman Bill Pascrell of New Jersey's 9th District released a statement sarcastically congratulating Oz on his Senate campaign.

“I want to congratulate my North Jersey constituent Dr. Oz on his run for US Senate in Pennsylvania,” Pascrell said in a tweet. "I’m sure this fully genuine candidacy will capture the hearts of Pennsylvanians.” 

Democratic candidates for the Pennsylvania U.S. Senate seat have also expressed dismay toward Oz’s announcement, including Montgomery County Board of Commissioners Chairwoman Dr. Val Arkoosh.

Arkoosh says she is “the real doctor” who is eyeing the seat.

“We’ve seen what happens when TV personalities gain power & @DrOz is the last thing we need when we face real challenges," she said in a statement on Twitter. 

https://www.courthousenews.com/tv-host-dr-oz-to-enter-senate-race-in-pennsylvania/

Republican attacks on elections infrastructure continue

“People are free to vote in The Soviet Union because their votes mean nothing. The people who count the votes mean everything.” --- paraphrasing the well-known authoritarian Joseph Stalin, expressing the well-known authoritarian attitude toward elections (the attribution is false, Stalin didn’t say that, but I’m sure he wishes he did)

By now, it is clear to almost everyone who can accept it. The Republican Party has become authoritarian and most of its rank and file still falsely believe the 2020 election was stolen. In response, Republican politicians and average voters nationwide are continuing to directly attack the infrastructure that used to protect election integrity. In at least 17 states where the ARP (authoritarian Republican Party) is in power, laws to suppress votes and/or rig elections have been passed. The election rigging laws allow the ARP to simply invalidate an election vote they dislike. There may be nothing unconstitutional about this. State legislatures may be able to nullify any elections they want to nullify for any real or fake reason or no reason.

The elections clause of the Constitution reads as follows: The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of choosing Senators.

The Washington Post writes on the ongoing ARP effort to subvert elections:

In Michigan, local GOP leaders have sought to reshape election canvassing boards by appointing members who expressed sympathy for former president Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 vote was rigged.

In two Pennsylvania communities, candidates who embraced election fraud allegations won races this month to become local voting judges and inspectors.

And in Colorado, 2020 doubters are urging their followers on conservative social media platforms to apply for jobs in election offices.

A year after local and state election officials came under immense pressure from Trump to subvert the results of the 2020 White House race, he and his supporters are pushing an ambitious plan to place Trump loyalists in key positions across the administration of U.S. elections.

The effort goes far beyond the former president’s public broadsides against well-known Republican state officials who certified President Biden’s victory, such as Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey. Citing the need to make elections more secure, Trump allies are also seeking to replace officials across the nation, including volunteer poll watchers, paid precinct judges, elected county clerks and state attorneys general, according to state and local officials, as well as rally speeches, social media posts and campaign appearances by those seeking the positions.

If they succeed, Trump and his allies could pull down some of the guardrails that prevented him from overturning Biden’s win by creating openings to challenge the results next time, election officials and watchdog groups say.

“The attacks right now are no longer about 2020,” said Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold (D). “They’re about 2022 and 2024. It’s about chipping away at confidence and chipping away at the reality of safe and secure elections. And the next time there’s a close election, it will be easier to achieve their goals. That’s what this is all about.”

A spokesman for Trump did not respond to a request for comment. [no surprise there]

Supporters of the former president who are seeking offices that would give them oversight of elections say they just want to make the system secure. 

Voters have a right “to scrutinize the election process,” Kristina Karamo, a candidate for Michigan secretary of state, told several hundred demonstrators gathered on the lawn of the state Capitol in Lansing last month in support of a “forensic” audit of the 2020 results. 

One leader of the effort to challenge the 2020 vote in the state, West Michigan lawyer Matthew DePerno, is seeking the GOP nomination for attorney general. DePerno, who waged a failed legal battle over an election-night vote-counting error in Antrim County, has built his campaign around a vow to expose fraud.

“The elites in this state, the elected officials they don’t want you — the voter, the common man, the taxpayer — they don’t want you to see the voting data,” DePerno told the cheering crowd at the Lansing rally, adding: “The Democrats and the establishment don’t understand the power of the grass roots movement in Michigan.” 

“This is a great big flashing red warning sign,” said Jeff Timmer, former chair of the Michigan Republican Party and a Trump critic. “The officials who fulfilled their legal duty after the last election are now being replaced by people who are pledging to throw a wrench in the gears of the next election. It tells you that they are planning nothing but chaos and that they have a strategy to disrupt the certification of the next election.”

In Genesee County, home of Flint, Michelle Voorheis, a 13-year Republican veteran of the county canvassing board, said in an interview that she believes the local GOP committee did not renominate her this year because she defended the outcome of the last election on social media.

The fact that elections were secure in 2020 makes no difference in ARP ‘thinking’ or propaganda. Voters are told they can scrutinize the process. But now the process can be subverted and nullified by partisan legislatures or partisan elections officials for partisan advantage. All the voter scrutiny in the world cannot affect toxic partisanship that subverts elections. 

ARP promises of transparency do not have to be kept because transparency for the public has not been put into any ARP election laws. Some ARP politicians and propagandists claim they want voters to see the voting data. In fact, seeing election subversion is consistent with the ARP's unjustified attacks on elections and voting rights. Transparency for voters has nothing to do with it. 

Thus it is reasonable to believe that ARP politicians and operatives would hide that data if they choose to nullify an otherwise valid election result. The ARP is no fan of transparency or inconvenient truth. Opacity and mendacity is the normal mode of operations for the elites who run the ARP.

We will have to wait for the 2022 and 2024 elections to see how badly the ARP has damaged elections and voting rights. The time of free and fair elections in America just might have come to an end. 

Questions: 

1. Was the 2020 election stolen as the ARP elites and rank and file constantly claim to the public, and as it relies on to justify voter suppression and election rigging laws, and the ARP’s overt efforts to oust honest elections officials? 

2. Is seeing ARP laws and actions as attacks on election integrity consistent with what the ARP is has done and still is doing to election infrastructure? If not, then why is the ARP doing what it is clearly doing and has done by (i) passing Republican elections-related laws in some states, and (ii) opposing a proposed voter protection law in congress? 

3. Do ARP claims of transparency for voters ring true, or is that just more ARP mendacity?

4. Do Democrats and the establishment not understand the power of the grass roots movement in Michigan as one ARP politician claims, or do rank and file ARP supporters in Michigan not know they have been deceived and arguably betrayed by ARP elites?

Changes in Evangelical Christianity and its involvement in politics

Context

I have a deep concern for the future of American democracy, the rule of law, civil liberties and social respect for facts and truth. I see a non-trivial possibility of the rise of an authoritarian American state with politics akin to fascism. The 2022 and 2024 elections should shed light on what direction American is likely to go in. Democracy does fall to  recently passed Republican Party vote suppression and election rigging laws in at least 17 states. If that happens, authoritarianism could rise. In that scenario, the American experiment would have ended, probably for a very long time. 

Two forces seem to be the key drivers of the rise of radical right authoritarianism in the modern Republican Party. One is special interest money working in the name of laissez-faire capitalism and unregulated markets. Those politics usually operate at the expense of the public interest, including the environment. That political force has been around at least since the mid to late 1800s. Lately, it has come to significantly control the GOP. 

The other is the rise of radical right evangelical fundamentalist Christian nationalism. That is a more recent source of influence in the GOP. Its modern origin arguably arose primarily with the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education that desegregated public schools and the fall of Jim Crow laws in the 1960s after federal voting and civil rights laws were passed. Those events enraged many religious conservatives and they are still enraged today. They were galvanized against the precipitating events and started to involve conservative Christianity directly in politics. 

The backlash against Christian nationalism

Today, there is a backlash within the political Evangelical Christian movement. Most young people are leaving it, often at least partly because they dislike church involvement in politics. They appear to see conservative political Christianity as a perversion of Christianity and Christian teachings and morals. An Oct. 24, 2021 article in The Atlantic, The Evangelical Church is Breaking Apart, describes what is happening. If too many young people leave the religious conservative movement, its power in the GOP might wane to a point where it is no longer a major force in the party or a major threat to democracy. The Atlantic writes:

The election of the elders of an evangelical church is usually an uncontroversial, even unifying event. But this summer, at an influential megachurch in Northern Virginia, something went badly wrong. A trio of elders didn’t receive 75 percent of the vote, the threshold necessary to be installed.

“A small group of people, inside and outside this church, coordinated a divisive effort to use disinformation in order to persuade others to vote these men down as part of a broader effort to take control of this church,” David Platt, a 43-year-old minister at McLean Bible Church and a best-selling author, charged in a July 4 sermon.

Platt said church members had been misled, having been told, among other things, that the three individuals nominated to be elders would advocate selling the church building to Muslims, who would convert it into a mosque. In a second vote on July 18, all three nominees cleared the threshold. But that hardly resolved the conflict. Members of the church filed a lawsuit, claiming that the conduct of the election violated the church’s constitution.

Platt, who is theologically conservative, had been accused in the months before the vote by a small but zealous group within his church of “wokeness” and being “left of center,” of pushing a “social justice” agenda and promoting critical race theory, and of attempting to “purge conservative members.” A Facebook page and a right-wing website have targeted Platt and his leadership. For his part, Platt, speaking to his congregation, described an email that was circulated claiming, “MBC is no longer McLean Bible Church, that it’s now Melanin Bible Church.”

What happened at McLean Bible Church is happening all over the evangelical world. Influential figures such as the theologian Russell Moore and the Bible teacher Beth Moore felt compelled to leave the Southern Baptist Convention; both were targeted by right-wing elements within the SBC.

“The divisions and conflicts we found are intense, easily more intense than I have seen in my 25 years of studying the topic,” he [a religious sociologist researcher] told me. What this adds up to, he said, is “an emerging day of reckoning within churches.”

The root of the discord lies in the fact that many Christians have embraced the worst aspects of our culture and our politics. When the Christian faith is politicized, churches become repositories not of grace but of grievances, places where tribal identities are reinforced, where fears are nurtured, and where aggression and nastiness are sacralized. The result is not only wounding the nation; it’s having a devastating impact on the Christian faith.

The first step was the cultivation of the idea within the religious right that certain political positions were deeply Christian, according to [historian George] Marsden. Still, such claims were not at all unprecedented in American history. Through the 2000s, even though the religious right drew its energy from the culture wars—as it had for decades—it abided by some civil restraints. Then came Donald Trump.

“When Trump was able to add open hatred and resentments to the political-religious stance of ‘true believers,’ it crossed a line,” Marsden said. “Tribal instincts seem to have become overwhelming.” The dominance of political religion over professed religion is seen in how, for many, the loyalty to Trump became a blind allegiance. The result is that many Christian followers of Trump “have come to see a gospel of hatreds, resentments, vilifications, put-downs, and insults as expressions of their Christianity, for which they too should be willing to fight.”

“What we’re seeing is massive discipleship failure caused by massive catechesis failure,” James Ernest, the vice president and editor in chief at Eerdmans, a publisher of religious books, told me. Ernest was one of several figures I spoke with who pointed to catechism, the process of instructing and informing people through teaching, as the source of the problem. “The evangelical Church in the U.S. over the last five decades has failed to form its adherents into disciples. So there is a great hollowness. All that was needed to cause the implosion that we have seen was a sufficiently provocative stimulus. And that stimulus came.”

But when people’s values are shaped by the media they consume, rather than by their religious leaders and communities, that has consequences. “What all those media want is engagement, and engagement is most reliably driven by anger and hatred,” Jacobs argued. “They make bank when we hate each other. And so that hatred migrates into the Church, which doesn’t have the resources to resist it.”

Scott Dudley, the senior pastor at Bellevue Presbyterian Church in Bellevue, Washington, refers to this as “our idolatry of politics.” He’s heard of many congregants leaving their church because it didn’t match their politics, he told me, but has never once heard of someone changing their politics because it didn’t match their church’s teaching.

The article goes on to discuss interviews with pastors who see the problem. One historian points out that Trump did not appear out of no where. She argues that Trump represents the fulfillment, not the betrayal, of many of white evangelicals’ most deeply held values. American evangelicals worked for decades to replace the Jesus of the Gospels with an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism. She defines Christian nationalism as “the belief that America is God’s chosen nation and must be defended as such.” That attitude which is a good predictor of attitudes toward things like immigration, race, guns and non-Christians. 

One expert asserts that the former president normalized discourse shocking rhetoric. He asserts that the “pugilism of the Trump era, in which anything short of cruelty is seen as weakness.” The problem facing the evangelical Church, then, is not just that it has failed to inculcate adherents with its values—it’s that when it has succeeded in doing so, those values have not always been biblical.

Some have resigned and some left the ministry entirely. Many Evangelical churches have become a hostile environment. Insufficiently incorrect pastors are slandered and demeaned by disrespectful and angry congregants. In some cases, organized groups of congregants demand firing of insufficiently correctly political pastors. These politicized Evangelicals tend to be more driven by political agendas than spiritual matters.

USA Today writes:

Division is causing people to abandon Christian churches. Last year, Barna found that the share of practicing Christians has dropped nearly in half since 2000. Gallup recently reported that U.S. church membership fell below 50% for the first time in eight decades.

But how many are leaving political Christian nationalism and how fast are they going? FiveThirtyEight writes in an article entitled The nones are growing, but it’s hard to know exactly how many there are:

By nearly all measures, the nones now represent at least a fifth of all American adults, rivaling Catholics and evangelical Christians as the nation’s largest cohort in terms of religious faith (or lack thereof). They are the fastest-growing religious/nonreligious cohort — the nones went from 12 percent of American adults in 1998 to 16 percent in 2008, to 24 percent in 2018, according to data from the General Social Survey. Gallup puts this group at about 21 percent. Pew Research Center says 26 percent. The Cooperative Election Study suggests their ranks are even larger, at about 32 percent.  

Part of that decline is about young people — elderly members of these denominations [mainline Protestant churches and Catholicism] who die are not being replaced by a younger cohort. But older people are now increasingly shifting from Christian to unaffiliated too — particularly older people who lean left politically. As a result, mainline Christianity is not only declining but becoming more conservative. Between 2008 and 2018, three of the largest mainline traditions (the United Methodists, the Episcopalians and the United Church of Christ) all became more Republican.

It’s fair to say that both the mainline and evangelical traditions in the United States are losing members. But that seems to be happening a bit asymmetrically. Evangelicalism is undoubtedly down from its peak in the early 1990s. But it’s reached a bit of a stasis in recent years, being buoyed by some inflows from the mainline tradition and enough younger families to offset some of the losses through death.

Questions: 

1. Is it reasonable to believe that conservative, political Christian nationalist fundamentalism is going to decrease such that the threat to democracy and the rule of law recedes before some form of radical right authoritarianism with staying power is installed by the GOP? Or, is it too early to predict?

2. Does the political Evangelical rhetoric The Atlantic article quoted sound or look a lot or exactly like standard post-Trump Republican Party rhetoric, talking points and behaviors?

America's commercial future?

The New York Times hypothesizes about what the consumer commercial landscape will look like in 2041:

Starbucks, whose longtime chief executive Howard Schultz pioneered a new wave of liberal corporate activism in the early part of the century, still dominates the coffee scene in college towns and blue-state urban centers. But Black Rifle Coffee, now publicly traded with a $250 billion valuation, is flourishing in suburbs across the country and in cities large and small across the Deep South and Mountain West.

Online, the partisan rift is equally wide. Facebook has become essentially a one-party site, a forum for conservatives — and occasionally for conspiracy theorists — to discuss the perils of immigration and excessive government regulation. Snapchat has become the go-to social network for liberals to share videos calling for voting reform and raising taxes for social programs.

“This is permanently part of the social context of business,” said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professor at Yale’s School of Management who has helped chief executives formulate their responses to hot-button issues. “It’s the job of C.E.O.s to elevate issues and explain how it matters to them.”

Yet for the most part, corporations did their best to steer clear of the culture wars.

The 2016 election of Donald J. Trump changed all that. Mr. Trump’s positions on issues ranging from immigration to race relations to climate change forced companies to make their positions clear. Oftentimes, under pressure from employees and customers, corporations broke with the president. After Mr. Trump equivocated in his response to an outburst of white nationalist violence in Charlottesville, Va., for example, two advisory councils stacked with prominent business leaders disbanded, with many of them repudiating the president and his response.

More than four years of this dynamic finally led many senior Republicans to begin pushing back against big business. This year, as companies rallied against restrictive new voting laws being advanced by Republicans around the country, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky told chief executives to stay in their lane.

“My warning, if you will, to corporate America is to stay out of politics,” he said in April. “It’s not what you’re designed for. And don’t be intimidated by the left into taking up causes that put you right in the middle of America’s greatest political debates.”

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida posted a video in which he called companies speaking out against Republican laws “woke corporate hypocrites.”

And Stephen Miller, an adviser to Mr. Trump, said on Twitter that big businesses were “openly attacking sovereign U.S. states & the right of their citizens to secure their own elections,” in what he called “a corporate ambush on Democracy.”  

John Schnatter, the founder of Papa John’s International, was ousted from the pizza chain he founded after uttering a racial slur on a corporate conference call. He recently called his exit from the company he started “a crucifixion,” blaming the “progressive elite left” for his downfall.

The hypocrite pot calling the kettle black

Rubio calls companies that speak out woke corporate hypocrites if they speak against bad things the authoritarian GOP does. The hypocrite is the Rubio and the rest of the GOP leadership, not corporations that speak out. Remember, it was the GOP that gave corporations free speech rights, calls them people, calls campaign contributions free speech and coddles them with tax breaks and deregulations that aid in profits and/or disadvantage consumers. 

Republican hypocrisy here is unlimited and shameless.

Even more ghastly in the hypocrisy and lies department is McConnell’s warning to corporate America is to stay out of politics because it’s not what corporations are designed for. Like hell corporations aren't designed for politics. They have been doing politics for decades, but just in private and secrecy. What in tarnation does McConnell think corporate lobbyists who secretly lobby himself and other Republicans (and Democrats) in congress are doing? They are demanding their quid pro quo return on investment for their campaign contribution participation in pay-to-play politics. That's called politics whether the public knows about it or not.

Equal to McConnells hypocrisy and lies is Miller’s assertion that criticism of GOP voter suppression and election rigging laws amounts to a corporate ambush on Democracy. The GOP is ambushing democracy, not corporate critics of the ambush.

The shamelessness is just breathtaking. 

How likely that the hypothesis will turn out to be about right is unclear. Probably unlikely. Companies are quietly backing off from the little spate of criticism after the 1/6 coup attempt. They are quietly reopening the campaign contribution taps to Republican authoritarians all over the country. The spasm of corporate social conscience has subsided in view of how incredibly deregulated and profitable it will be to help authoritarian Republican politicians finish ambushing and killing democracy.

Or, is that assessment of corporate morals, or lack thereof, too harsh and unreasonably inaccurate?

Boycott Papa John's!

A coordinated corporate attack on the free press

The Atlantic writes in an article entitled A Secretive Hedge Fund is Gutting Newsrooms about the intentional killing of local newspapers for profit and maybe other things. The article starts with a description of the Chicago Tribune's headquarters, which was completed in 1925. The tribune tower was a magnificent building designed by the best architects of the times. The Atlantic writes:

To find the paper’s current headquarters one afternoon in late June, I took a cab across town to an industrial block west of the river. After a long walk down a windowless hallway lined with cinder-block walls, I got in an elevator, which deposited me near a modest bank of desks near the printing press. The scene was somehow even grimmer than I’d imagined. Here was one of America’s most storied newspapers—a publication that had endorsed Abraham Lincoln and scooped the Treaty of Versailles, that had toppled political bosses and tangled with crooked mayors and collected dozens of Pulitzer Prizes—reduced to a newsroom the size of a Chipotle.

Spend some time around the shell-shocked journalists at the Tribune these days, and you’ll hear the same question over and over: How did it come to this? On the surface, the answer might seem obvious. Craigslist killed the Classified section, Google and Facebook swallowed up the ad market, and a procession of hapless newspaper owners failed to adapt to the digital-media age, making obsolescence inevitable. This is the story we’ve been telling for decades about the dying local-news industry, and it’s not without truth. But what’s happening in Chicago is different.

In May, the Tribune was acquired by Alden Global Capital, a secretive hedge fund that has quickly, and with remarkable ease, become one of the largest newspaper operators in the country. The new owners did not fly to Chicago to address the staff, nor did they bother with paeans to the vital civic role of journalism. Instead, they gutted the place.  

[Alden's two founders] are also defined by an obsessive secrecy. Alden’s website contains no information beyond the firm’s name, and its list of investors is kept strictly confidential. When lawmakers pressed for details last year on who funds Alden, the company replied that “there may be certain legal entities and organizational structures formed outside of the United States.”

The Atlantic goes to note that two days after Alden took control of the Tribune, it announced a round of employee buyouts that caused an exodus of journalists. Alden's corporate bloodletting got rid of the Metro columnist who reported on the problems that occupants of a messed up public-housing complex faced. The editor who maintained a homicide database that the police couldn’t manipulate was also pushed out. A quarter of the newsroom was eliminated. Major stories were no longer covered, including stories of corrupt politicians trying to sleaze their way out of legal troubles. Employee moral dropped and more professionals at the paper just gave up and resigned. 

For it’s part, Alden refuses to talk about what it had done or why. A former Tribune reporter commented that the Tribune was dying not because it could not stay alive. Instead, Alden was intentionally killing it: “They call Alden a vulture hedge fund, and I think that’s honestly a misnomer. A vulture doesn’t hold a wounded animal’s head underwater. This is predatory.” 

This was not something new for Alden. After the great recession, the hedge fund started buying newspapers and then later quietly gutted them. The point was profit. Alden’s business model was ruthless and directly on point. Gut the staff, sell the real estate, increase subscription prices, and wring out as much cash as possible before allowing the business to collapse. 

The Atlantic notes that in the past 15 years, more than a quarter of American newspapers have gone out of business. The survivors are smaller, weaker, and generally vulnerable to acquisition. Financial firms now control about half of all daily newspapers, according to an analysis by the Financial Times. That is likely to increase.

Randall Smith and Heath Freeman, the co-founders of Alden Global Capital devised and implemented the business model. They have been purely mercenary, with no interest in even pretending to care about their publications’ long-term vitality or service to the public interest. With this model, the newspapers can be profitable for a number of years before the business collapses.

Randall Smith

Heath Freeman -- claims he wants to save 

local news reporting (no one believes him)

The Atlantic comments on the consequences of the demise of local newspapers:

This investment strategy does not come without social consequences. When a local newspaper vanishes, research shows, it tends to correspond with lower voter turnout, increased polarization, and a general erosion of civic engagement. Misinformation proliferates. City budgets balloon, along with corruption and dysfunction. The consequences can influence national politics as well; an analysis by Politico found that Donald Trump performed best during the 2016 election in places with limited access to local news.

For laissez-faire capitalism and corrupt and/or authoritarian politics, it is undeniably important to control public information. It is thus easy to see why targeting and killing newspapers while profiting in the process would appealing to both corporations and politicians. Bad news gets suppressed, the public remains ignorant and plausible deniability for everything gets to run about as free and wild as unregulated markets and corrupt governments can devise.

The article is long and goes into details of how some local newspapers crumbled under the dead weight of Alden and, as one burned out reporter called them, “the lizard people” who control Alden. 

 

Questions: 

1. It is clear that both big corporations and dictatorship governments have things to hide and would thus would have a keen interest in seeing the corruption of US journalism into a gigantic sham. Therefore, is it reasonable to think that foreign enemies such as the Russian and Chinese governments are among the “certain legal entities and organizational structures formed outside of the United States” that invest in Alden? 

2. Is it reasonable to see what Alden is doing as inherently authoritarian, e.g., because the public becomes less informed and plausible deniability for crimes and fascism easier to deny in the absence of contrary information?

3. Would it be legal or illegal for a politician, billionaire, political party or corporation to secretly invest in Alden, and then ask it to kill a troublesome newspaper? After all, it’s just a business investment. [Seems legal to me.]